How to get 7th graders to smoke
experimental-history.com
experimental-history.com
"This here is methamphetamine, aka crystal meth or speed. If you see a man running down the street with the strength of a bear, there's a good chance he's high on this. It's very bad. You don't want to get near this--it'll make your heart explode."
It's a wonder that didn't work.
I don't do dares. (joke)
Drugs Are Really Enjoyable/Excellent
A few years later when my friends were smoking weed and laughed at my concerns, and I realized I’d been lied to, I pretty much did everything under the sun.
An actual education would have let me make better choices about my recreational drug use as a young person.
Alcohol and Tobacco have minimal short term health risks. Most people throw up rather than OD on Alcohol. Obviously driving while fucked us is dangerous, but the same is true of a lot of drugs. Driving stoned is an underappreciated risk.
LSD arguably the poster child for safe illegal drugs, but still physically risky due to people doing dangerous things in it and falling etc. However the mental risks with heavy use are significant much earlier. Luckily it’s not particularly addictive, but IMO it’s more dangerous than both Alcohol and Tobacco even as people claim otherwise.
Tobacco is seriously deadly long term, but the risks are low for the first 20 years. When you include risks from throwing up while unconscious etc, heavy use of many seemingly safe drugs end up risky on those timescales.
Alcohol is an _extremely_ harmful drug.
Risk of death is significant, but we’re talking under 0.1% per year.
that very few are overdosing isn't the issue.
No, LSD won't kill your body. But what are you? You aren't just your body, you are your mind and mental state and the consistency of that.
Do enough LSD, especially consistent high doses, and the "you" you know will die and be permanently replaced by something else.
I of course agree that LSD won't put you in a coffin. But there are more axes upon which a drug's danger should be evaluated than "what percentage of users are put in coffins?"
A conundrum.
And critically, lobotomy isn't a change from one set of mental states to another. That big chunk of brain doesn't grow back.
Post lobotomy people generally weren’t brain dead, even if diminished. So for extreme cases, yes it’s a solid comparison.
I consider myself lucky that the anxiety only shows up when on drugs, which is pretty easy to avoid by, y'know, not doing drugs. But clearly something permanently shifted inside my brain.
The inability to experience something I used to enjoy without a near-panic-attack is a bit more of an effect than a conversation might have.
I had a college roommate who did a shit ton of LSD one night and I woke up to the fire alarm having been pulled and him punching holes in the wall.
The police (fire department called the police) dragged him off and the hospital had to give him a bunch of antidepressants to short circuit the LSD.
He was literally not the same person ever again. That is terrifying, even more so than chemical dependency, to me.
Once you can't seperate fantasy from reality you're just one bad trip from falling out of a window you thought was a door.
edit: The responses here just seem like denialism from people who got lucky to be honest.
You can be aware that you are tripping and still imagine that something is something else.
Roads looked like footpaths to me, windows looked like doors, knives looked like forks, and so on and so forth. I was aware that it wasn't real but couldn't be sure of the safety of existing in the world.
I basically had to sit in a corner for 10 hours, hope that the corner was actually the one I thought it was and that I wasn't going to fall down a staircase instead.
It was great fun but felt like russian roulette.
Because what you’re describing doesn’t resemble LSD at all. You’re describing deleriants like datura if anything.
That said things can still happen on a bad trip. I posted my own personal experience downthread.
Yeah. If alcohol was discovered only today, there wouldn't be a government in the world that would legalise it.
It's legal because its grandfathered in, from the time before humans developed society and civilisation.
Something like cannabis, MDMA, or amphetamines would be. I think all of those have a decent claim to being safer than or comparably safe to alcohol.
Tobacco, as you say isn't particularly bad in the short term. But it is particularly addictive, so you end up with a large proportion of addicts / long term users for whom the longer term effects apply.
People have fatal overdoses on MDMA and hart attacks etc.
Amphetamines use is linked with cardiovascular issues and brain damage.
For each cause of death, the researchers compared trends in deaths in states with legal markets with those in states that had comprehensive medical cannabis programs and similar trends in death rates prior to implementing markets…
The study did not link cannabis use with traffic fatalities.
The study linked trends.
Cannabis use was not a factor in those deaths. Not listed as a cause. Not listed as intoxicated at time of accident.
There is a significant difference between the narrative being schlepped versus what data was actually accumulated.
Findings show that meta-analyses and culpability studies consistently indicate a slightly but significantly increased risk of crashes after acute cannabis use. These risks vary across included study type, crash severity, and method of substance application and measurement. Some studies show a significant correlation between high THC blood concentrations and car crash risk. Most studies do not support this relationship at lower THC concentrations. However, no scientifically supported clear cut-off concentration can be derived from these results. Further research is needed to determine dose-response effects on driving skills combined with measures of neuropsychological functioning related to driving skills and crash risk.
Suppose you have a study of 10k people split 5k:5k between smokers and non smokers. In the non smokers group you get say 10 cases of lung cancer and the smokers group you get 200. It’s really tempting to say the individual smokers got long cancer from smoking, but the base rate isn’t 0 so you don’t know who was screwed either way. Perhaps if nobody smoked in that total population there would have been 19 cases of lung cancer or perhaps 22.
Thus only thing you can say is smoking increases RISK of lung cancer not link it to specific cases.
People OD and die from drinking water, that doesn’t make it as dangerous as heroin.
