Pipe Smoking Study, It Doesn't Look Good.

[warren]

Sadly, society has made its opinion known. Tobacco is taboo for a lot of reasons to many. No distinctions are necessary or ... even called for. The horse is dead and you beating on it isn't going to get it back on its hooves.

You are boosting your post count and I'm riding your coat tails. Wait, what happened to visible post counts? Crap!

 

[olkofri]

So when you replace all the cigarette addicts with moderate Pipesmokers what do the children do?

Your entire argument rests on the assumption that addiction is an absolute conclusion of exposure to tobacco.
It boggles the mind that so many people here would defend that assumption so fervently, probably out of a motivation of guilt and self pity, that you’re unable to enjoy something responsibly and project your lack of self control onto everyone else.

Rest assured, many have succeeded where you have failed.

This success is the culture that needs to be promoted for Pipes to exist in the future, not the taboo that Nicotine is an undefeatable all controlling monster.

There is a correct path for the healthy existence of Tobacco in society, people just need to be made aware of correct consumption instead of treating the whole subject as taboo.

That (which I have boldfaced) is what happens when people take the naturalistic, materialistic approach: they end up with wrong or at the very least incomplete conclusions and notions, which they then use to create new ideas, arguments, science, and, horror of horrors, legislation. Life is like those math or physics exams in which the solution to the first question was a variable in the second one, whose solution in turn was a factor in the third one, and so forth—messing up in one question sent the whole exam to hades.

That exposure necessarily ends in addiction to, or at least liking of the given stimulus, is a completely erroneous blanket conclusion. It's not always the case. Plenty of youngsters were exposed, sometimes heavily, to pornography in their teens and yet they never developed an addiction or even a passing interest; yet some of these last named youngsters became drug addicts. What gives?

Pernicious behaviours have little to do with exposure and everything to do with a person's inherent weaknesses which predispose them to a given vice (and by vice I mean abuse or misuse of something, simple predilection is not vice, much to the chagrin of the social engineers)—pornography, abuse of estimulants, cleptomania, pathological lying, self-mutilation... the list is pages long. These weaknesses go beyond any naturalistic explanation, although many have been offered, such as genetics (uh-huh). It is what resides in the heart of man that is the nexus of the crisis, and the origin of storms.

 

[alaskanpiper]

So when you replace all the cigarette addicts with moderate Pipesmokers what do the children do?

Your entire argument rests on the assumption that addiction is an absolute conclusion of exposure to tobacco.
It boggles the mind that so many people here would defend that assumption so fervently, probably out of a motivation of guilt and self pity, that you’re unable to enjoy something responsibly and project your lack of self control onto everyone else.

Rest assured, many have succeeded where you have failed.

This success is the culture that needs to be promoted for Pipes to exist in the future, not the taboo that Nicotine is an undefeatable all controlling monster.

There is a correct path for the healthy existence of Tobacco in society, people just need to be made aware of correct consumption instead of treating the whole subject as taboo.

That is my entire point, that cigarette smokers cannot, and will not, ever be replaced by moderate pipe smokers. It won't happen, and never could have happened. Tobacco exists. People will roll it in to papers and inhale it.

My entire argument actually rests on the assumption that addiction is a somewhat common conclusion of exposure to tobacco, particularly cigarettes. Which it undeniably is, and will continue to be, even if RYO were the only option.

I'm not sure where you are going with the whole guilt and self pity or success and failure thing. I think it is perfectly reasonable for people to have different views on tobacco and it's addiction potential regardless of their personal level of use. I smoke one bowl a week, sometimes less. Moderate use of tobacco is certainly possible, that is obvious. However, extreme addiction is also possible, and can happen.

