5 ms·

I know plenty of people who have 1 drink a day, I know absolutely no one who smokes 1 cigarette per day. I’m sure they exist, but not in my n of several hundred

I know plenty of people who have 1 drink a day, I know absolutely no one who smokes 1 cigarette per day. I’m sure they exist, but not in my n of several hundred, so I’d bet that’s it’s pretty rare. Smoking is also much more obnoxious and directly harms anyone near. This is a first order effect, not a 2nd order effect like increased risk of car accidents.

dionidium 4y ago
Lots of people smoke cigarettes socially. There are in-jokes amongst smokers about the people who "don't smoke" who want to bum a cigarette in the smoking area outside at bars. It's extremely common. > Smoking is also much more obnoxious I'm not sure I've ever disagreed more with a claim than I do this one. People who have consumed alcohol are practically unbearable to the sober. And that's before we get into stuff like the fact that alcohol is implicated in some staggering percentage of all violent crime. Or drunk driving. Etc, etc.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  We’re talking about light use here. I very rarely drink, and people who consume a drink or 2 with dinner are totally fine to be around. On the other hand, a person smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes near me is actively harmful to my health. If you want to find a field somewhere to smoke sure, I won’t find it obnoxious, but no one does that. >Extremely common sure I’ve met those people, I’ve never met one who does it anywhere near daily. Also most of the ones I’ve known drift in and out of periods of being heavy smokers. Again I have met many people who can drink a glass of wine every night. I have never met a single person who smokes a single cigarette after dinner. To me that says there is something different about cigarettes that makes them harder to moderate.
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  - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
    > I have never met a single person who smokes a single cigarette after dinner. On the other hand, there are people who smoke one cigar occasionally: cigarettes, for whatever reason, seem to be a lot more addictive than other forms of tobacco consumption.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
      Cigarette breaks are a great -feeling way to punctuate your day because they force you to step outside for a brief moment once in a while with only your thoughts, and so they easily become tremendously habit-forming. The good thing about cigars is that they're terribly inconvenient. They're harder to acquire, harder to store properly, harder carry around, and they take nearly 10x as long to smoke. I've smoked a few cigars per year for almost 2 decades, and I can't imagine doing the same with cigarettes. Nobody really buys and smokes an entire pack of cigarettes in one night every few months (because it would be insane), but if they did, it's unlikely they'd become addicted.
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    - Maursault 4y ago
      > cigarettes, for whatever reason, seem to be a lot more addictive than other forms of tobacco consumption. Excellent observation. What is in cigarettes is not really tobacco.[1] Also, cigarettes are intentionally more addictive than natural tobacco, and far more harmful. According to the US Surgeon General Report Smoking and Health: No. 1103, p.112 >Death rates for current pipe smokers were little if at all higher than for non-smokers, even with men smoking 10 pipefuls per day and with men who had smoked pipes for more than 30 years. No. 1103, page 92 >Among the pipe smokers.... The US mortality ratios are 0.8 for non-inhalers and 1.0 for inhalers. ...which means pipe smokers (smoking natural tobacco) who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that don’t inhale live longer than non-smokers. Smoking anything is bad for you, but national brand cigarettes are deadly. There are over 300 added carcinogens in cigarettes. My personal feeling is it is the added carcinogens that is causing cancer, and not tobacco. So it isn't smoking, per se, that is killing people en masse, but smoking cigarettes made by Big Tobacco, which will be any national brand (other than Natural American Spirits, which guarantees the only ingredients are natural tobacco and water.) Everyone smoked during the Colonial era, including nearly all the Founding Fathers. Native Americans smoked for centuries if not millennia. Ever heard of a Native American with lung cancer? Only after the Chemical Revolution did smokers begin dying en masse annually. People feel very strongly about this, and usually the information I provide stirs a strong reaction, because everyone knows smoking kills! But the devil is in the details. Carcinogens cause cancer and kills people in droves. Smoking tobacco, actual tobacco, causes emphysema, not cancer. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdV_1u-TodY&t=13m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdV_1u-TodY&t=13m25s [2] https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
  - dionidium 4y ago
    > On the other hand, a person smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes near me is actively harmful to my health. This would be impossible to verify and strains credulity. People have gotten a little too comfortable making outlandish claims about the effects of secondhand smoke.