From one rave “Twelve patients with 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) toxicity from a single rave event presented to multiple San Francisco Bay area hospitals with various life-threatening complications including seizures and hyperthermia. Eight required emergent endotracheal intubation and six had hypotension. Hyperkalemia, acute kidney injury, and rhabdomyolysis were present in most of the patients. In all, 2 patients died, 4 survived with permanent neurologic, musculoskeletal, and/or renal sequelae, and 6 survived without any apparent lasting deficits. Hyperthermia was present in 10 patients and was severe (40.9-43° C) in 7. Using multiple cooling methods, the average time to achieve cooling was 2.7 hours. Serum drug analysis was performed on 3 patients, demonstrating toxic MDMA concentrations without the presence of other xenobiotics. Two capsules confiscated by police at the event contained 82% and 98% MDMA, respectively, without other pharmacologically active compounds. Capsule #2 contained 270 mg MDMA, which is more than twice the amount of MDMA usually contained in 1 dose. The MDMA-induced hyperthermia significantly contributed to the morbidity and mortality in this case series. Factors contributing to the severity of the hyperthermia include ingestion of large doses of MDMA, a warm ambient environment, and physical exertion.”
To be clear drug testing would have discovered fentanyl or other common drugs in their bloodstream, so it’s not just based on the pills recovered. Granted legalization would likely result in more consistent doses which would help, but the drug itself would still be risky if people just kept consuming more.
MDMA screws up the body's ability to regulate temperature. But without the warm environment and physical activity leading to hyperthermia, I can't imagine any of those people would have even needed medical attention.
That said, personally I would never call MDMA "the poster child for safe illegal drugs". Just because it won't kill you, doesn't mean it is safe or risk-free.
More broadly, I’m including traffic fatalities as a risk from alcohol and falls under LSD, so having deadly issues regulating body temperature definitely qualifies in an apples to apples comparison here.
Again, no, that San Francisco situation is strictly not describing an overdose. From the comfort of your living room, you can consume a massively higher amount of MDMA than what was described in that paper, and won't suffer significant medical issues.
> I’m including traffic fatalities as a risk from alcohol
OK, but that doesn't mean a drunk-driving fatality is an overdose on alcohol.
If they had taken that much at home it may not have resulted in an overdose, but in this situation it did.
I suppose you're free to say that, and everyone else is free to ignore this as ridiculous nonsense which is completely out-of-step with the widely-used definition of "overdose".
You're completely ignoring the context of the event. Have you ever been to a rave? Some promoters are good and understand the importance of providing free/inexpensive water, proper ventilation, and security who are able to spot attendees requiring medical intervention. Other promoters are shady AF and do none of those things. In the latter case, if someone consumes MDMA and also dances for hours without hydration and the venue is way too hot / oversold, yes that person is at risk of hyperthermia.
That can also happen even to sober people, I've literally seen it.
Try asking your GP about what it an insulin OD entails and they will refer to the results not the specific dose. Though obviously there’s a dose large enough it’s never appropriate.
And indeed some countries legally require it.
It appears thar heat stroke caused the problems not "toxic MDMA concentrations". The LD50 of MDMA is estimated to be 180mg/kg - Were those ravers taking tens of capsules? I presume there are toxicology reports from the deaths that estimated the dosages. But alcohol is poisonous if you have too much - we don't usually call it "toxic".
Weirdly they mention "a warm ambient environment" but what were the humidity levels? I presume there is good information on the underlying causes of death elsewhere? That summary is terribly uninformative.
"mortality from classic heat stroke approaches 80% and, for exertional heatstroke, 33% in the absence of prompt treatment" : https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp2210623
Disclaimer: personally I'm not a MDMA user. I'm a concerned citizen that thinks raves are generally healthier than bars. "sensible" MDMA usage anecdotally within those events seems safe to me (sample of thousands of people, zero deaths). Number of people I know dead from MDMA: zero. Number of people I personally know dead from alcohol: many (I am a middle aged guy so some were long term effects, one was in a house fire).
Drunk driving is a more indirect risk, but I am also including that as one of the risks of Alcohol consumption elsewhere in the thread. If you’re objecting to the name fine, but the risk still exists as MDMA consumption regularly kills people due to this and other risks.
PS: Water toxicity is a similar situation. It’s not just the amount of water alone that’s a problem instead the amount they’ve been sweating is often a contributing factor. Oddly, they also mention MDMA as a risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
Are you really arguing that meth is a poster child for safe illegal drugs?
Hell, even petty theft is caused by piss tests... if you truly believe that these people become addicted to badly that they'll do anything for a fix, hey guess what? That includes scrubbing toilets for minimum wage. So why do they steal copper wire out of foreclosed homes for scrap? Because piss tests disqualify them for the toilet scrubbing positions.
They just never really had the drive to improve their situation in life to the point where it often is easier to get high instead of confronting problems.
What on earth are you talking about? Alcohol can kill you in a single evening if you drink enough of it. How much shorter-term could its health risks be?
Of the ~3 million Americans that tried Alcohol for the first time in 2023 how many exactly died from an overdose that night? That’s what low risk looks like.
The risk on the first time they consumed alcohol is probably 1/100th of that due to younger ages etc.
If you take enough of a drug that it makes you throw up, you did overdose. 'Overdose' doesn't mean you died. Fatal overdoses just get talked about more than other overdoses because they're the most harmful kind of overdose.
Alcohol abuse either kills people in the long term, or combined with automobiles. Very few people have a bit too much to drink some night and actually die from it. You'll generally black out long before you get a lethal dose.
With opioids, you can trivially take a lethal dose.
(That doesn't change what the word 'overdose' means. If you want to be more specific than the word is, feel free to use adjectives, e.g., 'fatal overdose', 'deadly overdose', etc.)
OD refers to excessive consumption or negative heath outcomes, so yes and sort of. With alcohol people will sometimes throw up before all that much alcohol enters the bloodstream, throwing up may qualify on its own but may prevent things like liver damage but throwing up itself could qualify as a negative health impact.
So for a collage kid throwing up really does provide meaningful protection for their liver. Though obviously it comes with its own risks of asphyxiation etc.