You are correct about one thing, in that yes, there is a path for tobacco use, FOR SOME, that carries a probably negligible health risk. And that is indeed underplayed in todays political discussion. For some people, this can be done. For others, it absolutely IS an undefeatable all controlling monster. People respond differently to both psychological and physiological addiction to any substance. For some people (like me, and I have to assume you) moderate use is a possibility. For others it is not. Both populations do, and will always, exist, and for the latter populations, cigarettes, RYO or otherwise will always be a part of it.

 

[alaskanpiper]

That exposure necessarily ends in addiction to, or at least liking of the given stimulus, is a completely erroneous blanket conclusion.

Correct! That exposure necessarily DOESN'T end in addiction is equally erroneous.

Pernicious behaviours have little to do with exposure and everything to do with a person's inherent weaknesses which predispose them to a given vice

Exactly my point! Ease of exposure has little to do with it. The fact is, people will be exposed to tobacco (cigarettes included) if they desire to be, even if RYO were all that existed. And if they have a predisposition to nicotine addiction (which some will) then they will continue to smoke them, even if they have to roll them. The existence of cigarettes could never have been prevented, and their existence will never go away, even if packs of filters were outlawed and pipe tobacco continued to exist. People will roll it and inhale it.

 

[gatorlope]

I will not read the research, maybe that means I have my head in the sand (I am ok with that, so long as I can come up for puffs).
I already know through common sense and historical evidence that smoke inhalation is bad for your innards, and that nicotine holds very addictive properties. I use tobacco the same way I treat alcohol, bacon and ice cream...with moderation! (I do allow myself one proper hangover annually).

Reading and analysing statistics will encourage unnecessary stress for me. I read 'Life Is So Good' by George Dawson, the 101 year old man who learnt to read at 99, then co wrote his biography. In the book George talks about how in interviews people always want to know what his secret to longevity is, his diets and lifestyle choices. He made a point of saying he just ate what he wanted, when he wanted and he believed that his lack of knowledge and stress around the whole issue was actually what kept him healthy after all. "you folks are always stressing about what to eat or not eat, and that stress is killing you" (my hazy memory quote). George was not a smoker but I see the same kind of logic appears to be applied by that old fellow Richard Overton that liked his 12 cigars every day and lived to 112. National geographic have a little clip, but it is a little dated, he was only 109 at the time. Richard Overton Short Doc

Isaac

I agree about stress!
I’ve been an occasional smoker for the last 50 years (a few times a year & considered myself a non smoker for all practical purposes)
Three times I’ve been at the bedside of someone who died of cancer- a close friend, my mother in law and my first wife and only one of the three was a smoker!
So this year things changed! I turned 69, I have no family history of cancer and my 81 year old sister has been smoking like a chimney since she was 16!
So WTF! I’m going to enjoy this collection that I’ve accumulated over the last 50 years!

 

[PaulTheScandinavian]

and in some countries, Like Norway or Netherlands 90% smokers prefer their RYO Tobacco over any factory-made ones ,and it has been like this there a very long time

 

[gatorlope]

Good new everyone! Nicotine is not the most addictive substance in the world. At the very worst it's 3rd, behind heroin and cocaine. (Its exact position in the list differs depending on the source.) This probably isn't a newsflash to many of us.

I got a little chuckle from the post insisting that we are, without question, nicotine addicts for puffing on a couple bowls of pipe tobacco per day. I was reminded of the scene in "Half Baked" where Dave Chappelle, who's at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, tells the other attendees that he's addicted to marijuana. Bob Saget stands up and says, "Marijuana??? I used to s--- d--- for coke!!!"

Note: I didn't put the pipe smiley in my post, it appeared and won't go away.

It does the same thing for the first four letters in “Sherlock”, provided they’re all in lower case. Have fun with it if you can! Sherlock, potato masher, hardball basher etc.

 

[nunnster]

r

Well this has certainly taken a turn to interesting.

I, for one, am glad that humans have mostly passed through the Age of Enlightenment. Life became a little more complicated, but switching to using reason and critical thinking (and the scientific method!) was a pretty big breakthrough for us, when religion became more distanced from... well, reason and critical thinking. It's just my opinion, though.

