Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Smoking is divine. Eh, sorry, I mean Cigarettes are Sublime

https://www.dukeupress.edu/cigarettes-are-sublime

Ashtrays may go along into the dark arts of secret knowledge, along with hooking up a modem, coding your own BBS, repairing your own leather boots, starting a fire to cook dinner over, etc. But something human, something tactile, something that carries with it dangers and pleasures and the competence to determine your own safety, gets lost each time we're proud that the next generation doesn't have to think about these things and can't even conceive of them. I don't really think it's human advancement to throw out the bad things if it means forgetting what they are and why they were bad; then we're doomed to repeat our mistakes. Cigarettes are unquestionably a net negative, but if you haven't understood the pleasure and beauty of them, you can't really understand what makes them tempting. Just like you can't understand what makes religion tempting if you're an atheist, or what makes sex tempting if you're asexual. Yet these things we look down on are all parts of the human experience, and if all you do is look down on things that you never partook of, you really aren't well-qualified to decide whether they had merit.

It would be a lot easier to agree with you if the tobacco companies hadn't spent decades of time and millions of dollars trying to gaslight the world about the consequences of smoking, aiming advertising at children, and generally making comic-book villains of themselves. Unfortunately they fought so uncompromisingly to avoid having to cede even the slightest of their market that they made complete ostracization the only feasible path forward for public policymakers. Nearly half of adult America smoked in the 1960s; ten years ago that number was at 20%, and today that number is below 13% and dropping -- and unlike the drinking age, smoking wasn't used as a bludgeon by the federal government for forcing its will on the states. It's pure PR and a little urban taxation.

It's fine - this is not in defense of RJR or something. I truly love to smoke. I love to smoke a pipe, to feel the sting of the smoke and the richness and then take a glass of wine next to it, taste the leather and dried fruit interacting with the bittersweet tobacco. I love to roll cigarettes, the act of doing so for others and for myself, delaying the intense pleasure of the flick of the lighter and the sound of the burning leaves. I love a cigar, the method of it, the intensity of its flavor next to a glass of rye whisky, turning both into chocolate and raspberries, the sheer pleasure of each wave of smoke entering your mouth.

I'm not defending tobacco companies. I just fuckin love tobacco. Dig?

[edit] I did not steal these lines from "Cigarettes are Sublime" - they're my own personal feelings. I can't seem to find my copy of that book.

I truly love to ride a motorcycle.

No ignorance on it’s order-of-magnitude lethality multiplier over cars. But there is a certain cognitive-adrenaline fused pleasure that comes with seamlessly gliding your way through the perfect Bézier-esque curve over a gentle highway turn, whilst being held in the ever-present protective arms of gyroscopic precession, that makes the danger of it all worth it to me.

Rollercoasters let you experience a far greater degree of adrenaline and wind rushing through you, but don’t come close to this particular feeling of smiling at death.

The nicotine high is a very pleasant headspace. I only smoked occasionally in college and grad school for a few years and off-and-on afterword socially for a few more years but I miss the scintillating conversations and the headspace nicotine put you in. More pronounced than caffeine but not so stimulating as a stronger stimulant. Some of my most interesting conversations happened over a cigarette.

AFAICT nicotine is the lesser evil. It's addictve, and somehow toxic, but not hugely.

What makes cigarettes so vile is the actual smoke. The tars, the CO, the nitrous mess that's needed to keep the cigarette from extinguishing. The filter helps, but not a lot. A cigarette without any nicotine would still damage health a lot.

Fortunately, the addicts, and those who want the nicotine high, have the option of vaping now, which is close in the sense of the ritual required, but is much less detrimental to health.

Nicotine isn't a particularly difficult addiction in the grand scheme of things. It takes most people only a week or two to overcome nicotine addiction. Alcohol and opiates are on a different level. Cigarettes, on the other hand, are extremely addictive. There's something about putting a little stick in your mouth, inhaling, tasting it, then exhaling a cloud of smoke/vapour. I was given a nicotine-free disposable e-cigarette and was quite alarmed at how quickly I became addicted to it.

And possibly the fact that cigarette companies freebase the nicotine by soaking the tobacco in ammonia.

I switched to rolling my own smokes with hemp paper and filters almost 20 years ago. I can't stand the taste or smell of chemicals from packaged cigarettes (even the "organic" ones that still have all kinds of accelerants and flame retardants in the paper). A single Marlboro will give me a headache the next day.

