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US adult cigarette smoking rate hits new all-time low
- scifi 3y agoWhat an interesting cultural transition to live through. Smoking was omnipresent. Already I am having to provide background to younger folks on automotive cigarette lighters and ashtrays. Along with promotional paper matchbooks.
- nervousvarun 3y agoI have memories from being a kid sitting in hospital lobbies with people around me smoking. Honestly how did that ever even work? Ostensibly you had situations like people smoking while patients were wheeled around with oxygen? Of course back then the insulation was asbestos so maybe nobody worried about fires!
- logi2mus 3y agoPeople were just hotter back then. Me sitting in the train for 6 hours every adult is smoking, same for restaurants etc
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoSmoking on airliners was always the craziest accommodation for mass addiction.
- krys1010 3y agoI'm reading this while smoking.
- marcrosoft 3y agoIt probably won’t be soon but alcohol will be next.
- sjc02060 3y agoWhy? Some studies have shown benefits with moderate wine consumption for example
- jhickok 3y agoWhether you think it is justified for health reasons, alcohol consumption is down heavily in GenZ compared to their parents at the same age.
- swsieber 3y agoMy understanding is that those were later refuted. (And that light wine drinking correlates with socio-economic status, which also correlates with health)
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoLatest Huberman postcast episodes tend to discuss the opposite.
- misssocrates 3y agoBut something like 50% of studies don't replicate?
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- millzlane 3y agoIIRC three is an increased risk of liver cirrhosis with even one drink a day compared to drinkers of none. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6776700/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6776700/
- vkou 3y agoAnd other studies show the same benefits from moderate consumption of grape juice, sans the well-documented damage that alcohol causes.
- LesZedCB 3y ago
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- BiteCode_dev 3y agoThis and rear car seat belts are to me proof you can change the behavior of an entire society with a mix of punitive and educative actions if you stick to it long enough.
- agentwiggles 3y agoThis is one of the things that bothers me when it comes to prohibition - whether it's marijuana, vaping, or even more obviously harmful drugs like opioids. Cigarettes are some of the best evidence we have that we don't need prohibition to change behavior. We actually are capable of using regulation, taxation, and education to help encourage people to make smart choices on a society-wide scale. It's rare, it takes decades, and boy oh boy do a lot of incentives have to align. But it can be done!
- mrguyorama 3y ago>Cigarettes are some of the best evidence we have that we don't need prohibition to change behavior. It only took over 60 years, entire generations, and millions dead. Meanwhile giant corporations profited immensely, literally advertised to children, and made up shit science and fostered a general anti-science and anti-intellectualism vibe among the ones who need education most. Glad avoided prohibition for that! It was so beneficial to society to allow people the freedom to inhale literal poison for the benefit of an insanely addictive, mild stimulant, with awful withdrawals, all while poisoning the people around them. What a goddamn victory for liberty.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoLiberty is not the freedom to be obnoxious.
- Clubber 3y agoTechnically it is.
- avg_dev 3y agoFantastic news. Not so great about the vaping increase. I believe that prohibition is not the way to go at all here. Former 25+ cigarette a day smoker. It is an addiction and it may start in fun or on a lark, but it pervaded all areas of my life. Being in an airport for a layover and having to leave to smoke and come back through security is a shitty feeling. Running out of - or even running low on - cigarettes regularly created panic in me. I avoided many social activities and interactions because I didn’t want to have to either out myself as a smelly, disgusting smoker or else deprive myself for hours or more at a stretch. And the price has steadily gone up. I did try vaping for a time and it was likely a better alternative than cigarettes. But the best, speaking from personal experience, is not having any dependency on nicotine at all. The psychological effects were so devastating for me. And as the article says, so many people die or have died of smoking related diseases. And it is a slow, drawn out process. It is an incredible shame and I am very happy that it is affecting a smaller portion of people than ever.
- mnd999 3y agoVaping is up though. I’m not sure this is good news.
- mrguyorama 3y agoIt's so great watching literal decades of effort reducing a harm to literal children just evaporate because you can make it bubblegum flavored and nobody will stop you because you are rich.
- mpol 3y agoHere in the Netherlands, statistics are mostly about older people smoking (with all kinds of education) and younger people that have less high education. To say it in a rude way, only old and dumb people. I do think it is progress. Recently, on a Saturday evening, I passed by two young girls. One said to the other, a bit disgruntled, "I will only fake smoke tonight, I will not smoke for real anymore". Fake smoking here means a real cigarette, but not inhaling. Which ofcourse looks a bit silly. Strange thing though, advertisements about smoking were always about being independent and tough/rebel. Rebel against your parents ofcourse. But independent? Naah... Starting with smoking is more about giving in to social pressure. A few tough people in your social group start smoking, and telling the others to also start smoking, otherwise they are not tough and independent. I do hope we get more people who can say no and not give in to that social pressure. In the end, smoking simply signals that you give in to social pressure, very unlike the advertisements tell you.