    - drc500free 4y ago
      This is incredibly easy to verify, and is a daily reality for quite a lot of people. Some of whom I love a lot and I get to see first-hand the impact on their life.
    - sarchertech 4y ago
      Are you interpreting my comment to mean that there is a measurable health impact from the 2nd hand smoke of 1 cigarette? The EPA and the CDC have outlined the risks of 2nd hand smoke pretty clearly and convincingly, with a plethora of citations, if you care to google it.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > On the other hand, a person smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes near me is actively harmful to my health. I think you have a strange way of placing responsibility, because I am nearly certain what is actively harmful to your health is choosing to remain in the proximity of someone that smoked not only one cigarette but more than one. We know why they're smoking: they're addicted to nicotine, and it's unlikely they chose to become addicted. Why would you linger near them? Is it peer pressure?
    - sarchertech 4y ago
      Because they linger near the entrances of buildings, or are otherwise in a place I would like to be. If someone walks around swinging a chain, so that everyone who doesn’t want to be hit has to run away from them, would you say that’s is my fault when I get hit? Talk about victim blaming.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        > Because they linger near the entrances of buildings, or are otherwise in a place I would like to be. If the smoke doesn't alter your desire to be there, then it is still your choice to be there. > If someone walks around swinging a chain, so that everyone who doesn’t want to be hit has to run away from them, would you say that’s is my fault when I get hit? This is both the weak analogy and straw man fallacies in one. > Talk about victim blaming. One can believe you were offended, briefly, when they initially lit up, but once you stayed after they continued to smoke near you and completed their smoking, and then smoked a second cigarette, unless you were being restrained and prevented from leaving, then you were not being victimized. Once you chose to remain, you are stubbornly victimizing yourself. It is your choice to be offended when it is easy enough to walk away. Smoking is legal, and there are no stand your ground laws concerning it. If you were legitimately being victimized and you had the ability to move away, if you were rational, that is exactly what you would do. It would be similarly absurd for the smoker to be offended that you stayed within their secondhand smoke. You are in charge of you and not of them.
        sarchertech 4y ago
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  I'm not going to pull up statistics based on arbitrary consumption thresholds, but I would reason there are way more consumers of alcohol around me than smokers. Yet the number of times I've had to bear nuisance from smokers vs from drunkards is higher. Generally speaking, (here) smoking is forbidden in most indoor-ish spaces - which is the only reason smoking is anywhere close to the same level of nuisance as drunk people. Note that the same people that would enforce "no smoking" can also do something about the "practically unbearable" drunk person. And in outdoor-ish spaces, you can often avoid being affected - except in e.g. restaurants, where someone chain-smoking on the neighbor table can ruin the evening.
Cupertino95014 4y ago
Nice to meet you. In college, for a year or so, I smoked one cigarette a day. Eventually, I decided any number was too much, and stopped entirely. So yeah, it's a population that probably either graduates to a big habit, or gives it up completely. Fortunately I'm in the latter group.
robocat 4y ago
You are splitting hairs. A lot of drinking is due to social effects, for example drinking behaviours due to being around friends who are drinking. Many cancer societies are now recommending zero alcohol, for example in New Zealand (where I have some reasons to trust the organisation): https://www.cancer.org.nz/cancer/reducing-your-cancer-risk/alcohol-and-cancer-risk/ https://www.cancer.org.nz/cancer/reducing-your-cancer-risk/a...
- sarchertech 4y ago
  And you're arguing against something I'm not saying, which is that people seem to have a harder problem moderating cigarette use, and that cigarettes are more obnoxious to other people.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Most people I know don’t moderate their drinking. Sure, a drink or a cigarette a day is not so harmful. I do know people that only have an occasional puff when out socialising and don’t even have one cigarette a day,p. You chose an unrealistic starting condition for your comparison. I agree one drink a day is surely less harmful than second hand smoking from a pack a day. But choosing those starting conditions makes for an unfair comparison, so I pick different starting conditions, in part because I live in a country where alcoholism is rife and binge drinking is normal. Excessive alcohol consumption directly harms the drinker (accidents, cancer, disease, mental health) and directly harms the family, friends and children of the drinker (alcohol has different harms from second hand smoke, and the secondary impact of an alcoholic person is sometimes more acute than chronic). Disclaimer: yeah, anecdotal, but across a wide variety of my acquaintances.

