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I have a really controversial view about smoking: it has undeniable downsides but as a society we are now feeling what happens when a huge proportion of the pop

I have a really controversial view about smoking: it has undeniable downsides but as a society we are now feeling what happens when a huge proportion of the population no longer experiences the cognitive upsides they used to get from nicotine. It's somewhat similar to what would happen if you banned coffee.

jayski 3y ago
What are the cognitive upsides? The only one that I can think of as an ex-smoker is that helps to control anxiety. At the same time knowing I was harming myself by smoking added a lot of anxiety.
- fidotron 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance > Nicotine-containing products are sometimes used for the performance-enhancing effects of nicotine on cognition.[57] A 2010 meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory.[58] A 2015 review noted that stimulation of the α4β2 nicotinic receptor is responsible for certain improvements in attentional performance;[59] among the nicotinic receptor subtypes, nicotine has the highest binding affinity at the α4β2 receptor (ki=1 nM), which is also the biological target that mediates nicotine's addictive properties.[60] Nicotine has potential beneficial effects, but it also has paradoxical effects, which may be due to the inverted U-shape of the dose-response curve or pharmacokinetic features.
  - pluijzer 3y ago
    How susceptible to tolerance would the positive effect be? Would a long term smoker still have any benefit? Or is it like coffee, very quickly giving no benefit at all.
    - fidotron 3y ago
      This is a good question, along with what happens if that long term smoker then quits altogether. If you had ways to moderate the withdrawal of things like caffeine and nicotine you could possibly try alternating regimes. Would probably do dreadful things to your heart though.
- nradov 3y ago
  Studies have shown that nicotine has some mild cognitive benefits on attention and short-term memory. https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/ https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/ I'm not necessarily recommending nicotine to anyone, but there are ways to get it without smoking.
- im3w1l 3y ago
  When I was in high school we had a few smokers. They seemed to make a lot of friends while smoking and have better social skills than others.
lencastre 3y ago
Cognitive upsides? Sounds like Cowboy Man copy… the Surgeon General aproves this message. Or do you mean people worked faster because they couldn’t during their cig break?
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Nicotine has been added to energy drinks in Japan for years. The claim that it has cognitive upsides is not necessarily cigarette-company propaganda.
  - krispyfi 3y ago
    Do you have any links for this? I could only find references to nicotinamide, not nicotine.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      No links at hand, and I was unaware of the term “nicotinamide” for a form of vitamin B3. I am quite sure that I read claims of nicotine specifically being added, but I now suspect that the people writing that were misled by the name of nicotinamide. Thanks for enlightening me.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
I don’t know about nicotine, but I am all cognitive upside from never smelling a cigarette again.
CoolestBeans 3y ago
Smoking reduces quality years of life and puts a burden on a nation's health system. The drastic decrease in productivity in a nation from those two things has got to be far more than any increase from any cognitive benefits. But more importantly, it's morally wrong to suggest we shorten and make our lives worse for some short term stimulant spike.
- tschwimmer 3y ago
  Many studies actually show that smokers are cheaper to care for over their lifetimes, likely because they die earlier. This study[0] shows a +7% for men/+4% for women increase in healthcare costs if all people stopped smoking. I'm too lazy to vet the epistemological quality of this study, but it seems like there are a bunch of these much along the same lines. One thing these studies seem to neglect is total value lost associated with smoking, instead focusing costs alone. By folding in some QALY-like model, you could come up with the overall impact of smoking on society in quantitative terms. [0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9321534/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9321534/
  - glimshe 3y ago
    This number doesn't take into consideration the contributions of these people to society, which could outweigh their additional healthcare cost and make them an actual net positive to the economy (putting aside moral questions about calculating whether people should live or die based on their net value).
    - flappyeagle 3y ago
      Why does this matter? It’s definitionally the least productive years of someone’s life outside of childhood.
      - peapicker 3y ago
        A nearly 80 yr old man I know has a nearly 200k per year pension. Every five years he lives adds 1 million to the economy.
drpgq 3y ago
