From the standpoint of a pathologist who daily diagnoses malignant tumors linked to smoking, and has firsthand seen the misery that years of smoking causes (people hauling around oxygen tanks or speaking in buzzy mechanical voices through artificial voice boxes, after radical surgery to remove their larynx), I can’t imagine the depth of stupidity involved in taking up smoking when the risks are well known.
If you want to rebel, rebel against a fate suffered by stupid old people.
It has been said uppost, but let me emphasize it. There is no upside to smoking. When I started, maybe 60 years ago, the health hazards were not known (not well known, anyway), a pack of cigarettes cost less than a quarter and it was kind of a gateway to adulthood. Now none of those things are true. The cost even in constant dollars has about tripled, the health hazards are all too well known and far fewer adults smoke. And most adult smokers are trying to stop. There is no upside and that makes it pretty stupid. I stopped the day I had a heart attack at age 28.
Incidentally, although I would like to see some evidence of this, I have seen claims that the older you start using some substance, the easier it is to stop. That people who start past age 20 find it easy to quit, that no one older than 50 can become addicted to anything. Maybe that explains why I have been addicted to food since the day I was born.
Teenagers and adults with ADHD - especially undiagnosed - have a much higher rate of smoking. The thing is, nicotine is a stimulant, and ADHD is treated with stimulant medication. So by trial and error, people with ADHD figure out that smoking helps their symptoms. They’re more focused, they’re not as flaky, and they can get stuff done.
R. P. Murphy’s friends basically figured out how to get a legal high without the social stigma.
And yet, for all the shame piled on smokers, all the health detriments, all the evidence that smoking isn’t just bad for the smoker but for everyone around the smoker, there’s a thread in IMHO asking parents to chose between smoking and morbid obesity for their child. The vote was 87 for smoking and 7 for morbid obesity. So, I guess when there’s something considered even more shameful - and nicotine is a known appetite suppressant - it’s easier for a teen to justify smoking.
Taking up smoking is a friggin’ idiotic thing to do. That doesn’t mean that the people who do it are friggin’ idiots. People who are reasonably intelligent do friggin’ idiotic things all the time. But that doesn’t excuse doing something as idiotic as starting to smoke.
As for the analogy to drinking or obesity – what specific action there are you calling idiotic? Is eating a Big Mac idiotic? What if you eat only one a year as a special treat, and are a healthy weight? Is drinking a beer idiotic, if you only do it occasionally and never drive drunk? Eating unhealthy food or drinking alcohol may ultimately lead to bad consequences, but that isn’t the inevitable result. With smoking, you’ve got a one in three chance of dying of smoking-related illness. That seems pretty idiotic to me, especially when you consider how agonizing and debilitating the smoking related illnesses are.
I’ll let Yul Brynner have the last word.
I’ve got nothing against people who choose to smoke, but I work with a lot of guys who chew and smoke and sometimes give me dirty looks when I laugh off their attempts to get me to join them. I mean, maybe it’s rude to be so dismissive but do they really think I’m going to start smoking and chewing now in my life??? No way!
Ironically, french kissing a smoker is the exact polar opposite of that.
Inasmuch as the vast majority of people alive today are total idiots, I am shocked more people don’t smoke.
This is why anti-smoking warnings aimed at kids are doomed to fail, as well as anti-drug and anti-drinking campaigns. We tell kids there is no upside to smoking, or drinking or drugs, then they take that first puff, or hit or drink and find out it feels fucking awesome, and wonder what else we lied to them about. That is why kids smoke, or drink or do drugs to excess; it feels fucking awesome, contrary to all the warnings from grown ups. Adults haven’t found a way to dissuade kids from taking up destructive habits without lying about the seductive nature of addictive substances, and kids find out soon enough that adults were apparently keeping that a secret. If we want to teach kids not to smoke, or drink or do drugs, we have to figure out a way to warn them that it feels great at first, but becomes destructive later. I don’t know how to do that without planting a seed to try everything, but that doesn’t make telling untruths about addictive substances a better approach.
It is astoudingly stupid to take up smoking. Teens, who do not yet have the cognitive skills to understand the long-term effects get something of a bye, but only barely, and only until the reach the age of abstract thinking, about 20 yrs or so.
If you are an adult who takes it up or continues, I seriously question your intelligence. In fact, I take it as prima facie evidence of a basic inability to understand cause and effect; of prima facie evidence of a fundamental intellectual or emotional defect.
Smoking killed my grandfather at 53. Destroyed another grandfather’s ability to walk for the last twenty years of his life, thanks to emphesema. My grandmother was on oxygen for the last 15 years of her life and was miserable as a result of her forced immobility (she loved to cook and entertain. Coffin nails stole her greatest joys from her.) My father has had two different cancers, both linked to smoking. His best friend died at 42, riddled with metastasized lung cancer, leaving three children w/o a father. His last best friend died riddled with cancer- mid fifties. A great uncle lost his voicebox. A cousin, his lower jaw (chewing tobacco). All of this misery on both the smokers and those of us who don’t (I’m sick of funerals and slowly watching someone die a painful and horrible death. I hate dreading every phone call from my parents, wondering if this is the one that they tell me the cancer will kill my father has at last hit.