I'm genuinely interested in peer reviewed studies that show smoking is beneficial in some way. I'll happily whip them out when someone starts poking me for smoking and mentions how stupid it is because of all of the negative health implications. They'd be great for these kinds of threads too, which consistently come up.

The tobacco industry, without a doubt, has left no stone unturned and during their time of making billions of dollars in profits, absolutely searched for these studies (and funded a good number of them).

They must be in the public domain. "Big Tobacco" has very deep pockets and they would never let something of that kind of importance be swept under the rug.

They could even use it in advertising (which is perfectly legal if you can prove a claim), so I'm just wondering where they are. We find a load of information contrary to a lot of claims here, but very little (none presented so far) that supports them.

Seriously. If it was found that a cigarette, or half a cigarette, somehow presented a measurable and accepted health benefit, the tobacco industry would be on that like mosquitoes on a moose. They'd sell single dose packets with the health claim! Because they could! Legally.

It was taking too long to read through the plethora of responses before I was loosing my train of thought so forgive me if someone else mentioned this. But there ARE studies out there to do show some health benefits to tobacco use. Mainly, as stress seems to be one of our biggest health problems in our modern era, which leads to a host of other physicsl problems, there are studies out there that show nicotine and the ability to sit down and think and smoke decreases stress to a very high degree, and that people who smoke tend to be able to do complex problem solving faster and more effectively than a non smokers and on average tend to show higher intelligence. The studies are out there. You just need to know where to look. Without forking out 1000s of dollars to publishing companies or having access to a university data base, you would be hard pressed to find them because the FDA and other regulatory agencies dont want that information to get out there to counter the narrative they have been building for the last 60 odd year plus.

 

[olkofri]

And even some anti-smoking studies have found that children growing up exposed to so-called second-hand smoke had a higher resistance to lung cancer. Of course, they swept those findings under the carpet.

So, if you wanna save the children, smoke away. puf

 

[brian64]

So, if you wanna save the children, smoke away.

 

[brian64]

Pediatric cancer used to be extremely rare...now it's extremely common...and has nothing to do with tobacco.

But if we just keep giving billions and billions of dollars to the cancer-industrial-complex they'll be able to keep suppressing the cures eventually find a cure.

Just don't think about what's causing it all...you're not supposed to wonder about that.

 

[frozenchurchwarden]

and in some countries, Like Norway or Netherlands 90% smokers prefer their RYO Tobacco over any factory-made ones ,and it has been like this there a very long time

This again brings an interesting point.

Cigarettes have existed in some form for a very long time: Cigarette - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette

In the English-speaking world, the use of tobacco in cigarette form became increasingly widespread during and after the Crimean War, when British soldiers began emulating their Ottoman Turkish comrades and Russian enemies, who had begun rolling and smoking tobacco in strips of old newspaper for lack of proper cigar-rolling leaf.

But cigarettes still weren’t very popular until the 20th century:

The widespread smoking of cigarettes in the Western world is largely a 20th-century phenomenon. At the start of the 20th century, the per capita annual consumption in the U.S. was 54 cigarettes (with less than 0.5% of the population smoking more than 100 cigarettes per year), and consumption there peaked at 4,259 per capita in 1965.

I stand by the theory that limiting people to RYO is an effective way to limit the proliferation of Cigarettes in society.

If people want to inhale smoke and destroy themselves there’s never been anything stopping them from doing that, but there is little doubt that mass manufacturing and even government distribution of Cigarettes during the war is the cause of the dirty habit that plagued western society for the second half of the 20th century.

The rise of the cigarette was circumstantial, and the circumstances that caused it are now gone. There is no reason to think that Cigarette consumption won’t (eventually) fall to pre-1900’s levels if RYO were the only option available.

I’m not going to say it would be instant, but then again we do have Vape now so the argument about Cigarettes could very well be made moot in a relatively short period of time.

