Astro Hacker News - On cigarettes

catapart |next [-]

In college, I wanted to test my resolve for addiction, so I started smoking a pack a day for six months. The idea was to see how hard it is to quit so that I could better understand what people go through. Never took, though. Every cigarette was gross to me from the first one down to my last day. I threw away the box on the last day and never had a single moment where I wanted another one.

Instead of learning about addiction, it taught me a ton about socializing. Sharing a cigarette with a romantic interest is such a low friction way to be able to keep close enough to have a conversation, and subtly reinforce intimacy. And after I quit, I would bring a pack to any party I went to and not tell anybody until someone was asking. There was a double whammy of providing one for a stranger, and saving a friend from having to donate one.

By the end of the night, when everybody was either trying to bum one or find someone sober enough to make a run to the gas station, my reputation for both having cigarettes and not smoking made me pretty popular. It was also really nice that when people praised me for it (mildly; "that's really cool of you, man") my stock response was "yeah, no worries. I know how great it would be if someone had a Dr pepper for me when I was dry", which made a lot of people offer me my favorite soda all the time.

I still can't stand smoking, and have only had a dozen or so in the decade since then, strictly for ingratiating myself to people. But there is nothing out there like cigarettes for socializing. I'm with a lot of other commenters here in wondering how much we've lost by stigmatizing it without ever reconciling with the (trivial, in comparison) benefits.

Waterluvian |next |previous [-]

Despite having never smoked a single cigarette in my life, I have an intensely strong reaction to a very specific brand. Early in high school I met my first crush, and one summer learned that she liked me back. She was my first everything. And the scent of a lot of that teenage exploration was the awful but sweet smell of her parents’ basement, stained with that brand of cigarette.

I have no clue what brand it is. But if I ever smell it in public I am teleported back there and find myself aching terribly with youthful nostalgia.

vlian2088 |root |parent |next [-]

I don't think I ever saw anyone identify a brand just by the smell. it's impossible. most brands from the same parent company are made at the same factory from the same batch of the same chemical-soaked tobacco pulp. it's just the filters and packages that are different. when I smoked, chesterfields, l&ms, pall malls, winstons, parliaments, etc, all tasted and smelled the same to me. only the cheapest godawful local brands smelled different than the rest.

zabzonk |root |parent |previous [-]

> I have no clue what brand it is

You must have clue! If there is one thing tobacco companies are brilliant at it is branding. Why else would I have smoked Marlboro (and I am English) for all those sad, sad years.

Waterluvian |root |parent [-]

I’m sure I could just ask someone the next time I detect it. To be honest, I’m afraid to. I don’t want the power to portal myself there on demand.

GenerWork |next |previous [-]

This reminds me of the "It looks just as stupid when you do it" anti-smoking poster[0], which was meant to dissuade smoking, but actually goes kind of hard.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/1suta15/...

gobdovan |root |parent |next [-]

I'd like to imagine that the creator heard the 'Einstein zebra puzzle' (the puzzle about different nationalities having different pets and smoking different brands of cigarettes) and just made the pets have different nationalities and smoking the cigarettes directly.

trevithick |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Even secondhand smoking makes you cooler.

https://theonion.com/secondhand-smoke-linked-to-secondhand-c...

Gigachad |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Australian anti smoking ads were a lot more effective. Showing graphic images and video of diseased foot or someone struggling to talk, coughing up blood.

Was working incredibly well up until vapes came along and every school kid had one.

thrixton |root |parent [-]

Do you think they were really effective or was it more the large price hikes (which have now been undone by vapes and black market cigarettes)?

I guess it might have had an impact but it's hard to tell for me with the impressive mishandling of vapes and now the black market.

Gigachad |root |parent [-]

I mean it's hard to know the exact split, but obviously the combination of the negative advertising and price hikes killed smoking. It went from something that everyone did to only something addicts and homeless people do. Even with black market cigarettes now, kids still haven't taken up smoking.

While vaping has exploded, and while it isn't harmless, it's clearly safer than smoking so the current situation is still better.

hnzix |root |parent [-]

> it's clearly safer than smoking

There's a lot of anti-vaping FUD in the Oz media right now. Anecdotally a lot of people I speak with view it as more harmful than smoking. And legislation has made it extremely unpleasant and inconvenient to obtain low-nic vapes that don't taste like ass.

Fortunately every second convenience store sells high-nic illegal vapes under the counter, with $deity knows what chemicals inside. Yay?

