get addicted to it. I tried smoking when I was in the Army. I coughed a couple of times, spit, and then crushed out the cigarette with a mystified "People PAY for this shit?"

It looks bad, smells bad, tastes bad, and if it doesn't kill you outright, will certainly give you poor health and an unenviable quality of life.

I just don't get it...

People try to explain it through the prism of peer-pressure. My thing is: if your peers are pressuring you to smoke, get new peers!

For their generation it was what adults did.

Dad smoked all his life. It weakened his lungs and helped lead to his death. Mom stopped cold-turkey in 69, wanting to follow the discipline of the astronauts as they trained to go to the moon. She knew it was bad for her health and had a new grandson.

Last edited Mon Aug 19, 2019, 10:10 PM - Edit history (1)

The stink alone is repellent enough. My mom smoked when I was a kid, and we hated it. Never tried one, never even held one. I have never heard anyone say their first cigarette was a pleasant experience - usually quite the opposite.

If a food tasted and smelled that bad, and made you cough and puke, would anyone ask for a second helping?

Mushrooms make me puke, but I have never continued to eat them, hoping I would fit in better with mushroom lovers.

young. It disgusted us both so much that we never so much as touched a cigarette. We considered it totally gross.

My dad gave up smoking when I was an adult, but mom never stopped.

I think that is why so many kids start smoking in junior high, when they spend more time away from parents.
I got hooked from a coffee drinking friend I knew , when she moved away, I got the urge to smoke. Long time smoker hater and I wanted a puff or two. Got over it quickly, thank heaven.

My parents both had parents who smoked.

My mother's parents quit not long after my mother was born. But my father's mother continued to smoke like a chimney until just a few weeks before she died of lung cancer. Visits to her house were always tense. My father kept urging her to quit smoking, at least around us kids, and she never would, viewing such requests as rude. Several times, he came back from such confrontations, collected my mother and my sibs and said "We're leaving." My father had a set of flaws that spanned the entire spectrum of human frailty, but he did look out for his family, after his fashion.

So I guess once people get over coughing and spitting, they get hooked.

I acknowledge to them that I understand that it's addictive, and that that addiction is functionally no different than an addiction to heroin, for example.

I also reassure them that people quit every day, and stay quit. They can, if they want to.

In looking at a healthier alternative (getting a little short of breath these days) but having failed to break the nicotine addiction I went to the Juul website yesterday. It says there that while nicotine is addictive it is not a carcinogen. So I think I'll give the Juul a try.

Yes, addiction can be a terrible thing but I don't think it's realistic to compare addictions to heroin, cocaine, meth, tobacco, chocolate or right-wing politics.

The tar, and the tons of additives the tobacco companies adulterate their product with.

And the addiction is the same as heroin. If a smoker goes too long without a cigarette, his body starts to say "iwantmydrugiwantmydrugiwantmydrugiwantmyDRUG!" until he goes digging around for the pack. Once he gets nicotine into his system, the body relaxes. "ahhhhhhhhhihavemydrug..."

That's one reason why so many of my patients tell me they smoke to help with anxiety. I tell them they're going about it the wrong way. Nicotine is a stimulant, not a sedative. The reason they feel calm after smoking is because they've just fed their addiction, and are no longer going through withdrawal.

And nicotine in isolation is no good for you, either. It's a powerful vasoconstrictor that can produce elevated blood pressure and heart rate. And of course, by constricting the pulmonary vasculature, it causes shortness of breath even if one is vaping it, rather than smoking it.

vapor harmful to those who don't vape, but have to share, say, a small room with someone vaping? I am asking for myself -- I already don't like the smell -- it smells very chemical to me, but I really don't want to breathe the stuff in either.

then it's just as bad as smoking, since the solipsistic carelessness of the smoker has a similar result.

I think the vaping will work. I don't inhale, just puff and if it only cuts my tobacco use a little bit it'll be worth it. "Solipsistic carelessness"? My my, how you do go on.

People who blow smoke everywhere, heedless of the smell and the health deficits, and then strew their cigarette butts all over the place, certainly seem to have a 'no one matters but me" mentality.

Anyway, this ain't my first rodeo. I've had smokers get irritated with me before for calling them out on their deadly, disgusting habit. But yeah, I'm the bad guy...

and I'm welcome to put you on ignore. Buh-bye.

is the spokesman for the Tobacco Institute.

Remember that poor sap? "There is still no proof that......"

I always wondered what that gig paid...

I used to smoke, and it was hard to quit....then I remember reading a statistic that said there were now more ex-smokers than smokers.....I thought, I might not be able to play for the NFL or climb Mt Everest but if if tens of millions of people can do something, so can I.....and I did (on my seventh try)

At that time I had untreated depression and it lifted my mood.