dionidium 4y ago

Lots of people smoke cigarettes socially. There are in-jokes amongst smokers about the people who "don't smoke" who want to bum a cigarette in the smoking area outside at bars. It's extremely common. > Smoking is also much more obnoxious I'm not sure I've ever disagreed more with a claim than I do this one. People who have consumed alcohol are practically unbearable to the sober. And that's before we get into stuff like the fact that alcohol is implicated in some staggering percentage of all violent crime. Or drunk driving. Etc, etc.

sarchertech 4y ago
We’re talking about light use here. I very rarely drink, and people who consume a drink or 2 with dinner are totally fine to be around. On the other hand, a person smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes near me is actively harmful to my health. If you want to find a field somewhere to smoke sure, I won’t find it obnoxious, but no one does that. >Extremely common sure I’ve met those people, I’ve never met one who does it anywhere near daily. Also most of the ones I’ve known drift in and out of periods of being heavy smokers. Again I have met many people who can drink a glass of wine every night. I have never met a single person who smokes a single cigarette after dinner. To me that says there is something different about cigarettes that makes them harder to moderate.
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- fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  > I have never met a single person who smokes a single cigarette after dinner. On the other hand, there are people who smoke one cigar occasionally: cigarettes, for whatever reason, seem to be a lot more addictive than other forms of tobacco consumption.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    Cigarette breaks are a great -feeling way to punctuate your day because they force you to step outside for a brief moment once in a while with only your thoughts, and so they easily become tremendously habit-forming. The good thing about cigars is that they're terribly inconvenient. They're harder to acquire, harder to store properly, harder carry around, and they take nearly 10x as long to smoke. I've smoked a few cigars per year for almost 2 decades, and I can't imagine doing the same with cigarettes. Nobody really buys and smokes an entire pack of cigarettes in one night every few months (because it would be insane), but if they did, it's unlikely they'd become addicted.
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  - Maursault 4y ago
    > cigarettes, for whatever reason, seem to be a lot more addictive than other forms of tobacco consumption. Excellent observation. What is in cigarettes is not really tobacco.[1] Also, cigarettes are intentionally more addictive than natural tobacco, and far more harmful. According to the US Surgeon General Report Smoking and Health: No. 1103, p.112 >Death rates for current pipe smokers were little if at all higher than for non-smokers, even with men smoking 10 pipefuls per day and with men who had smoked pipes for more than 30 years. No. 1103, page 92 >Among the pipe smokers.... The US mortality ratios are 0.8 for non-inhalers and 1.0 for inhalers. ...which means pipe smokers (smoking natural tobacco) who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that don’t inhale live longer than non-smokers. Smoking anything is bad for you, but national brand cigarettes are deadly. There are over 300 added carcinogens in cigarettes. My personal feeling is it is the added carcinogens that is causing cancer, and not tobacco. So it isn't smoking, per se, that is killing people en masse, but smoking cigarettes made by Big Tobacco, which will be any national brand (other than Natural American Spirits, which guarantees the only ingredients are natural tobacco and water.) Everyone smoked during the Colonial era, including nearly all the Founding Fathers. Native Americans smoked for centuries if not millennia. Ever heard of a Native American with lung cancer? Only after the Chemical Revolution did smokers begin dying en masse annually. People feel very strongly about this, and usually the information I provide stirs a strong reaction, because everyone knows smoking kills! But the devil is in the details. Carcinogens cause cancer and kills people in droves. Smoking tobacco, actual tobacco, causes emphysema, not cancer. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdV_1u-TodY&t=13m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdV_1u-TodY&t=13m25s [2] https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
- dionidium 4y ago
  > On the other hand, a person smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes near me is actively harmful to my health. This would be impossible to verify and strains credulity. People have gotten a little too comfortable making outlandish claims about the effects of secondhand smoke.
  - drc500free 4y ago
    This is incredibly easy to verify, and is a daily reality for quite a lot of people. Some of whom I love a lot and I get to see first-hand the impact on their life.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    Are you interpreting my comment to mean that there is a measurable health impact from the 2nd hand smoke of 1 cigarette? The EPA and the CDC have outlined the risks of 2nd hand smoke pretty clearly and convincingly, with a plethora of citations, if you care to google it.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > On the other hand, a person smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes near me is actively harmful to my health. I think you have a strange way of placing responsibility, because I am nearly certain what is actively harmful to your health is choosing to remain in the proximity of someone that smoked not only one cigarette but more than one. We know why they're smoking: they're addicted to nicotine, and it's unlikely they chose to become addicted. Why would you linger near them? Is it peer pressure?
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    Because they linger near the entrances of buildings, or are otherwise in a place I would like to be. If someone walks around swinging a chain, so that everyone who doesn’t want to be hit has to run away from them, would you say that’s is my fault when I get hit? Talk about victim blaming.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      > Because they linger near the entrances of buildings, or are otherwise in a place I would like to be. If the smoke doesn't alter your desire to be there, then it is still your choice to be there. > If someone walks around swinging a chain, so that everyone who doesn’t want to be hit has to run away from them, would you say that’s is my fault when I get hit? This is both the weak analogy and straw man fallacies in one. > Talk about victim blaming. One can believe you were offended, briefly, when they initially lit up, but once you stayed after they continued to smoke near you and completed their smoking, and then smoked a second cigarette, unless you were being restrained and prevented from leaving, then you were not being victimized. Once you chose to remain, you are stubbornly victimizing yourself. It is your choice to be offended when it is easy enough to walk away. Smoking is legal, and there are no stand your ground laws concerning it. If you were legitimately being victimized and you had the ability to move away, if you were rational, that is exactly what you would do. It would be similarly absurd for the smoker to be offended that you stayed within their secondhand smoke. You are in charge of you and not of them.
      - sarchertech 4y ago
MauranKilom 4y ago
I'm not going to pull up statistics based on arbitrary consumption thresholds, but I would reason there are way more consumers of alcohol around me than smokers. Yet the number of times I've had to bear nuisance from smokers vs from drunkards is higher. Generally speaking, (here) smoking is forbidden in most indoor-ish spaces - which is the only reason smoking is anywhere close to the same level of nuisance as drunk people. Note that the same people that would enforce "no smoking" can also do something about the "practically unbearable" drunk person. And in outdoor-ish spaces, you can often avoid being affected - except in e.g. restaurants, where someone chain-smoking on the neighbor table can ruin the evening.

