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Comment by twofornone | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is misleading because it's not like 1 in 5 people who smoke are dropping dead from a deadly poison. More like after 30-60 years of daily tobacco use someone dies a few years before life expectancy of cancer and/or heart/lung disease.

It's an important distinction, because otherwise the danger of tobacco and culpability of tobacco companies are exaggerated. For many people a lifetime of pleasure from nicotine justifies the risk.

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Some details, which are in my view not unimportant:

- The tobacco use is not only affecting the person "choosing the lifetime of pleasure", but their surroundings too, thanks to second hand smoke.

- Nicotine is highly addictive:

"The majority of smokers would like to stop smoking, and each year about half try to quit permanently. Yet, only about 6 percent of smokers are able to quit in a given year" [1]

For me, that makes it highly questionable, if that is a voluntary choice. I know enough people, which have chosen to indulge in that particular pleasure, and after decades of abstinence still have to put a conscious effort into not relapsing (in certain situations).

[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/toba...

Well, secondhand smoke is not an issue when one smokes only outside away from others or only in the company of other smokers, and I think a significant portion of people who try to quit smoking do so because of the potentially overstated risk pointed out in the comment you're responding to, or the artificially inflated cost due to sin tax imposed and justified by that potentially overstated risk. Would those people try to quit if they calculated the cost more accurately?

That said, I'm an ex smoker, and I'm glad I quit, and I will never touch a cigarette again. To me it was not so much the risk of very early death as it was the impact on my health for however many years I will remain alive, the financial cost (imposed by governments) and the fact that I came to hate smoking cigarettes and got no pleasure from it whatsoever (which is not the case with nicotine in general or other forms of tobacco such as cigars, which I do enjoy once or twice a year).

I imagine there's also some false positives from people who know that "wanting to quit" is the more socially acceptable answer.

I think the second hand smoke thing was largely overblown to make it an "us vs them" thing rather than letting smoking be a personal choice. Smoking is a terrible habit, I hate being around people who are smoking, but I really think that modern anti smoking campaigns were less about health and more about puritan values, and not being able to stand the idea of someone else enjoying themselves in ways you disagree with. We see this regularly but it usually doesn't get enough traction to matter. The "dangers of second hand smoke" happened to be what finally stuck.

From what I understand, anti smoking campaigns have actually had a positive impact on life expectancy in western countries. On that metric, this is a positive thing. Personally I don't believe it outweighs the ills of allowing others to tell you what to do in the name of your health. I actually think all of the covid craziness can trace itself back to some extent to when we gave in and banner indoor smoking in most places. You start letting people make rules "for your safety" (and try to spin it so it's really about others) and next thing you know we've got the current hysteria as a popular thing.

Edit, because everyone that's replied so far has missed the point. I dont mean second hand smoke is pleasant. The rhetoric used to make allowing or disallowing smoking not a business decision but a state mandate, is that it was killing people. This was overblown, and is a completely different bar than "it smells bad and gives me a headache" - I agree with that, but its unreasonable to argue the state should be telling people what they can't do because of it. I'd sooner see Axe body spray outlawed on those grounds, but again, it's not the states business.

Indoor smoking bans are about others. Other non smokers who do not want to smell disgusting cigarette smoke. It has tar in it and sticks to all surfaces and never goes away.

So let establishments dictate whether or not to allow smokers. And smoking sections were generally well isolated from non smoking sections.

> And smoking sections were generally well isolated from non smoking sections.

This definitely does not match my memory. If businesses had to meet air quality standards that’d be one thing but usually they just pretended that a 4 foot gap was an airlock.

That's simply not true. I've practically never witnessed properly air-gapped section for smokers and the rest. Whatever you do, you come home smelling like shit and so does every single thing on you, usually also 1 layer below.

I find it so annoying that even in 2021 smokers and apologists even here tend to marginalize this issue which directly affects everyone else, and dismiss literally everybody telling them in the face how seriously fucked up that is.

When mankind has this mentality, how can we tackle bigger issues like slowly collapsing environment, when we can't handle something so trivial and provably bad on all possible levels.

> When mankind has this mentality, how can we tackle bigger issues like slowly collapsing environment, when we can't handle something so trivial and provably bad on all possible levels.

How is this different from just saying you don't like it when people have different priorities than you?

I strongly disagree. Smokers always used the excuse that it only affected them, even though everyone knew it had a negative impact for anyone within 20-30 feet, if not how precisely bad it was.

The studies confirming the risks of secondhand smoke were what gave social and legal weight to ending that period. When businesses were faced with liability, suddenly it became possible to taste your dinner and not be exposed to carcinogens. People stopped making excuses for exposing children as soon as society stopped indulging polite lies about it being harmless.

I was one of those children. My father used to smoke. I hated it, and so did my mother - who had given up and had various respiratory problem.

We didn't get a choice.

I have no doubt that the tobacco industry is simply evil. History still hasn't come to terms with the horror and catastrophe created by an industry devoted entirely to farming and promoting addictive toxins.

Me too – my dad only stopped smoking around us when my sister and I got migraines and he couldn’t tell himself it wasn’t a problem. This was 100% supported by the tobacco companies’ well-funded propaganda machine.

US CDC claims 49k deaths a year from second hand smoke [1]

There were 36k deaths from automobile crashes in 2019. [2]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...

[2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

Leaving everything to “personal choice” is nice, if you live in an alternate universe where no one has any causal effect on anyone else. In this case, you are inflicting a harm on others.

An acceptable compromise is one where restaurants and others must obtain licenses to become official smoking establishments, just as bars need a liquor license. That way, children can be barred from entering, and no one will invite others to one of those establishments for social events. But it’s pretty selfish to inflict cigarette smoke on others.

What would the criteria and terms of the license be? I'm serious, how would licensing help and not just be some extra bureaucracy? Certainly I agree that a licensing system would be better than the status quo (where I am anyway) where it is impossible to allow smoking indoors in restaurants.

> it’s pretty selfish to inflict cigarette smoke on others.

The only time something is inflicted is when the government forces everyone to do it. There were smoke free places before bans, and it's peoples choice to go to a restaurant, nobody is coming to your house and smoking in it. It's simply not a place for the government to tell businesses what they can permit. If you don't like smoking, go to a place that doesn't allow it.

Even as I write this, I really don't like the idea of going to a smoky bar, but I also don't see why I have standing to impose my views on those that do, just because I have a majority opinion. I don't like dogs and if I was dictator, I wouldn't allow them out in public, but thankfully for people that like them, it's not up to me. This is literally no different except for the proportion of people that agree.

Your post is posed as a plea to avoid misleading information.

You wrote: “dies a few years before life expectancy”

The article in the comment you reply to writes “Life expectancy for smokers is at least 10 years shorter than for nonsmokers”

It's terrible but not all of that is because of smoking. Smokers are often also drinkers, drug users, bad eaters, and just generally unhealthy people.

True. But doesn’t change that twofornone’s estimate of effect on mortality was incorrect.

Maybe on average it's only a few years. But some smokers live to old age, and some die of lung cancer in their early forties while their kids are still young.

I don't know a single old smoker who thinks that. My grandfather, great uncle and others acknowledged their shitty older years were their own damn fault but they urged me to never start. There was no "make a choice" or "it's worth it to some people."

I've only heard younger smokers say that but I don't think they've internalized how bad it's going to be.

It’s not really an important distinction, because all deaths are deaths that would have happened later anyway.

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