I co-own a small bar and help run our trivia night. Between rounds the smokers always go out for a smoke and they ended up all knowing each other.
- tennisprince 3y ago
  Asking for a lighter which then leads to a off-hand question, has often led to a interesting conversations, more than one would expect.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
>it has undeniable downsides but as a society we are now feeling what happens when a huge proportion of the population no longer experiences the cognitive upsides they used to get from nicotine. You don't need to inhale burnt tobacco to get nicotine, and there are plenty of other ways to get stimulants into your body; patches, teas, etc. and society is still consuming a shit-ton of stims; ain't been to an empty coffeeshop since COVID. vaping, while shown to be not great for you, is also still not as awful as inhaling tons of smoke, and can deliver the nico just as well. and it is the smoke that is the problem -- firefighters who handle a lot of cases often have lung cancer rates far higher than the rest of the population.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I think what doesn't help is that vaping is treated the same as smoking. It's also banned everywhere that smoking is even though it doesn't generate particles. I think many smokers feel that there's no real upside to vaping for this reason apart from their own health effects. I think they should make vaping more attractive eg allowing it in a vaping area at the office. Ps I'm not a smoker nor vaper. But I'm getting a bit fed up with this war on nicotine. The current strictness the EU is taking is clearly not working for those who are still smokers. Continuing to increase the price will not either. Just like the war on drugs is never ending and has not really accomplished much more than increase risk and this rewards that benefit bigger cartels, it's time to evaluate to see what actually works.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - serf 3y ago
    >It's also banned everywhere that smoking is even though it doesn't generate particles. I vape nicotine. That's not true in the slightest, unless you're using some wacky definition of 'particle'. I agree that the restrictions around where one vapes might need to be a little less lax when compared to cigarettes, but to claim that it doesn't 'generate particles' is disingenuous.
bigbillheck 3y ago
Drunk driving helps a lot of people to get to work on time.
glimshe 3y ago
There isn't really any societal upside with smoking. It's a real net negative for the vast majority of users, financially and healthwise. Maybe smokers should switch to coffee for their high, a drug with no major downsides for most people.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
  Replace smoking with nicotine/users in your comment. Nicotine is no more dangerous than other pharmaceuticals at normal dosages.
tennisprince 3y ago
Also adding the caveat about the obvious downsides of smoking before I assert this opinion but one thing that's kinda gotten lost is those micro social encounters you'd get from sharing a cigarette. Whether at work, at uni, at a concert, in a bar, or just about anywhere, those smoke breaks used to be a chance to strike up a 5-10 min convo with someone random. Even today, head to a designated smoke area and more often than not, you'll end up chatting with some stranger asking for a lighter before going back to what you were doing. I don't think society has found some other mundane shared experience to replace this.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  In many countries where smoking remains common, the people standing outside an establishment smoking are looking down at their phones, just like they would be looking at their phones on the bus. Trying to strike up any conversation would be a faux pas, and I imagine even asking a stranger for a light could be seen as an intrusion. In our modern world, experiences where people are physically close to one another does not necessarily mean that they will socialize.
  - random_kris 3y ago
    Not true at all
- Fluorescence 3y ago
  It used to be a great way to identify tribes and make friends. You could be at some stuffy conference and the gaggle of smokers would be the drinkers, musicians, poets and rebels. It offered a simple way to give, share and help a stranger that I can't invent in the modern world. I'm sure the non-smokers probably enjoyed our absence too!
dv_dt 3y ago
Coffee doesn’t emit secondhand fumes which increase cancer in people who have not elected to drink coffee
- Fluorescence 3y ago
  Coffee breath!
matthewbarras 3y ago
Also, there was routine to take a genuine 10 min break every few hours... interesting to see if the lack of this break (lung cancer aside) has implications on health
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
Smoking is also not great for your mental health: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37351135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37351135, about https://studyfinds.org/smoking-depression-bipolar-disorder/ https://studyfinds.org/smoking-depression-bipolar-disorder/
ljbc 3y ago
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jayski 3y ago

