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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

I have a really controversial view about smoking: it has undeniable downsides but as a society we are now feeling what happens when a huge proportion of the population no longer experiences the cognitive upsides they used to get from nicotine.

It's somewhat similar to what would happen if you banned coffee.

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>it has undeniable downsides but as a society we are now feeling what happens when a huge proportion of the population no longer experiences the cognitive upsides they used to get from nicotine.

You don't need to inhale burnt tobacco to get nicotine, and there are plenty of other ways to get stimulants into your body; patches, teas, etc. and society is still consuming a shit-ton of stims; ain't been to an empty coffeeshop since COVID.

vaping, while shown to be not great for you, is also still not as awful as inhaling tons of smoke, and can deliver the nico just as well.

and it is the smoke that is the problem -- firefighters who handle a lot of cases often have lung cancer rates far higher than the rest of the population.

I think what doesn't help is that vaping is treated the same as smoking. It's also banned everywhere that smoking is even though it doesn't generate particles.

I think many smokers feel that there's no real upside to vaping for this reason apart from their own health effects. I think they should make vaping more attractive eg allowing it in a vaping area at the office.

Ps I'm not a smoker nor vaper. But I'm getting a bit fed up with this war on nicotine. The current strictness the EU is taking is clearly not working for those who are still smokers. Continuing to increase the price will not either.

Just like the war on drugs is never ending and has not really accomplished much more than increase risk and this rewards that benefit bigger cartels, it's time to evaluate to see what actually works.

>It's also banned everywhere that smoking is even though it doesn't generate particles.

I vape nicotine. That's not true in the slightest, unless you're using some wacky definition of 'particle'.

I agree that the restrictions around where one vapes might need to be a little less lax when compared to cigarettes, but to claim that it doesn't 'generate particles' is disingenuous.

Well there's no solids. No tar, ashes etc.

Droplets yes but they are just oils. Similar to when you're frying in the kitchen. Probably a lot less than that in fact, considering the amount that goes into a vape pen.

I'd still rather not be breathing someone else's used strawberry flavor though, regardless of health effects or lack thereof.

Probably less PM2.5 rating

Smoking reduces quality years of life and puts a burden on a nation's health system. The drastic decrease in productivity in a nation from those two things has got to be far more than any increase from any cognitive benefits.

But more importantly, it's morally wrong to suggest we shorten and make our lives worse for some short term stimulant spike.

Many studies actually show that smokers are cheaper to care for over their lifetimes, likely because they die earlier. This study[0] shows a +7% for men/+4% for women increase in healthcare costs if all people stopped smoking. I'm too lazy to vet the epistemological quality of this study, but it seems like there are a bunch of these much along the same lines. One thing these studies seem to neglect is total value lost associated with smoking, instead focusing costs alone. By folding in some QALY-like model, you could come up with the overall impact of smoking on society in quantitative terms.

[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9321534/

This number doesn't take into consideration the contributions of these people to society, which could outweigh their additional healthcare cost and make them an actual net positive to the economy (putting aside moral questions about calculating whether people should live or die based on their net value).

Why does this matter? It’s definitionally the least productive years of someone’s life outside of childhood.

A nearly 80 yr old man I know has a nearly 200k per year pension. Every five years he lives adds 1 million to the economy.

If by “add 1 million to the economy”, you mean the local economy where the 80 year old lives, then sure I guess. But in general that’s just money moving around.

How does that work? I mean technically he takes 200k from the economy without producing anything in return. In very basic terms the government printing an extra 200k adds about as much value (assuming he's not actively investing and not doing anything else).

If he was “actively investing” would that change the situation?

Theoretically to some extent it would depending on how he allocated his investments (it could also be the opposite).

Many cancers triggered by smoking hit during late working years.

From a purely utilitarian/dystopian/evil/etc. point of view: aren't most people suffering much older on average?

e.g. in the median age at diagnosis is ~71. Most people at that age have very low productivity live on a pension/from savings/other passive income and economically probably cost more to the society than they contribute.

Smokers also pay more taxes over their lifetime so they contribute more to society in addition to costing less at the end of their life.

Is it morally wrong to eat a cupcake? I’m not a smoker nor would I want anyone I care about to smoke, but have you thought through the extrapolation of your assertion?

Similarly, old people are a drag on society. It’s not at all clear that reducing lifespan is a decrease on net productivity.

I would not want those I care about to die early, nor would I deny anyone else the same hope for the sake of productivity. But I can be objective enough to acknowledge the tradeoffs.

>Smoking reduces quality years of life

actually it make worse your worst year, but has no effect on your best years

> and puts a burden on a nation's health system.

listen, I know smocking is bad as anyone else, but if we wanna talk about "burden on a nation's health system" let's talk about cars (fumes are just the tip of the iceberg, we have more than 20 thousand deaths/year caused by car accidents and many more injured and/or left invalid) or having children.

You know what also puts a burden on on a nation's health system?

an aging population!

in my Country more than 25% of the population is over 65, so they not only are retired and do not contribute anymore to the expenditures through their work, they also need a lot of very expensive and prolonged care.

They most probably smoked in their younger years, but survived nonetheless and now they need to be taken care of.

Truth is the nation health system wastes too much money on things that do not help people, we've seen it during the pandemic, the personnel was crushed by the unsustainable shifts and the output was barely sufficient.

said by someone who was born and lives in a Country with a public healthcare system, who happily pays for it through a lot of taxes (half of my salary) and a big chunk of the family employed by the aforementioned public national health care system.

