I have a really controversial view about smoking: it has undeniable downsides but as a society we are now feeling what happens when a huge proportion of the population no longer experiences the cognitive upsides they used to get from nicotine.
It's somewhat similar to what would happen if you banned coffee.
>it has undeniable downsides but as a society we are now feeling what happens when a huge proportion of the population no longer experiences the cognitive upsides they used to get from nicotine.
You don't need to inhale burnt tobacco to get nicotine, and there are plenty of other ways to get stimulants into your body; patches, teas, etc. and society is still consuming a shit-ton of stims; ain't been to an empty coffeeshop since COVID.
vaping, while shown to be not great for you, is also still not as awful as inhaling tons of smoke, and can deliver the nico just as well.
and it is the smoke that is the problem -- firefighters who handle a lot of cases often have lung cancer rates far higher than the rest of the population.
I think what doesn't help is that vaping is treated the same as smoking. It's also banned everywhere that smoking is even though it doesn't generate particles.
I think many smokers feel that there's no real upside to vaping for this reason apart from their own health effects. I think they should make vaping more attractive eg allowing it in a vaping area at the office.
Ps I'm not a smoker nor vaper. But I'm getting a bit fed up with this war on nicotine. The current strictness the EU is taking is clearly not working for those who are still smokers. Continuing to increase the price will not either.
Just like the war on drugs is never ending and has not really accomplished much more than increase risk and this rewards that benefit bigger cartels, it's time to evaluate to see what actually works.
>It's also banned everywhere that smoking is even though it doesn't generate particles.
I vape nicotine. That's not true in the slightest, unless you're using some wacky definition of 'particle'.
I agree that the restrictions around where one vapes might need to be a little less lax when compared to cigarettes, but to claim that it doesn't 'generate particles' is disingenuous.
Droplets yes but they are just oils. Similar to when you're frying in the kitchen. Probably a lot less than that in fact, considering the amount that goes into a vape pen.
Smoking reduces quality years of life and puts a burden on a nation's health system. The drastic decrease in productivity in a nation from those two things has got to be far more than any increase from any cognitive benefits.
But more importantly, it's morally wrong to suggest we shorten and make our lives worse for some short term stimulant spike.
Many studies actually show that smokers are cheaper to care for over their lifetimes, likely because they die earlier. This study[0] shows a +7% for men/+4% for women increase in healthcare costs if all people stopped smoking. I'm too lazy to vet the epistemological quality of this study, but it seems like there are a bunch of these much along the same lines. One thing these studies seem to neglect is total value lost associated with smoking, instead focusing costs alone. By folding in some QALY-like model, you could come up with the overall impact of smoking on society in quantitative terms.
This number doesn't take into consideration the contributions of these people to society, which could outweigh their additional healthcare cost and make them an actual net positive to the economy (putting aside moral questions about calculating whether people should live or die based on their net value).
If by “add 1 million to the economy”, you mean the local economy where the 80 year old lives, then sure I guess. But in general that’s just money moving around.
How does that work? I mean technically he takes 200k from the economy without producing anything in return. In very basic terms the government printing an extra 200k adds about as much value (assuming he's not actively investing and not doing anything else).
From a purely utilitarian/dystopian/evil/etc. point of view: aren't most people suffering much older on average?
e.g. in the median age at diagnosis is ~71. Most people at that age have very low productivity live on a pension/from savings/other passive income and economically probably cost more to the society than they contribute.
Is it morally wrong to eat a cupcake? I’m not a smoker nor would I want anyone I care about to smoke, but have you thought through the extrapolation of your assertion?
Similarly, old people are a drag on society. It’s not at all clear that reducing lifespan is a decrease on net productivity.
I would not want those I care about to die early, nor would I deny anyone else the same hope for the sake of productivity. But I can be objective enough to acknowledge the tradeoffs.
actually it make worse your worst year, but has no effect on your best years
> and puts a burden on a nation's health system.
listen, I know smocking is bad as anyone else, but if we wanna talk about "burden on a nation's health system" let's talk about cars (fumes are just the tip of the iceberg, we have more than 20 thousand deaths/year caused by car accidents and many more injured and/or left invalid) or having children.