Like yeah if you take way too much lsd or take a tab a day it might fuck you up, but so will drinking a fifth of whiskey inside an hour, or having two or three cocktails every evening. Or take like double the top-end therapeutic dose of tylenol.
I’m not claiming most of them are strictly safe, just that most aren’t obviously in a whole different risk category from a couple of our legal drugs. Shit, I’ve given myself heart palpitations as a teen because nobody stopped me from getting a second triple-shot cappuccino.
Alcohol use kills both acutely and chronically. Alcohol is addictive. Long term use cause mental health issues.
LSD does not have the same health impacts and its lack of addiction potential gives it a significantly lower harm profile.
Do yourself a favour and read some material published by domain experts (may I recommend “Drugs Without the Hot Air” by David Nutt).
However, I’m looking at things from a per use basis because I’m not really attracted to drinking. So for me it’s about what risks are associated with drinking a beer vs dropping a tab vs smoking 1 more cigarette. Because people like me can choose to do some, all, or none of those things and it’s worth considering the risks on a per event basis.
Very few deaths are associated with LSD, but harm isn’t so binary. You can reasonably safely consume a lot of alcohol without issue, as in 1-3 beers a night for a decade, but daily LSD use at that level is another story.
This is not a useful metric at all, and is incredibly naive. Each of those activities carries with it the relative risks of addiction and long term harms. Your metric can lead to absurd conclusion that cigarettes are perfectly fine because nobody ever got cancer from having just one. The danger in tobacco is that people don't stop at just one.
> You can reasonably safely consume a lot of alcohol without issue, as in 1-3 beers a night for a decade
Some people can, but a significant minority of the people that try that will run into trouble and find their habit escalating. Even people like you who seem to think they are above addiction. And those who don't suffer addiction from that pattern will have increased their risk of cancer and various other diseases.
> but daily LSD use
Is so rare as to effectively constitute a complete fallacy of argument. That's the point, virtually nobody wants to use LSD on a daily basis, even amongst people who like and use LSD. Its risk profile is significantly lower than alcohol or tobacco as a result of that.
Seriously, go read up on this stuff, it's fascinating as well as enlightening.
Personal experience but Alcohol, Tobacco, opioids etc and never felt the pull. I tried smoking for a little under a year but didn’t really care for it. Used to drink fairly regularly but just kind of got bored with it to the point a found out beer eventually goes bad in your fridge.
> Is rare
Ok that may be personal bias in terms of use. I remember one guy saying enough LSD could replace sleep and things didn’t go well for him or a lot of other people.
So yes, I knew quite a few people that used it daily, but though none were able to function long term like that. Dad and various friends were connected to Timothy Leary and that’s about as much as I am comfortable sharing.
Sure, and that's your personal experience. If we were going by my personal experience we would get a different picture - that tobacco was highly addictive (though easy enough to quit in the end) but there was no issue at all with cocaine. Yet when we look at the harm profile of cocaine, we can see it's comparatively pretty bad and pulls people into spirals of addiction and self-destruction.
You can't really say "LSD is worse than booze" as a sweeping statement that you consider applies to everyone, and then use as justification your personal lack of issues with alcohol.
> I knew quite a few people that used it daily
No offence, but this is why the plural of anecdote is not data. Your sample bias here is extreme - people who were idealogically inclined to take acid daily as an almost pseudo-religious sacrament are not a representative sample.
Case studies are a major source of data in science. People exposed to extreme radiation doses from accidents play a significant role in our understanding of the consequences of said exposure and ways to treat it.
If the people I knew were able to handle that kind of LSD use then I would have a different opinion because LSD would be safer. Is 1% the use 1% as dangerous? Now that’s where you need controlled studies because the effect size diminishes, but feed 50 rats 1 gram of substance Y and they all die and that’s strong evidence on it’s own no need for statistical analysis.
Your theoretical study there tells you about substance toxicity, but it tells you very little about the real-world dangers of substance Y to rats.
Would rats choose to consume substance Y at all? How often and how compulsively? What are the effects on rats at the levels they choose to consume, rather than the effects on them at levels the scientists chose to dose them with? If most rats would choose to eat 1mg of Y, at most once a year, and that level doesn't seem to harm them, then that 50mg test has shown you nothing at all.
Substance Z doesn't kill at 50mg, in fact it's safe up to 1000mg, is it less harmful? Well that depends. If the rats compulsively gobble every bit of it they can find and then drop dead after a month, we can say that Z is much worse.
Imagine you worked in an alcoholic rehab centre. You have first hand evidence all around you of the horrific damage alcohol wreaks on its users. Many of them have liver problems, are aged by the booze and their tough lives. Some are battling cancers caused by the drink, others have severe mental impairments. Your impression of drinkers is likely very skewed.
That's what you're doing with your sample of LSD users. With alcohol you're explicitly excluding the equivalent group in your assessment - "You can reasonably safely consume a lot of alcohol without issue, as in 1-3 beers a night for a decade" - when we can be confident that the group of alcohol addicts is larger as a proportion and suffers from all sorts of issues you're happy to ignore.
This way of thinking is so common I'm considering naming it the "it's just a beer" fallacy. Most people who have a beer or two don't become alcoholics. Most people who drop acid once or twice don't become your dads friends. To gauge relative harm we need to figure out what 'most' means and what the consequences are across users. You don't get to select a moderate drinker and an extreme outlier acid-head and say "see! this one is worse!". That's not a valid comparison.
I could agree with tobacco but I don't believe LSD is more dangerous than alcohol. Most domestic violence, most fatal traffic accidents are under the influence of alcohol. It destroys families and communities. I don't see how LSD could be that damaging.
That cop came to my school too. On a bicycle. He also told us that 50% of us would die in any car accident over 50mph. It was really hard to not laugh at him given the number of us who participated in the local streetracing scene. In a room full of students in jackets and ties, he stood there spouting lies in his spandex bike shorts.
