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Smoking Is Even Deadlier Than Previously Thought
HughPickens.com writes Who still smokes?" as Denise Grady reports at the NYT that however bad you thought smoking was, it's even worse. A new study has found that in addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, researchers found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. "The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health," says Brian D. Carter, an author of the study. "It's not a done story." Carter says he was inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers but diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked. "I thought, 'Wow, that's really low,' " Mr. Carter said. "We have this huge cohort. Let's get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don't already know." The researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. "The Surgeon General's report claims 480,000 deaths directly caused by smoking, but we think that is really quite a bit off," concludes Carter adding that the figure may be closer to 540,000.
People with lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease, stroke and significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments just have a higher desire to smoke. Correlation and causation, you know.
Who wants to live forever.
Better for you.
If it is so bad then why not ban tobacco? The problem with tobacco is that it is so widely available, making getting off the stuff so hard. I certainly would not visit a dealer to get illegal baccy.
The reality is that governments are addicted to the tax income. 11 billion a year in Australia.
If the FDA wasn't so damn corrupt, smoking would be a thing of the past. Vaping works. Harm reduction works. It's only because the FDA's overlords, Big Pharma, can't compete with the technology that it isn't approved and pervasive in our society.
Openly accepted electronic cigarettes could make smoking as niche as, say, religious snake handling in a decade, but noooo. Gotta protect that status quo and the pharmaceutical industry's pocketbooks.
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
it seems unlikely a longer list will cause cigarette sales to plummet.
"I was okay with heart disease and lung cancer, but shit Mabel, now there claiming links to kidney and intestinal problems!"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I wish the media would stop amplifying everybody's state of fear.
I wish people would do studies as to how many of those diseases are caused by tobacco itself and how many by the additives pumped into the cigarettes and commercial tobacco and how many by the sheer pollution of our environment.
I wish people would have the wisdom in differentiating between the above and stop fearing every single thing.
I would also wish alcohol would be just half as stigmatised as tobacco is, although I consider it a lot more dangerous and harmful. Nobody killed people by driving and smoking, for example.
Don't waste your time on tobacco when there's medicinal herb with much better health benefits and much better side effects too!
Smokers should be charged much higher premiums for health insurance.
Former smokers should be charged slightly more than they are
That will encourage them to quit.
Never-smokers could recieve lower premiums.
Of course there would have to be a law change to allow this.
Finally some evidence that will make me quit.
I'd say the risk of setting one's crotch on fire counts as an "influence", wouldn't you? Or you might even run over your own head!
"Linked To" does not equal "Definitely Causes." Cmon, this is slashdot, we're supposed to be smart and see through the weasel words.
Remember, these are the same people trying their damndest to convince the world vaporizers are just as bad or worse than tobacco, even with a complete lack of evidence.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
What the FUCK, Slashdot! You made third columns ad cover the text!!!!!
... says philip morris: http://edition.cnn.com/2001/BUSINESS/07/16/czech.morris/index.html?eref=sitesearch
Their argument: smokers pay high taxes on the cigarretes they purchase but they will die early and collect less pension/health care beefits.
Just recently there was a story about how up to 80% of all cancers were the result of random errors in cell replication and had no link to an environmental cause.
I had a colleague who had tried everything from pot, cocaine, etc. The only thing he was not able to kick off was tobacco, he and wife were trying to use the nicotine patches. What really scares me is that, tobacco was not this addictive when it was originally introduced. Tobacco was a rich source of tax revenue and profits. Government and free market funded so much of research dollars into agricultural R&D that kept increasing the nicotine content of tobacco to such an extend it made it a lot more addictive than the plain old tobacco.
This is the trajectory pot might take. Marijuana is mostly illegal, and so it does not produce taxes either. So most of the pot you get are natural, and experimental cultivars are hit and miss affairs done by ordinary farmers. Make it legal, give it regular legal source of funding, you will let lose all the genetic engineering agricultural scientists know. If the Government gets its cut, it will look other way. Monsanto and other big agricultural firms will lobby the government and push the R&D. What took tobacco centuries to achieve, pot will do in decades.
