For the hell of it I would like to throw this information in, lung cancer has a 1.14 WHO health risk rating for smokers meaning that you are 14% more likely to get lung cancer if you smoke. Because of the relatively low number of lung cancer cases in general the WHO itself has admitted that by its guidelines this number is not significant. If you think the guidelines are screwed whole milk drinkers have a 1.40 WHO risk factor of lung cancer. Respond to that.
“The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.”
While tis true that the majority of lung cancer victims are smokers, tis also true that the majority of smokers do NOT get lung cancer.
However, most long term smokers develop one cancer, heart disease or emphysema.
But then, so do most people. It’s just a question of when and exactly which.
The thing that gets me is what an utterly perverse act it is in the first place. What the hell were the native Americans thinking? (They started it!). Hey…let’s set this plant on fire and inhale the noxious fumes! That sounds like a great idea!
It’s pretty obvious to me that anyone who smokes wants to be doused with a pail of water. Or s/he wants his cigs loaded with explosive loads.
Seriously, my husband started smoking in basic training in the Air Force over 20 years ago. He said he did it because of several reasons…
Smokers got a smoke break, while non-smokers got to “patrol the area”, which meant picking up trash and stuff.
Smoking was cool, and a lot of the senior NCOs did it and were sympathetic to smokers (see #1).
He missed me, and smoking comforted him.
I think that he also started smoking because the adults in his family smoke. He won’t admit this, of course…but even now, almost every single one of his parents’ grandchildren smoke. My daughter doesn’t, and the kid who has severe asthma doesn’t.
I flirted with smoking when I was a teen, because I thought that it looked cool and rebellious and independent. Fortunately, I didn’t get hooked on it.
My husband deeply regrets getting hooked. BTW, he and I are both 41, so we both knew the dangers.
One of the many things that we don’t yet know about any addiction is what makes some people use, continue using, and then progress to regular use while others use and don’t continue, or continue only sporadically (as you describe). People with your occasional use pattern are “chippers” and there are chippers who use tobacco, heroin, and (to a lesser extent) cocaine.
(Of course, the vast majority of alcohol users could be called chippers, though for some reason we tend to call them social drinkers and be done with it.)
You tobacco chippers are very much in the minority (I think something like 5% or less) and I sure would like to know what makes you that way. Some hypotheses include:
chippers have a liver enzyme that breaks down nicotine especially quickly
and
a different pattern of nicotine receptors in the brain that makes nicotine less pleasurable.
I wish I could answer your question with somthing more than “I wish I knew” but. . . I wish I knew.
What are your thoughts? What do you get from smoking? When you inhale the first cigarette on a friday night do you feel anything from it?
When I started smoking (both times) it was to relieve stress. I had some problems in my teenage years, and I couldn’t find a way to deal with them. I asked one of my coworkers what he did for stress, (he was a laid-back person) and he said he smoked. I weighed the odds as best I could in that state, and decided that cigarettes would take longer to kill me than would another breakdown.
I later quit, when my situation started to improve. I joined the military and within a year and a half of service, I was smoking again.
I’m 42, and both my parents smoked like chimneys. Yet none of my three sisters nor I have ever lit up a cig. I think we got so much second hand smoke as children (during the winter months we would all be in the back seat of the station wagon, windows up against the cold, and the car so full of smoke it looked like a fog in there!), that we had had enough by the time we were adults.
I can’t tell you why I smoke, since I don’t, but I can sure tell you why I DON’T smoke. I’m too cheap, I’m too active to sit still that long and poke something in and out of my mouth (I think eating and sleeping are a waste of time, for goodness sakes!), and one look at my mother tethered to a 10’ oxygen hose so she can breath due to her emphysema, that she is convinced is due to 55+ years of smoking, is enough to keep me from the demon weed.
Oh Stoidela, if there’s nothing I hate more it’s being told that I am not feeling the way I’m supposed to.
Smoking calmed me. I don’t care what it’s supposed to do.
Also, what gives you the idea that I will be smoking before too long - because I admit that I liked it and miss it? Honey, let me tell you - I’m not going to lie to you or myself about this. And just because you can’t fathom how someone would enjoy it is irrelevant to someone who does enjoy it, and will miss it.
I can’t fathom how a guy wants to have sex with another guy, but I trust that some guys do.
It is a proven fact (if you want to get into statistics) that women have a harder time quitting because they are addicted to the pshcyological aspects of smoking, whereas males tend to be addicted to the physical attractions behind tobacco.
This might explain why you are doing something you hate, and hating that you are doing it, whereas I quit something I loved, but am thus far successful at it.
Obviously, like any stats, this is not a 100% across the board thing, but from just knowing smokers reformed and otherwise in my life, it’s true for the most part IMHO.
Also, don’t dis the Zyban. I never could have made it without it. It is non-intrusive, non-addictive as all it does is tell the part of your brain that loves nicotine that it really doesn’t. Better than a lobotomy, no?
I object to people smoking in my air for the same reason I object to people puking on my plate of food, boomboxing in my vicinity, or advertising in my headspace. It’s an invasion. It annoys nobody for me not to smoke.
While your at it, why don’t you also ask: WHY DO PEOPLE OVER-EAT? WHY DO PEOPLE DRINK? WHY DO PEOPLE PROCRASTINATE? WHY IS IT THAT I WAS GIVEN THE FINGER WHEN DRIVING TO WORK THIS MORNING?
C’mon. People have bad habits that they know are bad. Don’t tell me you have none. It seems you have cast the first stone…
Men who smoke increase their risk of death from lung cancer by more than 22 times and from bronchitis and emphysema by nearly 10 times. Women who smoke increase their risk of dying from lung cancer by nearly 12 times and the risk of dying from bronchitis and emphysema by more than 10 times. Smoking triples the risk of dying from heart disease among middle-aged men and women.
