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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I'm a person who enjoys a pipe or a cigar once a month. I smoke alone on my balcony, so the smoke dissipates in the wind quickly and doesn't seem to bother anyone else. Any health effects incurred on me, I'm sure it's not as bad as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I don't even inhale the smoke (with pipes and cigars you are not supposed to inhale, as I will explain below) so the health risks are even less. Given these, why would you want to take this small pleasure away from me?
Cigars and pipes are not as addictive as cigarettes, and there is a reason for that. Cigarettes are designed to be inhaled. Their smoke is engineered to be more acidic, with additives to the tobacco and such. The acidic smoke is more readily absorbed by the lungs. Pipe and cigar smoke on the other hand is more alkaline in its nature. It is not absorbed well by the lungs. Instead, it is more readily absorbed by the mouth's mucosal membranes. Therefore you don't inhale cigar & pipe smoke. The result of all this is a major difference in the smoking experience. With cigarettes, you get an intense nicotine spike that lasts 5 minutes and then leaves you unsatisfied and wanting more. (The surface area of lung's absorbing membranes is a lot more than the mouth's, as you would expect, hence the intense nicotine spike.) With pipes & cigars, you get a slow and steady absorption of nicotine for an hour or so. It is relaxing and meditative. And you don't feel like having another cigar immediately after, since you are already left satisfied. I have been enjoying my once-a-month balcony smoking sessions for 3 years now. I have no feelings of craving or addiction. If I was smoking cigarettes, I highly doubt I would be able to enjoy one once a month. Instead, I would end up smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
You may say let's just ban cigarettes then. Well, prohibition has worked so well in its history after all. Look at how nobody uses alcohol or drugs anymore, since we banned them back in the days...
Cigarette use is already in the decline. Instead of taking completely useless prohibitionary measures, if we wait long enough, cigarette use will be completely replaced by vaper use. And there will be the occasional esoteric cigar & pipe smoker like me, who quietly enjoys his cigar in his balcony, porch, or at the local tobacconist.
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.