Cider9986 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

This one is just funny, but kind of works as anti-smoking just by looking at the guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzxmg3YCOqQ

Paste link and download to bypass age restriction/account: https://app.ytdown.to/en35/

sorum |root |parent |previous [-]

You're underselling this poster. It goes hard AF.

Racking my brain if there's another poster that unintentionally goes as hard as this one.

shon |next |previous [-]

When I was a 20-something big-4 consultant traveling weeks on end for work, I took up smoking for exactly the reasons you suggest. I had nothing to do in my down time and knew nobody, but I could sit in hotel bar with a smoke and strangers would trail over.

Yep, I’m old enough to have been working when you could still smoke in hotel bars. In Monaco you could order a pack of Marlboro Reds at your dinner table back in 2006.

Gualdrapo |root |parent |next [-]

Some +20 years ago one day at a local radio show there was the daily topic about how people went into smoking. One guy called and told that he had to go everyday early to his classes at uni and before going in there was a kind of convenience store where people piled up and asked for a hot coffee and a cigarette.

But the thing is that, according to him, it was a lot. Lots of people went in and asked for the same thing, a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

Allegedly he went into smoking because he got so used to hear people saying "one cup of coffee and a cigarette, please" for so long that one day he, unconsciously, asked for the same.

koolba |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Some of us are old enough to remember smoking sections on planes. (And yes it works out exactly as bad as you’d expect it … great way to past time on a transatlantic flight though!)

shon |root |parent [-]

Yes! I remember. It was bad lol.

trevithick |root |parent |next |previous [-]

A different time. I remember the first question from the host at a restaurant being "smoking or non?"

wildzzz |root |parent [-]

I love going to restaurants that were built when smoking indoors was a thing and trying to figure out where the smoking section (or non-smoking section in older places) used to be. There are a few bars around that still have smoking sections in my area but the requirements are more stringent now (closed room, seperate air handling system).

One of my favorite bars in college allowed smoking upstairs (and still does, although how many college kids actually smoke?). I really do miss having a cigarette in one hand and a frosty beer in the other.

shon |root |parent [-]

The good ole days ;)

In San Francisco, you can still find buildings where the elevators have ashtrays, though usually the actual tray is gone.

ycombinete |root |parent |previous [-]

Old enough!? I'm old enough to remember that and I'm only... nearly 40, damn.

sandcat_ |next |previous [-]

I find the reduction in smoking cigarettes fascinating at a societal level, in a similar way to a few other topics: toxoplasma gondii, widespread use of SSRIs. Probably some others I'm not recalling.

This must have had an effect, beyond health. Surely? It's hard to research because it gets crowded out (understandably) by all the negatives from smoking and all the improvements to health from the reduction of it.

But nicotine does have an effect on the mind. Certainly some positives (concentration, I believe) and I'm sure some negatives too. So the idea that a society would, over the course of a few decades, quite sharply reduce it's use of a particular drug surely must have had some interesting knock-on effects.

I've heard some people wonder if the rise of ADHD diagnoses could be related. That in the past all the ADHD folks would smoke and self-medicate, without even realizing. I have no idea if that's true.

Swizec |root |parent |next [-]

> This must have had an effect, beyond health. Surely?

Watch old music videos and TV or movies, everyone looks so old! You’ll have 30 year olds running around looking 50.

Then you look at modern media and think “Wow look at that 30 year old baby” and the person is pushing 50. Everyone looks so young these days! Cigarettes age your skin super fast.

mingus88 |root |parent [-]

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hnzix |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Smoking lowers the risk of developing ulcerative colitis and can suppress its symptoms. There's a lot of anecdotal stories on Reddit of people quitting smoking and getting an UC flare.

tpm |root |parent |previous [-]

One of the few public places it's still legal to smoke in in our country are psychiatric wards, supposedly it benefits the patients.

That said, there are other ways to consume nicotine.

garciansmith |next |previous [-]

My grad school supervisor (requiescat in pace) lamented the decline for a similar, very minor reason: he always thought that getting up, going outside, smoking a cigarette, and coming back in was the perfect amount of time for a class break. Ten minutes was too long, five too short.

OptionOfT |root |parent [-]

My mom (who smoked, and quit) explained to me that when she was growing up, the teachers would still smoke in class! That was in the 1959..=1964 timeframe.

awakeasleep |next |previous [-]

Smoking doesn't actually look cool, but you might need to have quit before to really see it- smokers are sucking on something that's essentially unpleasant to relieve the discomfort of the first pangs of withdrawal.

