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The navy didn't ban smoking on subs until 2010. That must have been something.
by jacobsenscott 4y ago
The navy didn't ban smoking on subs until 2010. That must have been something.
- csomar 4y agoBut subs get deployed for 6 months at a time. Unless they banned smokers from getting into subs??
- chongli 4y agoYou don't have to ban smokers to ban smoking on a sub. Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.
- csomar 4y agoI think this is bad idea. Maybe have a special room for smoking? > Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so. Some people are legitimately addicted. I know for a fact that I am not (I can go for a month without smoking and I won't go crazy) but removing smoking or nicotine will be a major quality of life downgrade for me.
- romwell 4y ago>Some people are legitimately addicted. And some people aren't fit to serve on submarines.
- chongli 4y agoWe’re talking about serving on a submarine, in the military. Quality of life takes a back seat to health and safety, performance, and the mission itself. Personal space and weight are extremely limited on board. What you’re suggesting is that smokers be given special accommodation by having their own room for smoking. Furthermore, they would need to be provided with special equipment to filter the air to remove all of the smoke produced by their smoking, otherwise it would spread throughout the other compartments as soon as they open the door to leave the smoking room. Is any of this reasonable? I don’t think it is. The only reasonable accommodation I can think of would be to allow smokers to bring a supply of nicotine gum or patches.
- csomar 4y ago> The only reasonable accommodation I can think of would be to allow smokers to bring a supply of nicotine gum or patches. Fair enough.
- PaulRobinson 4y agoAs an ex-smoker, I'd ask you to consider it as about the most addictive thing going. Think of something you really, really like doing. Something that calms or pleases you every time you do it. Like, playing a game, or reading a book, or eating your favourite food. Now imagine someone telling you that you don't have to do that, it's just a choice. Imagine being deprived of it and being guilt-tripped into it. Sure you can wean yourself off it, but it'll take effort - uncomfortable, painful effort - and you might fail. And meanwhile some idiot on the internet is saying it's all just a choice. It is an addiction that was designed to be addictive by the manufacturers. It has never been a "mere choice". That first cigarette or two, maybe, but addiction is awful and horrible and doesn't deserve to be denigrated and reduced by flippancy.
- chongli 4y agoMy father smoked for many years before quitting. I have two roommates that are smokers. The difference between him and them is that he wanted to quit, so he did. They continue to smoke because they do not want to quit. It’s as simple as that.
- jdkoeck 4y agoRight, so the reason there are thousands of books and methods about quitting smoking isn’t because it’s hard, it’s because people don’t really want to. Or maybe they’re stupid? Got it.
- chongli 4y agoI didn’t say it was easy, or that people who smoke are stupid, I said it was a choice. If you choose to quit smoking then you’ll succeed.
- actionfromafar 4y agoAh, the Yoda solution. "There is no try."
- bambax 4y agoThat's untrue. You (maybe) choose to start smoking, but once you have started, choice is entirely taken away from you. Incidentally, that's precisely what helped me quit (a long time ago): I realized I was a slave to the cigarette and the only way to be free again was to stop it altogether. It was one of the hardest thing I ever had to do. I stayed in bed for four days trying to think about something else and sleeping it through. And then it wasn't over for a couple of weeks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Sander_Marechal 4y agoI always describe quitting smoking as both the easiest and the hardest thing I have ever done. I wanted to quit for so long and suffered many, many failed attempts. I tried all kings of methods, acupuncture, gum, etc. All to no avail. In hindsight I didn't really want to quit. I wanted to quit for my health, for my morning cough, for my wife, for all kinds of reasons. But not really for me. I liked it, and quitting something you want to do doesn't work. At some point I read the Alan Carr book. I was skeptical but hey, might as well try it, right? Around that time my wife and I were also thinking about kids and I really wanted to quit before she was pregnant. I finished the book, smoked my last cigarette, went to bed, and lasted about 6 hours after waking up before I was back at it again. That night I re-read the last bit of the book, smoked my last cigarette (again) and went to bed. I haven't touched a cigarette since and it's been very easy. not a single pang or hankering or anything. I can get drunk without wanting a cig. People can smoke around me and I don't care. I'm not an ex-smoker. I'm a non-smoker. Looking back (4 years now) I find it hard to understand myself why I had so much trouble quitting. It's been soooo easy. But only after I really wanted it for me.
- chongli 4y agoExactly. The most insidious part of addiction is identifying as an addict. It’s that acceptance of your own addiction as a core part of your identity that makes it impossible to quit. As soon as you change your mind and decide “I am not an addict” you’ll quit instantly. The addict self-identification is also the reason why people get so defensive about it. People tell them to quit and they treat it like an attack, an injury against their identity, and this cognitive dissonance protects the addiction from being resolved.