So me and some buddies got a hold of some peyote and were more than a little afraid of it. We probably would have tossed it but we had a better idea. We called Coach and asked his advice. He gave us detailed preparation instructions. We followed them and got a bit sick, but not altered. Maybe it wasn't even peyote.
I'm not sure that this approach was just more nuanced than "just say no" or closer to "just do it".
I've never come across someone that does more preparation than drying, so to me it seems suspicious to suggest anything else. Mescaline is water soluble so one can make infusions, but it takes a fair bit of plant material to get dosed so there isn't much practical use in doing so.
Drying slightly improves the taste but not by much.
One thing they did that has stuck with me though was this plastic bag contraption with some material inside to represent the human lungs. There was a hole at the top which the DARE officer placed a lit cigarette, then began (somehow) pumping air from the hole down into the lung material. I remember watching the material quickly go from white to brown and tarry. By the time the cigarette was out, she looked us all in the eyes and said "this is what smoking does to your lungs"
Then some kids try some pot and discover that DARE was full of shit and they disregard the entire message or even rebel against it. Education programs are counterproductive when they are loaded with misinformation.
Interpret outcomes from that as you will.
I remember these programs, and I remember how they made me and my friends feel. But nobody asked us, lol.
I'd even try to tell people I thought, but instead of listening to us, we were admonished.
The problem is that these programs are full of bull shit, bad information, bad science, and lies designed to scare.
Kids pick up on this quickly, and you now have lost all trust with this cohort, permanently.
It's the exact same reason abstinence only education fails.
Humans want to feel good, that's okay, we also don't want to die or ruin our lives (assuming we aren't living in a hell). Basic facts here.
Whatcha drinking daddy?
A beer! Want to try it?
YUCK!!!!
This removes the rebellion portion from drinking to a degree.
As the author of the post says in a reply to a comment:
> ' This is a common outcome for programs like this: "It doesn't work, but the adults like it!" '
https://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2010/02/25/anti-smo...
But that one is not bad either :)
I'm definitely affected by both, but generally if I feel I'm being nannied my instinct is to go the other way. People don't need to be "convinced" to do things that are good for them - if they're not doing it, they likely just have reasons that you don't understand.
Then I must be quite different from that "literal 3 year old". Mom and Dad both drank coffee, and around the 3-year point I did want to try it, for the reason you say, because it was something "they" were doing. And, yes, that sip did taste like ass. So much like ass that to this day 54 years later, I do not and will not drink coffee.
Thinking back on it, were they powering their pirate jetskis with heavy crude? Was there a distillation column set up on the oil tanker? I probably shouldn't think too hard about Wet Mad Max because I bet a lot of that movie doesn't really make sense on closer inspection.
That reminds me of the classic short-film subversion of this trope: The Man Who Has a Cough and it's Just a Cough and He's Fine
Mia's OD scene in Pulp Fiction definitely scared me away from drugs
even though I wasn't supposed to be old enough to see it >_>
Makes me wonder if over-protecting children from negative feelings backfires. Pulp Fiction was a risk-free and simple way to make vivid the risks of heroin.
it definitely hit differently to "see it myself", versus having it introduced by a parent/guardian, who probably would shy away from making the lesson so graphic
I'm somewhat relieved that tobacco references are considered "adult" now in entertainment. The amount of smoking I saw in movies and TV (and around my uncle) normalized it for me, even though I knew how unhealthy it was.
Nicotine addiction is very subtle, for many it's hard to recognize until you're hooked.
Perhaps silence works better than negative mention? There's a real problem with anti-war or anti-violence media accidentally making it look cool, similarly with biographies of "troubled star" types detailing their drug uses.
Friend: Do you have anything that doesn't taste like middle school girl lip gloss?
Gas station attendant: *chuckles* No, sorry.
Friend: Fine, cherry-berry then.
There was quite obviously a concerted effort to remove smoking from movies and shows. It's been going on for more than a decade. It's quite abrupt, go back far enough and everyone smokes, especially the cool guys and gals. Then fast forward and almost nobody smokes, not even the villains. Ads for smoking are gone from my country's TV and cigarette packs by law must display horrifying photos of emaciated cancer patients.
A bunch of actors smoking never did anything for me.
Also the fact that vast majority of people who do drugs never realize the bad effects from it. They do it in moderation, use them responsibly, and stop without much thought. It's the hockey stick at the edge of the chart where all the destructive narrative comes from.
This is the same for every addictive substance, no?
How many people who try cocaine end up being the poster case for DARE? It's virtually no one. The risk analysis for having fun with drugs is totally lopsided. Society is fighting to keep 100% from using drugs in order to protect the 5% who will have their lives ruined.
It would be like only being able to buy wine in boxes of 20, or beers in crates of 30. Once you have it, you're much more likely to use it. I just want a beer or a bottle of wine this Friday evening, and maybe after that I want a cigarette. And that's it.
yeah I'm not sure how banning sale of loosies is protecting the kids. At 30, I get carded almost always when I buy a pack and almost never when I buy alcohol. If someone is selling to kids, they wouldn't care about this law anyway.
I find myself constantly wondering how people can be so gullible as to buy the drivel they're being fed.
No one is trying to change these people's behaviors. They are feeding them what they already want; reinforcing negative behaviors. That has always been very easy.
The relationship to today's political theatre is related to this discussion by comparing it to how easy it was to get everyone to smoke in the 1950's
I have found, repeatedly, that the way to get people to change is to make them think it was their idea. So you manipulate them, but in such a fashion that they do not realise they are being manipulated. For instance, I got my kid sister to quit smoking by taking up smoking and encouraging her to smoke more and more until she smelt like an ashtray and had a wallet as light as a feather - and then she decided that this was stupid, and quit. I then claimed to take inspiration from her and followed suit.