I thought of starting a thread about this. Maybe one day I will.

I have found that many "adult tastes" (by your leave) have to be acquired by an apprenticeship with distaste. Beer, harder liquor, coffee, are all bitter, and it takes some practice to become habituated.

As for smoking cigarettes, my understanding is that inhaling provides a brief rush which is stimulating. Pipes and cigars are usually not inhaled, and therefore the psychology of using them is different. One can also smoke cigarettes without inhaling, of course. The value then probably has something to do with an oral fixation, or with a need to do something with one's hands. A lady friend of mine, for example, hated the actual smoking, but loved lighting cigarettes, holding them, and the elegance of pretty lighters and slim cigarettes.

-- Mal

While there's no question that alcohol is one of the deadliest drugs on the planet, there's at least a safe, moderate level of consumption. Even one cigarette, however, can be bad for you.

... just that their appeal requires practice. And nicotine, I believe, is somewhat more of an addictive substance than alcohol, so more physically addictive quicker.


-- Mal

with some 2,500 different substances to make it more addictive.

It's a little amusing that purveyors of tobacco and alcohol have divergent methods for selling more product. Tobacco gets chemically-altered to make it more addictive so the smoker buys more, while alcohol gets watered down (at the point of sale, at least) in order to sell more.

is a bit of a stretch.

Smoking a cigarette can paralyse ciliary activity in the bronchial tree for as long as half an hour. The cilia sweep foreign particulate matter out of the lungs, up into the pharynx, where it gets coughed out, or swallowed and burned up by stomach acid. It's what helps keep the lungs clear.

Smoke long enough, and those cilia get burned away, and there's nothing left to help sweep the lungs clear. That's when you see long-time smokers hacking and hacking trying witout success to clear crap out of their lungs.

when not smoking at all. The lungs are full of junk left over from cigs and it comes out gradually and not completely. Once my son came home from a friends and said Hi Mom and I knew he had been to a certain friend's house. He asked how did I know, and I told him I smelled it on his breath. My son was in grade school at the time.

the tobacco leaves of cigarettes, but not on pipe tobacco or cigars. Also the carbon dioxide in the smoke gets into the blood easier than oxygen, so that might be the 'rush' you are describing. A loss of oxygen.

I hate even the smell of it.

in Mission Control smoking.

Even if it wasn't unhealthy, it's such a filthy habit; ash and cigarette butts everywhere...

smelling vapor is when I go to one of my friends. Even if I stay only a few minutes, when I get home I want to shower.

Was common everywhere. At work, on planes, in movie theaters, in hospitals, restaurants, everywhere.

By that time smoking had pretty well died out in US.

in the 90s and it was always a shock at first. But then it was just the wayback machine and felt like old times. I’m an ex smoker but I never had the militant anti-smoking reaction a lot of exes get.

I tried smoking for a few weeks when I was in college because that's what the cool people did and I was a dork who wanted to be cool. But it made me cough and stink so that attempt at coolness didn't last long. Smoking was everywhere; you couldn't go to a party or a bar or any other public place without having to throw your clothes in the laundry and take a shower the second you returned home. If you went to a restaurant you got other people's smoke with your dinner and there wasn't a thing you could do about it. And nothing stunk worse than stale cigarette smoke on a person who smoked a lot. And after college when I got a job I discovered that people smoked at work, too, so you couldn't get away from it there either, until in 1973 (I think) my state passed a clean indoor air law. That led to whiny people clustered outside in the cold with their cigarettes, but at least I didn't stink all the time from other people's smoke. I'm glad smoking has become something of a social faux pas, like public belching and farting.

you may see a lot of people smoke.

One of the very few things they got wrong in the series Band of Brothers. None of the troops smoked.

Every surgeon and nurse I knew smoked. Many times "lunch" was a cup of coffee and a cig while you went to the bathroom.

No one seemed to stop them. Really freaked me out.

casually smokes then crushes out a cigarette right there in the exam room just prior to doing the examination.

Sheesh! Just the sheer, mind-boggling health hazard and unsanitary nature of that...

I commented on the length of the ashes. He chuckled and flicked them into the ashtray. That must have been 55 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday. Times have changed!

Has old radio shows, which I listen to. It seems along with the smoking, they all had a pistol in their glove box. But I love the shows

Open flame in an enclosed metal tube 6 miles high.

What could go wrong?

got more difficult after they prohibited smoking on planes. Before then, they could find the leaks easily by looking for brown streaks on the exterior fuselage.