Or, for example, what has been the cost (both economical and social) of the recent opioid epidemic in the US of A caused by the health care system itself?

> But more importantly, it's morally wrong to suggest we shorten and make our lives worse for some short term stimulant spike.

like, for example, firing up combustion engines to drive kids to school? kids that, bear in mind, have perfectly functioning legs and can walk!

>in my Country more than 25% of the population is over 65, so they not only are retired and do not contribute anymore to the expenditures through their work, they also need a lot of very expensive and prolonged care.

If only there was something out there that could thin out this group of people in particular.

> If only there was something out there that could thin out this group of people in particular.

it's the same thing that, eventually, will happen to everyone of us.

But literally where I am from they have on average 20 years more to live (second oldest Country in the World) so, regarding the burden on the national healthcare system, smokers cost less (I must specify I believe the economic angle is rather meaningless when talking about health care. I don't believe health care should ever be profitable, barely sustainable it's enough).

A study concluded that the abuse of medicines causes around 40 thousands deaths/year in my Country, which is an incredibly high number, so maybe the secret lies in moderation and not in abolition and prohibition.

There's also the fact that for many people a long meaningless life is much worse than one lived fully, as the "owner" intended.

Maybe someone in the future will convince everyone to avoid any potentially dangerous habit, but I'm also quite sure that such a society will face an epidemic of depression and suicides.

What are the cognitive upsides? The only one that I can think of as an ex-smoker is that helps to control anxiety.

At the same time knowing I was harming myself by smoking added a lot of anxiety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance

> Nicotine-containing products are sometimes used for the performance-enhancing effects of nicotine on cognition.[57] A 2010 meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory.[58] A 2015 review noted that stimulation of the α4β2 nicotinic receptor is responsible for certain improvements in attentional performance;[59] among the nicotinic receptor subtypes, nicotine has the highest binding affinity at the α4β2 receptor (ki=1 nM), which is also the biological target that mediates nicotine's addictive properties.[60] Nicotine has potential beneficial effects, but it also has paradoxical effects, which may be due to the inverted U-shape of the dose-response curve or pharmacokinetic features.

How susceptible to tolerance would the positive effect be? Would a long term smoker still have any benefit? Or is it like coffee, very quickly giving no benefit at all.

This is a good question, along with what happens if that long term smoker then quits altogether.

If you had ways to moderate the withdrawal of things like caffeine and nicotine you could possibly try alternating regimes. Would probably do dreadful things to your heart though.

Studies have shown that nicotine has some mild cognitive benefits on attention and short-term memory.

https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/

I'm not necessarily recommending nicotine to anyone, but there are ways to get it without smoking.

When I was in high school we had a few smokers. They seemed to make a lot of friends while smoking and have better social skills than others.

Cognitive upsides? Sounds like Cowboy Man copy… the Surgeon General aproves this message.

Or do you mean people worked faster because they couldn’t during their cig break?

Nicotine has been added to energy drinks in Japan for years. The claim that it has cognitive upsides is not necessarily cigarette-company propaganda.

Do you have any links for this? I could only find references to nicotinamide, not nicotine.

No links at hand, and I was unaware of the term “nicotinamide” for a form of vitamin B3. I am quite sure that I read claims of nicotine specifically being added, but I now suspect that the people writing that were misled by the name of nicotinamide. Thanks for enlightening me.

I don’t know about nicotine, but I am all cognitive upside from never smelling a cigarette again.

There isn't really any societal upside with smoking. It's a real net negative for the vast majority of users, financially and healthwise. Maybe smokers should switch to coffee for their high, a drug with no major downsides for most people.

Replace smoking with nicotine/users in your comment. Nicotine is no more dangerous than other pharmaceuticals at normal dosages.

Also adding the caveat about the obvious downsides of smoking before I assert this opinion but one thing that's kinda gotten lost is those micro social encounters you'd get from sharing a cigarette. Whether at work, at uni, at a concert, in a bar, or just about anywhere, those smoke breaks used to be a chance to strike up a 5-10 min convo with someone random. Even today, head to a designated smoke area and more often than not, you'll end up chatting with some stranger asking for a lighter before going back to what you were doing. I don't think society has found some other mundane shared experience to replace this.

It used to be a great way to identify tribes and make friends. You could be at some stuffy conference and the gaggle of smokers would be the drinkers, musicians, poets and rebels. It offered a simple way to give, share and help a stranger that I can't invent in the modern world. I'm sure the non-smokers probably enjoyed our absence too!

In many countries where smoking remains common, the people standing outside an establishment smoking are looking down at their phones, just like they would be looking at their phones on the bus. Trying to strike up any conversation would be a faux pas, and I imagine even asking a stranger for a light could be seen as an intrusion. In our modern world, experiences where people are physically close to one another does not necessarily mean that they will socialize.

Not true at all

Coffee doesn’t emit secondhand fumes which increase cancer in people who have not elected to drink coffee

Coffee breath!

Also, there was routine to take a genuine 10 min break every few hours... interesting to see if the lack of this break (lung cancer aside) has implications on health

Smoking is also not great for your mental health:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37351135, about https://studyfinds.org/smoking-depression-bipolar-disorder/

I co-own a small bar and help run our trivia night. Between rounds the smokers always go out for a smoke and they ended up all knowing each other.

Asking for a lighter which then leads to a off-hand question, has often led to a interesting conversations, more than one would expect.

Drunk driving helps a lot of people to get to work on time.

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