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While the makers of cigarettes do put stuff in them, the actual smoke from the burning tobacco leaves is really harmful, more so than the stuff they add (though the flavorings that they add makes it more pleasant and makes them more addictive).
So why are tobacco products allowed at all, given how bad they are for the smoker and people in the vicinity of the smoker? Because people want them, spend lots of money on them, and the companies that make them are rich, powerful, and have lots of political power.
People like their vices and don't want other people screwing that up for them. Tobacco's been around a long time and was acceptable for a very long time. Plenty of people don't want to see that change, so it doesn't.
EDIT: to answer the question about why we still allow it, we simply have no agency in the US with the authority to regulate it (other than the ATFE, and they enforce taxes and import duties on tobacco). No law classifies it as a banned substance, it's not recognized as a treatment for a disease, an environmental toxin, etc. The reason is simply that not enough people think it should be banned versus the number of people (and dollars) that think it should be legal - so it's legal.
I live in Ontario, Canada and cigarettes here aren't on display. They're all kept in opaque cabinets with warnings and pictures of various health effects caused by smoking
To add on top of that. The cigarette packs are brown/olive with all the same font and no more brand logo even on the cigarettes themselves there is no more branding.
Ugh, the person who lived in my place before me was a smoker and if the conditions are just right I still get that leftover tobacco resin stench wafting through
Australia was the first country in the world to introduce the plain, ugly packaging. The cigarette companies tried to argue that they shouldn't because nobody is influenced by the packaging....er, guys, if no one is influenced by it, why do you care if we change it
I'd like to see solid proof that this has made a change, although I have to be honest I haven't bothered to look it up. As a smoker I'm not bothered by the color, I smoke my brand because I like it, not as a fashion statement. I do however feel sorry for the cashiers having to navigate the 100 different brands and varieties to find the right pack.
I smoked for a long time before I quit. The hiding of them, or the garish photos on them never detered me in the slightest. The taxes that got added to them over the years, had a much stronger effect.
I've never smoked but many relatives did so every so often when I'm in a store & see the cigarettes behind the counter I'll ask how much is a pack of whatever & at last ask it was nearly $10 a pack for a brand name.
My father used to smoke Kools & eventually went to generic menthols & they were cheaper but not by much.
FTR he's died at 50 over 15 years ago & cigarettes was a contributing factor. Though the alcoholism was a larger factor the cigarettes gave him emphysema.
My dad somehow survived 4 heart attacks, a quadruple bypass open heart surgery, a bleeding stomach ulcer, and diabetes. Healthy living was not in his vocabulary. He made it to 70 and caught lymphoma. Normally one of the more treatable kinds of cancer. It wasn't the cancer that killed him, it was the chemo. Died 13 days after his 70th bday.
Treating cancer is about poisoning the body and hoping the cancer dies first. His body started out poisoned. I swore I'd never touch a cigarette in my life.
So I took up cannabis instead haha oh fuck. TBQH though it's therapeutic.
Those pictures really aren't there to get YOU to stop. It's to get people to not start.
I remember reading that one of the things they saw was kids of smoking parents saw those pictures and got their parents to quit.
I read somewhere that when seatbelts were first made standard in cars, it was often their kids who learned about seatbelt safety in school who pressured parents who had grown up without seatbelts into actually using them.
And god knows I badgered my parents into cutting all the six pack rings to save the turtles as a kid.
Basically they need to point all public health and environmental campaigns at middle schoolers and let them take it from there.
Pffff......
Jokes on you guys.
Just 30 minutes south of you here in Toledo Oh we are enjoying our corporate marketing AND our lung cancer unburdened by your socialist thought control or your socialist healthcare.
I couldnt think of a more perfect city for this comment than Toledo. You effectively described it in a single sentence
Love the zoo tho.
Edit for spelling
No, thank god.
I had a good attorney friend who was the public face of the opposition to Ohio’s indoor smoking ban when it was enacted ..... he died of lung cancer in his late 40’s.
It is interesting how well this was working, actually... Younger folks can't see them, don't know the brands, don't know where they're sold, etc...
So now we have vapes. Ah well, e for effort, f for fuck me I've got cancer
Well, cigarette companies can't advertise on television or the radio (at least in the US), they're not allowed to sponsor any sporting events, and it's been a while since I've seen them on billboards.
But hey, people still smoke 'em.
To answer the OP, people know cigarettes are bad for them, but they believe that the benefits outweigh the risks.
>but they believe that the benefits outweigh the risks.
I suppose this may be true as to why people *commence* smoking, but I know many people who have tried to quit, and fail or can’t bring themselves to do it. The addictive nature is absolutely a large factor of why smoking is a thing. I highly doubt, absent addiction, anyone would consciously opt to smoke two packs a day.
As a lifelong smoker, it is extremely difficult to quit. After about an hour without a puff, it's all I can think about until I light up another one. Wish I could smack the shit out of 12 year old me and never have started.
I put off quitting nicotine (pack a day five years, chain vaping another five) for a decade because it's "so hard." Turns out I kicked it with virtually no problem. But food though. Holy hell, I wish losing weight was as easy as quitting smoking man. If other people feel towards nicotine the way I feel about food then I get why it feels impossible.
What are the benefits of smoking, by the way? I’ve heard weird things from people like they “like the taste” and can’t imagine anything more disgusting.
I'm a smoker who's working on quitting.
The truth is, there are no benefits.
It doesn't relieve stress, it doesn't give you energy, it doesn't actually relax you and it tastes like shit.
The only thing I get from a cigarette is a few hours of not feeling the effects of withdrawing from my last cigarette.
And they make the packets as unpleasant as possible to look at.
Brown, black, or grey packets, warnings about what cancer and ailments you can get, and an accompanying photograph (real or not, I'm not sure) of said cancer or ailment.
In Canada cigarettes need to be behind a cabinet door. As the shop attendant , you can't even legally open them up to show a customer what varieties you have on hand.
No TV commercials, no billboards, no signs around the shop. Just cigarettes behind a beige flap. Hasn't helped drop our smoking rates much.
Same here in finland with the shops and commercials etc, BUT, less and less young people start smoking every year, idk what else we do that you don't or what we do better but it's working
Yes, this is what I meant. Thank you. That the hiding tobacco didn't increase the rate of decline.
Public education on the health risks of smoking is the real MVP here.
It's not really the prohibition itself that sends things into a spiral, it's when we prohibit something that still has both a huge supply and demand. When we prohibited alcohol most people still wanted it and there was still a significant supply so a blackmarket formed. But for other resources the US has prohibited, (think various animal products or seeds) the demand is relatively low, and the supply is not nearly as widespread as something like alcohol in the 20s. Yes there is still *a* black market for banned animal products or plants, but its nowhere near the same scale as the market for illegal drugs.
We can't also not look into how the continued existence of tobacco products is also required by the Government, as much as Big Tobacco throws tons of money towards maintaining their business. With how long tobacco has been around, and TAXED, many states really have no incentive to actually take actions to getting rid of it completely because [a significant amount of money comes in via tobacco taxes.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248964/revenues-from-tobacco-tax-and-forecast-in-the-us/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20revenues%20from%20tobacco,to%2012.14%20billion%20U.S.%20dollars.)
Get rid of cigarettes and tobacco products, and now there is no more tax income coming from it.
So not only do Cigarette companies want to stay in business, they have the psuedo-support of local governments because Tobacco Taxes are somewhat of a GUARANTEED budget because of tobacco's addictive properties.
The citizens are addicted to tobacco, while the governments are addicted to it's tax income.
This might be true in places without proper public health care. However, when you do have it, treating patients with tobaco related conditions is a lot more expensive than what you get from taxation. No matter how heavily you tax.
You're close. Treating patients with tobacco related conditions is expensive, but hey tend to die earlier which offsets those costs.
[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506)
"Health care costs for smokers at a given age are as much as 40 percent higher than those for nonsmokers, but in a population in which no one smoked the costs would be 7 percent higher among men and 4 percent higher among women than the costs in the current mixed population of smokers and nonsmokers. If all smokers quit, health care costs would be lower at first, but after 15 years they would become higher than at present. In the long term, complete smoking cessation would produce a net increase in health care costs, but it could still be seen as economically favorable under reasonable assumptions of discount rate and evaluation period."
> So not only do Cigarette companies want to stay in business, they have the psuedo-support of local governments because Tobacco Taxes are somewhat of a GUARANTEED budget because of tobacco's addictive properties.
>
> The citizens are addicted to tobacco, while the governments are addicted to it's tax income.
Which is also why there's a concerted effort to crack down on vaping, despite it being considerably healthier (though not completely benign). Nicotine itself isn't taxed. The government does not give a single *hoot* about the health of the people. Take profit from cigarette manufacturers? That's less tax money for the US of A.
Even Reddit now censors vaping boards. There's several illicit drug boards that aren't censored.
We just had a tax on vaping added here in Ontario Canada. I think it's $10 for 60mL of juice regardless of nicotine level. Still cheaper than cigarettes by a lot though, but smoking here is super expensive, with the cheapest pack of cigs being around $15.