- ThinkingGuy 3y agoadvertisements about smoking were always about being independent and tough/rebel. We have Edward Bernays to thank/blame for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom
- xnx 3y agoGlad to see Gen-Z smoking less and drinking less cow milk and alcohol.
- soupfordummies 3y agodon't forget "having less sex"
- throw_pm23 3y agoOne of the three is the odd one out and you know it as well.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoStopping smoking was one of the best decisions I ever made. I didn't need a gimmick, I didn't need to vape, I didn't need patches, I needed to admit that willpower was what I had lacked in the past and that I wanted better health for my family. If you genuinely want to quit, you can do it if you learn self-discipline. Say no to social smoking, say no to just another pack, nip it in the bud today if that's what you want for yourself. Yes, it can be psychological torture in the short-term to not take the easy route, but that's why you started in the first place. In the long-term, your quality of life will be far higher, and you'll be better off for it financially. Take the money you saved from not smoking and invest it in your own health and that of your family.
- matthewmacleod 3y ago“You might remember me from such self-help videos as ‘Get Confident, Stupid!’” This is useless advice that basically says “I quit smoking by simply not smoking any more”.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoHow is it useless? If I acknowledge that placebo gimmickery didn't stop me smoking, but just powering on through withdrawal and not giving in to the easy instant gratification, how is that bad advice? It isn't like alcohol where it might actually cause you brain damage to suddenly stop.
- Clubber 3y agoIt's the same as telling a person with a lifelong heroin addiction to just stop using heroin.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoHeroin is nothing like cigarettes, don't conflate them. Keep in mind I've had family in living facilities for months at a time over addiction.
- misssocrates 3y agoWhile obesity hits an all time high, one wonders if we traded one vice for another? Is it better to smoke if it means you eat less? Or vice versa? What's the tradeoff in health? Are there more health problems as a result of smoking or obesity, in cases where one has made this trade?
- soupfordummies 3y agoI get where you're going but plenty of smokers are obese. The meme of "model having Virginia Slims for lunch" is probably just a very specific subset of the overall smoking population. But of course I'm also just going off anecdata/own experience
- buescher 3y agoMental health problems in young people are also at all time highs and nicotine has known palliative affects on some mental health problems.
- FriedPickles 3y agoCigarettes are obviously an awful way to deliver nicotine, but I've failed to find any science showing that nicotine is any worse than caffeine. In fact, its shorter elimination half-life makes it far less disruptive to sleep. Are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Gwern on the subject: https://gwern.net/nicotine https://gwern.net/nicotine
- vkou 3y agoThe difference is that breaking a caffeine addiction is feeling like shit for 2-3 days. And then you're done. Breaking a nicotine addiction is something most people struggle with for years.
- Clubber 3y agoI think he meant in regards to the health effects of it, not specifically the brutality of the addition. I finally got off cigarettes with vapes and Juul was the only one that worked for me. I smoked since I was around 13.
- chomp 3y agoI personally would consider the addiction part of the health effects. Particularly in the lower income population who can struggle with keeping their addiction fed. For us tech professionals, keeping an addiction fed is not an issue. The Gwern article posted earlier is more about the benefits of nicotine, but does note that nicotine is potentially more disruptive than caffeine: "we will want to be more careful with the nicotine than with modafinil or caffeine, where the main consequence of carelessness is tolerance rendering the stimulant useless or messing up our sleep for a few days." Also note that the article specifically calls out that vaping is an issue, and the author is only comfortable with the use of nicotine gum. It mainly points out that if you are extremely careful with the addictive properties, it's a decent drug. But no, I don't think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the lack of studies on the topic of vaping, and the potential of saddling you with a difficult to shake addiction.
- conscion 3y ago
- lordnacho 3y agoThe change from when I was a kid has been enormous. It used to be that there were places that were basically just a cloud. You open the door, there's a cloud inside with people sitting in it, chatting, eating, whatever. I remember getting sent by my dad to buy his cigs, and I'd try to hold my breath on my way to the counter. Nowadays, I hardly see any smokers. They still have them outside night spots, but it's not many. I only caught the tail end of it, but it used to be all over the place, every single kind of establishment had to accommodate smoking in some way. On this issue, it's worth looking up the statistic epistemology around how we discovered that smoking is bad for you. At the time a very famous statistician (Fischer?) maintained that we couldn't actually tell whether it was causal or not. In the end the evidence from various studies ruled out various competing hypotheses, for instance that people who are going to get cancer will somehow be more prone to smoke. IIRC they found a dataset of doctors and found the ones who smoked tended to die of cancer more often than those who didn't.
