Not a smoker, but I’d rather be physically assaulted by this asshole than have my rights taken away by the “omnipotent moral busybodies” that run my city. They violated state law by banning tobacco sales to anyone under 21. In the rest of the state the age of legal purchase is 18. At least this guy I can punch in the head.
Good luck, keep at it. Former smoker here, took a some tries. Not sure if I have any helpful advice, as I think what works for people is pretty highly individualized. Some people I know found a phone app helpful, some people swear by that book Easy Way to Stop Smoking, among other tricks. Just keep at it, and WANT IT.
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You know what. I hate this argument. Smoking isn’t bad for you because there’s something uniquely bad about tobacco. All these heath effects are due to smoke inhalation, the “tar” we go on and on about is just the particulate in the smoke suspended in the moisture released when you burn leaves. Marijuana has that too. As does wood. Sage. Cloves. The components of the “herbal” cigarettes we make performers smoke (with out any information on their relative danger or long term effects I might ad). The difference with the pot, is in dosage. Few people, if any, are smoking 20+ joints the size and weight of a cigarette a day. So however much or little crap is in pot smoke. You aren’t getting nearly as much from smoking it at the usual levels as the typical cigarette smoker. But you’re still talking about chronic, low level, smoke inhalation.
Now there is nicotine. Some of the theories on why cigarette smoking is associated with heart disease peg nicotine. Either its constriction of blood vessels, or the direct results of persistent low level stimulant abuse. But those things shouldn’t be limited to nicotine if that’s the case. And at the very least nicotine bearing vapes would have the same issues. If you’re interested in banning things because of negative public health outcomes, then alcohol is at least as bad as Tobacco. And banning that didn’t work out so well. People should certainly smoke less, and we could do a lot more to push less harmful forms than cigarettes. And press all that technology towards making it less addictive and less dangerous instead of more addictive and more dangerous.
Good luck with it. Its worked well for a number of family members. I’ve decided to avoid the stuff as another family member ran into that whole “suicide is a side effect” thing. Make sure the people around you know when you’re starting, so they can watch for behavioral changes. Expect crazy dreams at the very least.
I’ve got a lot of patches and gum hanging around for my next try. I’m thinking a month or two.
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damn, this guy needs a punch to his face. What a fucking idiot.
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I agree that combustion is the more general hazard with regards to smoking, but you make it sound as if the substance burned makes no real difference which seems obviously untrue. If smoke does all of the work, then why don’t people get a THC buzz off of nicotine, or catnip for that matter? Because cannabinoids are specific drugs which affect the body in certain ways. As is nicotine, not to mention the many other additives often found in tobacco. And why then is unsmoked tobacco also considered to be a carcinogen? It only takes some cursory research to find that nicotine is a drug with its own specific affects.
There are a few distinctions there. Alcohol is (for most people) far less addictive than tobacco. Also, it is a basic hydrocarbon, one of the building blocks of organic chemistry. So it is fairly ubiquitous, making prohibition unrealistic. And there is research that small amounts of alcoholic beverages may be actually beneficial to people, while this is in no way the case with tobacco.
With drugs which aren’t cripplingly addictive, (such as nicotine, cocaine, heroin, etc are) nearly all of the harm I think comes from the social culture and ritual surrounding its their use. The drugs are a “social problem” not because of their qualities or characteristics as drugs, but because of people’s shitty attitudes. This is certainly true of addictive drugs as well, but compounded with the problems of physiological addiction.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think the prank is much (or at all) about an anti-smoking message, and just about being absurd, obnoxious and over-the-top. Dressing up as a firefighter (I like how he thanks the local firefighters in the credits…) and you know, putting out fires. Personally I think the funniest bit is him waiting in line at the grocery store with a cart full of water.
Hell, being anti-smoking zealot here in the south of France would be exhausting and futile.
(Most of his videos are seriously hilarious, but I agree this one is reckless.)
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Is that where the fish all go belly-up at the same time from the shock?
