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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.
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
Thank you.
A small part of me died when I saw the headline. Slashdot is definitely (d)evolving into a mindless click-chasing news aggregator like all the others are.
Worst about this is that the (classic) misunderstanding is actually explained in TFA:
"Correlation does not prove a cause-and-effect relationship, so this kind of research is not considered as strong as experiments in which participants are assigned at random to treatments or placebos and then compared. But people cannot ethically be instructed to smoke for a study, so a lot of the data on smoking’s effects on people comes from observational studies."
"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...
Cannabis smoke contains many of the carcinogens as tobacco smoke and can lead to some of the same afflictions.
Mostly not, as shown by UCLA study.
The fact that someone has associated the term "medicinal" with cannabis means that someone needs to go to jail for crimes against humanity.
The fact that we're making plants with medical value illegal and telling lies that they have no medical value is a crime against humanity. This action has probably harmed as many human lives as any other in history, due to both primary and secondary effects — both of which were wholly intentional.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Cannabis smoke contains many of the carcinogens as tobacco smoke and can lead to some of the same afflictions.
Doesn't seem to cause lung cancer:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html
Doesn't cause any of the other pulmonary issues that tobacco does either:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/marijuana-smoking-does-not-harm-lungs-study-finds/
So what exactly are these dreaded "afflictions" that you are trying to blame on pot? The munchies? An appreciation for the music of Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
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.
... 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.
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.
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
From cancer.org "There is still concern that marijuana may cause toxic side effects in some people, and any benefits must be carefully weighed against its potential risks.
A number of reviewers have concluded that the scientific evidence does not support smoking marijuana as a medicine because of problems with dosing and the variable amounts of any one compound that might be delivered. "
It goes on to list a number of other side effects, including loss of intelligence, impairment of driving, paranoia, low blood pressure, fast heartbeat, dizziness, slow reaction time, lung infections, heart palpitations.likelihood of heightening of existing psychosis, increased risk of heart attack, etc.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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."
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
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.
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.