Cupertino95014 4y ago

Nice to meet you. In college, for a year or so, I smoked one cigarette a day. Eventually, I decided any number was too much, and stopped entirely. So yeah, it's a population that probably either graduates to a big habit, or gives it up completely. Fortunately I'm in the latter group.

robocat 4y ago

You are splitting hairs. A lot of drinking is due to social effects, for example drinking behaviours due to being around friends who are drinking. Many cancer societies are now recommending zero alcohol, for example in New Zealand (where I have some reasons to trust the organisation): https://www.cancer.org.nz/cancer/reducing-your-cancer-risk/alcohol-and-cancer-risk/ https://www.cancer.org.nz/cancer/reducing-your-cancer-risk/a...

sarchertech 4y ago
And you're arguing against something I'm not saying, which is that people seem to have a harder problem moderating cigarette use, and that cigarettes are more obnoxious to other people.
- robocat 4y ago
  Most people I know don’t moderate their drinking. Sure, a drink or a cigarette a day is not so harmful. I do know people that only have an occasional puff when out socialising and don’t even have one cigarette a day,p. You chose an unrealistic starting condition for your comparison. I agree one drink a day is surely less harmful than second hand smoking from a pack a day. But choosing those starting conditions makes for an unfair comparison, so I pick different starting conditions, in part because I live in a country where alcoholism is rife and binge drinking is normal. Excessive alcohol consumption directly harms the drinker (accidents, cancer, disease, mental health) and directly harms the family, friends and children of the drinker (alcohol has different harms from second hand smoke, and the secondary impact of an alcoholic person is sometimes more acute than chronic). Disclaimer: yeah, anecdotal, but across a wide variety of my acquaintances.