Of course, this doesn’t work en masse without essentially going into conspiratorial psyops on the population, but on an individual or small group basis, people can be given a set of precepts and ideas that lead them to an almost inevitable conclusion - and because it was their idea, it’s precious. You can then really cement it by trying to get them to drop the idea, and convince them that the thing that you wanted them to think is wrong.
Contrary creatures, we.
This seems flat out wrong to me given how extremely difficult it is for most people to change themselves. I guess on some level you could argue that people are "manipulating" themselves, but that seems a bit silly to me given how you are using the word manipulation.
It's hard to change people because humans are actually great at multiple forms of homeostasis. All research I've read has said that people's personalities are basically solidified from early childhood (i.e. age 5-6).
That is, you're basically asserting "If you try to change your behavior, but can't, it's because your explicit beliefs have been manipulated into thinking something that your body won't go along with." Well, how do you know? Seems like you're saying "Because your body would go along with it if your brain wasn't being manipulated."
Just look at the millions of people who have tried for decades to lose weight. You can call it "manipulation" or whatever, but I think a poor quality of life, shortened life span, etc. are plenty real, valid, "non-manipulative" reasons on their own for obese people to want to lose weight even if you ignore the societal implications. And does taking semaglutide somehow magically make it not "manipulation" anymore by your definition?
The reason for this is that the most important element of persuasion is Ethos, or your perceived character. This is much more important than Logos (logical appeal) or Pathos (emotional appeal).
Suits have no credibility to teenagers so they cannot be persuasive. Cool kids have a ton of credibility and thus are very persuasive.
Imagine what they could do if they had a PhD and bad intentions...
But let's say, first they do have good intentions. However, even then, if these people devoted their lives to their cause, they promoted programs, wrote countless powerpoint slides, even books. And now some other research comes out and says "well it looks like that other stuff was actually hurting kids". How many of the PhDs with good intentions, will acknowledge that and effectively throw away their life's work?
> Some famous CEOs were mean to their employees and got good results, so I should do that too, which is convenient because I am a jerk.
That's exactly what one of the leadership team did in a company I worked at. They tried to emulate Steve Jobs. And out of brilliance, dedication to perfection, design, hiring the best people, all possible qualities they could have tried to emulated, they emulated being an asshole, hoping the company would become the next Apple at some point.
So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business, the alternative "legal" way to sell the drugs.
I’m sure there are whales that spend on vaping like some stoners spend thousands on Mothership glass, but they pale in comparison to the millions of multipack-a-day smokers that are worth thousands a year in profit. I assume that’s why Juul was pushed so hard by cigarette companies, the economics of Juul pods are much closer to cigarettes than the stuff sold in vape shops.
Or is the addiction tied to both the method of consumption and not only the effect (why i drink coffee and not take caffeine pills i guess)
Method of consumption is definitely important. I couldn’t fully switch to vapes until I found one that had the same “throat feel” as my American Spirits. Not just the type of nicotine (salts) but the exact brand of vaporizer and coil style. Just like people prefer the taste and ritual of coffee to caffeine pills.
If they're going custom then the upfront cost will be a lot more, but e-juice is super cheap. Have to replace the coils every now and then as well unless it's a refillable pod system. You can also choose whether you get freebase vs nicotine salts and how much nicotine the juice contains.
I personally believe disposable vapes are dangerous and can get a newcomer as addicted to nicotine as a pack-a-day smoker in a matter of weeks. And for smokers, it won't give you a pathway to taper off your nicotine intake.
What do you mean by this? Why would you buy less than 50 mg at a time?
I use snus, and I'd guess it's several mgs per pouch, and I buy something like 200-250 pouches at a time because I'm not a heavy 'snusare' so one roll at roughly 30 bucks lasts more than a month. 50 mg would be, what, like two-three packs of cigarettes?
edit: Basically, no clue how much nicotine you'd technically intake with a puff but it seems absurdly stronger than the slow intake of 6mg in your gums.
Vapes on the other hand can range from expensive to cheap as dirt. When I vaped I was spending probably $10/mo to replace a pack a day habit. I made my own flavorless juice and used a $50 tank/mod system.
It wasn't the type of fantasy I was expecting at the time, but I did eventually figure out the message a year or two after we broke up.
Unfathomably based.
By their logic, they needed to experts in all the ways to be safe to prevent it from happening, but pre-internet, their info was a little dodgy. One summer, they had a "No boys in the hot tub, at all" rule. It took some convincing to get them to explain why, but someone had heard that sperm. could swim. in water.
...
And they'd just live in there, like goldfish? Did they need to be fed? Did they have maps?
That one was probably the most precious. They never really questioned how the aggressive little Olympians might end up there in the first place, and these girls could all drive.
And the article seems to argue that interventions are unlikely to change people while also accepting that the drug study did change the kids in the wrong way. To me that doesn't indicate that it's necessarily wrong to try to intervene with short-ish programs in schools, it indicates the content of those programs might be really bad.
Maybe that program didn't actually harm kids, beyond wasting their time, and was a statistical outlier. I don't have much opinion that. But I can understand why interventions can backfire if they're inauthentic. When I figure out you've been lying to me, I want to throw everything you said out the window. If you also made me make some videotaped promise saying something YOU want me to believe then you can bet I'm gonna feel betrayed too.
It almost seems as if the researchers triggered something resembling the Streisand effect. The Social and Emotional programs were obviously intended to discourage the kids from smoking, but participation in those programs was only serving to keep the kids' attention on smoking, and making some of them curious.
The kids might also have gotten the message that trying smoking is okay, as long as it's not related to peer pressure or feelings, but one's inherent curiosity. Programs designed to produce resilience against peer pressure will not block smoking that is not caused by peer pressure.