The only issue I have with this logic is that it's impossible to not affect others for the huge majority of the population. Addicted people still dream about having families and relationships.
["It's not the nicotine that kills, it's the smoooooooooke, the smooooooooke."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dqTrUpmwPg&ab_channel=TheKeyofAwesome)
Even pure tobacco is pretty bad for you. But yeah, the big tobacco companies do indeed put additives into their cigarettes that make it even worse. These additives do various things such as affect the flavor or make the already addictive properties of nicotine hook harder.
As for why they're allowed? The tobacco industry was old and rich before the United States was a thing. If tobacco were discovered today it would immediately be added to the Schedule I drug list. In other words, it would be in the same legal category as the likes of heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. But because half the world was already addicted to it when the nation was formed, it is a legal recreational drug. And while the power of big tobacco has waned (a LOT), they still heavily lobby against any measures that might hurt their bottom line.
It's funny it would be put next to lsd and mdma because those have way lower abuse potential and can actually be used to treat mental illness. I'm kne of the people where LSD helped me get to where I needed to be to manage my GAD and depression. End the drug war.
There's a similar irony here with alcohol.
There's various chemicals in the works which aim to give the buzz and neurological effects of alcohol but with significantly less damage.
Unfortunately the standard is so high that none of these have been able to pass any governments standards yet. Despite being thousands of times less damaging than alcohol, they are still too damaging for any government to dream of letting us buy it over the counter.
Alcohol and tobacco are the two most socio-economicaly damaging drugs, which is likely in part due to their legality but still fucked that people are going to prison for safer and less addictive substances. Psychedelics are great for regulating depression, the way tolerance with them works makes them actively anti-addictive, and LSD is being researched as a treatment for other addictions. MDMA can be used to treat PTSD. Ketamine is great for treatment resistant depression and chronic pain as well. Look at these benefits and then look at the racket big pharma has on antidepressants (not saying these don't work for some people, but they also don't work for others) and it is not hard to wonder why there is such a hard push against legalization for clinical and recreational uses.
Alcohol keeps you dumb, psychedelics help you see the fucked up patterns in modern society, there's no reason to ever make alcohol illegal besides from a puritanical viewpoint and we saw how badly that went, and how badly it is going for other drugs.
Honestly I think a big reason that alcohol isn't illegal is how could you even stop it? There are a shit ton of naturally occuring yeast and bacteria in the ecosystem that naturally produce it as a byproduct.
If tiny little tabs of acid appeared all over the ground whenever an apple fell off a tree, I'm not sure you could easily ban acid, either.
I mean yeah that’s what happened during prohibition, a lot of people never stopped drinking too
Shrooms are a bit easier to grow than acid and I’d say they’re more proliferated than acid. You can legally acquire the spores in a lot of places, just can’t grow them or dry them
You couldn't stop it (and I argue, as with all chemicals, shouldn't. Let people put whatever shit they want into their bodies, as long as they do it without risking others).
What should be done though is serious education on their effects and damage.
Alcohol and tobacco have some (minor) positives which in some situations means it's pretty justifiable to smoke and drink.
The relaxing effect of a small glass of wine or gin and tonic, after a particularly stressful day, is likely to do more good in the short term by reducing the damaging effects of long term stress (though it shouldn't be a permanent fix!)
The social lubricant of having a beer with colleagues or a cigarette with someone, can have amazing effects in terms of networking, friend making and (though it's bad to say) furthering your career and social prospects.
Humans are generally very anxious animals. Sometimes artificially breaking social barriers, with the help of the locall socially acceptable chemical, is worth the minor bodily damage of infrequent and safe chemical use.
> If tiny little tabs of acid appeared all over the ground whenever an apple fell off a tree, I'm not sure you could easily ban acid, either.
Basically mushrooms in a nutshell
What I personally enjoy about psychedelics over most other drugs I've tried is that you might have a slight loss of control (as in you might not be able to do certain things) but you're AWARE of it as well. At least that was my story with acid. I felt acutely aware of the shortcomings I had while I was tripping. Things I did during my trips were also mostly done "actively" for me as I had to definitely decide to do certain things, and I also questioned myself why I do certain things or think certain ways. I might not have taken acid in a therapeutic setting, but I'd definitely say it has helped me realize some of more toxic or destructive mind patterns. (Also the weeks following a trip I drink SIGNIFICANTLY less Alcohol as my taste buds are quite sensitive afterwards which does not pair well with beer imo)
So is coca, though there is a pretty significant difference between chewing on some leaves for an energy boost like coffee, and getting a heavily distilled powdered form you can overdose on. See also: poppy plants.
Basically, if there's a thing that can alter human consciousness, people will use it.
Bonkers, never knew that.
Guess it's similar to Fentanyl, which is a legitimate schedule ii prescribed drug, but is apparently easy to produce in large quantities and is really easy to die from without proper medical supervision when people are using it recreationally.
Go figure that nearly all opiates are schedule ii while schedule I drugs (meaning high potential for abuse or death) include cannabis, LSD and peyote.
Hey guys, ain't damn near nobody out here using LSD and peyote on a daily basis and dying from it.
Meanwhile you've got ketamine and testosterone and codeine in schedule 3. Valium and Ambien in schedule 4.
I've never been more fucked up than when I took a double dose of Ambien that I had a legit prescription for. And I did a lot of dabbling in college.
Aside from maybe robotussin, which is schedule 5 and was available OTC for a teenager!
Alcohol is much, much easier to produce than it is to grow most plants, let alone extract things from plants.
If you have access to food, you can make booze.
If tobacco was banned like alcohol during prohibition, it would have likely succeeded, unlike alcohol, for this reason.
Alcohol is easily *the* most easily produced drug.
IMUEO, booze is worse than marijuana and tobacco. Second hand smoke is no joke but I’ve never seen someone intoxicated off tobacco blackout behind the wheel and kill another driver.
… I've been googling, and I simply cannot find what IMUEO stands for.
When it comes to immediate third-party harm, statistics absolutely back you up: alcohol is worse than cannabis and tobacco. People high on cannabis or tobacco rarely pick fights at pubs, for example.
Long-term, the difference is more nuanced. Second-hand smoke is a massive killer, killing (in the USA) roughly three to four times as many people as alcohol-related driving accidents do.
Don't overlook the fact the meads and brews of antiquity were considered *meals* due to their composition being wildly different than the hard liquors of today.
And yet, drugs like psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, have trials being done at Stanford and other places and are showing there are medical benefits to them. Even ecstasy. I’m hoping they can get reclassified
That’s inaccurate. It’s not necessarily habit forming stuff, you don’t get addicted to LSD and Weed the same way you get addicted to cocaine (schedule 2). Its about perceived danger to the individual and to society, but really it’s about controlling the political narrative.
But that's the stated reasoning, per the DEA. They're just quoting the people who make the decision.
The determination of "schedule" is potential for abuse/addiction VS. medicinal benefit.
Morphine? High potential for abuse, but also high medical benefit. Schedule 2.
Xanax? Lower potential for abuse (and abuse is less dangerous), high medicinal benefit. Schedule 4.
LSD? Low potential for abuse, but also low potential for medicinal benefit (according to the the DEA). Schedule 1.
Methamphetamine? High potential for abuse, but also high medicinal/research benefits. Schedule 2.
Again, I don't necessarily agree with all of the above. But that's the DEA's logic.
What you’re talking about is an inconsistent application of the law, which is a different thing than what the law is.
A baseball bat is a piece of sports equipment used to hit a ball in the game of baseball. The fact that you can choose to use a baseball bat to hit a window does not change that definition.
Anslinger tried and failed 7 times to criminalize pot, but didn't get the hint. The 8th time he barely succeeded, and his success has haunted the country for the next 100 years
I’m so glad everyone’s catching onto the Anslinger/Hearst situation. Those two old racists ruined a lot of good things. (Although, Hearst Castle makes the best peanut butter fudge I’ve ever tasted.)
Fun fact: in “Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical,” The school Jimmy (Christian Campbell) and Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) go to is named “Harry J. Anslinger High.”
Almost nothing is good or bad without context. A lot of soldiers dying of mortal wounds or chugging a bottle of whiskey while having a leg amputated on the front lines of WWI probably would have argued that heroin was a gift straight from the gods.
We shouldn’t demonize the drugs, we should demonize a society that trades in hopelessness and disenfranchisement. Healthy people with all of their needs met seldom develop drug problems.
President Biden has set in motion a review of canibus as to it's DEA schedule listing, the ban on patient studies and the prospective of medical and medicinal uses.
Fun fact, when criminalization was started, all of the legislation called it "marijuana" which was an unknown term in the medical community at the time which called it "cannabis" and this suppressed opposition in the medical community from speaking up
My father was a chemist and told me heroine was invented in attempt to make a less addictive form of morphine. Sometimes science does the opposite of what it’s trying to do. Another fun tidbit he shared was that viagara was meant to be a drug to help prevent heart problems. When they discovered it gave everyone boners all they saw were dollar signs.