You know what also puts a burden on on a nation's health system?
an aging population!
in my Country more than 25% of the population is over 65, so they not only are retired and do not contribute anymore to the expenditures through their work, they also need a lot of very expensive and prolonged care.
They most probably smoked in their younger years, but survived nonetheless and now they need to be taken care of.
Truth is the nation health system wastes too much money on things that do not help people, we've seen it during the pandemic, the personnel was crushed by the unsustainable shifts and the output was barely sufficient.
said by someone who was born and lives in a Country with a public healthcare system, who happily pays for it through a lot of taxes (half of my salary) and a big chunk of the family employed by the aforementioned public national health care system.
Or, for example, what has been the cost (both economical and social) of the recent opioid epidemic in the US of A caused by the health care system itself?
> But more importantly, it's morally wrong to suggest we shorten and make our lives worse for some short term stimulant spike.
like, for example, firing up combustion engines to drive kids to school? kids that, bear in mind, have perfectly functioning legs and can walk!
>in my Country more than 25% of the population is over 65, so they not only are retired and do not contribute anymore to the expenditures through their work, they also need a lot of very expensive and prolonged care.
If only there was something out there that could thin out this group of people in particular.
> If only there was something out there that could thin out this group of people in particular.
it's the same thing that, eventually, will happen to everyone of us.
But literally where I am from they have on average 20 years more to live (second oldest Country in the World) so, regarding the burden on the national healthcare system, smokers cost less (I must specify I believe the economic angle is rather meaningless when talking about health care. I don't believe health care should ever be profitable, barely sustainable it's enough).
A study concluded that the abuse of medicines causes around 40 thousands deaths/year in my Country, which is an incredibly high number, so maybe the secret lies in moderation and not in abolition and prohibition.
There's also the fact that for many people a long meaningless life is much worse than one lived fully, as the "owner" intended.
Maybe someone in the future will convince everyone to avoid any potentially dangerous habit, but I'm also quite sure that such a society will face an epidemic of depression and suicides.
> Nicotine-containing products are sometimes used for the performance-enhancing effects of nicotine on cognition.[57] A 2010 meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory.[58] A 2015 review noted that stimulation of the α4β2 nicotinic receptor is responsible for certain improvements in attentional performance;[59] among the nicotinic receptor subtypes, nicotine has the highest binding affinity at the α4β2 receptor (ki=1 nM), which is also the biological target that mediates nicotine's addictive properties.[60] Nicotine has potential beneficial effects, but it also has paradoxical effects, which may be due to the inverted U-shape of the dose-response curve or pharmacokinetic features.
How susceptible to tolerance would the positive effect be? Would a long term smoker still have any benefit? Or is it like coffee, very quickly giving no benefit at all.
This is a good question, along with what happens if that long term smoker then quits altogether.
If you had ways to moderate the withdrawal of things like caffeine and nicotine you could possibly try alternating regimes. Would probably do dreadful things to your heart though.
No links at hand, and I was unaware of the term “nicotinamide” for a form of vitamin B3. I am quite sure that I read claims of nicotine specifically being added, but I now suspect that the people writing that were misled by the name of nicotinamide. Thanks for enlightening me.
There isn't really any societal upside with smoking. It's a real net negative for the vast majority of users, financially and healthwise. Maybe smokers should switch to coffee for their high, a drug with no major downsides for most people.
Also adding the caveat about the obvious downsides of smoking before I assert this opinion but one thing that's kinda gotten lost is those micro social encounters you'd get from sharing a cigarette. Whether at work, at uni, at a concert, in a bar, or just about anywhere, those smoke breaks used to be a chance to strike up a 5-10 min convo with someone random. Even today, head to a designated smoke area and more often than not, you'll end up chatting with some stranger asking for a lighter before going back to what you were doing. I don't think society has found some other mundane shared experience to replace this.
It used to be a great way to identify tribes and make friends. You could be at some stuffy conference and the gaggle of smokers would be the drinkers, musicians, poets and rebels. It offered a simple way to give, share and help a stranger that I can't invent in the modern world. I'm sure the non-smokers probably enjoyed our absence too!
