How could anyone have ever thought smoking wasn't bad for you?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Lets sidestep the cancer decades down the line issue, since it is mostly beside my point.

I can’t understand how anyone could have ever thought smoking tobacco or marijuana was not unhealthy or even good for you.

I used to be an occasional smoker and one or two(spread out) cigarettes a day for me personally were imperceptible to not smoking that day. But exceed this amount and actual lung pain, reduced lung capacity, reduced capability for physical exertion all became noticeable. Lower quality marijuana feels so bad on your lungs it can be hard to inhale.

I mean how can someone think something that makes your lungs HURT isn’t unhealthy?

2

Doctors used to tell people it was “good for their nerves” apparently. Some medical treatments are painful, but ultimately of benefit, so maybe that’s why people believed it.
Exercise can be painful, but it isn’t necessarily bad for you.

3

It is seriously inconceivable that people don’t know something AFTER everyone knows it. Of course, bacteria causes disease, uh, except for hundreds of years that wasn’t so obvious.

Everything is obvious after the fact.

People have always been just as smart or stupid then as they are today; it is the knowledge base that has dramatically increased.

The first guy to eat toadstools and die wasn’t stupid. The ones much later after it was known that they were poisonous were stupid.

4

Willow bark tastes nasty and gives you a stomach ache. That doesn’t mean it is bad for you. The perceived benefits of the smoke outweighed the irritations of the delivery system. Besides, “you can feel it working”.

5

Decades from now there will be a post titled: How could anyone have ever thought that a lifetime of addiction to nicotine from e-cigs was harmless?

We’re good at fooling ourselves.

6

For a time, people even made medicated cigarettes, adding stuff they thought would help your asthma or whatever, in the belief that smoking the cigarettes would get the stuff into your lungs. Here’s an image:

There seems to be even less evidence that you could have a positive impact on your health with cigarettes than that you can poison someone with cigarettes (the topic of a thread of mine from a month or so ago), and the idea disappeared. Although apparently some people still have medicated cigarette in Ayurvedic Medicine:

7

I think what I would liken it to is alcohol, drink a certain amount of alcohol and it feels"toxic" in the sense that it is actually harming your body. (not to mention how purer liquor burns the hell out of mucus membranes). Observing some alcoholics would show you the physical effects of long term exposure to high levels.

Like I said I expected no one to know instinctively this causes cancer, but they had to know it wasn’t healthy.

Excess exercise is bad for you, it can cause joint damage etc.

8

I always wondered how anyone could think inhaling smoke, over and over, could not be bad for you. But, way back when, everyone did it and they didn’t look sick, they looked cool. Sure, old people who smoked were dying and they looked pretty nasty before that happened but we never saw those people. Beautiful movie stars smoked. Magazine ads showed doctors smoking.

I think everyone kinda knew it wasn’t a good idea but more like how we knew eating too much fat is bad. It is easy to ignore bad effects that take years to show themselves.

9

In all reality, in times past, it was thought healthy to be fat. It was a sign of health, vigor and prosperity. Everything is obvious after it is known.

10

Right now I’m typing on a laptop that’s literally on my lap.

Five years from now, we may learn that these gizmos actually do release enough radiation to be harmful and that we’ve been lied to all these years. And I’ll go “doh” and feel really stupid, since I chose to ignore my gut instinct all this time.

I think there must be something evolutionarily embedded in our psyches that causes us to assume the things our parents do are automatically safe. I still occasionally hear smokers citing their long-lived smoking parents as evidence it can’t be all THAT bad.

11

For most of us, smoking isn’t painful at all. There is a minor nausea associated with the first few cigarettes you smoke in your life, then you adjust to that. After that, it seems like pure pleasure. I haven’t smoked in nearly 50 years.

12

Way back when it started, people called it “drinking” tobacco. Nobody smoked anything, so there wasn’t a term for it.

And right from the beginning, people were condemning it as unhealthy. It’s not as if everyone, or even a majority, thought this was undoubtedly a good thing.

James I wrote his Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604:

It goes on for quite a bit after that:

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/james/blaste/blaste.html

He then passed a law against it:

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/james/blaste/blaste.app.html

There are lots of similar proclamations and laws in Europe from the same time.

13

taking this completely off-topic:

anybody who bitches about kids using “txt spk” should be condemned to read stuff like the above. What a bunch of over-wrought, wordy bloviation.

14

Then I guess we are going to find that chili peppers are about the deadliest food there is. And it will make them even more popular.

I’ve got to wonder how many things we eat that virtually no one likes the first time they try. With most things it happens so early in life we all have forgotten the initial dislike.

15

the difference is that capsaicin doesn’t actually cause any tissue damage.

16

Following the reasoning of the OP.

17

One of the greatest scientists and statisticians of the last century, R. A. Fisher (take an introductory evolution, animal behavior or statistics class and his name will be ubiquitous) actually went to his grave denying vociferously that tobacco caused cancer.

18

Aw, I was going to quote King Jamie.

Here’s a thought, though. We tend to forget that for thousands of years, people had fires and the accompanying smoke in their houses most of the day. Peasants barely had chimneys in a lot of places. Everybody had been marinating in smoke forever when tobacco arrived in Europe, and there were lots of folk beliefs about house smoke being good for you, keeping disease away, and so on. I wonder if that had something to do with it?

19

There were certainly many people who argued that smoking was unhealthy a century ago or more. You can see many references to this in literature of the period. What’s less clear is whether anyone believed there were zero negative health effects from smoking or if people just felt that what were thought to be the positives (e.g. digestion, clarity of mind) outweighed the negatives.

In our own times it’s known to scientists that smoking does have certain positive health effects (e.g. Parkinsons and UC, IIRC) but this tends to be supressed because the negative aspects far outweigh them and encouraging people to keep smoking is very much a net negative.

20

Back then, though, it was thought that disease was transmitted by bad smells.