So, if you are a smoker, you are either too stupid to understand the misery and anguish you will put upon yourself, and your family, or you are too egotistical to care about the anguish you will cause yourself and everyone who loves you.
I hate smoking. H A T E smoking. I don’t care if it’s hard. STOP. I want my memories of my grandparents to be happy and joyful, of shared experiences, not of them wasted away down to 90 pounds, dying, delirious from cancer, or of twenty years of gasping for every breath. I want to go fishing with them; I want to build something in their workshops, I want grandma’s vegetable soup.
I don’t want the memory of my father crying over two men he loved like brothers. Seeing your father’s heart break is horrid. I’d like to be able to talk to my cousin. I bet his wife and son wish the same thing.
H**l yeah I’m angry.
All of this misery was inflicted by people who willingly, knowing the dangers, smoked. If that ain’t stupid, I don’t know what is.
I’d like to say something about young people, young adults that are slightly older than teenagers:
When I went to university (2003-2007), you wouldn’t believe how many of my university friends started smoking while in university. this stunned me because 1) I heard that smokers usually start younger, and 2) these people are in university, they should be intelligent, they should know that smoking’s bad for you.
The reason they did it? One of my friends who started smoking in university (who has since quit) said it was to deal with stress. I imagine the rest of my university-smoker friends started smoking for the same reason.
Oh, and to answer the OP’s thread-title question: I think, in a word, yes.
I did find my first drag enjoyable, and it did make me feel good, but I believe I was addicted to Dad’s second-hand smoke (between him and the ashtrays they were on 4-5 packs/day at the time; he’d be leaving them all around the house, burning unattended). While I knew about the health consequences, the main reason I didn’t take up smoking was that I didn’t have enough money to smoke and go to the movies - I liked the movies better.
I think young people start because they don’t realize how hard it will be to stop. They get tatoos thinking they’ll just have them removed later if they change their mind. They are too young to realize their mortality and often do very dangerous things.
I’ve always enjoyed how much the SDMB prides itself on its tolerance of others’ lifestyles except smokers. They can all go to hell, amirite?
Thanks, Jimbabweosu. Both my parents had slow, painful deaths due to smoking. You have said what I could not bring myself to articulate.
Because look:
Fact: smoking ruins your lungs.
Fact: smoking reduces life expectancy.
Fact: education about the dangers of smoking is quite rigorous at this point.
Fact: smoking is advertised negatively.
Fact: there are so many restrictions on smoking and the minimum age is 18.
Fact: buying cigarettes easily costs hundreds of dollars per year along with high taxes.
Therefore, if you start smoking as a teenager, you are breaking the law, which makes you an idiot in and of itself. If you are at least 18, then you are also a fucking idiot to start smoking because it should be quite obvious to you that smoking is dangerous and poses health risks. Plus, basically you are paying to die early and significantly increase your chances of getting a deadly disease. I don’t know what sane person would actually do that.
Fact: Smoking feels fucking awesome.
Bolding mine. Smoking is unhealthy. I get it. Everybody gets it. What I’m pointing out is that as tolerant and liberal as this board loves to come off as, there’s a limit. And I think it’s a bit hypocritical, especially when you consider all the other horrible shit people here and everywhere else do to their bodies.
Yeah, living forever isn’t everyone’s goal. Untreated depression has the same fatality rate as smoking; castigating mental health denialists as stupid would probably do more incremental good than beating the smoking horse at this point.
I haven’t called anyone an idiot (because I think that’s a callous and unhelpful thing to do), but to those here who have I would say: if you think smoking is idiotic, then I imagine you should also find eating Big Macs idiotic, or not exercising idiotic, or being an alcoholic idiotic. If you find smoking one cigarette a year idiotic, then you should also find eating one Big Mac a year, as a special treat, idiotic.
If this were in Great Debates, I’d post a bunch of links to studies saying how stigmatizing smoking isn’t as helpful as everyone thinks it is. I assume that’s why people in this thread are ridiculing smokers? To shame them into quitting, or not starting at all? Surely it’s not just to make yourselves feel morally superior to addicts?
Because the habit selfishly sucks up a ridiculous amount of healthcare resources, exposure leaves a lot of helpless kids vulnerable to asthma, allergies, respiratory infections, and a propensity to take up the same destructive habit, smokers habitually leave a near permanent blight on the landscape with their deliberate litter, smokers often suffer painful, lingering, expensive ailments and leave grieving relatives behind, and they stink up every office, store, and library I’ve ever worked in. It’s a selfish, filthy, costly, selfish habit that negatively impacts countless others and is totally unnecessary to support life.