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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.
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.
"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
I want to live forever.
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.
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!
I know a kid who wrecked his motorcycle when a bee flew under his faceshield. Freaked out and lost control. I guess in your world, he was under the influence of bees?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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.
Wrong question. The question should be "Who wants others to live forever?" Because that's the actual problem we're facing today: We're getting too old. It would be less of a problem if we got old and stayed healthy (it would still be one, but a lesser one), but we get old and spend the last decade or so as dependents, some even longer than that. If you now factor in childhood, you get about 30 years of lifetime per person where people are a burden rather than a boon for society. That's a third of a person's life, if we're really generous. The half of it if we feel less generous.
That's not going to work out, people. What we used to have is people who needed 15-20 years of nurturing and education, then spent about 40 years productively and maybe had 5 or 10 years left where they were more or less healthy enough to at least be no burden (or if they were we had those funky 50s style ataractics that kept feisty gramps in a stupor 'til he finally croaked). Today we keep our kids unproductive 'til they are well into their 20s (because of the all important college education the cost of which you'll never in this or any lifetime recover), work 'til they're like 60 (if that) and then spend another 20-30 years dependent on drugs and care. Fuck that "half your lifetime being productive if you're not generous", it's half your lifetime that you're productive if you are generously speaking.
And you want people to stop smoking? To stop drinking? To eat healthy? Fuck that! Let them smoke, snort, shoot and gobble down anything they want. The less healthy, the better! Yes, terminal lung cancer is quite care intensive, but it's terminal! It's one year of intensive care instead of 10+ years of hogging that respirator.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I wouldn't buy that for a dollar.
By that argument we should encourage depressed elderly people to commit suicide, then tax their estate.
The problem is that while money is a pretty good proxy for human welfare, it's not a perfect one.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Drinking too much coffee has its health issues as well. Should Folger's be on the hook for that? How about we leave the responsibility with the person choosing to use the products they choose.
Yes, it's known as "influence". It is not, however, known as influence.
... 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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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....
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
If it turns out that tobacco users have lower lifetime healthcare costs do we send them the money?
I'm willing to be their shorter lives far outweigh any increase in the cost of dying related to smoking.
I'm also willing to bet their (total paid in - total cost) / lifespan is greater then non smokers of the same income.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Apparently smoking is linked to smokers dying twice or even three times. Just one smoke apparently gets you onto the reincarnation train....
#### ## Laroue ####
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.
that finds it odd that we allow companies to sell a substance who's sole purpose is to be addictive?
If you think the sole purpose of nicotine is to be addictive, you are sorely misinformed. People don't start smoking because it's addictive: they start smoking because it's enjoyable.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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."
You must have forgotten that big tobacco settlement in the '90s in the suit filed by multiple state attorneys general. Naturally, not one penny of that actually went to covering medical costs of smoking, but that was what it was supposedly for.
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!
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.
People don't start smoking because it's addictive: they start smoking because it's enjoyable.
Which, given how rewards in the brain work, are close relatives.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
What's expensive is not healthy older people; it's *un*healthy older people. The focus on smoking and death ignores the more important point that smokers are much more likely to need many years of expensive care in their later years before they die and are likely to have much lower quality of life.
wg
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.
....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?
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
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.
That's not going to work out, people.
Why not? To take the US as an example, the per capita GDP has increased more than three-fold since the 1950s. That means that it should easily be possible for a population with a 40/90 productive lifespan to sustain itself.
Of course, this assumes that the increased productivity has translated directly to increased wealth for the average person. But that not being the case means you have a wealth distribution problem, not one of resource constraints.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
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.