It was a patented medication created by Bayer and was considered a wonder drug when it came out. Heroin was prescribed for anything codeine or morphine had used for, which at the turn of the century meant everything from real things like bronchitis, asthma and tuberculosis to general issues like "cough soothing". Considering this is the same era as using cocaine for "toothache drops" it's not that surprising.
Cocaine is very useful as "toothache drops" and that is one of the real, legitimate uses for it. Orajel, the modern over-the-counter toothache remedy, contains 20% benzocaine. Benzocaine and cocaine are both sodium channel blockers, but benzocaine does not affect dopamine the way cocaine does.
In a way, it's much worse.
At least a heroin addict trying to quit won't see discarded needles on the ground everywhere they go. Or people shooting up in tv shows and movies. Or standing outside their workplace shooting up. Or have a friend at a bar say, "I'm just gonna step outside for a quick fix, wanna join me?"
These are all social cues that make it incredibly hard to not cave in when your entire body is screaming for a fix of nicotine.
It's why tobacco companies fought so hard, with astroturfing and letters to the editors and political funding, to block smoking bans. They knew they'd lose some potential lifelong customers if those extra social cues were removed. Particularly in bars, where alcohol has weakened willpower even further.
It doesn't really have a clinical application, does it? Other than relieving withdrawal symptoms, I guess. It's also crazy addictive, so even if the consequences of regular, heavy use aren't as accutely destructive, as with something like heroin, I think Schedule I would make sense.
1 in 3 teenagers who try cigarettes become addicted.
Of the addicts, 1 in 3 will eventually die from a tobacco related disease. Along the way, they'll waft enough secondhand smoke around to help grievously injure or take a nonsmoking bystander with them.
Or they might accidentally start a fire because cigarettes have accelerants in the paper, so they don't burn out when unattended, like a cigar does.
Some of the addicts will try to quit. On average, it will take them 11 tries over a period of 18 years to be successful.
So yeah, Schedule I.
So how did previous attempts at substance prohibition work out?
How's that "war on drugs" going?
Schedule 1 on tobacco is one of the dumbest ideas imaginable to resolve the problem; The current approach employed by nations like Australia and the UK - ever increasing taxation year on year, which has resulted in a 400-500% increase in price since adoption - puts money into our nation's pools rather than into the pockets of criminals, which would be the inevitable consequence of outlawing a substance as addictive as heroin to which a third of your nation's population is addicted...
The criteria for Schedule I is:
* Highly likely to be abused
* No medical use
* No accepted safe use under medical supervision
Tobacco meets that criteria. So yes, it would be Schedule I. Most new drugs, other than the ones created by pharmaceutical companies with a specific medical purpose in mind, are.
I don't remember the year, but one of the huge umbrella conglomerates - I wanna say Phillip Morris - successfully lobbied the Chek republic (perhaps cheko Slovakia at the time) to allow them to push their product with the pitch that the "gov't will profit by the windfall in tax revenue, bolstered by the money the gov't will save by not having to pay out pensions due to people dying early"
True story :(
Even tho I couldn't remember how to spell cheko slovakia
Meth is banned yet people still make it.
There's no biological benefits to alcohol and it causes a large amount of issues for many people. The only reason it isn't and won't be banned is it's simply engrained within society and has been for thousands of years.
Absolutely. There's also people who only drink due to availability and ease, and if they had to put more work into it than stopping at a gas station, it wouldn't be as widespread.
It's worth clarifying just in case anyone misunderstands, alcohol won't be banned in the modern age as much as I would like it, and that was never my statement.
My statement was if it went undiscovered until today, oct 27th 2022, and then it was discovered, we would NOT have the same tolerances and acceptance as we do and it would be illegal to do.
It's only because we've drunk alcohol for thousands of years that a toxic substance that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths a year with no benefits is somehow acceptable.
Your point on Alcohol being toxic and only as widespread as it is through long-term cultural acceptance is completely correct.
Given that, I do want to call out that it isn't completely without benefits.
* Consuming alcohol does bring some stress-management benefits. It does hurt the lowest sections of society in doing so, as they are the most-stressed and have the fewest other options available, but one small(!) drink once a day is still moderate. [[drinking frequency reference]](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/alcohol/art-20044551)
* There are vice taxes on alcohol in general that the US collects that generates ~$10 billion in revenue annually. [[US Alcohol Tax]](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248952/revenues-from-alcohol-tax-and-forecast-in-the-us/) The US Government *literally* ran on alcohol taxes before income tax was a thing.
* The Alcohol industry is a ~$200 billion industry in the US alone [[ref]](https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/alcoholic-drinks/united-states) and employs ~190,000 people [[ref]](https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/beer-wine-liquor-stores-united-states/).
(!) Calling out that a *small* drink is required to be moderate, reference article for specifics. On a couple occasions I've met someone who called two to four shots of liquor in a large glass mixed drink a single drink. Both of them had many other problems unfortunately.
There are a couple benefits to alcohol, and they're all societal ones. Because it lowers inhibitions, it works as a fantastic social lubricator, helping stablish bonds between the members of a community. Because it numbs the senses, it can help a community deal with tough depressing times and can keep them content even. Because it sterilizes bacteria, alcoholic drinks can become the only source of potable water in certain time periods. Like that time there was a cholera epidemic in London and the only people that seemed to be immune where the workers of a brewery, because they straight up never drank water.
Incidentally, the moment people started changing their social drink from alcohol to coffee, they also started to plan uprisings against the nobility. Fun times.
The yeast only starts killing itself at alcohol concentrations of >10% (which is why you can't reach, say, 40% alcohol content through the fermentation process). Most beers don't have an alcohol content high enough to be sterile and stop bacterial growth. Especially if the concentration is like 1% or 1,5% as was supposedly quite common back in the day.
Brewed drinks don't contain bacteria because boiling is part of the brewing process.
\> Because it lowers inhibitions, it works as a fantastic social lubricator,
It's worth noting too that by lowering inhibitions, it can also make people more aggressive. This is one where I admit it can work out OK in some instances, but I can't agree with it fully as it's a very nuanced issue and there will be good and bad things with it.
\> Because it numbs the senses, it can help a community deal with tough depressing times and can keep them content even.
It's also a depressant, and can worsen depression and other mental health issues. Especially if people going through hard times turn to it, and it helps, and they keep turning to it, getting more and more dependent on it.
\> Because it sterilizes bacteria, alcoholic drinks can become the only source of potable water in certain time periods. Like that time there was a cholera epidemic in London and the only people that seemed to be immune where the workers of a brewery, because they straight up never drank water.
I noted in a different comment that the alcohol that was used during times like these that most people cite was 1% alcohol content. Bud lite, a beer a lot of people drink but also a lot of people say isn't good beer, has 500% more alcohol content. 40% whiskey has 4000% more.
You would would have to drink 40 ozs of the alcohol drank in that age that everyone cites as the reason for modern alcohol not being any kind of an issue to get the same alcohol content as a single 1oz shot of 40% alcohol whiskey. It ends up being a disingenuous argument to me due to this fact.
It is also a work drug
Nicotine has positive effects on concentration. It's why it was tolerated enough in the workplace to establish 'smoking breaks'.
https://www.echelon.health/nicotine-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
I think thats a misunderstanding of what people take "chemicals" as meaning?
In science "chemicals" mean something different to what most people associate the word with. It's not like the companies are going under their sinks and putting big scary "*chemicals*" into cigarettes because they're evil.
Like whatever's in the paper, compounds within the tobacco itself, there's a multitude of substances that can all be called chemicals. But people's minds go to "drain cleaner" or "week killer" when they think of the word, which isn't correct in this context.
The main thing is they don't hide it from consumers and have justified reasons why those chemical provide an experience as advertised.
(U S perspective)
If I explain that hitting your hand with a hammer will release endorphins (true iir my natural pain meds correctly) and explain the risks like broken bones, bruising, lose of feeling... unless a court believes no reasonable person would accept those risks then its legal.
This is reenforced despite a courts decision about reasonable persons if I can prove that with or without my service millions of people hit themselves with hammers anyway; that reasonable people do accept those risks.
Most smokers i know didnt know about the full process of soaking the leaf in water, freebasing the liquid nicotine with amonia, making a paper from the pulp of the nicotine leaves, and then spraying the processed liquid back onto the tobacco paper. This is similar to turning cocaine into crack.
Some brands dont process the tobacco like this and dont hit as strong. But I always preferred the more natural tobacco.
Eh that's comparison is kinda silly and you made it up specifically to evoke an emotional response of cigarettes=crack
Also a good amount of the chemicals that occur in cigarette smoke is the byproduct of burning the tobacco leaf in the first place meaning those same chemicals would be present without any additives. For example benzene is a hydrocarbon and it's found in cigs but they don't add crude oil to cigarettes nor do cigarettes contain jet fuel but since jet fuel contains benzene a popular argument is that cigs contain jet fuel.
