I enjoy a good cigar every now and then, but in my four decades on this planet, I never smoked a cigarette. I want to change that, though. Thing is, if I take up smoking, I want to go all out, balls-to-the-wall, and do it right. I want to puff like Union Pacific 3985, or better yet, a chimney of a Chinese coal-fired power plant. I want to smoke a carton of smokes a day.
So, if I work at home where I can puff away beyond the reach of nanny state laws, sleep eight hours a day, and puff away at a normal pace, is it possible to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day? Do people smoke a carton a day?
Timewise, sure you could. A carton is 200 cigarettes, I personally average 3-5 minutes per cigarette. That would be a range of 10-16 hours to finish of a carton.
Upon reflection, I guess it would possible, if you were determined to do so. Just the thought of attempting to do so, however, makes me want to gag - and I’m a smoker myself.
Five packs a day is the upper limit for every chain-smoker I have met. That is extreme, hard-core smoking and I doubt you could double it except as as a one-time stunt if you were really determined. I smoked a pack a day when I was in high school and in college and occasionally two packs and that seemed like a lot. If you smoked them honestly, you would be hurting literally. Nicotine is a toxic drug and your lungs can handle only so much in a given time-frame.
If you truely smoked each cigarette and didn’t just throw them out half used, then I seriously doubt you could get past 5 packs in 16 hours. There were times when I was up to 4 packs a day, but I left a lot of those to burn out in an ashtray, or put them out early because something distracted me. It takes a lot longer to smoke a cigarette than 3 to 5 minutes. You might ocassionally smoke one that fast, but you’d have to be puffing pretty hard.
I did a Google search on “pack-year smoking record” and came up with two references to people with 200 pack-year smoking histories. If there were 10 packs to a carton (excuse my ignorance) they could have smoked a carton a day for 20 years (a pack a day for 200 years seems unlikely). My patient with the 250 pack-year history stands atop the pack (sorry) for now, although I’m sure some anecdotal records will top that before long. (Incidentally she made it past age 70, though not without incident).
While searching I found this interesting site, which logs records for a whole bunch of patient lab and historical parameters as collected by medical residents at the VA hospital in Seattle (VAs are great places to amass smoking records). Besides the 200 pack-year smoker there are highs and lows for other fascinating things like 24-hour urine output. Much fun.
Pack Year: A way to measure the amount a person has smoked over a long period of time. It is calculated by multiplying the number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day by the number of years the person has smoked.
When a person hits 20 pack years, that’s when they really start to be at a much higher risk for things like cancer, emphysema, and premature vascular disease.
Lesser numbers increase the risk too, but the risk increase really takes off after 20.
No. A pack-year is the number of packs smoked on average per day multiplied by the total number of years as a smoker. So, if you smoked five packs a day, on average, for twenty years, you have a 5 x 20 or 200 pack-year history. You could also attain a 200 pack-year history by smoking a pack a day for 200 years, but that would be really hard to do.
Tell ya what. Figure out how much all that will cost and send the money to me. I’ll burn it for ya* since, essentially, that’s what you’d be doing smoking all that. If you sendit to me, you’ll be as broke but your lungs and heart will be in much better shape.
Oops, yes. I had the number 200 stuck in my head, since that’s the number of cigs in a carton, and someone else mentioned a 200 pack-year history earlier. Make that 20 a 40 (or the 5 a 10). :smack: