Smoking in puberty is an obvious signal of many other malign traits: low socio- educational-economic level, violence, mental disease, besides of possible harm to their sperm.
Many confounders that are difficult to include.
I think this needs to factor in cultural attitudes toward smoking. It varies based on the location, but in my experience generally smoking is more widespread among lower income people, especially if their kids are smoking. And so I question whether the shorter lifespan is more reflective of less access to healthcare, good food, etc. more broadly.
Wow, that’s really eye-opening. It’s one thing to know smoking harms your own health, but realizing it could affect your future children at a biological level adds a whole new layer. The idea that habits formed as a teenager can leave such a lasting legacy is honestly a bit scary. Just more reason we need to keep pushing awareness and prevention, especially for young people.
The difficulty will be getting this message across to teenagers who can only think six months ahead. Even talking to them about the impact when they are older will be pointless, so about their potential future progeny...
Do what many countries do and price them out. Since age limits are only as effective as ID verification, we know some kids are able to buy cigarettes and vapes. With a high enough tobacco tax, they can’t afford the habit and will be less inclined to even start.
As a side effect it really does a number on the addiction of adults, too!
Smoking is one of those harmful activities where state has some incentives to not be too proactive in preventing people from doing it. Eases a lot of social security costs down the line (vs cancer treatments, but many go out quickly via heart attack or stroke, just like my uncle did).
Quickest fix would be total ban (with addicts moving en masse to black market). Not practically possible in regular democracies.
Its up to people themselves for the most effective care. Easy talk about addiction which is ranked around cca heroin addiction in terms of how difficult it is to shed it. One always pays for one's mistakes, here its actually the offsprings...
To me the key element is the addiction aspect. It’s one thing to ingest a substance which has good short term results but bad long term ones, but entirely another when the machinery of corporations is used to maximize that usage and make it as addictive as possible.
As a side note, the movie The Insider by Michael Mann with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe is the single most effective anti-smoking thing I’ve come across. It shows how evil those corporations are and what they did to a whistleblower.
Part of the scandal covered in The Insider is that tobacco companies deliberately added carcinogenic compounds to cigarettes in order to increase the impact of nicotine.
So sure, tobacco is still addictive, but as I said in my comment, my main issue is with the hacking/maximization of this by corporations. Especially when that hacking involves adding even more poisonous chemicals.
That is a false dichotomy. I want a smartphone with apps that are heavy regulated against bad practices.
- No dark patterns that make difficult to unsubscribe or that add automatically products to the basket
- No promotion of hate and other highly emotional and highly addictive content
- Limit the amount of daily ads so increasing retention time is not a goal
- Removal of loot boxes and other gambling from games
and other things like that. Medicines are dangerous and have a lot of regulations, nobody is asking to remove all medical products. That is a straw man argument.
No, because I didn't say anything about forcing people to give up cigarettes. But it seems reasonable to me to have legislation that limits how addictive corporations can make them.
Applying the same type of legislation to social media apps (for children, at least) seems reasonable to me.
I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances)
> I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances)
Too easy to work around and too hard to define. Look at a lot of "No added sugar" sweet things - they can use fruit juice concentrates, or plant syrups etc. Then there are artificial sweeteners. Then there things bred for sweetness.
I don't think that's the same thing. If you add a fruit juice concentrate to bread, that counts as added sugar. If you have a fruit juice and it contains fruit juice concentrate that's not added sugar. I don't think it's that easy to work around at all. All things that naturally contain sugar you don't need to put a label on it, and all things that don't you put a label on.
I think it's the hard work arounds that will eventually break it. Like we're already growing strawberries that are naturally sweet, in the future maybe our bread will be made of wheat that has "natural" sugars in it or something. But I feel that for that to happen the "no added sugars" labeling would have to be exceptionally effective.
Because that would be utterly ludicrous? I enjoy a few small sweet things every day as part of a healthy diet. This harms nobody, me included.
Much better to make more effort in schools to teach people how to cook good food (including enough fat and salt that it's actually tasty). Plus maybe change some relative prices so that they eat less sugar on average.
Natural sweet things are healthy (fruits are an example). Processed food where sugar was added to make it addictive is not. I would argue most pastries are not healthy but you can make them at home and remove 50% of the sugar if you really crave one.