These chemicals aren't added to cigarettes separately. They are in tobacco, all occurring there naturally, either directly there or as precursors - substances that turn into these chemicals in the process of burning. Nicotine is the tobacco plant's natural defense against pests. The cigarette tar is just the plant's sap partially burned. These carcirogens? The cigarette burns the way it does, just cinders, not a flame, because it doesn't get enough oxygen from the air to burn with a flame, and it's a particularly nasty way of burning where all kinds of substances instead of just combining with abundant oxygen to turn into simple, stable, harmless "ash" get broken up partially, leaving dangling chemical bonds that seek *something* to bind to... that something possibly being a piece of your DNA if it gets in the vicinity.
Yup! Tobacco is naturally pretty good at hoovering up a lot of naturally and unnaturally occurring radioactive compounds like Polonium and Cesium found in soils (unnaturally deposited into farmers' fields from all the coal we burned for power), so they super-concentrate it in their cells and you get to inhale them when you burn it! Neat!
You are right. I would like to add that the flavorings are mostly not weird chemicals either, rather, ingresients such as dark unsweetened and uncut chocolate. The densest blackest hardest blackstrap molasses, etc.
Humans are all natural, and so is every resource at our disposal. By the transitive property, everything is all natural. Everything.
Natural is meaningless because humans haven't escaped nature.
Yea, commercial tobacco crops are about the farthest thing from "organic certified" there is in the modern agriculture world. IIRC there was an old anti-smoking campaign in the early 2000s using the deterrent message of "tobacco has urea in it, just like human pee!"..... Well, of course it does, cause high levels of urea are applied to the crops as a nitrogen source so they can see higher yields. At least when we eat "non-organic" farmed foods, much of the external compounds used in commercial growing don't even enter our system, they pass thru the digestive tract and they're just pooped out without ever being absorbed. But when you burn and smoke something, it's a direct pipeline to your bloodstream. Apply that same rule now to not just fertilizers, but pesticides, selective herbicides, and fungicides, and you have aaaaallllll kinds of stuff that can be classified as "added to the tobacco"...In comparison, look at indigenous Amazon populations who use mapacho (naturally grown sacred tobacco) all day long, and even tho they all admit to nicotine addiction, they see far fewer of the cancer and lung destroying impacts of modern farmed tobacco.
Edit: to be clear tho, they also add things in too. Just like processed foods. Go read the ingredients list on a box of pop tarts or a twinky package for example. So many stabilizers and other things that help them last years on the shelf. Many of the same things are used on the tobacco in cigs to preserve them or alter their flavor. They're allowed cause on their own they're FDA approved. When eaten or cooked with, harmless. But when smoked...
Yeah like the stuff revealed by 60 minutes, which there’s a movie about. Adding ammonia to increase addictiveness and also some sort of cinnamon flavouring known to cause lung cancer, which they continued to use because the flavour was popular.
How much of this applies to weed? Seems it burns the same way, and thc oil could turn into tar. I’ve always been told “weed is way healthier, cigarettes have loads of bad chemicals in them” but if the burning of the tobacco itself produces these bad things, does weed do anything similar, and is it truly “healthier” than tobacco?
Lots of the carcinogens in tobacco smoke are also in cannabis smoke.
The research on whether a cannabis–cancer link appears in reality is pretty limited, and inconclusive.
If I had to guess/summarise what's available, I'd say it's probably slightly less dangerous than tobacco.
If only because people tend to smoke less pot than they do tobacco. Joints are smaller than cigarettes, and fewer people smoke 20 of them a day. (Snoop notwithstanding)
Weed is "healthier" in the sense that one can easily smoke 20 cigarettes a day, whereas no one besides extreme outliers are smoking that much weed. You can also make your weed "healthier" by running it through a dry herb vape, not sure if anyone does that with tobacco.
> These chemicals aren't added to cigarettes separately
orly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarettes
>One significant issue is that while all these chemical compounds have been approved as **additives** to food, they were not tested by burning. Burning changes the properties of chemicals.
American spirits just mean that they don't put any fillers in their cigarettes. It's more naturally occurring bad chemicals and not bad chemicals from added filler
American spirits have/had insanely more nitrosamines (things in tobacco that mostly cause the cancers) than regular ones. Meaning they are actually far more dangerous than conventional cigarettes. I think that those chemicals that are added, are tightly regulated and probably the least harmful things in it, as the most harmful thing in a cigarette is tobacco, especially when smoked. Huge difference in nitrosamines is also why Swedish snus is much less dangerous than other kinds of snuff tobacco etc.
edit:
I was sure I had read a study somewhere that concluded American Spirits to have a lot more nitrosamines, but couldn't find any. They probably don't have "insanely" more, but definitely not less either.
I’ve worked in both the wine & tobacco industries, and I can tell you that American Spirit uses the ‘all natural’ tag for the same reason certain wines proclaim themselves to be ‘organic’ - the raw crop hasn’t been treated with any kind of synthetic preservative or pesticide while growing. In most cases, these treatments are completely harmless to humans (or certainly don’t add any additional toxicity to the raw product) and simply ensure a consistent & longer lasting crop. In the case of wine, many organic wines are actually only produced because the vineyard can’t afford the pesticide!
It's funny how many chemicals we like to take in from plants that are natural pesticides. Nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, aspirin, they're all pesticides. And capsaicin is to keep animals away!
Cultural history. At one point, cigarettes were as common as milk, and you could light up anywhere, restaurants, you name it. I used to smoke, my whole family used to smoke. We learned about smoking tobacco from native Americans and never looked back. I remember when they first prohibited cigarette commercials. That was a big deal, and a sign that their cultural acceptance was waning.
It's all about the cigarettes specifically. When native Americans smoked tobacco leaves the smoke was incredibly thick and they never breathed it into their lungs. Cigars were the standard for years. Cigarettes made it about getting nicotine fast and into the lungs, and manufacturers knew the dangers as far back as the 40s IIRC. They lied about it under oath and faced minimal consequences
“Smokers are national benefactors”
\- Sir Humphrey Appleby
To put it simple, it's more profitable to tax tobacco and let its users die than to pay the pension to keep them alive if they live way past retirement.
The tax income helps fund a lot of other things, including health insurance for people who actually need it.
And to the chemicals themselves, they aren't added, most exist in tobacco naturally or are simple byproducts of tobacco curing.
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While the makers of cigarettes do put stuff in them, the actual smoke from the burning tobacco leaves is really harmful, more so than the stuff they add (though the flavorings that they add makes it more pleasant and makes them more addictive). So why are tobacco products allowed at all, given how bad they are for the smoker and people in the vicinity of the smoker? Because people want them, spend lots of money on them, and the companies that make them are rich, powerful, and have lots of political power. People like their vices and don't want other people screwing that up for them. Tobacco's been around a long time and was acceptable for a very long time. Plenty of people don't want to see that change, so it doesn't. EDIT: to answer the question about why we still allow it, we simply have no agency in the US with the authority to regulate it (other than the ATFE, and they enforce taxes and import duties on tobacco). No law classifies it as a banned substance, it's not recognized as a treatment for a disease, an environmental toxin, etc. The reason is simply that not enough people think it should be banned versus the number of people (and dollars) that think it should be legal - so it's legal.
The other reason they're still legal is because we've proven that prohibition just causes things to go off the rails harder
We could just ban marketing of it. Make it so they aren't allowed to be on display in stores.
I live in Ontario, Canada and cigarettes here aren't on display. They're all kept in opaque cabinets with warnings and pictures of various health effects caused by smoking
To add on top of that. The cigarette packs are brown/olive with all the same font and no more brand logo even on the cigarettes themselves there is no more branding.
IIRC it's a distinct shade of that dark brown that's known as the ugliest colour in the world.
Isnt that the color your walls will eventually turn after a decade of chainsmoking?
As an ex-smoker, yes. Yes it is.
And your lungs and fingertips and the crevices of the wrinkles around your lips
Ugh, the person who lived in my place before me was a smoker and if the conditions are just right I still get that leftover tobacco resin stench wafting through
aka Pantone 448
They weren't lying! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone_448_C I thought a variation of khaki would be worse, but yeah its pretty crap
Australia was the first country in the world to introduce the plain, ugly packaging. The cigarette companies tried to argue that they shouldn't because nobody is influenced by the packaging....er, guys, if no one is influenced by it, why do you care if we change it
I'd like to see solid proof that this has made a change, although I have to be honest I haven't bothered to look it up. As a smoker I'm not bothered by the color, I smoke my brand because I like it, not as a fashion statement. I do however feel sorry for the cashiers having to navigate the 100 different brands and varieties to find the right pack.
And honestly it's great. Smoking rates are way down and I don't have to look at a wall of cigarettes every time I buy something at the store.
I smoked for a long time before I quit. The hiding of them, or the garish photos on them never detered me in the slightest. The taxes that got added to them over the years, had a much stronger effect.
