Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet

The reality is, most people are very focused on their own problems. Complaining is free, but doing something about it is not.

Voters don't care because news orgs don't care (in a meaningful way). Lobbyists writing law isn't as sexy to editors as sportsball, celebs or missing pretty white girls.

IIRC there is government legislation that effectively mandates that tobacco companies add polonium to tobacco. Something to do with the fertilizer sticking to the trichromes on the leaves.

Generally berkshire hathaway has not made large equity investments in tobacco companies although they are in warrens sweet spot of famous consumer brand names.

On the other hand berkshire hathaway has invested in a lot of companies selling sugar to consumers.

Also worth clarifying that the tobacco plant is radiophilic, meaning it proactively takes up radioactive elements into the body of the plant and tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity.

It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers

One of the many reasons why, even though smoking anything is not great for your health, smoking tobacco is particularly harmful.

I rinsed my tobacco leaves after cutting / before drying, but I dunno how common that is in industrial farming. I've just grown a few plants as a hobbyist interest, advised by someone who helped grow tobacco 50yr ago, specifically for "plug" chewing tobacco. That's a bit different than the bulk of production even then.

Anyways my leaves were covered with a fuzz of (dead) gnats that needed washing off. My advisor says thats normal in moisture like mine.

"Washed" = soaped and waxed and repainted like commercial vegetables; then no. It all goes in a big grinder anyway.

Look at what happened with Juul. Maybe it's changed now, but they had a safer alternative and got shut down.

Also as a bit of trivia, iirc from the book "Barbarians at the gate", RJ Reynolds in the 80s was working on a safer cigarette under Ross Johnson that heated the tobacco instead of burning it. Once they got LBO'd and saddled up with debt, that got canned.

> In recent years, tobacco companies have been investing in or acquiring pharmaceutical companies, which produce medications for a myriad of diseases, including tobacco-induced conditions and diseases, and emergency medicine.

Isn't that a vape?

It’s a tough sell, especially since smoke is now banned pretty much everywhere indoors and outdoors.

There is no shortage of “healthier nicotine devices” though: gum, vapes, Zyn, etc.

And no, they're probably not trying to cure cancer in the slightest. My grandpa was studying in the 1960s and 1970s, and big tobacco tried to fight the laboratory he worked for. The important thing he taught me before he died, from his research, was that nicotine itself interferes with your blood platelets. It's unhealthy beyond the particulates and fumes that we think of as cancerous, because nicotine is fundamentally bad for the blood. That means vaping, dip, everything affects your cardiovascular system.

Theyve started making moves to roll out it further internationally - big tobacco has been pushing “smoke free” nicotine products for a few years now.

David Nutt was and is a big proponent of this. Instead of the moralistic hysteria about cigarettes and alcohol, there should be a big effort to create cigarettes that don't give you cancer, and alcohol that doesn't ruin your coordination, decisionmaking skills, and your liver.

That being said, we already have healthier alternatives to cigarettes in Swedish Snus and vaping. The nonprofits that won against the cigarette companies, now desperately looking for another thing to justify their salaries, attacked the alternatives, often in tacit cooperation with the cigarette companies that were also trying to suppress cigarette alternatives (until they were better positioned in those markets.)

Any healthier alternative would be attacked in proportion to how much healthier it was. The healthier nature of it would be characterized as making it too easy, or encouraging addiction. It's like when right-wingers were campaigning against the HPV vaccine because it made sex less risky.

if you want to compare the health crises, then divide the results by time to create an 'impact' score.

That's why we're focusing on opiates collectively.

Opiate addiction cuts life expectancy by ~35 years. And getting them onto safer drugs would save lives very immediately. There's stuff that could be done, and everyone knows it, and it's not happening. That's the public health crisis.

edit: and, yes, also, opiates are also more socially destructive, due largely to the criminality.

Most people who smoke tobacco don't experience any significant quality of life issues until many decades in when the COPD and serious illness starts. Obviously horrible - but I would say you'd lose more than 7x more quality of life (disability adjusted years?) being an opiate addict over being a smoker.

And smokers die old. Quickly too... don't linger on with chronic disease like other old people. Helps keep Medicare solvent.

