Until you lean in for a kiss, or even a hug.
The $4 billion gum industry has gone into freefall, with sales down 11% and volume down 20% in the past five years.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3033451/why-nobody-likes-to-chew...
As a father, an uncle, and a dog owner who has changed a lot of diapers and cleaned up a lot of poop (at ~10 years x 365 days x 1-10 events/day x ~1 lbs/event, probably a literal ton of shit) and been numbed to the smell, I'd literally prefer to smell feces in your adult Depends than cigarette smoke on your breath. It's not "hot" at all, completely the opposite.
It's not entirely off-putting it but it is certainly noticeable.
I recently attended an event hosted at an American Legion Post and went to the bar there where smoking was allowed (and done, frequently). The scent first hit me quite negatively, but something triggered in my mind and honestly made it feel more like home. It was an odd feeling of both not really enjoying the immediate sensation while also triggering positive nostalgia memories.
I have smoked less than one cigarette in my entire life, but for two decades was a daily cannaburner. In the past two months, I have almost entirely stopped combusting to consume (i.e. no flame/burning), and instead used a Volcano.
My blood pressure has dropped -20/-15 in those two months of not burning.
YMMV, n=1, "not a controlled study."
Also, even full smoking of marijuana is less dirty than smoking cigs, and a significant amount of marijuana smokers use things like bongs, bubblers, and other water filtration systems which do (slightly) reduce the harm of the smoke.
Marijuana is straight up harm reduction over big tobacco.
I would trust vape juice 1000x over thc oil, especially if it was unflavored. Vape juice is three ingredients and very easy to get their pure forms. Vape oil is pretty sketchy and has to be done very carefully.
But thc gummies are almost certainly safer than any of the above.
Very much depends on how you define threat.
I'd very much prefer that the driver in the other lane is smoking a ciggy rather that vaping marijuana in the interest of preserving their individual health.
Not as big of a harm reduction as people not smoking anything, which is where we were heading in the 1990s before marijuana legalization.
But since cigarettes also accelerate aging, you don't stay "hot" for too long.
The shoving of high-fructose corn syrup and other calorie-rich ingredients into everything sold in the US to increase consumption (again, for profits) has a much greater impact on weight management, though.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...
It doesn't have to be some conspiracy to make people addicted to calories. People are (relatively) rich, food is cheap, and eating feels good.
That only happens in a society that is not rich and happy.
If people are actually rich and happy you see them take up expensive sports, golf, tennis, horseback riding. They rarely get fat unless there's something personally wrong with them.
Swedes aren't WASPs, but we are this way. I think Spanish people and Germans are too. I agree that it is as you say in India, but surely both Indian-Americans and Asian-American must become a bit this other way, since they'll probably work with many WASPs, and surely they get affected by media and general societal expectations?
My point is that suggesting that people who eat and gain weight must be unhappy and coping, because happy rich people play sports, is a culturally based assumption. American WASPs and Northern Europeans absolutely stand out in that respect. Even in East Asian cultures with strong social pressure to not gain weight, adults playing sports isn’t common.
I think when people have more of their needs fulfilled, it becomes more rational to tackle the final bits. When you're poor, you care about food and having somewhere to live, then at an intermediate level it's about paying the bills and not falling down into the poverty hole, then at a higher level it's succeeding at university, doing good research, making a successful company, but when you have all that, and you can't lose any of these things, then you start also wanting other things, and then playing sports reasonably often becomes extremely natural.
If someone is getting fat, or eating to excess, there has to be something wrong. Something stressing them, something they want to turn away from, to distract themselves. Happy people don't have such needs.
Do you have any evidence of this conspiracy? Perhaps it's just food producers adding an abundant, cheap sweetener to their crap because that's what the market demands?
Read the ingredients and buy or don't buy. People need to have a bit of personal accountability in these things.
But it takes a little time and a bit of care.
If you're stuck in traffic for time measured in hours, you're not baking fresh bread during the week.
Even the much-higher-end supermarkets near me don't have meaningful alternatives for a lot of products where I am, and I'm in a HCOL area.