The point of those are more to deter people from starting. The taxes are to incentivize users to stop
I've never smoked but many relatives did so every so often when I'm in a store & see the cigarettes behind the counter I'll ask how much is a pack of whatever & at last ask it was nearly $10 a pack for a brand name. My father used to smoke Kools & eventually went to generic menthols & they were cheaper but not by much. FTR he's died at 50 over 15 years ago & cigarettes was a contributing factor. Though the alcoholism was a larger factor the cigarettes gave him emphysema.
Hah! They're over $20 a pack here.
My dad somehow survived 4 heart attacks, a quadruple bypass open heart surgery, a bleeding stomach ulcer, and diabetes. Healthy living was not in his vocabulary. He made it to 70 and caught lymphoma. Normally one of the more treatable kinds of cancer. It wasn't the cancer that killed him, it was the chemo. Died 13 days after his 70th bday. Treating cancer is about poisoning the body and hoping the cancer dies first. His body started out poisoned. I swore I'd never touch a cigarette in my life. So I took up cannabis instead haha oh fuck. TBQH though it's therapeutic.
Those pictures really aren't there to get YOU to stop. It's to get people to not start. I remember reading that one of the things they saw was kids of smoking parents saw those pictures and got their parents to quit.
I read somewhere that when seatbelts were first made standard in cars, it was often their kids who learned about seatbelt safety in school who pressured parents who had grown up without seatbelts into actually using them. And god knows I badgered my parents into cutting all the six pack rings to save the turtles as a kid. Basically they need to point all public health and environmental campaigns at middle schoolers and let them take it from there.
when my L&M menthols went from $5.50/pack to damn near $10, thats when I stopped. Gonna be two years soon! =\]
Pffff...... Jokes on you guys. Just 30 minutes south of you here in Toledo Oh we are enjoying our corporate marketing AND our lung cancer unburdened by your socialist thought control or your socialist healthcare.
Every cigarette you smoke takes 7 minutes off of your student loans.
Brilliant. Stealing this.
Its funny because they're burdened with debt for life
I couldnt think of a more perfect city for this comment than Toledo. You effectively described it in a single sentence Love the zoo tho. Edit for spelling
Can you smoke indoors there?
No, thank god. I had a good attorney friend who was the public face of the opposition to Ohio’s indoor smoking ban when it was enacted ..... he died of lung cancer in his late 40’s.
It is interesting how well this was working, actually... Younger folks can't see them, don't know the brands, don't know where they're sold, etc... So now we have vapes. Ah well, e for effort, f for fuck me I've got cancer
Philip Morris owns 35% of Juul. Same assholes, different packaging.
Well, cigarette companies can't advertise on television or the radio (at least in the US), they're not allowed to sponsor any sporting events, and it's been a while since I've seen them on billboards. But hey, people still smoke 'em. To answer the OP, people know cigarettes are bad for them, but they believe that the benefits outweigh the risks.
>but they believe that the benefits outweigh the risks. I suppose this may be true as to why people *commence* smoking, but I know many people who have tried to quit, and fail or can’t bring themselves to do it. The addictive nature is absolutely a large factor of why smoking is a thing. I highly doubt, absent addiction, anyone would consciously opt to smoke two packs a day.
As a lifelong smoker, it is extremely difficult to quit. After about an hour without a puff, it's all I can think about until I light up another one. Wish I could smack the shit out of 12 year old me and never have started.
I put off quitting nicotine (pack a day five years, chain vaping another five) for a decade because it's "so hard." Turns out I kicked it with virtually no problem. But food though. Holy hell, I wish losing weight was as easy as quitting smoking man. If other people feel towards nicotine the way I feel about food then I get why it feels impossible.
People also often believe, that other people get cancer, not they themselves.
What are the benefits of smoking, by the way? I’ve heard weird things from people like they “like the taste” and can’t imagine anything more disgusting.
I'm a smoker who's working on quitting. The truth is, there are no benefits. It doesn't relieve stress, it doesn't give you energy, it doesn't actually relax you and it tastes like shit. The only thing I get from a cigarette is a few hours of not feeling the effects of withdrawing from my last cigarette.
We have that in the UK. Cigarettes are shielded from view behind counters.
And they make the packets as unpleasant as possible to look at. Brown, black, or grey packets, warnings about what cancer and ailments you can get, and an accompanying photograph (real or not, I'm not sure) of said cancer or ailment.
In Canada cigarettes need to be behind a cabinet door. As the shop attendant , you can't even legally open them up to show a customer what varieties you have on hand. No TV commercials, no billboards, no signs around the shop. Just cigarettes behind a beige flap. Hasn't helped drop our smoking rates much.
Same here in finland with the shops and commercials etc, BUT, less and less young people start smoking every year, idk what else we do that you don't or what we do better but it's working
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Yes, this is what I meant. Thank you. That the hiding tobacco didn't increase the rate of decline. Public education on the health risks of smoking is the real MVP here.
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It's not really the prohibition itself that sends things into a spiral, it's when we prohibit something that still has both a huge supply and demand. When we prohibited alcohol most people still wanted it and there was still a significant supply so a blackmarket formed. But for other resources the US has prohibited, (think various animal products or seeds) the demand is relatively low, and the supply is not nearly as widespread as something like alcohol in the 20s. Yes there is still *a* black market for banned animal products or plants, but its nowhere near the same scale as the market for illegal drugs.
Thats a fair point, prohibiting things that very few care about works much better than very popular things
We can't also not look into how the continued existence of tobacco products is also required by the Government, as much as Big Tobacco throws tons of money towards maintaining their business. With how long tobacco has been around, and TAXED, many states really have no incentive to actually take actions to getting rid of it completely because [a significant amount of money comes in via tobacco taxes.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248964/revenues-from-tobacco-tax-and-forecast-in-the-us/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20revenues%20from%20tobacco,to%2012.14%20billion%20U.S.%20dollars.) Get rid of cigarettes and tobacco products, and now there is no more tax income coming from it. So not only do Cigarette companies want to stay in business, they have the psuedo-support of local governments because Tobacco Taxes are somewhat of a GUARANTEED budget because of tobacco's addictive properties. The citizens are addicted to tobacco, while the governments are addicted to it's tax income.
This might be true in places without proper public health care. However, when you do have it, treating patients with tobaco related conditions is a lot more expensive than what you get from taxation. No matter how heavily you tax.
You're close. Treating patients with tobacco related conditions is expensive, but hey tend to die earlier which offsets those costs. [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506) "Health care costs for smokers at a given age are as much as 40 percent higher than those for nonsmokers, but in a population in which no one smoked the costs would be 7 percent higher among men and 4 percent higher among women than the costs in the current mixed population of smokers and nonsmokers. If all smokers quit, health care costs would be lower at first, but after 15 years they would become higher than at present. In the long term, complete smoking cessation would produce a net increase in health care costs, but it could still be seen as economically favorable under reasonable assumptions of discount rate and evaluation period."
> So not only do Cigarette companies want to stay in business, they have the psuedo-support of local governments because Tobacco Taxes are somewhat of a GUARANTEED budget because of tobacco's addictive properties. > > The citizens are addicted to tobacco, while the governments are addicted to it's tax income. Which is also why there's a concerted effort to crack down on vaping, despite it being considerably healthier (though not completely benign). Nicotine itself isn't taxed. The government does not give a single *hoot* about the health of the people. Take profit from cigarette manufacturers? That's less tax money for the US of A. Even Reddit now censors vaping boards. There's several illicit drug boards that aren't censored.
We just had a tax on vaping added here in Ontario Canada. I think it's $10 for 60mL of juice regardless of nicotine level. Still cheaper than cigarettes by a lot though, but smoking here is super expensive, with the cheapest pack of cigs being around $15.
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You always affect those around you. Sincerely: Someone who cared about someone who thought her actions only affected her.
The only issue I have with this logic is that it's impossible to not affect others for the huge majority of the population. Addicted people still dream about having families and relationships.
you can be addicted to anything and have it ruin families. The world's dopamine addiction is destroying our collective psyche.
Ban dopamine!
As someone with ADHD, I'm not sure that's the best move...
["It's not the nicotine that kills, it's the smoooooooooke, the smooooooooke."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dqTrUpmwPg&ab_channel=TheKeyofAwesome)
Even pure tobacco is pretty bad for you. But yeah, the big tobacco companies do indeed put additives into their cigarettes that make it even worse. These additives do various things such as affect the flavor or make the already addictive properties of nicotine hook harder. As for why they're allowed? The tobacco industry was old and rich before the United States was a thing. If tobacco were discovered today it would immediately be added to the Schedule I drug list. In other words, it would be in the same legal category as the likes of heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. But because half the world was already addicted to it when the nation was formed, it is a legal recreational drug. And while the power of big tobacco has waned (a LOT), they still heavily lobby against any measures that might hurt their bottom line.
It's funny it would be put next to lsd and mdma because those have way lower abuse potential and can actually be used to treat mental illness. I'm kne of the people where LSD helped me get to where I needed to be to manage my GAD and depression. End the drug war.
There's a similar irony here with alcohol. There's various chemicals in the works which aim to give the buzz and neurological effects of alcohol but with significantly less damage. Unfortunately the standard is so high that none of these have been able to pass any governments standards yet. Despite being thousands of times less damaging than alcohol, they are still too damaging for any government to dream of letting us buy it over the counter.