- soco 3y ago20 years ago I'd come out of my favorite club and could rub mud from my face. Good times (the age, not the mud).
- dxbydt 3y ago>At the time a very famous statistician (Fischer?) maintained that we couldn't actually tell whether it was causal or not. It was Fisher, here's a fantastic summary of the whole episode: https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics-didnt-believe/ https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics... My statistics professor showed us gruesome pictures of what was done in the 70s due to lack of conclusive evidence that smoking causes cancer. They forced dogs to smoke. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/may/20/thepeople-investigative-journalism https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/may/20/the... Then monkeys. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6782600/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6782600/ Now that we have conclusive evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, have we stopped ? Here's a zoo in China that forces a baby monkey to smoke in an apparent attempt to dissuade future smokers. https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/05/china-baby-monkey-forced-to-smoke-for-zoo-public-health-campaign-15552034/ https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/05/china-baby-monkey-forced-to-s...
- syngrog66 3y agomeanwhile MJ smoking is way up. even if not carcinogenic compared to tobacco the act of taking all that hot smoke and its fine particulate matter into one's lungs is unlikely to make a person more healthy
- causi 3y agoIf marijuana were more widely legal I suspect THC vapes would take over its industry the same way nicotine vapes are eating the cigarette industry.
- throwaway345343 3y agoIf we can estimate sales as proportional to allocation of counter space in a typical Seattle area dispensary, they are selling approximately 1/3 vapes and concentrates for vaping, 1/3 edibles/drinks/tinctures/topicals, and 1/3 whole plant products. I'd assume at least a quarter to a half of the whole plant product sales are being consumed with a vaping process, like a Volcano, Magic Flight Launchbox, or one of the many of vapes they sell that will take dried and ground plant products (not just weed) instead of concentrate.
- sircastor 3y agoI was over in Germany a few years ago and kind of shocked at how much smoking was happening. My wife and I had initially picked a table outside a restaurant to enjoy the weather, but quickly moved inside when we realized that outside tables are essentially the de-facto smoking section. I think Marijuana smoking is increasing - it feels like I can't go a day anymore without smelling pot smoke somewhere. (I live in the Portland, OR area)
- mgkimsal 3y agoI remember visiting Europe a few times over the decades (late 80s through early 2010s). I'd noticed an increase in smoking in Europe as I was noticing a decrease in the US. Someone might have more specific numbers/details/charts, but IIRC, cigarette companies were starting to ramp up marketing outside the US as they could see legislation coming and social support waning.
- Veen 3y agoIn my experience, it's still pretty prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe. I was able to smoke in a restaurant in Bulgaria three years ago, and you get nothing like the social disapproval for smoking you tend to in Western Europe (I've since stopped smoking cigarettes.)
- mgkimsal 3y agoIt seemed relatively prevalent in Romania when I visited in 2018. And I didn't see it everywhere in Moscow in the early 2010s, but there was more of it than we see in the US daily. And... the other side of that is we have a lot more obese folks in the US than I've seen in various European places. We might be healthier from a smoking standpoint, but probably less healthy in other ways.
- wil421 3y agoSerbia you can pretty much smoke anywhere. The smoking table was next to the non smoking table, only difference was no ashtray.
- thisismycombacc 3y agoI want to give my perspective on smoking/vaping that is purely from my own experiences. It's unlikely many agree with me, but I wanted to share my thoughts as someone who smoked and vaped and has since quit. To provide context, I started smoking before later finding vapes. I regularly switched between the two throughout the day - depending on the context. For a period of time I smoked four packs a day and vaped 50mg nicsalt in between that. Others have said that quitting is a matter of will, and that things like patches or vapes are ineffective gimmicks. I disagree with this notion, and the logic behind it. I used patches to quit, and they were very effective. I also believe that we have to accept a lot of people aren't at the right place to quit smoking entirely. Vaping is a much better alternative to smoking tobacco. It does not have tar, monoxide, or any other chemicals. It is three chemicals - VG, PG, and Nicotine. If you are a person who smokes a pack a day, switching to vapes will still add time onto your life. Yes, quitting entirely is still the best outcome. But are we really gonna tell people not to bother minimizing risk just because they arent ready to quit entirely? It's arrogant, in my opinion. The US in particular vilifies vaping to a greater extent than European nations. I think this is likely because Europe still has a strong smoking culture, but it also shows that they understand there is still a benefit to risk mitigation. We need to stop pretending like there is a one and done strategy to quitting. Smoking rate decreasing and vape usage increasing are not exclusive outcomes. These are people on a journey - and we should encourage them along the way.