In many countries where smoking remains common, the people standing outside an establishment smoking are looking down at their phones, just like they would be looking at their phones on the bus. Trying to strike up any conversation would be a faux pas, and I imagine even asking a stranger for a light could be seen as an intrusion. In our modern world, experiences where people are physically close to one another does not necessarily mean that they will socialize.
Also, there was routine to take a genuine 10 min break every few hours... interesting to see if the lack of this break (lung cancer aside) has implications on health
I remember sometime in the 90's or so taking a trip to California (I'm on the East Coast) when they'd just banned smoking in bars. That was such a revelation. Doubly so because I went to some jazz/blues place and the it was all just so weird but also so nice.
It makes me a totally hypocrite (my poltics are generally against those kind of bans) but it made everything so much nicer that I couldn't help but like it.
They came for the smokers and I did nothing. Niemöller was totally right.
Similarly, traveling from smoke-free to smoking-afflicted regions is a major shock, and I've had to stop myself from commenting where I see people lighting up or encounter smoke-filled premises.
Though my immediate inclination on encountering same is to get out as quickly as possible. The experience is absolutely revolting.
While I prefer non-smoking sections indoors, generally, I've been in a few coffeeshops with such good ventilation that the air felt better inside than on the street. (though that might have been an illusion from it being cold)
IIRC, the country I'm in was the first to ban smoking indoors at venues. 2003 or so, I believe. I was a kid, so I didn't really notice it aside from the warning signs and the first time I went abroad.
When I was a kid, children (or at least teen-agers) could work in foodservice spaces in which smoking was permitted. By end of shift, clothing and hair smelled like an ashtray.
The smoking bans I'm familiar with were phased in beginning in the 1990s, though specifics varied by locale (some cities and counties were earlier on the ban) and type of location (offices, restaurants, bars, etc.).
There are still 12 US states without comprehensive smoking bans, virtually all in the deep south: AL, AR, GA, KT, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, VA, WV, WY. (SD and WY are the exceptions.)
Notably, the famed liberal strongholds of Missouri and Mississippi do have restaurant smoking bans.
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Why is it that whenever people suggest any kind of nudge that might be helpful to society, the immediate response is to take it to a totalitarian nightmare. Don't get me wrong; I think the government should leave people alone as much as possible. But jumping straight onto the slippery slope seems like a thought-terminating cliché — rather than leading to an actual discussion about how best to manage individual freedoms while living in a society. (and no, the answer is not "everybody is free to do everything" just as it isn't "nanny state knows best; eat your veggies or else")
>Why is it that whenever people suggest any kind of nudge that might be helpful to society, the immediate response is to take it to a totalitarian nightmare.
Perhaps because those nudges are already a totalitarian nightmare. People should control the government, not the other way around, and definitely not their personal lives and habbits.
The prohibition or the "war on drugs" weren't some made up fantasy nightmare, but very real history of a totalitarian nightmare.
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I'm saying that third parties like states deciding what is or isn't "for the benefit" of the people (as opposed to being told what the people want) is not good for them. It's crossing boundaries and it's infantilizing.
For two cases where it's gone horribly wrong consider the prohibition and the "war on drugs". Not to mention the "don't eat fat" campaigns...
If a majority of people in a country want smoking to be disincentivized, and the government acts on that, is it still crossing boundaries and infantilizing?
> Not to mention the "don't eat fat" campaigns...
Bad example, as it turns out that eating a regular amout of fat is fine. The gov't was wrong.
Here's a better example: food corporations actively market sugar-filled cereals, "juices", "fruit snacks", etc to both parents and kids, actively misleading them on what a healthy human diet is. This had contributed to a surge in obesity and all the related health problems. This puts strain on the medical system, raises insurance premiums, and generally makes society worse.
So do I support making it harder for corporations to market their HFC garbage to kids and parents? Hell yes. Do I support making it illegal for tobacco corps to market to kids? Yes again. And I say this as someone who enjoys sugar and smoking, to a reasonable degree.
>If a majority of people in a country want smoking to be disincentivized, and the government acts on that, is it still crossing boundaries and infantilizing?