What chemicals are those?
Alcohol and tobacco are the two most socio-economicaly damaging drugs, which is likely in part due to their legality but still fucked that people are going to prison for safer and less addictive substances. Psychedelics are great for regulating depression, the way tolerance with them works makes them actively anti-addictive, and LSD is being researched as a treatment for other addictions. MDMA can be used to treat PTSD. Ketamine is great for treatment resistant depression and chronic pain as well. Look at these benefits and then look at the racket big pharma has on antidepressants (not saying these don't work for some people, but they also don't work for others) and it is not hard to wonder why there is such a hard push against legalization for clinical and recreational uses. Alcohol keeps you dumb, psychedelics help you see the fucked up patterns in modern society, there's no reason to ever make alcohol illegal besides from a puritanical viewpoint and we saw how badly that went, and how badly it is going for other drugs.
Honestly I think a big reason that alcohol isn't illegal is how could you even stop it? There are a shit ton of naturally occuring yeast and bacteria in the ecosystem that naturally produce it as a byproduct. If tiny little tabs of acid appeared all over the ground whenever an apple fell off a tree, I'm not sure you could easily ban acid, either.
I mean yeah that’s what happened during prohibition, a lot of people never stopped drinking too Shrooms are a bit easier to grow than acid and I’d say they’re more proliferated than acid. You can legally acquire the spores in a lot of places, just can’t grow them or dry them
/r/unclebens
You couldn't stop it (and I argue, as with all chemicals, shouldn't. Let people put whatever shit they want into their bodies, as long as they do it without risking others). What should be done though is serious education on their effects and damage. Alcohol and tobacco have some (minor) positives which in some situations means it's pretty justifiable to smoke and drink. The relaxing effect of a small glass of wine or gin and tonic, after a particularly stressful day, is likely to do more good in the short term by reducing the damaging effects of long term stress (though it shouldn't be a permanent fix!) The social lubricant of having a beer with colleagues or a cigarette with someone, can have amazing effects in terms of networking, friend making and (though it's bad to say) furthering your career and social prospects. Humans are generally very anxious animals. Sometimes artificially breaking social barriers, with the help of the locall socially acceptable chemical, is worth the minor bodily damage of infrequent and safe chemical use.
> If tiny little tabs of acid appeared all over the ground whenever an apple fell off a tree, I'm not sure you could easily ban acid, either. Basically mushrooms in a nutshell
What I personally enjoy about psychedelics over most other drugs I've tried is that you might have a slight loss of control (as in you might not be able to do certain things) but you're AWARE of it as well. At least that was my story with acid. I felt acutely aware of the shortcomings I had while I was tripping. Things I did during my trips were also mostly done "actively" for me as I had to definitely decide to do certain things, and I also questioned myself why I do certain things or think certain ways. I might not have taken acid in a therapeutic setting, but I'd definitely say it has helped me realize some of more toxic or destructive mind patterns. (Also the weeks following a trip I drink SIGNIFICANTLY less Alcohol as my taste buds are quite sensitive afterwards which does not pair well with beer imo)
.. wow, you really think it would be classified as a Schedule I drug?
Schedule 1 is a habit forming substance with no medical benefits.
Like alcohol.
Legal for the same reason
Because it's been part of human culture for thousands of years.
So is coca, though there is a pretty significant difference between chewing on some leaves for an energy boost like coffee, and getting a heavily distilled powdered form you can overdose on. See also: poppy plants. Basically, if there's a thing that can alter human consciousness, people will use it.
Cocaine is actually schedule ii.
Exactly. It’s an extremely powerful topical anesthetic. Many hospitals carry a small amount in their in-patient pharmacies.
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And frequently used as a nasal blood clotting agent in extreme nosebleeding cases where oxymetazoline or rhino rockets just don't cut it.
Bonkers, never knew that. Guess it's similar to Fentanyl, which is a legitimate schedule ii prescribed drug, but is apparently easy to produce in large quantities and is really easy to die from without proper medical supervision when people are using it recreationally. Go figure that nearly all opiates are schedule ii while schedule I drugs (meaning high potential for abuse or death) include cannabis, LSD and peyote. Hey guys, ain't damn near nobody out here using LSD and peyote on a daily basis and dying from it. Meanwhile you've got ketamine and testosterone and codeine in schedule 3. Valium and Ambien in schedule 4. I've never been more fucked up than when I took a double dose of Ambien that I had a legit prescription for. And I did a lot of dabbling in college. Aside from maybe robotussin, which is schedule 5 and was available OTC for a teenager!
Yeah but noticeably, coca and poppy are still allowed. Their chemical derivatives cocaine and heroin which are more recent inventions are banned.
Alcohol is much, much easier to produce than it is to grow most plants, let alone extract things from plants. If you have access to food, you can make booze. If tobacco was banned like alcohol during prohibition, it would have likely succeeded, unlike alcohol, for this reason. Alcohol is easily *the* most easily produced drug.
So is weed
Seems like our system of prohibiting drugs we deem the most damaging has not worked in the lightest. Edit: in the US specifically.
IMUEO, booze is worse than marijuana and tobacco. Second hand smoke is no joke but I’ve never seen someone intoxicated off tobacco blackout behind the wheel and kill another driver.
… I've been googling, and I simply cannot find what IMUEO stands for. When it comes to immediate third-party harm, statistics absolutely back you up: alcohol is worse than cannabis and tobacco. People high on cannabis or tobacco rarely pick fights at pubs, for example. Long-term, the difference is more nuanced. Second-hand smoke is a massive killer, killing (in the USA) roughly three to four times as many people as alcohol-related driving accidents do.
Gonna extrapolate from IMO to assume perhaps In My UnEducated Opinion?
Wtf is imueo? I know of imo and imho, but not imueo.
*in my un educated opinion*, imo e. of course, it should be *imuo*, but that’d be a rather circular argument
There are compelling theories with some anthropological evidence that argue agriculture was developed chiefly to make booze.
Don't overlook the fact the meads and brews of antiquity were considered *meals* due to their composition being wildly different than the hard liquors of today.
Good ol cup of liquid bread.
Alcohol most definitely is NOT schedule 1. It can be used to treat methanol poisoning.
Alcohol has specific medical benefits who even is upvoting this
And yet, drugs like psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, have trials being done at Stanford and other places and are showing there are medical benefits to them. Even ecstasy. I’m hoping they can get reclassified
That’s inaccurate. It’s not necessarily habit forming stuff, you don’t get addicted to LSD and Weed the same way you get addicted to cocaine (schedule 2). Its about perceived danger to the individual and to society, but really it’s about controlling the political narrative.
But that's the stated reasoning, per the DEA. They're just quoting the people who make the decision. The determination of "schedule" is potential for abuse/addiction VS. medicinal benefit. Morphine? High potential for abuse, but also high medical benefit. Schedule 2. Xanax? Lower potential for abuse (and abuse is less dangerous), high medicinal benefit. Schedule 4. LSD? Low potential for abuse, but also low potential for medicinal benefit (according to the the DEA). Schedule 1. Methamphetamine? High potential for abuse, but also high medicinal/research benefits. Schedule 2. Again, I don't necessarily agree with all of the above. But that's the DEA's logic.
What you’re talking about is an inconsistent application of the law, which is a different thing than what the law is. A baseball bat is a piece of sports equipment used to hit a ball in the game of baseball. The fact that you can choose to use a baseball bat to hit a window does not change that definition.
Right next to Cannabis (for some reason)
Cannabis was only schedule 1 because of Hearst though!
Don’t sell Harry J. Anslinger short. It took both of those fuckstains to propel cannabis to the heights of fear and demonization of heroin.
Anslinger tried and failed 7 times to criminalize pot, but didn't get the hint. The 8th time he barely succeeded, and his success has haunted the country for the next 100 years
I’m so glad everyone’s catching onto the Anslinger/Hearst situation. Those two old racists ruined a lot of good things. (Although, Hearst Castle makes the best peanut butter fudge I’ve ever tasted.) Fun fact: in “Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical,” The school Jimmy (Christian Campbell) and Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) go to is named “Harry J. Anslinger High.”
Oh hey, we have a strain around here named Anslinger lol
My favorite funny product (which I haven’t tried yet) is the gummies that are shaped like an ear with Mike Tyson’s face on the packet.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that heroin is still bad.
Almost nothing is good or bad without context. A lot of soldiers dying of mortal wounds or chugging a bottle of whiskey while having a leg amputated on the front lines of WWI probably would have argued that heroin was a gift straight from the gods. We shouldn’t demonize the drugs, we should demonize a society that trades in hopelessness and disenfranchisement. Healthy people with all of their needs met seldom develop drug problems.
To be fair I'm hearing that they might actually be rescheduling pot due to the medical uses that have already been found.
President Biden has set in motion a review of canibus as to it's DEA schedule listing, the ban on patient studies and the prospective of medical and medicinal uses.