I don’t know how to make it clickable on this message board (sorry).
The original data are in:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Smoking-attributable mortality and years of potential life lost–United States, 1990. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 1993;42(33):645-8.
If you believe these statistics for the US (I do), they suggest that either the base rate of world lung cancer is much greater than in the US (hard to believe, but possible) OR the data you cited may have been misinterpreted. Can you please give a link or source for your WHO data? Once you do I’ll examine it and get back to you.
Murray, no one dies from second-hand finger-giving, or second-hand junk food. One of my main objections to smoking is not that it killed my father, but that it’s killing my mother, who had to breathe his smoke for 30 years and has serious respiratory problems as a result. If anyone lights up anywhere in her vicinity, she winds up in Emergency. Thank goodness for today’s non-smoking sections; she can finally eat in restaurants, take planes and trains! People say, “George Burns smoked, and he lived to be 100!” Yeah, but Gracie Allen died in her early 60s of heart disease . . .
ThreeMae, Stoidela did answer your post: yes, it’s true that not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. But almost no one who doesn’t smoke gets it; and smokers also let themselves in for heart disease, premature wrinkles, other lung problems and other cancers–as well as causing SIDS and miscarriages in their own babies.
I am keeping my fingers crossed for all of you trying to quit, I really hope you make it! The posts here have reinforced what I’d suspected–the best way to cut smoking is to double the price. That would encourage adults to quit, and keep a lot of kids from starting. I think those “Don’t Smoke!” campaigns aimed at kids are worse than useless; if kids know adults don’t want them smoking, just watch 'em run for the cigarettes! And actors (especially Winona Ryder) really should not be photographed or filmed constantly smoking–they are role models whether they like it or not, and should not be making it look “cool” to their impressionable young fans.
Eissclam, are you a doctor, or do you just play one on TV?
They call me “doctor” though I’m a scientist, not a physician. Cigarette withdrawal is one of my primary areas of study. Lately I’ve become particularly interested in why some kids who try tobacco (and most do) go on to use regularly and others try it and don’t use (or use sporadically). I think understanding the details of initial tobacco use episodes, of which we currently know next to nothing, will be very important in reducing the costs associated with tobacco use over future generations.
I’ve been keeping up with the Straight Dope ever since graduate school. Does anyone else think Uncle Cecil has lost some of his wit/sarcasm over the years? The heady days of parsecs full of flies and rhyming physics lessons ("Said Win, ‘don’t panic, no grease monkey I, but Quantum Mechanic’) have given way to some pretty tame responses.
Well, it makes me rather chipper! (sorry, couldn’t resist.)
That’s a good question. What do I get? A little bit of a buzz, since I’m not all that used to nicotine. It wakes me up. I like the taste of tobacco. I also like the “break” it gives me. I live in a town where smoking is banned in restaurants and bars, so generally what happens is a girlfriend and I go outside to yak and have a cigarette.
What I don’t like is that after 2-3 in one night, I know I’ll wake up the next morning feeling like some small animal has crawled into my mouth and died. I also work out regularly, and I can definitely tell the difference when I’ve been smoking too much. To me, too much is more than 3 cigarettes 2 nights in a row.
I go in cycles. I’ll smoke a little for 3 months, then it just becomes unappealing to me and I stop for several months. I’ve stopped for years a time, simply because I wasn’t around other people who smoked, and my ex husband was sure to give me crap about it and tell me I was going to become addicted.
So, Eissclam, I believe that if I was going to become addicted, I would have already. Does your research agree to this? I sure would hate to wake up one morning addicted. Could that happen?
Athena, I’m neither a doctor nor a scientist (and keep up the good work, Eissclam!), but I’m gonna guess that you are one of the incredibly lucky freaks of nature who don’t have whatever “addiction” gene that is. Some people can get hooked on a drug after one puff; you’re just their direct opposite. I urge you to reproduce a lot, so we can populate the world with non-addicts!
Thanks for the response. Generally speaking, less than 5 cigarettes/day should not lead to nicotine dependence in an adult. Thus, if this is the pattern that you have maintained for years, you are likely not to be currently dependent on nicotine. Furthermore, so long as you maintain the pattern, I doubt that you will become dependent.
I glanced through my files for a reference for this statement (I am certain there is one) but couldn’t find it.
As a word of caution for others, though, I note that this pattern is exteremely rare and difficult for most users to maintain. You may be tempted to try it but I wish you wouldn’t. Odds are you’ll progress to more regular (and thus dangerous) use.
BTW, Athena and other chippers: people are actively working on what makes you dependence-resistant. I picked this little tidbit off of an abstract in PubMed (Kassel et al., 1994).
“The strongest finding indicated that sensation seeking best discriminates among the three groups, with nonsmokers clearly viewing themselves as more socially inhibited and less interested in pursuing sensations relative to both regular smokers and chippers, both of whom evidenced comparable scores. Regular smokers evidenced less self-control, or restraint, and appeared more impulsive and unable to resist temptation, compared to chippers and nonsmokers. Surprisingly, none of the groups could be differentiated on the basis of perceived stress, coping, or social support. Even among the personality variables, however, the effect sizes were relatively small, indicating that these differences in personality cannot fully account for chipper’s resistance to dependence.”
Oh, Flora, Flora…just when I was going to ask you to be Missus Ukulele, too.
I enjoy smoking cigarettes, they’re one of the perfect examples of a perfect pleasure; exquisite, yet leaving one feeling unsatisfied. Thank you, Mr. Wilde.
As for the health considerations, as the estimable Mr. Satan said, “Eat right, stay fit, die anyway.”