For salt, I disagree. Normal humans don't need to add salt to a varied diet. Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
I like fruit. I like pastries. I eat plenty of fruit and the occasional small pastry. This is a perfectly healthy, balanced diet. Sure, I could choose to never eat pastries (or to eat pastries with half the sugar in), but the overall effect would be to lower my happiness.
Your approach strikes me as the sort of dietary absolutism that is actively damaging to public health.
The salt thing is a case in point. Perhaps it's theoretically true that we could all learn to enjoy our food with less salt. But this would be very hard, and I'm not convinced that an ordinary amount of salt is very damaging to health (except in the case of some specific health conditions that most people don't have).
But many schools in the UK take your approach: kids get taught to cook meals with no added salt (and also the bare minimum of fat). Everything they make therefore tastes bland and tedious.
The result? These kids don't learn to love cooking or home-cooked food. Instead, they learn that the way you eat food that tastes good is to order it from restaurants and fast food outlets. This is much more expensive and much less healthy than cooking at home using a reasonable amount of salt and fat, and it's a public health disaster.
It tastes bland because our taste buds have adjusted to our salt consumption. I eat with no added salt and my food tastes just fine since I adapted.
Over-salting is one of the causes of the most common way of dying. I couldn't say for sure because I don't go to restaurants a lot anymore, but it's not rare to see people salting their dishes without even tasting them beforehand.
> Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
Salt was extremely valuable and thought after before it was broadly available. People always liked salt because it makes things taste better. The amount is a matter of habit and too much salt is unhealthy, but the general principle stands: a little salt is and always was tasty and healthy.
Your body does not need a lot of salt to function healthily.
Sure it makes everything tastier, but salt added to every dish is a danger to your health. Where I live you would get almost all your daily recommended intake by your usual portion of bread.
So, yes, salting your lunch or dinner will result in excess salt.
Because it is waaaay easier to bully minorities, esp. in democracies? If you take something away from the majority, you run a huge risk of loosing in the next election...
>In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical?
Insane levels of homogeneous demographics and group think. Think like HOA or school board chock full o' Karens doing something wild. That's the kind of situation you'd need.
Benevolent dictatorship with a veneer of democracy? Or any system that does motivate pushing for long term actual solutions, not just chasing votes for next election cycle.
Restriction of rights is a spectrum. For example, we know that driving cars carries some (very small) risk. If we banned driving, fewer people would die (from car related accidents). This must be balanced against individual rights and social outcomes. If we banned cars, how many people would lose their jobs? How many people would be unable to get to hospital? It's like that banning cars would cause more harm than lives it saves. This is an extreme scenario to illustrate not all bad things should be banned.
Smoking is more nuanced. For the most part (as long as public spaces and spaces with children are appropriately regulated), smokers hurt only themselves. In countries with public healthcare, this can increase care costs, but most studies now find that because smokers die much younger, their combined lifetime costs are actually lower. Old people are very expensive to care for. So the question becomes: to what degree do we want the state preventing people from hurting themselves? Where does that authority end? Alcohol? Sugar? Fatty foods? Less than eight hours of sleep? Not exercising? Too much TV and iPad? Social media? Not reading enough books? This is, IMHO, a slippery slope. For reasons of ideology and pragmatism, I do not support regulation for "victimless" activities, unless there are significant social costs/harm. This means I support legal tobacco, marijuana, MDMA, alcohol, and and many other drugs. I also support the right to partake in extreme sports, eating junk food and sugar, and not exercising.
The implications of this particular study are very difficult to morally and legally navigate. If smoking while young can make children age slightly faster, surely there is a moral imperative to prevent those who are 15 and younger from smoking? I believe that is the case in most of the West already. However we also know that parents who don't exercise and eat poorly also tend to pass along these habits to their children. Should we also ban parents from eating at McDonalds?
Generally, you discourage them with taxes or other restrictions. Most developed countries have very high taxes, and various legal restrictions, on tobacco, say. Many have high taxes on sugar.
There aren't really _that_ many things which fall into the "clearly harmful, but people won't give them up" category; tobacco, alcohol, sugar, maybe meat (this one can be, and has been incessantly, argued both ways to an extent), would be the big ones.
Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find.
Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach.
Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
>Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find.
The taxation level that maximizes revenue or minimizes harmful noncompliance never satisfies the moralizing people who wanted the thing you're discussing (whatever it is) punitively taxed in the first place.
There's lots of different externalities. Eg smoking also produces smelly smoke.