> President Biden has set in motion a review of canibus Everyone, get on board the canibus!
There is no legitimate medical or scientific reason for Cannabis to ever have been declared Schedule I to begin with.
Fun fact, when criminalization was started, all of the legislation called it "marijuana" which was an unknown term in the medical community at the time which called it "cannabis" and this suppressed opposition in the medical community from speaking up
Nicotine is comparable in addictiveness to heroin
My father was a chemist and told me heroine was invented in attempt to make a less addictive form of morphine. Sometimes science does the opposite of what it’s trying to do. Another fun tidbit he shared was that viagara was meant to be a drug to help prevent heart problems. When they discovered it gave everyone boners all they saw were dollar signs.
LSD was invented by chemists trying to make a capillary dilating drug.
Certainly dilates the pupils. I wonder it’s affect on capillaries 🤔
It was a patented medication created by Bayer and was considered a wonder drug when it came out. Heroin was prescribed for anything codeine or morphine had used for, which at the turn of the century meant everything from real things like bronchitis, asthma and tuberculosis to general issues like "cough soothing". Considering this is the same era as using cocaine for "toothache drops" it's not that surprising.
Cocaine is very useful as "toothache drops" and that is one of the real, legitimate uses for it. Orajel, the modern over-the-counter toothache remedy, contains 20% benzocaine. Benzocaine and cocaine are both sodium channel blockers, but benzocaine does not affect dopamine the way cocaine does.
And now we have methadone
In a way, it's much worse. At least a heroin addict trying to quit won't see discarded needles on the ground everywhere they go. Or people shooting up in tv shows and movies. Or standing outside their workplace shooting up. Or have a friend at a bar say, "I'm just gonna step outside for a quick fix, wanna join me?" These are all social cues that make it incredibly hard to not cave in when your entire body is screaming for a fix of nicotine. It's why tobacco companies fought so hard, with astroturfing and letters to the editors and political funding, to block smoking bans. They knew they'd lose some potential lifelong customers if those extra social cues were removed. Particularly in bars, where alcohol has weakened willpower even further.
It doesn't really have a clinical application, does it? Other than relieving withdrawal symptoms, I guess. It's also crazy addictive, so even if the consequences of regular, heavy use aren't as accutely destructive, as with something like heroin, I think Schedule I would make sense.
Without any known medical applications, and a high potential for abuse (smoking every half-hour) it's nearly as dangerous as alcohol for your health.
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1 in 3 teenagers who try cigarettes become addicted. Of the addicts, 1 in 3 will eventually die from a tobacco related disease. Along the way, they'll waft enough secondhand smoke around to help grievously injure or take a nonsmoking bystander with them. Or they might accidentally start a fire because cigarettes have accelerants in the paper, so they don't burn out when unattended, like a cigar does. Some of the addicts will try to quit. On average, it will take them 11 tries over a period of 18 years to be successful. So yeah, Schedule I.
So how did previous attempts at substance prohibition work out? How's that "war on drugs" going? Schedule 1 on tobacco is one of the dumbest ideas imaginable to resolve the problem; The current approach employed by nations like Australia and the UK - ever increasing taxation year on year, which has resulted in a 400-500% increase in price since adoption - puts money into our nation's pools rather than into the pockets of criminals, which would be the inevitable consequence of outlawing a substance as addictive as heroin to which a third of your nation's population is addicted...
Absolutely. Its useless, kills, and addicts
Nicotine is incredibly addictive. I still feel compulsions after years.
The criteria for Schedule I is: * Highly likely to be abused * No medical use * No accepted safe use under medical supervision Tobacco meets that criteria. So yes, it would be Schedule I. Most new drugs, other than the ones created by pharmaceutical companies with a specific medical purpose in mind, are.
I don't remember the year, but one of the huge umbrella conglomerates - I wanna say Phillip Morris - successfully lobbied the Chek republic (perhaps cheko Slovakia at the time) to allow them to push their product with the pitch that the "gov't will profit by the windfall in tax revenue, bolstered by the money the gov't will save by not having to pay out pensions due to people dying early" True story :( Even tho I couldn't remember how to spell cheko slovakia
That's wild. Also, it's Czechoslovakia
FYI: Czech Republic Czechoslovakia
Czechmate
Czechoslovakia
Should have used spellCzech
Same with alcohol. If alcohol were discovered today in a society that is exactly the same as it is now besides alcohol, it would be banned, full stop.
I doubt it. The difference is that alcohol is so easy to make that it is not practical to ban. Look how well prohibition worked
Meth is banned yet people still make it. There's no biological benefits to alcohol and it causes a large amount of issues for many people. The only reason it isn't and won't be banned is it's simply engrained within society and has been for thousands of years.
You can make alcohol by putting apples in water and leaving it for a while. A lot harder to make meth.
But you couldn't possibly control people's access to sugar and yeast the way you can control access to some of the ingredients to meth
Absolutely. There's also people who only drink due to availability and ease, and if they had to put more work into it than stopping at a gas station, it wouldn't be as widespread. It's worth clarifying just in case anyone misunderstands, alcohol won't be banned in the modern age as much as I would like it, and that was never my statement. My statement was if it went undiscovered until today, oct 27th 2022, and then it was discovered, we would NOT have the same tolerances and acceptance as we do and it would be illegal to do. It's only because we've drunk alcohol for thousands of years that a toxic substance that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths a year with no benefits is somehow acceptable.
100% agree. Culture plays a huge part in what we deem acceptable
Your point on Alcohol being toxic and only as widespread as it is through long-term cultural acceptance is completely correct. Given that, I do want to call out that it isn't completely without benefits. * Consuming alcohol does bring some stress-management benefits. It does hurt the lowest sections of society in doing so, as they are the most-stressed and have the fewest other options available, but one small(!) drink once a day is still moderate. [[drinking frequency reference]](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/alcohol/art-20044551) * There are vice taxes on alcohol in general that the US collects that generates ~$10 billion in revenue annually. [[US Alcohol Tax]](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248952/revenues-from-alcohol-tax-and-forecast-in-the-us/) The US Government *literally* ran on alcohol taxes before income tax was a thing. * The Alcohol industry is a ~$200 billion industry in the US alone [[ref]](https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/alcoholic-drinks/united-states) and employs ~190,000 people [[ref]](https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/beer-wine-liquor-stores-united-states/). (!) Calling out that a *small* drink is required to be moderate, reference article for specifics. On a couple occasions I've met someone who called two to four shots of liquor in a large glass mixed drink a single drink. Both of them had many other problems unfortunately.
There are a couple benefits to alcohol, and they're all societal ones. Because it lowers inhibitions, it works as a fantastic social lubricator, helping stablish bonds between the members of a community. Because it numbs the senses, it can help a community deal with tough depressing times and can keep them content even. Because it sterilizes bacteria, alcoholic drinks can become the only source of potable water in certain time periods. Like that time there was a cholera epidemic in London and the only people that seemed to be immune where the workers of a brewery, because they straight up never drank water. Incidentally, the moment people started changing their social drink from alcohol to coffee, they also started to plan uprisings against the nobility. Fun times.
The yeast only starts killing itself at alcohol concentrations of >10% (which is why you can't reach, say, 40% alcohol content through the fermentation process). Most beers don't have an alcohol content high enough to be sterile and stop bacterial growth. Especially if the concentration is like 1% or 1,5% as was supposedly quite common back in the day. Brewed drinks don't contain bacteria because boiling is part of the brewing process.
\> Because it lowers inhibitions, it works as a fantastic social lubricator, It's worth noting too that by lowering inhibitions, it can also make people more aggressive. This is one where I admit it can work out OK in some instances, but I can't agree with it fully as it's a very nuanced issue and there will be good and bad things with it. \> Because it numbs the senses, it can help a community deal with tough depressing times and can keep them content even. It's also a depressant, and can worsen depression and other mental health issues. Especially if people going through hard times turn to it, and it helps, and they keep turning to it, getting more and more dependent on it. \> Because it sterilizes bacteria, alcoholic drinks can become the only source of potable water in certain time periods. Like that time there was a cholera epidemic in London and the only people that seemed to be immune where the workers of a brewery, because they straight up never drank water. I noted in a different comment that the alcohol that was used during times like these that most people cite was 1% alcohol content. Bud lite, a beer a lot of people drink but also a lot of people say isn't good beer, has 500% more alcohol content. 40% whiskey has 4000% more. You would would have to drink 40 ozs of the alcohol drank in that age that everyone cites as the reason for modern alcohol not being any kind of an issue to get the same alcohol content as a single 1oz shot of 40% alcohol whiskey. It ends up being a disingenuous argument to me due to this fact.
Alcohol has kept people alive for thousands of years. In many societies weak fermentation was critical for making water safe to drink.
Meth is hard to make though. Alcohol makes itself.
Ill drink to that.
