The Nicotine Fix

The problem is not tobacco or nicotine, it's smoke.

Nicotine alone isn't really addictive and yields almost no reward [0], which is why nicotine replacement therapies are so useless [1]. It's only addictive due to other substances, majorly MAO inhibitors. However, these same MAOIs protect tobacco users against Parkinson's disease [2]. Given all that, along with mild caffeine-like effect from nicotine, smokeless tobacco (including tobacco extract eliquids) is probably beneficial. Banning tobacco in general would be very bad.

[0] http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/38/8593.full [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.12429/abstrac... [2] http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/155/8/732.full

I've always suspected that the reduction in smoking rates was due to primarily people finding out that smoking was harmful and people valuing their health more rather than the taxes imposed. The Per Capita Cigarette Consumption chart seems to affirm this as large federal taxes were imposed in mid-2000s, well after the decline has begun (although taxes were imposed earlier than that).

In New York, cigarette prices are well above $10 which seems very high to me, especially considering that the average smoker tends to be in a lower income demographic. I'm surprised I don't often hear the argument that cigarette taxes are ineffective in curbing consumption but actually act as a regressive tax on the marginal members of society. I also find it perplexing that FDA is considering stricter regulation on menthol cigarettes in particular. Don't know if it has anything to do with demographic that tends to smoke them. Seems very targeted to me.

The saddest part of high cigarette taxes is that it encourages a lot of low income New Yorkers to enter the black market (e.g. Eric Garner, a Staten Island resident killed by police when confronted about selling illegal untaxed cigarettes).

Menthol Cigarettes: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/health/fda-takes-steps-tow...

Allen Garner: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/nyregion/eric-garner-state...

As a smokeless tobacco user (common brands include Skoal and Copenhagen, if you don't know what I'm talking about), I found this paragraph most useful:

"It’s true that smokeless tobacco is not entirely safe, but even products high in nitrosamines—an element believed to be highly carcinogenic—present a much lower risk than smoking. In the case of newer low-nitrosamine smokeless products, research suggests that the risk is no more than 10 percent that of cigarette smoking, and possibly much less. If smokers substituted one of these products for cigarettes—assuming they would not quit otherwise—their health gain would be immense."

I have spent considerable time trying to track down actual data on the dangers of smokeless tobacco beyond the government-mandated scare messages ("...not a safe alternative to cigarettes." Yeah, but how much "not safe"?) What are the dangers? Is nicotine the problem? Other chemicals?

Also interesting, regarding snus: "Yet <Swedish males> smoking rate is very low, and extensive research has found little evidence that sustained use of snus causes any serious health problems, including cancer."

I haven't finished the whole article yet, but those two paragraphs alone answer questions I've left unanswered for years. Those kinds of informative articles are why I continue to subscribe to the _The Atlantic_ despite a dip in editorial quality in recent years.