- squarefoot 4y agoI wish it was that easy. Smoking is addictive, and I can assure you that quitting requires a lot of effort and in some cases luck too. I was "lucky" enough to be hospitalized for an appendicitis that degenerated into a peritonitis due to a wrong diagnosis just at the right time, that is, in the middle of a local tobacco crisis during a spring in the early 90s when cigarettes were so hard to find that either one knew someone in the black market or had to roll mashed cigar leftovers like I did just before getting ill. Moral of the story, I had been hospitalized for 12 days when I was already smoking a lot less than my usual rate (two full 20 packs/day) and when I was discharged from the hospital I said to myself "it's now or never!" and the rest is history. 30 years have gone and since then I didn't touch any cigarette, cigar, pipe, or anything else because I'm 100% aware that if I'd take a even just single puff for a friend or my girlfriend I'd start again, because I still like that smell unless someone smokes directly in my face.
- astura 4y agoExactly. People replying to you are acting like a smoker will literally explode if they don't smoke for a few months. Some of these comments are truly bizzare! We're talking about cigarettes here. Just like a nonsmoker, smokers are just fine being forced to go without cigarettes while underway. My husband was both a smoker and a submariner at the same time for many years. He couldn't stand vaping or using dip so he was just was forced to go without nicotine for the duration of the underway. Of course he (and the other smokers) were really grumpy about it, but that's it. I also have smoker relatives who were somewhat frequently hospitalized. You simply can't smoke in a hospital, tough cookies if you want a cigarette. You simply just deal with going without - you can be prescribed nicotine patches is all, which aren't helpful to my family members. We are talking about people getting annoyed they can't smoke.
- Hard_Space 4y agoI have a friend in Germany who gives up smoking for the entirety of Lent. It always seemed so stupid to me, since if I could have given up for that long, I wouldn't have gone back. I was a smoker for many decades who gave up three months ago, and feel kind of cheated by how easy it was and how little I miss it (wish I had done it far, far earlier).
- larve 4y agoThis narrow view of addiction is also missing the fact that smoking has many positive effects. I smoked from age 13 to age 38, and I’m pretty sure smoking made my life better overall. Besides allowing me to socialize more easily, it’s an incredibly potent stress reliever which allowed me to deal with sensory overload and other stressors (I’m autistic). Nothing comes even close to how quickly it can defuse stressful situations. The fact that something nudges you to take a break and a few steps every hour is also something I miss tremendously. I always joked that I was the in-house bug hunter and hard problem solver because I’d walk the stairs every hour and would solve the problem on the way back up. Now that I’ve quit, many things in my life have become much harder. I need to be conscious of my stress level at all times and plan for mitigation through cardio, ear protection, fixed schedules. A 1h run achieves the same result as a 2 minute cigarette break would, and I have to set an alarm to remind me to take breaks. Because of Covid and consequent work from home, this has all become manageable, but I don’t think I could function in normal society very well without picking smoking back up.
- spiralx 4y agoI've got ADHD, and the enforced outdoor smoking gave me the perfect excuse to dip out of any social situation that I found awkward or uncomfortable as well as give me somewhere else to recombobulate. And I agree that it gave you a great break routine that helped productivity, I do miss that a lot.
- astura 4y agoI'm confused - the comment you are replying to basically says the Navy can freely ban smoking onboard submarines and end up with no real consequences other than some mildly grumpy sailors. It made no moral judgement about smoking or addiction. Did you mean to reply to another comment?
- larve 4y agoI was replying at that level to echo the other comments. It's reacting to the "they merely chose to do so" part. It might not be the best parent to reply to, but it's what spawned a whole thread I wanted to sibling.
- michaelt 4y agoI think the real thing people are disagreeing about here is whether you're still a smoker when you're deliberately going 6 months without smoking. Is 'smoker' a permanent status, like some people consider themselves alcoholics even when they haven't drunk alcohol in a decade? If so, you could have a submarine full of smokers very easily! But if you're only a smoker if you've had at least 1 cigarette in the past week, your submarine would have no smokers after seven days at sea.
- bagels 4y agoThey just have to ban the smoking. Pretty hard to smoke if there are no cigarettes on the ship or if the crew runs over to put out the fire any time you light a cigarette.
- kashunstva 4y agoOthers have designated smoking as a medical condition owing to its physiological addictive qualities. Taking that stance I would just note that the United States Navy bans from operating certain equipment all sorts of people with medical conditions. For example the USN wouldn’t let me, with my 20/400 vision uncorrected anywhere near an F-35C. So I can see banning active smokers from submarines.
- QuarterReptile 4y agoSurprisingly this hasn't been answered. Yes, smoking is banned (with probably 3 hours of exception, all at once and in one inconvenient place.) No, smokers aren't banned. They all hate the ban, live with it, and mostly use chewing tobacco. And then they go back to smoking.