Externalities also depend on context. Eg your example of cheaper healthcare only works when healthcare is priced by pooling payments. If you have a system where an actuary looks at each case individually (well, a system designed by an actuary does) and assigns a premium, then it doesn't matter what other people are doing: you are paying for your own risk (and competition between insurance providers keeps the system honest).
Even if you insist on pooling, you could pool smokers and non-smokers separately.
Granted in many places regulations force health insurance providers to do the naive pooling where your statement can be true. Similar, or even more so, for pensions.
It's to do with complete lack of will to enforce. You can open a dodgy tobacconist shop, get shut down with a ridiculously low non-personal penalty, and open another one two doors down.
I always wonder about the heroin comparison. I just doesn't check out for me. Feels inappropriate. Heroin has pretty pronounced withdrawal symptoms, which are (AIUI) mostly physical withdrawal. At least from personal experience, nicotine withdrawal doesn't do anything to me. I just recently spent a day in an ICU, and had no craving at all. Same for longer smoking breaks, like a week or two. No craving. However, I sometimes miss the socialisation / being occupied thing, which is plain mental addiction. Maybe I am special in this regard, but I doubt it. Most "nervious" smokers I met were, IMO, "protesting" against the fact that they are currently not free to do what they wanted. You can hype yourself up a lot without actual physical reasons.
It's likely that you're doing this to yourself by underselling your cravings. Presumably you came out of your ICU visit and began smoking again but you've lied to yourself about the reasons why. The physical aspect of nicotine addiction is extremely well documented.
I agree. I've never done heroin but I understand the withdrawal is absolutely horrible.
I stopped using nicotine this month. I've been using snus which is a Nordic product similar to chewing tobacco. You put it under your upper lip, the type I've been using has significantly more nicotine per dose than a cigarette. Like 2-4 times as much, 25mg per dose.
It was fine. The first day was pretty hard for me, I was sitting next to a lady who kept her snus box on her desk and I really wanted to bum one but didn't. Day two was a bit easier, day three easier still and after that I felt like I was done. I'm on day 16 now and hardly think about it any more.
It's strange because I've been using nicotine for almost two decades and I've been wanting to drop it for most of that time, even did drop it once but blundered and started again a year or so later. I've tried and failed to quit so many times, but the times that it's actually worked have always just felt like a state of mind difference. Like I didn't really want to quit the other times. When I really decide and all doubt is gone it's quite easy to quit. It's just hard to get to that state of mind and keep it.
My experience is that using a method allowing me to gradually lower the amount of nicotine I consume made stopping completely manageable and mostly painless.
Cravings come back when I'm under stress but it's fine. I know I will just stop again the same way I did before. It's made the whole thing guilt free for me which strangely makes cravings much more manageable than when I was beating myself trying to not restart.
Yeah that was my plan B, and I kind of did wean myself off using Oliver Twist chewing tobacco for a couple days. It has about 5mg per dose so much less than the snus I'd been using. Used that for 2 days then cold turkey.
The plan if I failed was to use nicotine patches of decreasing potency. I think you can get those in a sort of kit but I haven't actually found the kit as a product. Anyway the plan now is to just keep it up. I'll avoid alcohol for a while as it makes it more difficult.
It is delicious, a real delight. I'd happily become an addict if I could get a reliable reasonably-priced pharmaceutical-quality supply; but of course you can't, bloody puritans.
I'm sure "smoking" here is a proxy for something else that provokes substance abuse. Cigarettes are surely easier to see than psychological conditions.
I can confirm I was too smart for my age in my teens. And to make growing up even faster I smoked as well. Good times, kids these days have to vape as cigarettes are too expensive, not to mention cheap synth drugs.
The times were simpler, it’ll be much harder to do a similar study in the future due to the proliferation of new carcinogenic substances in food, drugs, drinks, etc. All in all we are healthier anyway.
First, just because it's hard to disentangle correlation and causation, doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and just assume causation into existence.
Second, your objection would equally wreck a study that just looks at correlation only.
Third, presumably quantity matters, even if everybody is getting at least some secondhand smoke, that doesn't mean everyone is getting the same amount. The study found a way to measure this: they are looking at parental smoking, which presumably is connected with higher total amounts of secondhand smoke on average.
The problem with teasing out causation of A leading to B is that you need some mechanism that cuts of the possibilities of B causing A, and some third factor C causing both A and B. It's easiest to do that, if you know that A was caused by the coin flip of the researcher that put subjects into either treatment or control group. But there are other clever approaches, like 'natural designs'.
