Marijuana use is outpacing cigarette use for the first time on record | Hacker News Reader

Marijuana use is outpacing cigarette use for the first time on record

npr.org

36 pointsgeox14 comments

Cigarettes are a chemical garbage stew, optimized for addiction.

If you don't want to get high and just want to enjoy tobacco, I recommend a traditional tobacco pipe and some good English pipe tobacco.

Or buy old MREs. When Steve1989 smokes a Camel or Chesterfield from the 1940s and describes the experience on YouTube, all I want in the world is to smoke one of those little sticks of ecstasy. And I've never smoked a cigarette in my life, though everybody around me smoked. (My lungs are just too averse, maybe because I grew up around in-door chain smokers.)

I’m most surprised by the last fact

> Sixty-seven percent of Americans in the most recent poll said they are drinkers, compared to 63% in 1939

I know alcohol consumption rose during the pandemic, but it also seems to be increasingly common and socially acceptable to abstain from alcohol.

Define drinker. As is, it seems to be a poll not on the distribution of alcohol consumption, but on the social acceptability of alcohol—which is also an interesting question, just a different one.

When drinking a lot becomes less popular, I’d expect drinking a bit to become the common case, not total abstention, and those people might still self-report as “drinkers”, even if they e.g. refuse to drink at parties.

>Do you have occasion to use alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine or beer, or are you a total abstainer?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/395867/say-alcohol-adversely-af...

Seems like it is self-defined. Which if answered honestly I think is fine. Someone that drinks a glass of wine a day would likely describe them self as a drinker, while the person the person that only has one drink socially might not.

Using marijuana and smoking marijuana are two extremely different things

Conflating using with smoking and talking about that synonymously isn’t telling anybody anything

Cigarettes are for old people all the cool kids use vapes. Check mate statistics!

That’s a funny way to say cigarettes are vanishing, and weed is more legal. Stay classy, journalists.

If you'd read the article legalization is never mentioned, and this is specifically about smoking cannabis (not, say, eating edibles you could also buy legally).

More details in the poll results page: https://news.gallup.com/poll/396893/americans-not-convinced-...

Although the (very short) article doesn’t delve into increasing legalization of marijuana, the second sentence and majority of the text is indeed dedicated to the fact that cigarettes are vanishing.

Do you mean NPR? They are an accepted paragon of professional journalism, at least for sane people.

NPR is a federation of smaller public radio stations. The quality of content under the NPR banner is a broad spectrum: they have good stories and they have some that are crap - biased editorials costumed as objective journalism.

NPR stories on average tend to be higher quality than corporate media news, but I think 'accepted paragon' is quite superlative, out of touch, and lacking imagination.

First off, ableism.

Second off, this is absolutely not accepted fact and they have a lot of controversy, both in their lack of neutral point of view as a government-funded media sources, as well as their coverage of corporate sponsors. NPR is not the American BBC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com