I know more casual cigar smokers than I know casual cigarette smokers. So, are cigars less addictive than cigarettes?
I’ve been smoking small cigars for too many years, I hated the smell of cigs. They were, to me, just as addictive. Casual smokers are not smokers.
My understanding is that (most? all?) cigarettes use tobacco that is “bright cured” which makes it more effective at delivering nicotine to the blood quickly, and that this tends to make it more addictive, at least in some sense, than cigar or pipe tobacco.
Keep also in mind that cigar and pipe smokers don’t inhale the smoke like cigarette smokers do.
Most cigar smokers do not inhale the smoke into their lungs, as cigarette smokers do, so they don’t take in as much nicotine.
ETA: Ninja’ed! Curse you, Floater!
As a small cigar smoker, I would agree they don’t inhale as much as a cig smoker but compensate by having a longer smoking period.
The hell we don’t inhale. Some of us do and I mean every damn puff.
What do they do with the smoke if they don’t inhale it? Where does the smoke go?
No, nowhere near as addictive, which is to say almost non-addictive. People that get hooked on pipes and cigars are more like people who get hooked on weed - it is much more of a psychological component than a physiological addiction. In fact, I think a good number of pipe and cigar smokers who report nic fits are also getting nicotine from cigarettes, chewing tobacco, snus, or snuff. All of which engender much more nicotine dependency than pipes and cigars.
I’ve been smoking pipes for over a decade, and a lot of the blends that I smoke pack a nicotine wallop. That said, I regularly go days and weeks without a single smoke, and in the winter I - since I smoke outside - I won’t smoke for months on end. I never get a physiological nicotine craving.
Where does the soda go when you drink it with a straw? It doesn’t jump straight down your gullet; you hold it in your mouth for a moment. You can do the same with smoke. You can even exhale the smoke out of your nose without taking it into your lungs. It’s a neat little trick that aids in picking up more flavor in a particularly good smoke.
Small cigars are often smoked just like cigs, in that the smoke is inhaled. Thus they are just as addictive.
Pipes do not have this issue, generally, nor do larger cigars. Mind you, many pipe smokers smoke a couple of bowls a day only, and some “large” cigar smokers make only smoke one cigar a day.