It will do well for "legalize pot" to make sure it is not taxed and to make sure modern science is not used to increase addictive elements in it. It will be big disaster if pot follows the commercial success trajectory of tobacco.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"It must be annual smokers are shit week." <--- From 'fortune -o', one of my favorite "offensive" fortunes, even though I've never smoked.
News for nerds indeed.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That's amazing how some developed countries don't care much about tobacco, medical cost and deaths linked to it. Take Japan for instance, where people smoke almost anywhere, like a 3rd world country. The law is still lenient in this regard.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That if only people wouldn't smoke, they wouldn't die.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
How much deadlier than "fatal" can You get?
Of all the nasty things in tobacco smoke, one of the absolute worst is polonium, a powerful alpha emitter. For some reason tobacco has elevated levels of polonium (probably from absorbing underground radon, which decays to polonium), and when you smoke it, the particles go right into your lungs and blood.
The consequence should be that tobacco companies have to pay for the tobacco-induced-illness portion of medical costs.
Same for booze companies.
... I was involved in some of the tobacco litigation (we hit several billion dollars) and the gist of the fight was this:
Anti-tobacco: "Cigarettes are bad."
Big tobacco: "Jobs."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Come to South Florida. So many people smoke here. And not just the poor or uneducated, either. A lot of people here are grossly wealthy, highly educated, and very stupid. Hence, they smoke to be "cool".
I can't wait to move out of here.
We don't spend nearly as much on those programs as the right wing would have you believe. Also, any place with socialized medicine is likely to make up the cost of feeding/sheltering those people from the medical expenses. I suppose here in America where we're happy to let most of them die (as long as they're under 65) there's a cost. But in Australia you'll probably blow a few million per person on Chemo before they drop dead.
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So most of the pot you get are natural, and experimental cultivars are hit and miss affairs done by ordinary farmers.
Armchair science. The "natural" weed has so little medicinally active content that it will get you sick before it gets you high. "Ordinary farmers" growing hemp are more likely to get in a hassle with the cotton and flax farmers rather than the established pot industry.
that finds it odd that we allow companies to sell a substance who's sole purpose is to be addictive? Anyone ever read the Space Merchants? Popsi ring a bell? I can't say I'm in favor of prohibition, but we can just require them to lower nicotine requirements until it's no longer addictive. People don't smoke for the cool, cool flavor. They smoke because it's highly addictive. Last I heard the Amish were growing nicotine free tobacco...
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I get it. I'll quit already. And not tomorrow. Today.
I'd run out of smokes this morning anyhow.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I am a smoker - and get hammered by the UK Government in tax.
As already stated here, if tobcco is _that_ serious, ban it. But then that will cause a black market underground whereby the smokers still smoke, but the tax man gets nothing.
Also, cynical as it may sound, the Governments think that by keeping people alive longer results in more tax, as like here in the UK, the retirement age keeps getting pushed up to longer and longer lifetime ages - luckily I am 55 now, and my retriement age is now 66 (it was 65 when I first started working 39 years ao). People of 20 years old will have to work until the age of 75+ before they will be able to retire.
The reason?
TAX.
Man that's heavy...better light me up a cig....
ALARMIST ALERT! ALARMIST ALERT! BS DETECTOR GOING OFF~ Good grief, let's invent a crisis that we knew has been there for 50 years! Slow news day. Guess what, high cholesterol foods found to be benign. Only a few people have real medical issues with Gluten, and Florida is not underwater. Fals alarms abound. Give us a rest!
So being off by 12% is quite a bit? Sounds more like "a little bit" ...
Yeah, how many grad from top 10 Engg schools are employed by the "established" pot industry? How many of them are experimenting with additives to increase addictiveness, scientifically?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hemp is no more natural then Thai highland haze or Afghani Kush.
