I’ve been addicted to both, and I do tend to agree with you, although I found getting off cigarettes much easier than alcohol. For cigarettes (two pack a day habit), I just stopped. For alcohol, I had the shakes, had to go into detox and rehab. I understand for most people, it’s the other way around, but the “nicotine is harder to shake than heroin” wasn’t at all true for me, showing just how differently people are wired for addiction. Overall, yeah, I think in general for most people it’s easier to get hooked on a daily habit of smokes than beer. I also think it takes much longer consistent use of alcohol before it becomes a problem, whereas cigarettes tend to hook folks more quickly.
Yep, it’s complicated – addiction is often co-morbid with other psychological conditions, often untreated. Add to that environment, as you mentioned, and it becomes such that some people are more vulnerable to the escapism or relief various substances provide. And there are biological factors, as well.
I’m not a smoker, but if you’re specifically looking for a boredom-reducer, I don’t think nicotine pills would work nearly as well. You’d miss the ritual of smoking, the something to do with your hands, the chance to play with fire, and the excuse to take a break and go outside for a while.
I’ll note that there do exist caffeine pills, but they don’t seem to be nearly as popular as coffee, tea, or soda. And if there were, similarly, alcohol pills, I can’t imagine they’d be nearly as popular as beer, wine, or liquor.
True enough and that definitely applies to swallowing nicotine pills.
But there’s another way to take nicotine by mouth - nicotine containing gum or lozenges. The nicotine is absorbed by the tissues of the mouth (albeit slowly when compared to smoking).
I challenge your whole premise, particularly when it comes to cigarettes. There are only two features to smoking - one is intake of nicotine and the other is puffing on burning tubes of tobacco. As to the former, any buzz you get from that could be replicated by patches, which you reject as a solution to your boredom. So that leaves the physical act of smoking. Is that really sufficient to make your life interesting?
I suspect you are simply addicted, same as Hitchens.
Maybe being an addict feels interesting, but it definitely makes you less interesting to others. For most people, the first addict they have to deal with is nonstop drama, but the second one has nothing new to show them.
Another differentiating point about alcohol and tobacco is flavour. Other dugs don’t come with anything else on the tin. But these two come with the idea that you are getting a taste experience, and in advertising, and indeed in a lot of consumption (at least of alcohol, and tobacco at the start) these take precedence over addiction when purchased. For casual users of alcohol. even when consumed for its chemical effects, alcohol is almost always purchased in a form that is most pleasing to those imbibing. And that is quite personal.
It is that mark of an addict when they will drink anything, no matter how foul or cheap, or even dangerously adulterated.
Tobacco comes in many flavours and brands, and smokers have pretty strong preferences if the choice is available. One might add cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and even snuff to the range of experiences.
In Star Trek they have synthahol which is supposedly a replacement for alcohol without the deleterious effects. This is entirely fictional. (Just adding it for fun…hope that is ok this far into the thread.)
However, most people who like “normal” alcohol hate the stuff. Including Scotty:
A recovered alcoholic posited (I think it was on this forum, though it could’ve been Slashdot) that nobody actually likes alcoholic drinks per se, they’ve just associated the buzz and pleasure they get from the alcohol with the flavors of their drinks of choice. A similar criticism could be levied against smoking. At first I thought this sounded absurd, like a post-rationalizing coping mechanism as part of the poster’s recovery, but after some pondering it does make me wonder if this has some merit.
I get no pleasure from alcohol, in fact I find the wooziness to be rather unpleasant, and while I do partake from time to time, I don’t really enjoy the drinks for their own flavor. Beer is gross, red wine is meh, white wine is ok if it’s not too dry, and some mixed drinks are decent. When I think about the couple of mixed drinks I like (my go-to is a whiskey sour with Maker’s, or a lime margarita), generally it seems like I’d rather just have the mixers and garnishes than the actual alcohol. That’s basically juice or soda, whether from sour mix, simple syrup, Sprite, lemon juice, or whatever. Like if I get a really good limeade, adding even the best tequila to make an ad hoc margarita is still a net loss to me.
I think this is why the near beers and Star Trek’s synthehol fail, because without the alcohol to trigger the right synapses, the flavor of most non-mixed drinks sucks. It seems like the beers, wines, liquors, cigarettes, cigars, etc. are more of a means to mask the unpleasantness of the active ingredient, and give people something to satisfy an oral fixation or twiddle with.