Or.... smoking may be indicative of people from poorer backgrounds, where health is generally lower. (cant say for sure, but thats the case where I am from)
You can eat salad everyday, never enjoy a drink and then die from some random shit in your 50s anyway. Sadly, I hear stories like that quite often.
I get it, this proves nothing, but I have plenty of people in my family who drank daily, chain smoked and lived until they were into their late 80s / 90s.
Leading a healthy lifestyle increases your chances, eating like a pig decreases them.
Looking at the outliers and saying "See?! It's all a lie!" is like looking at a lottery winner and concluding that lottery tickets are a sound investment.
What's interesting is the people who are "unfit" and especially obese seem to fair the worst.
Most of the people I spoke of, drank and smoked a lot, but also active to very active, and exercised regularly even in their 80s. Swimming, walking, playing tennis, yard work, gardening. They all seemed to share these things in common.
Being Obese and sedentary seems to be a dangerous undertaking.
My dad used this argument to justify his smoking/drinking and convince my mom. She died of cancer way too early. Stop for a second and think 'maybe it's asshole behavior' trying to do the same justification to random people on the internet.
Um, what does that have to do with the topic? Yes, people die of environmental exposure to things. This is about a specific exposure, at a specific age period.
How does it account for stress.
My hunch is many people smoke because of stress, same stress from socioeconomic situation may age someone outta stress?
Now if you adopt a kid from such family into low stress enviornment and they still age, now that's better link.
Smoking in puberty is an obvious signal of many other malign traits: low socio- educational-economic level, violence, mental disease, besides of possible harm to their sperm. Many confounders that are difficult to include.
What if their dad left home though, so limited exposure?
Good to know. I never touched a cig till I was 26 and got addicted a bit post a breakup but quit it earlier this year.
My dad however probably has been smoking since he was 18 so I don't know what good that does me besides the second hand smoke I had to endure.
I think this needs to factor in cultural attitudes toward smoking. It varies based on the location, but in my experience generally smoking is more widespread among lower income people, especially if their kids are smoking. And so I question whether the shorter lifespan is more reflective of less access to healthcare, good food, etc. more broadly.
Wow, that’s really eye-opening. It’s one thing to know smoking harms your own health, but realizing it could affect your future children at a biological level adds a whole new layer. The idea that habits formed as a teenager can leave such a lasting legacy is honestly a bit scary. Just more reason we need to keep pushing awareness and prevention, especially for young people.
The difficulty will be getting this message across to teenagers who can only think six months ahead. Even talking to them about the impact when they are older will be pointless, so about their potential future progeny...
Do what many countries do and price them out. Since age limits are only as effective as ID verification, we know some kids are able to buy cigarettes and vapes. With a high enough tobacco tax, they can’t afford the habit and will be less inclined to even start.
As a side effect it really does a number on the addiction of adults, too!
Smoking is one of those harmful activities where state has some incentives to not be too proactive in preventing people from doing it. Eases a lot of social security costs down the line (vs cancer treatments, but many go out quickly via heart attack or stroke, just like my uncle did).
Quickest fix would be total ban (with addicts moving en masse to black market). Not practically possible in regular democracies.
Its up to people themselves for the most effective care. Easy talk about addiction which is ranked around cca heroin addiction in terms of how difficult it is to shed it. One always pays for one's mistakes, here its actually the offsprings...
To me the key element is the addiction aspect. It’s one thing to ingest a substance which has good short term results but bad long term ones, but entirely another when the machinery of corporations is used to maximize that usage and make it as addictive as possible.
As a side note, the movie The Insider by Michael Mann with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe is the single most effective anti-smoking thing I’ve come across. It shows how evil those corporations are and what they did to a whistleblower.
You say that as if smoking tobacco that does not come from corporations would not be addictive!
All forms of tobacco are inherently addictive due to the presence of naturally occurring nicotine, which is the main driver of addiction.
Part of the scandal covered in The Insider is that tobacco companies deliberately added carcinogenic compounds to cigarettes in order to increase the impact of nicotine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_%26_Williamson#Controver...
So sure, tobacco is still addictive, but as I said in my comment, my main issue is with the hacking/maximization of this by corporations. Especially when that hacking involves adding even more poisonous chemicals.