... also could have a unintended effect. A kid could start to notice a peer pressure and get more clear idea how to follow trends or even predict them and to run ahead of them.
Teenagers are really concerned about what their peers think about them. If you tell them all about peer pressure, they will listen attentively, and develop a strategy how to grow in the eyes of their peers. Very bright could get the idea that you can be the source of peer pressure. Lets start smoking and lets make all others to start smoking too.
I would say, that if you talk with kids about smoking, some of kids get the idea that if they were seen smoking, then they will look more knowledgeable about smoking than you. Or maybe they will see rebellious and independent from boring adults. Especially rebellious if adults talk about dangers of smoking all the time.
People's minds are difficult complex machines, they could react at your stimulus in unexpected ways, and the more ways you can predict the more mind-blowing unpredictable become.
We know how hard it is to change ourselves, yet view others as fuzzy and that it's easy, just enact a few advertisements and a program or two, done.
But at the same time, it's basically impossible to know what will work until it hits the field. Better to just throw a bunch of stuff and then adjust according to the results.
Ever used nicotine: 70.1% in 1991 to 17.8% in 2021; Occasional use of nicotine: 27.5% in 1991 to 3.8% in 2021; Frequent use of nicotine: 12.7% to 0.7%; Daily use of nicotine: 9.8% in 1991 to 0.6% in 2021
https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/teen-cigarette-smoking...
I suspect the same can be said for workplace sexual harassment and outlooks on diversity. I agree that the programs are dumb and the trainings are dumb, but they have an effect.
Whether the programs are working or not is more of a debate, but don't want this cherry picked stat to go untouched.
The message of the article wasn't that you can't discourage drug use at all, it's that the means may be counterproductive. The means used in DARE were counterproductive.
If you want someone to DO something you just need to show that it COULD fill a gap in some other part of their life. If it's addictive as well then they don't need to experiment for long before it's a solid part of their life.
Getting someone to stop plays off loss aversion and sunk cost.
Does anyone else feel the opposite?
I can much more easily intuit how others feel and synthesize hypotheses on why they behaved the way they did than I can with myself. I have an infinite number of framings and reframings to choose from when it comes to my own behavior that it's difficult to objectively choose. I constantly ask myself how do I know that my own model isn't unconsciously avoiding negative feelings or conversely biased toward being too critical? So much so that I simply give up more than I like to admit.
But I also struggle hypothesizing others' reasons for behavior. I can readily empathize with others, but often can't transfer from the emotional response to the underlying reasons/logic.
The speaker made one especially-memorable comment: "I'm told that shooting heroin feels like an all-over-body sexual climax. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds pretty neat."
(The rest of the lecture was standard stuff about how doing drugs would get us de-nuked and basically end our careers.)
Later, Reagan couldn't relate to poor or minorities, so he (and Nancy) doubled-down on "tough on crime" militarization and ineffective PSAs.
The movie "Thank You for Smoking" has a great scene between Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and Big Firearms lobbyist caricatures [1].
[1] Merchants Of Death Thank You For Smoking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss0jLHvMO20
next what prevented me from doing this was that it is illegal. Plain and simple. I am not questioning the law. I am following it.
Lastly, what prevents me is my community faith that has labeled it to be forbidden.
OTOH, caffiene is also bad. My family told me so. And they drank it nevertheless. And I drank a few times, but very few. But I avoided it because children should not be drinking coffee/tea. Until college came. And then I had to. It was a hack. But I kept it disciplined. And then I got married to someone who always drank coffee. And now I am an addict. and my potassium is super high. And everything else in my body is in the gutters because of it. And I can't come off of it. It's a way to stave off depression. And stress. And anxiety. And keeps me in a positive state because I can drink and become a superworker and get all my work done, without addressing some of the more problematic stuff. All I have done is push the crash further down the timeline.
Caffiene should be banned too. And probably ADHD drugs while we are at it.
Also, ADHD medication is regulated. It's an effective treatment for what can be a truly debilitating disorder affecting executive function, memory and emotional control. ADHD is not something that trying harder will fix.
I'm a white guy who grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the 60s and 70s, so you can imagine what my implicit biases are like pretty reliably. What helps me get away from that is access to social media sites like X, reddit, and tumblr, where I follow people who are as different from me as possible. I have updated my influences. I listen. I pay attention to my internal dialogue and reactions and try to challenge myself.
>and if you do all that, congratulations, you’ve started what we call a cult.
Right. It's one thing to open myself to worlds I'm not aware of. It's something completely different to try to control what someone else experiences.
Another way of saying that is—as an atheist, I don't find religions interesting or useful. But I know that I'll never be able to sell atheism to anyone if their religion is a deeply meaningful part of their worldview and identity. Any attempt to do so has to start by destroying that world and that identity, and that kind of violence is anathema to anyone with the smallest bit of empathy. We are made of our influences and this essay covers that well.
It's a great essay that covers so much more than smoking (or drugs). Thanks for the link.
Peer pressure works - if all your friends think drugs are really stupid you probably won't ever try them, but you probably will if they all do them. Indoctrination in this fashion works well in isolation but tends to fall apart as people move socially and geographically.
Or maybe getting stuck in the fractal of details is not specifically an ADHD thing, but the ADHD meme groups I'm in sure lead me to think it is.
That said, I did manage to go to the gym regularly for a while. After a few times the routine of scoping out the equipment you want to use becomes habitual and the whole process becomes less overwhelming, though the do-it-for-the-rest-of-your-life requirement poses a challenge. For a few months, sure, but forever? I've got an infinite list of projects with infinite loose ends to attend to!
Where the main characters took regular breaks to smoke their Winstons, using those ancient Zippo lighters that basically rubbed two sticks together to light up.
Fred & Barney never looked so relaxed and satisfied any other time.
I didn't smoke but I used to accept them and then give them to my smoker friends.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/30/health/chain-smoking-children...
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/pmi-who-...
Maybe an "out of sight, out of mind" thing would do better than explicitly telling people not to do something?
As a carpenter and electrician, I smoked many cigarettes during my career and they calmed me and allowed me to focus a bit better.
However, I finally realized that few things say "hey look at me I'm am absolute idiot" quite like smoking.
That's actually what I told myself over and over again to shame myself into quitting. I associated smoking with a few trashy individuals that I knew. I told myself that I didn't want to be like those people so I tricked my mind into quitting.
among adult smokers, i've always wondered what the breakdown was between people that actively like smoking and want it in their lives versus those that are ambivalent but quitting is too much of a hassle?
I used it to quit smoking tobacco, quit drinking, and quit a 20+ habitual marijuana habit. I use shame to make myself do that extra bit of work in the evenings after my family has gone off to bed. Shame has plenty of good uses if leveraged properly.
Then I took a long had look in the mirror and told myself that I was better than that person and that I could make better decisions.
This is not really true.
They exist for shifting liability -- which is similar, but also quite different -- to where it needs to be. They exist so that you don't even have to listen to the "but that's just normal", "but we always do that", "i had no idea that wasn't allowed" excuses when a person gets in trouble. They exist because otherwise when someone does something that everybody including the perpetrator obviously knows was wrong, they can say "how was I supposed to know that was bad?" and suddenly you have to start arguing in a context where your opponent can "win" the argument by feigning being an idiot, which is a surefire way to have a shit day.
Consider this: https://dynomight.net/teaching/
We shame it so much, that when you have questions or you start thinking about it, you don't have people who you can go to and ask questions without judgement or being preached at.
And then of course once you do try something, it is criminalized so you can't go talk to someone to get help without being worried about going to Jail (depending on where you are).
It also doesn't help that so many of these systems love to talk about how Pot is just as bad as every other drug, which of course it isn't.
I feel like we need more of a focus on compassion instead of just beating us over the head with "Drugs are Bad mkay" so of course we are going to rebel against adults telling us this. Especially when we know we can't have alcohol but they can, so are they telling the truth about drugs?
Same with Smoking. The message gets mixed up when we are being told all these things that we shouldn't do but adults are able to do some of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck
Most training modules are dry and clinical. This one is the opposite. Many people are killed, dismembered, and otherwise mutilated.
I think the combination of good comedy and vividly illustrated consequences makes Klaus far more effective and memorable than the average corporate training module that OP is discussing.
Ah yeah, those signs that completely remove the human tragedy of those who lost their lives driving. Instead you see something like "99 people died on this highway" and for a moment I can't always help but think, "so close to 100!" before remembering these are dead people, not just a number.
What always reminds me to drive more carefully and not be so complacent is reading about some family has been torn apart by some little driving mistake that I could have easily made as well. It's tragic and depressing, but that's what reminds me to think about my own family when I'm driving.
With regards to smoking, what convinced me to never take up smoking was seeing what 50 year old smokers looked like. Yikes. Should some lifelong smokers be fortunate enough to live to 80, taking a look at them will typically put to rest any remaining desire to smoke.
I have always belived that the widespread of cheap psychological content aimed for average people is a mental-unhealthy plague and would only make them overconfident in judging their own and others mental health, this is why we see overuse of terms like bi-polar, trauma, narcissist etc.. in social media where teenagers are active.
Nuclear War.
On the other hand scientists seem to be very bad at it (if the last few decades of quantitative social science research are any indicator). My pet hypothesis is that this is because an experimental environment is actually a very bad way to reason about human behavior. When you're dealing with basic material phenomena (particles, energy, chemical reactions, even biological reactions to a certain extent) the behavior is 'isolatable'. It will happen in a predictable way under controlled conditions, and removing outside influences makes that behavior easier to observe. Human behavior is the exact opposite of 'isolatable' though: so much of what makes us act the way we do is the influence of outside factors. In a general sense I don't even think it really makes sense to imagine a 'single person' or 'isolated behavior', our mind exists in mutual definition with the social world around us. Indeed the successful examples I listed above are successful precisely because they take control of your environment: a secluded meditation area or a sweaty club are critical tools for changing the way someone is.
As a result I think scientists often have a really skewed understanding of what motivates people, because anything they do in a controlled environment basically can never generalize by definition. Want to get kids to stop smoking? Don't treat the kids, treat the media environment they live in. But this isn't something that can be replicated in a generic/engineering/scientific manner; there's no magic recipe it's just common sense and coalition building (getting buy-in from the people who make media). But because these tools don't fit cleanly into an experimental framework they kind of get sidelined. Instead we get endless variations on nudge theory and little cognitive games to try and induce the behavior we want. Shockingly this fails time and time again. Preventing sexual harassment in the workplace simply cannot come from a PowerPoint deck or training, it will only follow from a massive overhaul in the cultural milleu. Look at any successful grassroots political movement: find people who are primed to receive your message; convince them to support you; use their support and evangelism to widen the circle to the next group of slightly less-primed people; repeat until massive; force structural/cultural change through a crush of bodies. Simple as.
edit: hm okay I clicked one link in the OP and it seems this point is not very original https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/its-hard-to-change-peo...
To your point, the DJ (and I would say many performance artists) has a practice for how to make this occur in a repeatable manner, but the practice is an artistic practice and therein a cultural practice, not a conventional scientific practice. To me, it raises the question of whether for the goals of any kind of "social science" to come to fruition if it must become an artistic practice. I don't have a great answer to this question but you can probably tell in which direction I lean.
> To me, it raises the question of whether for the goals of any kind of "social science" to come to fruition if it must become an artistic practice.