I remember a recent thread about people who do shots of strong spirits, and I believe I agreed that people who drink like that are specifically doing it for the effect. But I strongly disagree with the notion that nobody likes any alcoholic drinks.
There are some alcoholic drinks I enjoy and some I don’t. When I was younger, I might have suffered through a cheap or distasteful drink, but - as all old people know - young people are dummies.
That’s not to say the alcoholic benefits don’t add value. As a diabetic, my general rule is that I only drink calories in the form of alcohol and I only drink stuff that I really, really like. The added value of the pleasant feels pushes the opportunity cost over the line for me. But I do enjoy the drinks I enjoy.
That sounds suspiciously propganda-like. Yes, there’s “developing a taste” for alcohol and some specific alcoholic beverages, but that’s much the same as doing the same thing for coffee. All of them taste nasty at first, but after a little repetition, you start to notice other flavors and/or the ones that so bothered you tone down.
I’m not convinced that “developing a taste” necessarily corresponds with associating the buzz and pleasure with the beverage. Speaking from experience, I liked having a buzz when drinking beer in high school and college, but I never really developed a taste for it to the point where I enjoyed it for its own sake until about the middle of college. Before then, it was pretty much a delivery vehicle for alcohol and nothing else. Same thing with coffee- at first, it was something I choked down to keep me awake on late nights programming in college, but after a while I started to enjoy it.
As far as alcoholic drinks go, some of them are good- a lot of the old-school tiki drinks and more tropical-oriented drinks like various riffs on daiquiris use base spirits and liqueurs that you can’t really replicate in a virgin format, such as maraschino liqueur for example. It’s not high proof, but it’s got a very unique flavor. Same thing with certain rums, or whiskies, or tequilas.
Assuming you aren’t put off by the taste of alcohol, some drinks do indeed taste very good. Some are godawful, and keep getting published for reasons that I cannot fathom- possibly because they were included in some ancient bar book and as a result have attained “classic” status.
Here’s a drink that pretty much anyone who isn’t disgusted by alcohol would agree tastes good. It’s the “Hemingway Daiquiri” from the book “And a Bottle of Rum - A History of The New World in Ten Cocktails” by Wayne Curtis. The combination isn’t like anything you’ve had before, but it’s fantastic.
1.5 oz light rum
0.25 oz maraschino liqueur (like Luxardo)
3/4 oz simple syrup
1/2 oz grapefruit juice
3/4 oz lime juice.
Proves we are all different.
I dislike any form of inebriation. I tend to limit my drinking to very low levels, low enough that I would be comfortable taking an alcohol breath test at any time. But I enjoy lots of alcoholic beverages. I live in one of the world’s best wine growing areas. Some of the wines are so good they take your breath away. Others are pretty blah. (And the price is not a good indicator.) Well crafted beers can also be fabulous, whereas mass produced muck can be terrible. Spirits and fortifieds can be fabulous as well. A nice single malt whisky or cognac can be fab. Some are a bit of an acquired taste. (Islay whiskies for a start.) But I never drink for the effect. I really just don’t like it. If these beverages were available in alcohol free form without affecting the taste I would be all over them. Some friends think I’m a trifle odd with this stance.
I get the same odd looks when I order a double shot de-decaffeinated coffee at night. Even coffee snobs seem to think that of you are not in it for the caffeine, your are somehow not doing it right.
We haven’t mentioned caffeine yet. It might be a mild drug, but there are probably more people with caffeine habits than all the other drugs put together.
If this were actually the case there wouldn’t be so many varieties of alcoholic drinks. The craft beer scene has absolutely exploded in the US, with a ton of new or resurrected older styles coming into vogue. That is due to people enjoying the taste of the beverages. Otherwise, why not just buy a Budweiser and call it a day (*shudder)
I remember that, and I could probably find it if I spent enough time searching. I thought it was an example of someone being unable to grok that other people experience the world differently than they do.
I don’t think coffee is a good example because it’s a delivery matrix for caffeine which has its own addictive qualities and is similar to alcohol and tobacco in that respect. There are other acquired tastes that don’t have that secondary (primary?) component, like stinky cheeses, strongly pickled vegetables and fish, Vegemite/Marmite, etc., though I have known a few people to get food buzzes too, so maybe it’s all just a matter of what gets you off?
Yes but they’re still just a means to deliver alcohol. So many people choke down bitter hoppy IPAs it makes me think of the Simpsons Tomacco episode or a Malcolm in the Middle where Dewey got hooked on cigs. In both cases they basically went “I hate the taste but I can’t stop!”