I read the ingredients on everything (I'm a vegetarian) and I don't buy anything with corn syrup or added sugar that isn't either 1) a once-in-a-while treat or 2) something I'd add a bit of sweetener to if I were to make it myself.
I don't shop anywhere special.
If I were FDA dictator for a day, I'd requite a corn logo on anything with corn syrup, and crossed corn for anything with HFCS.
Now calorie inflation can be done with sugar, too - the real deal is to have things that aren't "diabetes inducing sweet".
Personal accountability can only go so far when you're shown ads for sugary cereals and candy every morning as a kid.
Contrast that with, say, the current marijuana market in my region. It's regulated, it's only available at a relatively high price from licensed dispensaries. There are billboards but not much in the way of TV or radio ads. It's not marketed to kids. If you get addicted to marijuana in the Lower Midwestern US, that's a lack of personal accountability because you can't point to all of the stuff that's used to make junk food popular and say "they got me addicted!".
The same thing is true for junk food. People eat it because it tastes good. How much food should be regulated is up for debate but there's something irritating about this reflex to blame every problem on some shadowy cabal of rich people.
...Except marijuana absolutely isn't legalized, so this is completely incorrect. And in the minority of states that currently ignore the illegality of marijuana, they impose the same age restrictions as cigarettes.
THC-A is just the natural form of good old delta-9 THC while the plant is still freshly harvested and unheated. THC-A is the natural, standard weed chemical that converts to “good old delta-9 THC” at 100% efficiency as soon as the weed is heated for consumption, or while the plant sits around in storage for a long time. The old laws counted THC-A as contributing to delta-9 THC content, you summed them together or converted them before testing to decide if it was hemp. Now it’s treated as a different cannabinoid and only delta-9 content determines if it is hemp or weed.
So yes, weed is now legal nationwide is the USA, and sold in brick-and-mortar stores in all 50 states…it’s just gone completely and utterly under-the-political-radar.
Also “good old delta-9 THC” edibles are legal now as well, at very high strengths, because as long as the total weight is <0.3% delta-9 THC its a “hemp gummie”.
I don't know where you live, but I buy my marijuana from a government store. There exist other countries.
To claim "marijuana absolutely isn't legalized" is completely incorrect. Something being illegal is more complicated than what the above poster makes it seem, unless a definition of "illegality" is used that's so broad that it's meaningless.
My point is that the legal and cultural barriers that kept young adults from heading down to their local dispensary to buy dope have disappeared. So while we were on the cusp of freeing people from smoking in the 1990s, we have just made it easy and effectively legal to smoke a different thing, and everyone seems to have forgotten that inhaling smoke into your lungs is bad for you.
I don't know for sure, but does this imply that the FDA can't really regulate these dispensaries? Since the federal government's official stance on marijuana is "you shouldn't be using it anyway!" then presumably they don't feel the need to ensure purity of the product for dispensaries.
I've said for years that I'm the only person I know that D.A.R.E. was actually effective on; I'm way too much of a coward to consume things that aren't regulated. Even as a teenager I never did any drugs because I was afraid that it might be cut with something horrible like meth and I wouldn't have any recourse for them doing that.
I'm sure most dispensaries are fine, but I'm still kind of afraid of something that doesn't have FDA oversight.
I'm blaming marijuana legalization for young people smoking marijuana, when they wouldn't smoke cigarettes. The fact that marijuana isn't legal in all states, or is illegal at the federal level, is immaterial to my point. In the places where my family and I live (D.C. and Oregon), marijuana has been legal for a decade. It was made legal in Oregon in 2015, after being decriminalized in 1973. Dispensaries are all over the place. In D.C. it's been legal to grew, possess, and barter since 2015.
The fact that it's illegal under federal law has no effect on people's use of it, because the feds do not bother to enforce that law on individuals. My neighborhood in downtown D.C. reeked of pot smoke way back in 2016.
Young people who would never smoke cigarettes smoking marijuana was already happening the 2000s, long before any state approached legalization.