It is bloody hard to give up, really hard but not impossible. If you want to give up then I do recommend that you prepare yourself mentally. I ended up coming up with a couple of "downside mantras" that I would repeat to myself, whenever thoughts of smoking happened.

I initially thought I would use a vape but realized very quickly that would not work for me. If nicotine is the (only) addictive substance then patches, gum, vapes etc would just work. The habit thing is relatively easy to crack but there must be other addictive components to smoking, including sensation (you need to be a smoker to understand that one). Also I didn't want to substitute one thing for another, so abstention was the way to go for me. Some may find help with gum and patches - gum is probably the best substitute, being "active" (and might even improve mouth hygiene).

I stopped mid afternoon on a Friday and had a lie in on Saturday. That got me to around 18 hours. I made it to 24 hours. Then I managed two days, then four, then a week (a landmark one day less than the next double - every little helps). Then two weeks. Visited the kids and bummed a drag on a fag and hated it.

At around a week my sense of taste and smell re-arrived with a major jolt! I can remember smelling people entering the room and other mad things. It calmed down to normal about week three and I now have a sense of smell that accords with other non smokers.

In the end, if you want to give up, then get cracking sooner rather than later and develop strategies but do not try to rely on things like vapes and gum to do it for you. You have to quite literally give yourself a massive mental kicking too.

For me I focused on two aspects I hated about smoking and I would mentally repeat this to myself whenever I thought of it:

"I don't want to smell and I don't want to die"

Even with my denuded sense of smell I could tell I reeked and the second one is pretty obvious. When I did that the craving or thought would be quashed for a while. I did have dreams where I smoked and sometimes woke up convinced I had been smoking. You do have to wrestle with yourself somewhat and decide to win!

I continued: ... then a month. Now I have saved £10.50 x 30 = £309 (I thought I smoked 20 a day but I smoked more - self delusion, probably more like 25-30). Cool.

... two months, four months (quarter of a year). Six months. Now I have realistically saved around £2000, have a functional sense of taste and smell and I no longer cough all the time.

... one year. Fuck me, how the hell did I manage that?

... pandemic etc

... 29 July 2023 - rarely think about smoking until an article on HD hoves into view.

That question was answered years ago when smoke was banned in pretty much every indoor and outdoor space across America.

Would take a pretty big effort to reverse that now. Not saying it couldn’t be done, though

The difference is dramatic! Healing happened and I am in great shape today. Hard to tell anything now.

Regulate it so people can find safe vapes.

And no blame and shame. Everyone knows we sell death sticks to people for profit. Vapes are tame by comparison and offer many possibilities beyond nicotine too.

For the non-familiar its not uncommon to go through a pack per day between the ones you personally smoke and the ubiquitous people around too cheap to buy their own pack but happy to bum one or more of yours. So lets just say $20 x 6 days a week for $120/week. Thats about $480/month to continue being an active smoker. Take a years worth of that spending and you got yourself a pretty nice vacation.

We need to define what to optimize for. Cost-wise, a society with smokes makes sense to some.

“Well cigarettes aren’t that bad really when you think about it,” Devine said. “It might shorten a couple of years off the end of your life, but that’s a good thing. That actually saves money in the long run for the health system.”

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37343/do-smokin...

Freedom doesn’t mean making good decisions. It means having the liberty to make a decision, even if it’s not in your own best interest.

Do you have a right to destroy your own health? Do you have a right to get yourself addicted to a substance? Do you have a right to smell bad? Does the government have a right to exact a tax to disincentivize bad decisions? Do you have a right to contaminate the air in personal spaces like your own home? Do you have the right to contaminate the air in public spaces?

Do you have a right to tell someone else they aren’t allowed to make any number of those decisions?

There’s the other side of the transaction as well. Do you have a right to grow something that’s bad for your health? Do you have the right to smoke it? Do you have the right to share it? Do you have the right to sell it?

In this case, do you have the right to lie to the person you’re selling it to about whether it’s good/bad for their health? How does that change if you didn’t know it was a lie? How does it change if you did? How does it change if you didn’t know, but you could have known if you’d sought out the information?

Which I think leads to two things. One is that maybe freedom isn't that good by itself. Second is that every system will have its flaws, and so, its abusers. And sometimes the system shouldn't be designed to be as abuse-free as possible. Sometimes that throws out the baby with the bathwater.