They are all a product of human selective breeding.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No need for tinfoil hat. No need for additives. Forty years of straight up selective breeding, cultivation and hybridization have yielded a huge variety of diiferent marijuana strains with all different effects.Check out leafly some time. No chemistry, no secret additives, just 19th century agriculture producing "better" plants.
And what is productivity? Are you productive if you work in an office selling insurance? Or writing software used by people in other offices to support people in yet further offices? When we talk about leading a productive life we don't tend to think of that in terms of worker productivity. I don't know how that relates to the above posts, but it doesn't make me feel that happy.
I didn't read the article, but seems like a typical correlation study that immediately claims causation.
People who smoke are likely to have other traits in common that lead to life style choices which could lead to greater risk for certain diseases.
I know I am just speculating. But do those researchers and journalists know it?
This is the trajectory pot might take. Marijuana is mostly illegal, and so it does not produce taxes either. So most of the pot you get are natural, and experimental cultivars are hit and miss affairs done by ordinary farmers.
It's the trajectory it's already taking. Who wants low-THC cannabis?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Frightening articles get clicks. The market has spoken: people will pay to be told frightening things.
Balanced, reasonable, and informative articles are desired only by a tiny subset of the population, so there isn't much media focus on that kind of content.
You have been outvoted.
What's your next boogeyman after tobacco usage and sales are deemed illegal? How is big pharma a less dangerous, dominant, and imposing figure in our lives? And when is the romanticism linked to alcohol going to subside? Tobacco is bad. We get it. Until it's illegal and unavailable in most countries, people have the freedom to partake in using it. Yes, people - particularly in America - have the freedom to risk harm to themselves. Four out of five American adults take prescription drugs where the long term effects have yet to be determined over multiple generations. There's your next cause.
I know you liberals are much more intelligent than the rest of us. It must really piss you off that I am so dumb. When I die, I will die as a free man and there is nothing you can do about it.
With a little luck, I will take a few of you out with my second hand smoke that you whine about so much. What is wrong with you control freaks?
It's not actually the nicotine. It's the nicotine combined with MAO inhibitors in cigarettes that makes them so very addictive. That's why there is a definite transition period is a cigarette smoker tries to switch to cigars, pipe, patch, or e-cig. They're getting all of the nicotine (or even more) that they got from cigarettes and find it missing something.
Once transitioned, the nicotine is still all there but it is a much less urgent need than with cigarettes.
If smoking really does cause all that death, let's promote it.
It is a cheap eugenics program for starters.
Besides, if all those people die off early, we won't have to look after them when they're old.
But all that death-and-destruction scare mongering won't stop people from smoking. To get people to quit, just put hundreds of thousands of click-bait ads all over the intertubes that say, "1 quick trick to live longer, stay healthier and stay pretty longer".
Gotta run -- smoke break!
ain't Freedom a bitch?
What "addictive elements" does pot have? I hope you at least enjoyed taking that dump on science's head.
Others have commented on why the "all-natural" weed is as unappealing to a pothead as smoking tea leaves.
What this means is, we've had people genetically crossing cannabis for decades, and doing a pretty damn good job at it, too.
No, not "farmers", but scientists. I doubt farmers had anything to do with the pot we know and love today.
Take prof. Raphael Mechoulam to begin with, and then, some of my best friends own or work for seed companies (in Amsterdam).
They are geneticists, botanists, and so forth and they take things so seriously, any nerd would be impressed walking around their huge labs.
Of course, with medicinal weed being more widely accepted, no thanks to pseudo-scientists such as yourself, we have more of what you'd categorize as "real scientists" working on that as well.
What I'm trying to say is... We already have pretty much the strongest weed possible, or we're pretty damn close otherwise.
Cannabinoids = fat-soluble trichromes secreted by the plant to protect itself from bugs/UVA/UVB. Considering that you have to account for "plant material", you're not going to reach a strain with, say, "80% CBD".