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? Because drugs have different effects. Aside from the proposition that the direct action of nicotine is responsible for the connection to heart disease almost all of the health effects of smoking are down to the inhalation of smoke. In the case of heart disease/nicotine connection. Most of the proposed mechanisms revolve around nicotine’s stimulant action, and potential that it may act as a vasoconstrictor. Neither of which are unique to nicotine, any low level stimulant or vasoconstrictor consumed in the same long term, low dose way should cause those same heart disease issues. Problem is as far as I know they don’t. Caffiene users don’t see the same connection.
So the other major theories I’m aware of with smoking and heart disease tend to revolve in some way around lung damage from the smoke, rather than the action of nicotine. Which again any smoke will do that to you with the same exposure pattern. In smokeless tobacco it seems like the presence of carcinogens in the tobacco, passed on by contact, is the result of curing methods that create or pass on combustion products. And smokeless tobaccos processed by other means (like Scandinavian Snus) have curiously low associations with cancer and other complications. Lower combustion temperatures (as in whole leaf vaporizers, and tobacco pipes) seem to be associated with lower production of dangerous smoke components. Though I don’t think I’ve seem much that confirms this means lower risks. But that should be the case, and its been the driving assumption behind the adoption of pot vaporizers for decades.
I wasn’t arguing that nicotine has no effect, and I acknowledged it as the major exception to the smoke does the damage bit. Its a stimulant, which is why we like it and why you get a nicotine buzz. But the tooth and gum disease, mouth, throat and lung cancers, COPD, Emphysema and other conditions (outside of heart disease where its muddy) caused by smoking are all clearly and directly tied to “tar” and specific carcinogens and compounds found with in it. Tar is just condensed smoke. Bearing all the carcinogens and nasty shit that lives in smoke.
Alcohol addiction not so much. In the physical sense of addiction is quite nasty. Tolerance builds quickly and once you hit the point of chemical dependency things get pretty extreme. Though it, sort of, hard to hit that point. Alcohol withdrawal (the DTs) is deadly. Alcohol over dose is incredibly dangerous. And alcohol dependency fits nicely in the broader non-chemical category of “addiction” while also being pretty much the most common form of that addiction. The heath effects of long term alcohol abuse are well known and weirdly analogous to cigarette smoking. Including cancer (of the liver) and heart disease, along with a whole host of other nasty shit. Vitamin deficiencies, and nerve degradation, digestive problems. Alcohol use and abuse had disproportionate representation in violent crimes, suicide, domestic abuse, other drug addictions. All despite being legal, and thus avoiding the “prohibition breads crime” dynamic. And so on and so forth.
None of that is true of nicotine addiction. Nicotine addiction is innocuous. Its difficult or impossible to over dose on nicotine under typical use scenarios. Nicotine withdrawal is uncomfortable but safe. Noone’s shooting each other or themselves because they smoked too many cigarettes and lost control of themselves. Its the co-factors of long term use that bring a health crisis. And other forms of nicotine consumption. Including other forms of smoking (pipe and cigar) bring far less risk of those health effects under typical use levels than cigarette smoking does. Those risks, and those health effects are almost entirely down to the mechanics of regularly inhaling burning plant matter. Inhale smoke from something else and you’ll see the same sort of damage, varying according to precise smoke make-up and use level.
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Yup. When I was a dumb kid (more redundant redundancies), my friends and I would sneak into our neighbors’ back yard and use their giant trampoline. One day the two college kids that lived there got up on their roof and hosed us with a fire extinguisher.
I doubt this has so much to do with anti-cigarette sentiment as the fact that Mr. Gaillard clearly likes to live dangerously.
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FTFY
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As long as they don’t do it in my car or house, it doesn’t bother me. If I don’t like them enough to put up with it, I’ll be elsewhere anyway. Fortunately most of the smokers I know are occasional cigarette smokers who don’t want their cars or houses to reek either.
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There’s another factor that i think* needs to be mentioned. Tobacco, at least in the United States, is overwhelmingly gas cured. Currently that is not true about most marijuana, although that may change with more commercialization. Gas cured means that it is dried out over a gas flame, leaving behind a slew of complex hydrocarbons. This adds a large amount to the cancerous properties of cigarettes.
*I am no expert and didn’t double-check this.