Regulation is not the same as nudges towards personal health and discouragment-taxation towards "what's good for you".
>It's infantalizing for you to claim that they aren't consciously choosing that.
The "majority of people" aren't even asked about things like this, and they're constantly lied to and betrayed on the subject of electoral promises of all kinds, even on way more major issues. Not to mention being treated like cattle that needs to be "told what to want" and to be whipped into shape by technocrats and policy advisors.
So, invoking what the government does as a proxy of "what people wants" is very shaky grounds...
To be frank, alcohol, most drugs, and fat are not the same. Every time I go to a place where smoking is not culturally frowned upon, I can't make a few steps without inhaling vomit-inducing smoke. If it wasn't for this, then I would agree with you.
If not the state, the free market will fill the gap and tell us what is for our own benefit, bet a lot more boundaries get crossed when the tobacco industry, pharmaceutical industry etc. get free reign.
In this case, it is also for the benefit of others, as second hand smoke causes and/or contributes to cancer, emphysema, and a myriad of other lung and heart diseases.
It's pretty popular in India too, especially among IT workers. These days I see a lot of young ladies smoking as well, which was pretty rare a decade or so ago.
In the last few years after all the health craze of the 2010s a lot of tv shows and movies have smoking actors again AND speaking as a German HHC (a variant of THC... imagine THC light) is not yet banned in Germany and every gas station, vape shop or kiosk is selling it. In Europe a joint is basically what in the US is a split so everyone is mixing their weed with tobacco. It's probably just a coincidence but there is a lot of weed smell in the cities right now.
cigarette vending machines are still super common here in Vienna as well. There's always teens hanging around them asking people to swipe their cards to buy the cigarettes in exchange of cash
A bit of history to this - previously there were just machines, you put in cash and get cigarettes - but then it was decided this made it too easy for underage people to buy cigarettes so now you have to use a bank card (I think?) for identification, so young people just hang around the machines and ask a passerby to lend them their card.
Here in Italy you need to use your Codice Fiscale or Carta d'Identità cards (both official documents) as (debit) cards (pre-paid or connected to some bank account) can be obtained as early as 13 or so (of course authorized by parents).
This is how I bought my first pack on holiday with family. It took some careful planning to gather the right coins, identify the location of a machine and then create the opportunity to dash to it, get the pack and not be rumbled. I was like 10 years old. I don't think I even learned how to inhale until a few years later, just puffed on them like a cigar... didn't matter, the transgressive act was thrilling enough to give me butterflies in my stomach.
Everyone I see is smoking in Spain, Portugal, Greece, lot of places in the U.K, Germany, China (all parts they think belong to them), etc. It’s dying in some places I guess and definitely not smoking inside is better for all of us.
Last time I was in the Netherlands in 2022 I bought a pack on the ferry (duty free baby!) and I’ve been quit for 10 years or so. Most people I passed in the city were smoking and I loved walking in the evening sucking down the my pack.
Certain countries make my iron will into a type of jelly.
I know firsthand that smoking is still a huge part of the social culture in all Balkan countries and even Italy to a lesser extent. OTOH, many studies show that it’s better than vaping. I’ve had some conversations with my pulmonologist and a friend of mine who’s a board certified (nearly retired) cardiologist who both confirm this and tell me that they see increasingly younger patients develop serious disease very quickly after starting vaping, including a 16-yo patient who developed emphysema.
Don’t have them on hand (or necessarily put faith in them) but a couple of studies have claimed to show a link between vaping and higher susceptibility to ordinary lung disease (bronchitis) with the suspected cause being that people vape far more than they smoke in terms of air volume, and that the higher temp of some vape products adversely affects the lungs in a way that cigarettes don’t. I’m pretty skeptical that there’s anything as bad for you as smoking unless it’s obesity or a sedentary lifestyle- all 3 are correlated, as is alcohol abuse, depression, and a number of other bad things. I think vaping is probably too new to know anything definitive about it, though.
What a weirdly incoherent headline. Why not, "Smoking is Dying Out, Except in Germany", which is an actual sentence that conveys the same information in fewer words?