All that is pointless. Because we already have ridiculously strong *concentrates*.
About 70~90% cannabinoids, usually on the higher end of that range.
It doesn't make it more addictive; in fact, you can't really smoke too much of it, and building up tolerance to these levels is nearly impossible.
Living in Amsterdam, I know quite a few people who smoke nothing but that, every single day.
Every now and then, they don't have the luxury to smoke that or any pot at all (when they fly abroad, for instance), and they don't seem to have a nervous breakdown or whatnot when that happens.
You're confusing pot with physical addiction such as nicotine, cocaine, heroin, alcohol -- the kind of crap which should worry us as a society slightly more than a bunch of stoners smoking insanely-potent pot...
If you are manufacturer of some product, and there is a way to make your customers crave for your product, would you do it or not? If you don't, would your competitor do it or not?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I mix my own e-liquid, so I control the inclusion or not of an MAOI. It's much easier than growing one's own tobacco.
That's probably why large corporate interests are so against e-cigs. It's just too easy to DIY or for mon'n'pop to get into the market and they hate that.
There are some people who use 'tobacco alkaloids' that may include the MAOI, but it's not that common and at least they know what they're getting. It's still less harmful than smoking.
... and we found 2 weeds. One of them was one of the safest substances known to mankind, which chilled you out and even had some health benefits. And the other was tobacco, which causes major health problems in just about every organ in the body.
AND WE MADE MARIJUANA ILLEGAL.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I used to chew tobacco. I like nicotine. When I quit chewing actual tobacco I switched to the nicotine gum stuff. I liked the gum more than actual tobacco for obvious reasons like my breath not stinking, I didn't have to spit, leave a bottle at my desk for it, etc. I eventually gave up the nicotine entirely after a year on the gum. I can certainly understand why people like it. I don't fault them for that. It's actually a kinda useful drug.
But getting it by SMOKING tobacco... that has to be the worst idea ever. Health issues, smell, hassle, etc. I don't get it. Gum is -cheap- if you buy it right. I last bought some at around 17 cents for a 4mg piece. I think part of the problem is that retail prices are out of the world. I'd never buy that stuff at Walgreens or any other brick and mortar. I'm not sure why it's that out of whack either. This is from memory but retail you're looking at 50 cents per piece and Amazon is, like I said, around 17 cents.
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, "Never go against a troll when frist ps0t is on the line".
Yes, I'm cynical. But you get that way if you spend too much time in this world.
And what's productive is easy: Whatever pushes the GDP. So an investment banker is productive, a housewife is not.
My definition would be a little different and I know who could rather do without, but that's how the world works.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What took tobacco centuries to achieve, pot will do in decades.
Sigh. You kids and your ignorance. The truth is that today's weed is not substantially more potent than the weed of a century ago, and it's probably not going to be substantially more potent a century from now. It's physically impossible for it to get more than maybe twice as potent, tops, because the percentages of active material are already well into the double digits. And it's not addictive now, so how are you supposed to increase the addictive ingredients?
What this study doesn't speak to at all is whether this is the influence of modern tobacco strains, or the shit that's sprayed on the majority of modern tobacco. That would be a much more interesting study than this, although this is somewhat interesting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes. My wife does a more important job than I do. I could write software for any company, and I could be replaced by any software engineer. Only she can be the stay at home mother to our children, any replacement would be different and probably detrimental.
My father died recently of a heart attack. He was mid-sixties and, apart from smoking, very healthy and active. Of course, nobody can say for sure it was the smoking that caused the heart attack, but it doesn't seem unlikely. His retirement years were his most happy and I'm sure he'd have swapped smoking for 10 more years of that. Not that I think he could have been able to stop, he tried to kick it in so many times, and the only thing that worked for him were the new drugs that became available year before he died.
It seems to me that the working years of your life are the least productive for many people. You're a replaceable cog in a replaceable money machine. Childhood, study and retirement are where it's at.