What are the cognitive upsides? The only one that I can think of as an ex-smoker is that helps to control anxiety. At the same time knowing I was harming myself by smoking added a lot of anxiety.

fidotron 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance > Nicotine-containing products are sometimes used for the performance-enhancing effects of nicotine on cognition.[57] A 2010 meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory.[58] A 2015 review noted that stimulation of the α4β2 nicotinic receptor is responsible for certain improvements in attentional performance;[59] among the nicotinic receptor subtypes, nicotine has the highest binding affinity at the α4β2 receptor (ki=1 nM), which is also the biological target that mediates nicotine's addictive properties.[60] Nicotine has potential beneficial effects, but it also has paradoxical effects, which may be due to the inverted U-shape of the dose-response curve or pharmacokinetic features.
- pluijzer 3y ago
  How susceptible to tolerance would the positive effect be? Would a long term smoker still have any benefit? Or is it like coffee, very quickly giving no benefit at all.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    This is a good question, along with what happens if that long term smoker then quits altogether. If you had ways to moderate the withdrawal of things like caffeine and nicotine you could possibly try alternating regimes. Would probably do dreadful things to your heart though.
nradov 3y ago
Studies have shown that nicotine has some mild cognitive benefits on attention and short-term memory. https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/ https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/ I'm not necessarily recommending nicotine to anyone, but there are ways to get it without smoking.
im3w1l 3y ago
When I was in high school we had a few smokers. They seemed to make a lot of friends while smoking and have better social skills than others.

lencastre 3y ago

Cognitive upsides? Sounds like Cowboy Man copy… the Surgeon General aproves this message. Or do you mean people worked faster because they couldn’t during their cig break?

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Nicotine has been added to energy drinks in Japan for years. The claim that it has cognitive upsides is not necessarily cigarette-company propaganda.
- krispyfi 3y ago
  Do you have any links for this? I could only find references to nicotinamide, not nicotine.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    No links at hand, and I was unaware of the term “nicotinamide” for a form of vitamin B3. I am quite sure that I read claims of nicotine specifically being added, but I now suspect that the people writing that were misled by the name of nicotinamide. Thanks for enlightening me.

lotsofpulp 3y ago

I don’t know about nicotine, but I am all cognitive upside from never smelling a cigarette again.

CoolestBeans 3y ago

Smoking reduces quality years of life and puts a burden on a nation's health system. The drastic decrease in productivity in a nation from those two things has got to be far more than any increase from any cognitive benefits. But more importantly, it's morally wrong to suggest we shorten and make our lives worse for some short term stimulant spike.

tschwimmer 3y ago
Many studies actually show that smokers are cheaper to care for over their lifetimes, likely because they die earlier. This study[0] shows a +7% for men/+4% for women increase in healthcare costs if all people stopped smoking. I'm too lazy to vet the epistemological quality of this study, but it seems like there are a bunch of these much along the same lines. One thing these studies seem to neglect is total value lost associated with smoking, instead focusing costs alone. By folding in some QALY-like model, you could come up with the overall impact of smoking on society in quantitative terms. [0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9321534/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9321534/
- glimshe 3y ago
  This number doesn't take into consideration the contributions of these people to society, which could outweigh their additional healthcare cost and make them an actual net positive to the economy (putting aside moral questions about calculating whether people should live or die based on their net value).
  - flappyeagle 3y ago
    Why does this matter? It’s definitionally the least productive years of someone’s life outside of childhood.
    - peapicker 3y ago
      A nearly 80 yr old man I know has a nearly 200k per year pension. Every five years he lives adds 1 million to the economy.

drpgq 3y ago

I co-own a small bar and help run our trivia night. Between rounds the smokers always go out for a smoke and they ended up all knowing each other.