It's actually just really sad that smokers have been force-fed that deadly shit, because while the poster above is correct that nicotine itself is not harmful and it's mainly the burn products of the tobacco leaf that are carcinogenic, they don't need to be nearly as deadly as they are in modern packed cigarettes. Some of the additives are mandated by the government (such as the wood glue that's now used in all commercial rolled cigarette papers as a "fire safe" stopper halfway) and those are as bad or worse than the arsenic and other additives the tobacco companies came up with.

On the other hand, roll-your-own (RYO) tobacco, especially the type labeled organic, has its own issues. One of them is that "organic" tobacco actually has a higher level of Polonium (which is taken up and concentrated by all tobacco plants, where it's present in the fertilizer - but organic fertilizers have higher levels of Polonium). Of all the thousands of compounds you inhale when you smoke a cigarette, that's probably the one that's most likely to cause lung cancer.

And yet smoking is so fucking delicious. The commenter above who talked about conversations in college over a cigarette -- that's my life. Every night. Having to step outside the cafe hasn't killed it, that social ferment, although I think that was the intention when they banned smoking inside. If anything, it's heightened the interaction after an entire generation was forced into these ghettos. If only 11% of Americans smoke (which cannot possibly be true -- that's an absolute lie, as at least 70% of people I can think of in Portland from 30 to 60 smoke cigarettes and Portland is not exactly Mississippi) they're definitely the most interesting 11%, and highly concentrated now.

Wtf did I just read

You just read some extremely refined copium in text form.

This person has some major cognitive dissonance about the health and safety of smoking cigarettes and is dissociating from the dissonance with poetic drivel.

Tobacco is unhealthy to consume. It's okay in small, occasional doses, your body can probably shrug off a few draws from a ceremonial peace pipe like it was nothing.

But smoking every day or multiple times a day is unhealthy and will hasten your demise, and there is no working around that, not even by using organic free range gluten free fair trade halal tobacco grown by vestal virgins in the Himalayas.

Don't be silly. Is your home's air filtered correctly? Did you scratch your face after touching a public doorknob? I hope you're not using "poetic drivel" to justify use of a gas stove when we know it leads to combustion byproducts in the air. You better be eating healthy all the time too, or else only copium is justifying your food choices.

Nobody is saying that cigarettes or nicotine is healthy. The warnings exist and are highly popular. Smoking bans in public places in the many US states are generally very popular in those states. The "poetic" poster talked about how cigarettes are bad multiple times. But as adults with full knowledge of the risks of something, these adults can still engage in these activities in ways that are not posing risks to other. That's what it means to be an adult.

The moral panic around secondhand smoke is what bothers a lot of smokers. Having smoked in the past I will often join smokers to outdoor areas where they smoke just to chat without partaking and the restrictions are often really difficult to work around so I understand where the opinion comes from, even though I'm a fan of the restrictions generally.

The dangers of smoking are not equatable to the dangers of unfiltered house air.

Smoking is a known carcinogen with a known increase in death rate on top of all of the things you listed. In fact smokers probably also have the exact same air quality and environmental dangers that you listed but have added smoking on top of that.

Sure, have fun, it's your life. Smoke away. Just don't believe lies about "organic tobacco" being healthy for you. It's not.

I don't think anyone believes any lies about "organic tobacco" being healthy for you. Cigarettes and combustion are bad for you. It's obvious and the labels and taxes enforce this so that future generations understand what they're getting into with tobacco products. I don't smoke myself and it's because I'm aware of the risks of what's happening.

Offering snark at someone else's conscious bad habit that affects nobody but themselves and other smokers who opt-in strikes me as silly. Smoking has been successfully regulated, though minor vigilance is required to make sure tobacco companies don't try and undo regulation. There are many worse things that Americans partake in all the time that are untaxed, unlabelled, and only minorly regulated that will have much better public health outcomes than continually shining a spotlight on smoking and will be a better use of our collective moral and political capital as a country.

So, you think my responses are simply about how smoking is bad?

Oral fixations are tough for some of us. A former coworker and I found ourselves utterly addicted to chewing gum after our office began offering gum as a free perk. I've cut it out of my life because I found myself going through a pack of gum in a day. No nicotine at all, just regular chewing gum.

It's not just the smoke. Otherwise chewing tobacco and inhaling it wouldn't cause cancers for the mouth and nose.

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