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Yeah partial combustion of the plant during processing. At temperatures that increase the presence of carcinogens that aren’t produced even by smoking at the right combustion temp. Same thing may drive cancer risks from smokeless tobaccos. Pipe and cigar tobaccos skip this.
But weirdly there’s not a lot of research on these sorts of topics. We can draw inferences from what’s out there. But there’s little in the way of comparisons between different types of tobacco, processessing, and consumption methods. So everything we hear about tobacco and health is based on studies done specifically on mass manufactured cigarettes. Which carry much higher levels of nicotine, different forms of nicotine, don’t use whole leaves, burn differently and are consumed differently and at much higher levels than other approaches.
If we really want to tackle this as a public Heath issue we could use some answers on this kind if stuff. Bans in these cases haven’t worked out terribly well, and if not in the states I’ve heard some speculation that prevention/cessation approaches may be hitting a soft cap in how much they can reduce smoking.
It makes sense to push people and the industry to less dangerous (not safe or safer) forms of tobacco consumption. Given that people will keep consuming it, because it’s pleasant (even cigarettes in the early offing). But we don’t really know which direction that is. And vaping, in the form of liquids and e-cigs, isn’t tobacco consumption. It’s nicotine use, presented in a tobacco free cigarette analogue.
Has anyone tried the Pax with whole leaf tobacco? Apparently that’s what it’s designed for. And not just as a legal dodge. Would be cleaner and easier for travel than my pipes, and fewer sinus infections than I got from the vapes as a cigarette replacement.
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my vape > your cigarette
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You’d think, but no. It is called “powerlining” and is actually pretty clever. I think I read it was invented by fishermen at Montrose harbor and Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. promptly banned it.
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Launching the line with a pressurized canister to get a longer cast? Seen a bit of that with surf casters. I think they used pancake compressors. Or bottle rockets.
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Tobacco smoke also is known to paralyzed thracheal cillia, the little flailers that pull gunk out of the lungs and into the mouth. Pot smoke isn’t known to do that, and I’d expect smokeless tobbaco likely doesn’t either simply because it’s not inhaling anything.
So that may be a factor in the difference in incidence of lung cancer between pot smoking and cigarette smoking.
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OH YEAH. Its why I have a smoker’s cough. IIRC is down to ammonia in the smoke. That being the thing that paralyzes the cillia. There is some ammonia created when burning tobacco. Also other plants, but tobacco apparently creates more than usual. So presumably with burning weed as well. Though at a level different than tobacco. But with commercial tobacco you aren’t smoking a whole burning leaf as with marijuana.
They take the tobacco. Grind it up. Extract the nicotine. Turn the leaves into a brown, unbleached paper. Then spray a solution of the extracted nicotine and additives onto it. Dry it and shred it. And that shredded paper is what gets rolled into your Marlboro.
One of the additives is additional ammonia. Aside from de-activating esophageal cillia, that added ammonia turns the nicotine present into free-base nicotine. Free-base versions of plant alkaloids are stronger, more addictive, and have a shorter half life in the body. Think the difference between crack and cocaine. The added ammonia both increases the incidence of smokers cough (cillia can’t move phlegm and smoke residue out of the way, so they pool, and coughing is needed to move it), but also makes cigarettes more addictive. And the nicotine addict needs more of them to keep things even.
Supposedly. Again there’s a lack of proper comparative studies. Little action on comparing cigarettes with added ammonia and without. And establishing if free-base nicotine is truly unique to processed tobacco papers. But would tobacco conglomerates really be adding the stuff if it didn’t make things more addictive?
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So it’s a (relatively) good thing that I’ve pretty much always made my own cigs with pipe tobacco and filter tubes, and have to sacrifice about 10% of the pipe tobacco due to the tube-ruining stems and stalks?
I have noticed that I don’t really have much of a smoker’s cough. But I do still cough. Usually first thing when I wake up. Probably because the several hours of smoke-free sleep I get gives my cillia a chance to recover a little bit abd they start working at some fractional capacity.
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Also, the tobacco paper deal is because it’s more efficient. Even if it didn’t make cigarettes more addictive, they’d still do it because there’s less waste and it reclaims a lot of tobacco that would have been unusable. And that’s just gravy for the balance book.
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