tennisprince 3y ago
Asking for a lighter which then leads to a off-hand question, has often led to a interesting conversations, more than one would expect.

red-iron-pine 3y ago

>it has undeniable downsides but as a society we are now feeling what happens when a huge proportion of the population no longer experiences the cognitive upsides they used to get from nicotine. You don't need to inhale burnt tobacco to get nicotine, and there are plenty of other ways to get stimulants into your body; patches, teas, etc. and society is still consuming a shit-ton of stims; ain't been to an empty coffeeshop since COVID. vaping, while shown to be not great for you, is also still not as awful as inhaling tons of smoke, and can deliver the nico just as well. and it is the smoke that is the problem -- firefighters who handle a lot of cases often have lung cancer rates far higher than the rest of the population.

wkat4242 3y ago
I think what doesn't help is that vaping is treated the same as smoking. It's also banned everywhere that smoking is even though it doesn't generate particles. I think many smokers feel that there's no real upside to vaping for this reason apart from their own health effects. I think they should make vaping more attractive eg allowing it in a vaping area at the office. Ps I'm not a smoker nor vaper. But I'm getting a bit fed up with this war on nicotine. The current strictness the EU is taking is clearly not working for those who are still smokers. Continuing to increase the price will not either. Just like the war on drugs is never ending and has not really accomplished much more than increase risk and this rewards that benefit bigger cartels, it's time to evaluate to see what actually works.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- serf 3y ago
  >It's also banned everywhere that smoking is even though it doesn't generate particles. I vape nicotine. That's not true in the slightest, unless you're using some wacky definition of 'particle'. I agree that the restrictions around where one vapes might need to be a little less lax when compared to cigarettes, but to claim that it doesn't 'generate particles' is disingenuous.

bigbillheck 3y ago

Drunk driving helps a lot of people to get to work on time.

glimshe 3y ago

There isn't really any societal upside with smoking. It's a real net negative for the vast majority of users, financially and healthwise. Maybe smokers should switch to coffee for their high, a drug with no major downsides for most people.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
Replace smoking with nicotine/users in your comment. Nicotine is no more dangerous than other pharmaceuticals at normal dosages.

tennisprince 3y ago

Also adding the caveat about the obvious downsides of smoking before I assert this opinion but one thing that's kinda gotten lost is those micro social encounters you'd get from sharing a cigarette. Whether at work, at uni, at a concert, in a bar, or just about anywhere, those smoke breaks used to be a chance to strike up a 5-10 min convo with someone random. Even today, head to a designated smoke area and more often than not, you'll end up chatting with some stranger asking for a lighter before going back to what you were doing. I don't think society has found some other mundane shared experience to replace this.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
In many countries where smoking remains common, the people standing outside an establishment smoking are looking down at their phones, just like they would be looking at their phones on the bus. Trying to strike up any conversation would be a faux pas, and I imagine even asking a stranger for a light could be seen as an intrusion. In our modern world, experiences where people are physically close to one another does not necessarily mean that they will socialize.
- random_kris 3y ago
  Not true at all
Fluorescence 3y ago
It used to be a great way to identify tribes and make friends. You could be at some stuffy conference and the gaggle of smokers would be the drinkers, musicians, poets and rebels. It offered a simple way to give, share and help a stranger that I can't invent in the modern world. I'm sure the non-smokers probably enjoyed our absence too!

dv_dt 3y ago

Coffee doesn’t emit secondhand fumes which increase cancer in people who have not elected to drink coffee

Fluorescence 3y ago
Coffee breath!

matthewbarras 3y ago

Also, there was routine to take a genuine 10 min break every few hours... interesting to see if the lack of this break (lung cancer aside) has implications on health

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

Smoking is also not great for your mental health: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37351135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37351135, about https://studyfinds.org/smoking-depression-bipolar-disorder/ https://studyfinds.org/smoking-depression-bipolar-disorder/

ljbc 3y ago

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