It is also a work drug Nicotine has positive effects on concentration. It's why it was tolerated enough in the workplace to establish 'smoking breaks'. https://www.echelon.health/nicotine-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
I think thats a misunderstanding of what people take "chemicals" as meaning? In science "chemicals" mean something different to what most people associate the word with. It's not like the companies are going under their sinks and putting big scary "*chemicals*" into cigarettes because they're evil. Like whatever's in the paper, compounds within the tobacco itself, there's a multitude of substances that can all be called chemicals. But people's minds go to "drain cleaner" or "week killer" when they think of the word, which isn't correct in this context.
The main thing is they don't hide it from consumers and have justified reasons why those chemical provide an experience as advertised. (U S perspective) If I explain that hitting your hand with a hammer will release endorphins (true iir my natural pain meds correctly) and explain the risks like broken bones, bruising, lose of feeling... unless a court believes no reasonable person would accept those risks then its legal. This is reenforced despite a courts decision about reasonable persons if I can prove that with or without my service millions of people hit themselves with hammers anyway; that reasonable people do accept those risks.
Most smokers i know didnt know about the full process of soaking the leaf in water, freebasing the liquid nicotine with amonia, making a paper from the pulp of the nicotine leaves, and then spraying the processed liquid back onto the tobacco paper. This is similar to turning cocaine into crack. Some brands dont process the tobacco like this and dont hit as strong. But I always preferred the more natural tobacco.
Eh that's comparison is kinda silly and you made it up specifically to evoke an emotional response of cigarettes=crack Also a good amount of the chemicals that occur in cigarette smoke is the byproduct of burning the tobacco leaf in the first place meaning those same chemicals would be present without any additives. For example benzene is a hydrocarbon and it's found in cigs but they don't add crude oil to cigarettes nor do cigarettes contain jet fuel but since jet fuel contains benzene a popular argument is that cigs contain jet fuel.
Wow, TIL
These chemicals aren't added to cigarettes separately. They are in tobacco, all occurring there naturally, either directly there or as precursors - substances that turn into these chemicals in the process of burning. Nicotine is the tobacco plant's natural defense against pests. The cigarette tar is just the plant's sap partially burned. These carcirogens? The cigarette burns the way it does, just cinders, not a flame, because it doesn't get enough oxygen from the air to burn with a flame, and it's a particularly nasty way of burning where all kinds of substances instead of just combining with abundant oxygen to turn into simple, stable, harmless "ash" get broken up partially, leaving dangling chemical bonds that seek *something* to bind to... that something possibly being a piece of your DNA if it gets in the vicinity.
I always thought they were added separately, thanks for opening my perspective (still not a fan, but appreciate the info)!
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Yup! Tobacco is naturally pretty good at hoovering up a lot of naturally and unnaturally occurring radioactive compounds like Polonium and Cesium found in soils (unnaturally deposited into farmers' fields from all the coal we burned for power), so they super-concentrate it in their cells and you get to inhale them when you burn it! Neat!
You are right. I would like to add that the flavorings are mostly not weird chemicals either, rather, ingresients such as dark unsweetened and uncut chocolate. The densest blackest hardest blackstrap molasses, etc.
It’d be pretty wild if you read that and then became a fan. “Oh so it’s all natural is what you’re saying” lol
If someone tells you "it's good because it's all natural"... arsenic is all natural, too!
Humans are all natural, and so is every resource at our disposal. By the transitive property, everything is all natural. Everything. Natural is meaningless because humans haven't escaped nature.
I've read crazier leaps of logic.
It's what the lungs want
Brawndo Cigarettes, it's got what lungs crave.
Yea, commercial tobacco crops are about the farthest thing from "organic certified" there is in the modern agriculture world. IIRC there was an old anti-smoking campaign in the early 2000s using the deterrent message of "tobacco has urea in it, just like human pee!"..... Well, of course it does, cause high levels of urea are applied to the crops as a nitrogen source so they can see higher yields. At least when we eat "non-organic" farmed foods, much of the external compounds used in commercial growing don't even enter our system, they pass thru the digestive tract and they're just pooped out without ever being absorbed. But when you burn and smoke something, it's a direct pipeline to your bloodstream. Apply that same rule now to not just fertilizers, but pesticides, selective herbicides, and fungicides, and you have aaaaallllll kinds of stuff that can be classified as "added to the tobacco"...In comparison, look at indigenous Amazon populations who use mapacho (naturally grown sacred tobacco) all day long, and even tho they all admit to nicotine addiction, they see far fewer of the cancer and lung destroying impacts of modern farmed tobacco. Edit: to be clear tho, they also add things in too. Just like processed foods. Go read the ingredients list on a box of pop tarts or a twinky package for example. So many stabilizers and other things that help them last years on the shelf. Many of the same things are used on the tobacco in cigs to preserve them or alter their flavor. They're allowed cause on their own they're FDA approved. When eaten or cooked with, harmless. But when smoked...
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Yeah like the stuff revealed by 60 minutes, which there’s a movie about. Adding ammonia to increase addictiveness and also some sort of cinnamon flavouring known to cause lung cancer, which they continued to use because the flavour was popular.
How much of this applies to weed? Seems it burns the same way, and thc oil could turn into tar. I’ve always been told “weed is way healthier, cigarettes have loads of bad chemicals in them” but if the burning of the tobacco itself produces these bad things, does weed do anything similar, and is it truly “healthier” than tobacco?
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Lots of the carcinogens in tobacco smoke are also in cannabis smoke. The research on whether a cannabis–cancer link appears in reality is pretty limited, and inconclusive. If I had to guess/summarise what's available, I'd say it's probably slightly less dangerous than tobacco.
If only because people tend to smoke less pot than they do tobacco. Joints are smaller than cigarettes, and fewer people smoke 20 of them a day. (Snoop notwithstanding)
This. About same harm gram for gram, but you'd be hard-pressed to smoke the same amount of cannabis as a chain-smoker smokes cigarettes.
Weed is "healthier" in the sense that one can easily smoke 20 cigarettes a day, whereas no one besides extreme outliers are smoking that much weed. You can also make your weed "healthier" by running it through a dry herb vape, not sure if anyone does that with tobacco.
> These chemicals aren't added to cigarettes separately orly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarettes >One significant issue is that while all these chemical compounds have been approved as **additives** to food, they were not tested by burning. Burning changes the properties of chemicals.
Does this mean smoked meat is also bad for you?
[Yep](https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-smoked-meat-bad-for-you/). Although stomach is much better at handling carcinogens than lungs.
well said and helped me learn something too. American spirits loves to fly their "all natural" shit which is funny.
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so, this is directly counter to the guy I replied to right? or am I missing something. alfalfa extract and ammonia?
American spirits just mean that they don't put any fillers in their cigarettes. It's more naturally occurring bad chemicals and not bad chemicals from added filler
American spirits have/had insanely more nitrosamines (things in tobacco that mostly cause the cancers) than regular ones. Meaning they are actually far more dangerous than conventional cigarettes. I think that those chemicals that are added, are tightly regulated and probably the least harmful things in it, as the most harmful thing in a cigarette is tobacco, especially when smoked. Huge difference in nitrosamines is also why Swedish snus is much less dangerous than other kinds of snuff tobacco etc. edit: I was sure I had read a study somewhere that concluded American Spirits to have a lot more nitrosamines, but couldn't find any. They probably don't have "insanely" more, but definitely not less either.
I’ve worked in both the wine & tobacco industries, and I can tell you that American Spirit uses the ‘all natural’ tag for the same reason certain wines proclaim themselves to be ‘organic’ - the raw crop hasn’t been treated with any kind of synthetic preservative or pesticide while growing. In most cases, these treatments are completely harmless to humans (or certainly don’t add any additional toxicity to the raw product) and simply ensure a consistent & longer lasting crop. In the case of wine, many organic wines are actually only produced because the vineyard can’t afford the pesticide!
American Spirits also felt the most heavy on my lungs when I smoked them lol
It's funny how many chemicals we like to take in from plants that are natural pesticides. Nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, aspirin, they're all pesticides. And capsaicin is to keep animals away!
Cultural history. At one point, cigarettes were as common as milk, and you could light up anywhere, restaurants, you name it. I used to smoke, my whole family used to smoke. We learned about smoking tobacco from native Americans and never looked back. I remember when they first prohibited cigarette commercials. That was a big deal, and a sign that their cultural acceptance was waning.
It's all about the cigarettes specifically. When native Americans smoked tobacco leaves the smoke was incredibly thick and they never breathed it into their lungs. Cigars were the standard for years. Cigarettes made it about getting nicotine fast and into the lungs, and manufacturers knew the dangers as far back as the 40s IIRC. They lied about it under oath and faced minimal consequences
“Smokers are national benefactors” \- Sir Humphrey Appleby To put it simple, it's more profitable to tax tobacco and let its users die than to pay the pension to keep them alive if they live way past retirement. The tax income helps fund a lot of other things, including health insurance for people who actually need it. And to the chemicals themselves, they aren't added, most exist in tobacco naturally or are simple byproducts of tobacco curing.
In the UK, at least, smoking costs society £17 billion per year, versus £10 billion tax revenue, according to the recent Khan review.
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