One is an "epidemic" and "public health crisis" and access is locked behind a prescription. One is available to anyone 18 or older on each streetcorner.
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.
As such even if you smoke for many decades and quit your risk decreases dramatically pretty quickly, even within days.
In other words if we would treat tobaco the way we treat the hard drugs, would people addicted to it perform crimes to get their fix on the surely much more expensive black market?
I truly don’t know the answer.
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.
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.
This information is not useful to anyone without that context.
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.