If you can put yourself back in that moment with honesty, and remember the hope and inevitable disappointment that this will be a 'good cigarette' ... lol that is not cool

Gigachad |root |parent [-]

There's the imagery in media with the hero smoking in a leather jacket or whatever. And then there's the reality where all smokers look homeless or otherwise unhinged where everyone avoids walking too close to them.

chriscrisby |next |previous [-]

I smoked for 20 years, loved every minute of it and looked cool as hell

zabzonk |root |parent [-]

I did about the same, until my GF said "it's them or me". Haven't touched one in over 30 years, thank god.

To anyone out there that does smoke - stop. You will improve your health, your finances, and you won't smell (well, no more than you would otherwise). And you probably don't look much like James Dean anyway.

Gigachad |next |previous [-]

Have to wonder what in todays world could replicate the social aspect of smoking. Something that gets people to step away from their work for a moment, keeps your hands busy and phone away and encourages people to talk to each other.

gobdovan |root |parent |next [-]

I heard people with dogs claiming similar effects.

gwerbin |root |parent |previous [-]

Food trucks honestly

zzgo |root |parent [-]

No way I'm hitting a food truck every two hours for a taco, it would be cheaper to be a pack a day smoker.

atmavatar |next |previous [-]

When talking about the health impacts of smoking, most people (the article included) focus on the lung cancer aspect but gloss over the general heart and lung impacts.

Upon banning smoking in public areas, my city and the surrounding municipalities encountered an immediate and statistically significant (~10%) reduction in heart attacks.

crypttales |next |previous [-]

"Oh cigarette, Oh cigarette, How good thou are to me Yet I have crush you. "

Me the first time getting drunk in the woods realizing I had crushed my smoke in my jacket.

I became friends with my best friend that day.

OptionOfT |next |previous [-]

What I find interesting about cigarettes is that it created a whole new set of legislation requiring things to be non-flammable or at least flame-retarding.

The tobacco industry lobbied for this, because they didn't want to be held accountable for the deaths related to say a smoldering cigarette that lit a house on fire.

And those products themselves really weren't that healthy, as the flame-retardant added to say your couch would off-gas for a LONG time.

Now cigarettes (at least in the EU and in the USA) have 3 speed bumps in them, so they don't completely burn. They stop at each of these, and you need to suck more to overcome these bumps.

trevithick |next |previous [-]

Some sources suggest cigarette smoking is cool again. E.g., https://www.wsj.com/health/cigarettes-popularity-celebrity-s...

locusofself |next |previous [-]

I haven't smoked in about 13 years, but I did from the time I was 13 until 29 or so.

It's disgusting and I couldn't be more glad that I quit, but it does sound good sometimes. I also quit drinking and had to give up caffeine, so I have like zero vices now besides napping and ice cream.

|root |parent [-]

SugarReflex |next |previous [-]

I vaped for a while and my take was that you felt worse in general with the ability to feel better on command for a little bit.

It may be the remnants of addiction speaking, but there was something about vaping that elevated certain scenarios. I loved standing at a tall place and watching the cloud dissipate into the scenery as my eye balls and body relaxed from the nicotine. Whether it was a cityscape or a high hill, it was just lovely and I remember it fondly.

The very last time I vaped, I was in the smoking lounge at the Singapore Changi airport. It was a rough room with harsh dystopian concrete benches. In the ill lit space, I sat down and took my last drags. As I inhaled, a middle aged Chinese business man in a suit sat down next to me and silently enjoyed his cigarettes. Then we went our own ways without saying anything. I thought it was a good last time.

Also, I'm sorry, but at least for me and a friend we found it hilariously easy to quit vaping. We simply just "stopped" and that was that. I found it much more painful to quit caffeine (which induced in me a fortnight of withdrawal symptoms, sore bones and fevers).

robocat |root |parent [-]

To quit caffeine, taper down intake slowly over a few weeks.

Caffeine pills (nodoz) are probably the best way to reduce intake slowly that I've done so far - easy to measure based on broken tablets.

There should be a product we could buy to do it because the progression would be satisfying in itself. Unfortunately one-off product categories never sell enough to make such a product profitable.

I've also done it slowly over a few weeks using instant coffee. It's a bit unpleasant at the end if watered-down because it's so weak. I also just reduced intake having the dry granules on a spoon (unpleasant but doable!)

Every few years I get bored of coffee shops or I get slight allergies to espresso coffee so I give up again.

Cold turkey gives me nasty headaches for far too long so I don't just stop any more.

calvinmorrison |next |previous [-]

i love smoking!

singpolyma3 |next |previous [-]

Cigars can fuck off? Because we hate being classy or what?

l34ch |root |parent [-]

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123sereusername |previous [-]

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