“Artistic practice” is absolutely what I think the field is missing, and which many other disciplines with similar concerns (ex. marketing) are way more enthusiastic to incorporate. And thats not just about getting social scientists to start painting or whatever, but more adopting that mindset of an artist trying to perfect their craft. The basic program for the performing artist is to bomb over and over again until you can change people’s behavior “by feel” (or maybe you never develop the knack and change careers). Politicians similarly start out by pressing the flesh and going to endless community meetings until they figure out how to move a crowd. Doing these things isn’t “hard” once you’ve figured out the trick, but it’s a skill that you acquire by extensive practice and apply by intuition/artistic judgment, rather than something that you can figure out solely through sufficiently rigorous analytics. Not to say that this isn’t experimentation, it absolutely is, but it’s not laboratory experimentation, it’s fully integrated within the real world.
It's easier than you think, but the techniques that actually work are all the ones in the no-no box that liberals like me know not to touch. Advertisers use them all the time: appeals to emotion, misleading and outright false comparisons, ridicule, etc. I cannot think of a single successful propaganda or advertising campaign that worked specifically because it embraced the whole "marketplace of ideas" debate club ideal.
Speaking of "how to get 7th graders to smoke", anti-smoking and anti-vaping PSAs. They're so awful as advertising that they make smoking and vaping look good, because that is what advertising is designed to do. Make you feel good about the product being talked about. The few commercials that did actually get people to stop smoking back in the day were ones that were profoundly disturbing and had no positive emotional sentiment. Like the one where someone's smoking through a hole in their trachea. If you want to get people to stop smoking, you need to make it look as profoundly unsexy as possible, and that's something advertisers aren't great at doing.
Likewise, for sexual harassment, you don't bombard people with incredibly obvious basic moral principles and legal minutiae. You make sexual harassers look like objects of ridicule. Cringe, as the kids say. My go-to example of how to do this would be Hbomberguy's early video essays[0], like the one where he systematically deconstructs all of Davis Aurini's toughboy affectations[1].
So let's break down the archetypal sex pest. They're not sexually harassing people because they need sex - in most countries you can just pay people for it now. Instead, they're doing it for the same reason my two male guinea pigs hump each other: to assert dominance. I want you to imagine the most domineering asshole you can think of, and then figure out what qualities will make them look pathetic rather than sexy. Again, if you want an example, perhaps check out this old video from The Onion about a sex pest dinosaur: https://www.theonion.com/paleontologists-discover-skeleton-o...
Forget the Social program, forget the Emotional program, I'm talking about the Make Smoking Cringe Again program.
[0] No shade to his later work - it's also amazing, but in a different way.
[1] People say he's still sipping that shot glass to this very day.
Smoking is considered "a problem" to society because intelligent, caring people that notice that smoking injuries and medical conditions cause sorrow, strife, and excess medical waste. They've run huge propaganda campaigns to get us to care about this problem: literally "other people are dying because of this habit so you need to hate this habit."
But the people who smoke usually don't care about the social sorrow & strife caused by smoking, and they don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to provide hospitals or lung cancer screenings. They just smoke because they enjoy it and don't really anticipate or care about the consequences.
So really, what's going on is that well-intentioned meddlers are trying to meddle in the lives of people who don't share the utopian, collaborative values of the meddlers.
The answers that actually solve "the problem"--ban cigarette sales outright, imprison or exile smokers, refuse medical treatment to smokers--are unthinkable to the meddlers, because they genuinely believe in their principles, especially "everyone in society should be taken care of by competent people".
(For the record: I don't smoke, and I don't think anyone should smoke.)
It actually did work incredibly well (at least in the US). Smoking went from something the majority of the American population did that was present in almost all private and public spaces to something only a small minority does in a small number of places.
Whether or not you agree with the methods, I think it is necessary to recognize that the methods worked.
I was thinking more about the "at risk" populations that are very resilient to smoking interventions, which are what the seventh-grade propaganda campaigns that I sat through and are talked about in the article are trying to capture and influence. There are still 20-30M adult smokers in the US, and cigarette sales are pretty stable. Smoking is still considered "a problem" by smoking interventionists, but they're not doing a great job at finally stamping it out, because they need harsher methods than learning campaigns and well-intentioned propaganda.
Edit: I had removed "predictably, this doesn't work" from my original comment before you commented for the exact reason that you commented. To a degree, it does work, on people who typically follow rules, when it's combined with taxes and bans that make it a crime to smoke.
.. doesn't work in the rest of the war on drugs. But on the other hand, if you care that little about their outcomes that you're willing to do those things, why are you doing them in the first place rather than leaving them alone?
The reason the US is losing the war on drugs is not because harsh measures don't work, it's because the measures in the US are inconsistently applied by incompetent and corrupt leadership and agents.
I didn't need a media campaign to hate this habit, although it probably helped when they made Mr. Potato Head give up his pipe, the smell and the residues everywhere were enough.
I guess it was one way to get kids to play outside; I never wanted to be in my grandparents' homes while they were smokers. Didn't matter if they were smoking at the time, it was always gross.
I personally like the smell of smoke and get a great nicotine buzz when I do smoke. If it didn't cause health issues I'd smoke all day.
> They enjoy it and don't really anticipate or care about the consequences.
This is the actual core and it applies to all risky and anti-social behavior. Speeding while driving, sloth, over indulgence, smoking, addictive drugs, ..etc
What's your take on the morbidly obese? Deny food and let their diabetes take hold?
If you don't want to be obese, you have to maintain constant self-denial, long-term planning, and a basic scientific understanding of nutrition in the face of your available food supply being hijacked by advertisers and profiteers. For millions of years, the best possible strategy for feeding was "acquire as many calories as possible and make them as tasty as possible", and only in the past 30-40 years has that strategy suddenly started yielding bad results.
I think there is a much stronger need for a huge legal and philosophical intervention into the western food supply than there is into the western nicotine supply.