Ummmm.......
The mortality rates have not changed. The difference in lifespan is measured independently of assignation of specific diseases. This one study is just assigning specific disease to smoking. If anything this could allow smokers and their health care providers to recognize opportunities to mitigate specific symptoms.
I'm tired of people going on about how smoking is the worse thing to happen to us. Then don't even blink at the pollution spewed into our lives by industry and everyone of us who cause the demand for it. Hypocrites
Yes, for you. But it's hard to monetize you during that time. And that's pretty much all that counts. Hell, if we could get away with selling you after you die...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is, those that want it banned don't smoke, so it doesn't affect them. They are just self-righteous, selfish, useless idiots. They have no problem with taking things away from other people but would fight tooth and nail if the government took something away from them 'for their own good'.
Tell like it is brother.
Yep truth is we are all going to one day die of something. You can cheat on your taxes but you can't cheat death. Note how articles like this are built around precentage points. Truth is you can always "tweek" precentages.
Me a hit on social programs if I get sick??? What the fuck is all that money I HAVE TO PAY for insurance? I'm paying money out so it isn't "Social". If I quit smoking can I stop paying for insurance and quit supporting the insurance companies fat twats? If I quit smoking will that mean I will live forever and never be ill? I think not.
I respect those that don't smoke. I don't smoke around them I'll go outside and take a walk if I want to smoke. I say nothing to them about their non-smoking habit. All I ask in return is to pay me the same respect and leave me the fuck alone about my smoking.
Here's ya some precentage points.... 100% of the people will die of something someday! No shit!
....it would have been court ordered to be pulled off the market and the manufacturer would have been dragged to countless courts for gross negligence. So why is tobacco still sold?
If everyone stops smoking, drinking alcohol, eating awful fatty foods and generally doing the things that foreshorten their lives immediatley, there'll be a lot of self righteous boring old farts walking about in 20-40 years from now.
Tell me did your father eat healthily? Veg and salad every day, some fruits? Did he live in a city or in the countryside? Did he live a stressful life? These are all as important factors for a long life as smoking or not smoking.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Smoking does not affect the death rate, it only affect the age at which death occurs and the cause. There are studies that suggest the net result of smoking is a gain for society, even if it is a huge negative for individuals and their families.
Every pack of cigarettes is heavily taxed. That money goes into the public coffers. Couple that with the age at which death occurs, and there is a reduction in benefits paid out after the individual stops working. Additionally, the time from when the health decline begins to the time death occurs is shortened. Non-smokers sometimes have a decade or more of slow decline where they need additional services whereas smokers usually get sick and then die in shorter time frames.
All of this is very Machiavellian, but it doesn't change the reality of it. Smoking is a net gain for governments which is why they will not ban it.
something people always seem to forget, is the fact that cigarettes are worse for you today then they were 100 years ago. all because people fell asleep and burned homes killing themselves and/or other people. so now instead of being just tobacco it has a bunch of other chemicals to make it burn slower and go out if you stop puffing on it.
Interesting. We have what appears to be possibly science and the argument becomes, "If you disagree with me and him, you're a troll." Unless of course the discussion can be broken down into an us-versus-them debate, in which case you're either a tree-hugging-anti-vaccination-baby-killing-Prius-driving-vegan-liberal, or a planet-raping-woman-hating-big-pharma-loving-corporate-shill-Teabagger. In either case you're allowed to angrily deny any facts which may contradict your favorite meme. The internet is only fun to read these days if you can make fun of almost everybody.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Eat perfectly, no drinking, no smoking, exercise appropriately, In other words do EVERYTHING right. You'll die anyway. Gar-raun-teed. Nobody gets out of life alive.
Now pass me another bottle of Tim Smith's Moonshine! Has a very specific taste... Ahhh.
It does increase odds a lot but the way they lie about it makes it sound like most people who smoke will die from it, which is a flat lie.