Society needs to re-form its relationship with Tobacco, and leaving future generations with nothing but the knee-jerk reaction of an ignorant war torn world as the last impression would be a horrible misrepresentation.

In the long term Tobacco is practically no different from Alcohol.
Many risks, a right time and place, but enjoyed responsibly by the overwhelming majority.

 

[olkofri]

Guess the haven't banned tobacco outright yet because they wanna blame on it all the cancers that will be caused by 5G? ?

 

[brian64]

But cigarettes still weren’t very popular until the 20th century

The PR campaign by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays that ignited Torches of Freedom for women was a significant factor in that.

 

[alaskanpiper]

I stand by the theory that limiting people to RYO is an effective way to limit the proliferation of Cigarettes in society.

I have not, and would not disagree with this. It would probably reduce use. How much? I have no idea. And neither do you. My initial response to your post supporting an "outright ban on cigarettes." was simply making the point that cigarettes will not go away simply because packs of filters are eliminated. As I said in that post, as long as shag cuts or plugs exist, or any form of tobacco, really, so will cigarettes. You replied to that post, saying that this was "Wrong." And now here we are.

You may be able to limit the proliferation of cigarettes in society with a ban on filters (maybe, we'll likely never know), but they are not going to disappear simply because filters are banned. Regardless of how it came to be, far more people (at least in the united states) use cigarettes than any other form of tobacco. Limiting them to RYO may reduce that number, but it certainly would not eliminate them. And as long as those people keep smoking some form of cigarette, younger generations will probably continue do the same.

To be clear, I would also love to see cigarettes go away, I am not arguing against that, I am just making the point that if such a thing were to happen (it likely won't) we should have realistic expectations for the result. I think pre-1900s levels is probably an unrealistic expectation, since they are already so prolific, but we can agree to disagree on that point, neither one of us will be able to empirically support what amounts to pure speculation on that note, the data simply doesn't exist.

If people want to inhale smoke and destroy themselves there’s never been anything stopping them from doing that,

Yes, that was my only point in my initial response to your ban on cigarettes post. Fully agree.

In the long term Tobacco is practically no different from Alcohol.
Many risks, a right time and place, but enjoyed responsibly by the overwhelming majority.

I hate to open another can of worms, but do you have a citation for anything supporting the statement that tobacco is enjoyed responsibly by the overwhelming majority? I'd love to read it....

 

[warren]

Nunnster mentions all sorts of studies and never cites one. "I wonder why," he asks sarcastically. Mysteriously "they" have hidden them away.

Nicotine has been shown to possibly have some medical uses. But, never nicotine delivered via incinerated tobacco taken into the body and either sucked into the lungs or simply absorbed through the membranes in the mouth and nose.

Then there are the befuddled who insist smoking is bad only when inhaling. This totally discounts the damage done when oxygen is replaced in the blood by nicotine.

There are no, absolutely none, studies showing efficacious effects of igniting tobacco and taking it into one's body. They couldn't be totally hidden away from scrutiny.

 

[olkofri]

Bans are the best way to encourage consumption. I see no reason to ban cigarettes just because I don't happen to like the smell of cig smoke. Golden Rule applies: I can't decry government arbitrary and tyrannical overregulation of my chosen form of tobacco and then, at the same time engage in same kind of shenanigans.

 

[brian64]

Then there are the befuddled who insist smoking is bad only when inhaling.

Then there are the non-befuddled who insist smoking is worse when inhaling.

But inhaling isn't really the problem either...it's the exhaling we all have to give up.

We're all nothing but a bunch of filthy CO2 machines. It's the only thing that unites us all, and it's time we all agree that breathing is really the primary problem with human beings.

This we know from the cutting edge of modern science.

 

[Chasing Embers]

Bans are the best way to encourage consumption.

Yup, nothing like forbidden fruit.

 

[warren]

".it's the exhaling we all have to give up"

Excellent point!