Smartphones are addictive and designed by large corporations to be so. Ready to give yours up?
That is a false dichotomy. I want a smartphone with apps that are heavy regulated against bad practices.
- No dark patterns that make difficult to unsubscribe or that add automatically products to the basket - No promotion of hate and other highly emotional and highly addictive content - Limit the amount of daily ads so increasing retention time is not a goal - Removal of loot boxes and other gambling from games
and other things like that. Medicines are dangerous and have a lot of regulations, nobody is asking to remove all medical products. That is a straw man argument.
No, because I didn't say anything about forcing people to give up cigarettes. But it seems reasonable to me to have legislation that limits how addictive corporations can make them.
Applying the same type of legislation to social media apps (for children, at least) seems reasonable to me.
> legislation that limits how addictive corporations can make them
Such legislation sounds hard to draw up.
Importantly, they are designed BY large corporations TO BE addictive.
Not everyone becomes addicted
See also, processed food!
I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances)
> I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances)
Here is the US Health Secretary talking about it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/rfk-jr-sugar...
Too easy to work around and too hard to define. Look at a lot of "No added sugar" sweet things - they can use fruit juice concentrates, or plant syrups etc. Then there are artificial sweeteners. Then there things bred for sweetness.
I don't think that's the same thing. If you add a fruit juice concentrate to bread, that counts as added sugar. If you have a fruit juice and it contains fruit juice concentrate that's not added sugar. I don't think it's that easy to work around at all. All things that naturally contain sugar you don't need to put a label on it, and all things that don't you put a label on.
I think it's the hard work arounds that will eventually break it. Like we're already growing strawberries that are naturally sweet, in the future maybe our bread will be made of wheat that has "natural" sugars in it or something. But I feel that for that to happen the "no added sugars" labeling would have to be exceptionally effective.
Because that would be utterly ludicrous? I enjoy a few small sweet things every day as part of a healthy diet. This harms nobody, me included.
Much better to make more effort in schools to teach people how to cook good food (including enough fat and salt that it's actually tasty). Plus maybe change some relative prices so that they eat less sugar on average.
Natural sweet things are healthy (fruits are an example). Processed food where sugar was added to make it addictive is not. I would argue most pastries are not healthy but you can make them at home and remove 50% of the sugar if you really crave one.
For salt, I disagree. Normal humans don't need to add salt to a varied diet. Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
I like fruit. I like pastries. I eat plenty of fruit and the occasional small pastry. This is a perfectly healthy, balanced diet. Sure, I could choose to never eat pastries (or to eat pastries with half the sugar in), but the overall effect would be to lower my happiness.
Your approach strikes me as the sort of dietary absolutism that is actively damaging to public health.
The salt thing is a case in point. Perhaps it's theoretically true that we could all learn to enjoy our food with less salt. But this would be very hard, and I'm not convinced that an ordinary amount of salt is very damaging to health (except in the case of some specific health conditions that most people don't have).
But many schools in the UK take your approach: kids get taught to cook meals with no added salt (and also the bare minimum of fat). Everything they make therefore tastes bland and tedious.
The result? These kids don't learn to love cooking or home-cooked food. Instead, they learn that the way you eat food that tastes good is to order it from restaurants and fast food outlets. This is much more expensive and much less healthy than cooking at home using a reasonable amount of salt and fat, and it's a public health disaster.
It tastes bland because our taste buds have adjusted to our salt consumption. I eat with no added salt and my food tastes just fine since I adapted.
Over-salting is one of the causes of the most common way of dying. I couldn't say for sure because I don't go to restaurants a lot anymore, but it's not rare to see people salting their dishes without even tasting them beforehand.
I'm with you: salt and sugar are the scapegoats of a bad diet.
Then, in your opinion, what qualifies as a bad diet? You just removed the two biggest factors.
> Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
Salt was extremely valuable and thought after before it was broadly available. People always liked salt because it makes things taste better. The amount is a matter of habit and too much salt is unhealthy, but the general principle stands: a little salt is and always was tasty and healthy.
Your body does not need a lot of salt to function healthily.
Sure it makes everything tastier, but salt added to every dish is a danger to your health. Where I live you would get almost all your daily recommended intake by your usual portion of bread.
So, yes, salting your lunch or dinner will result in excess salt.
Too much sugar is unhealthy regardless of its source. It doesn't matter whether it's "naturally" occuring in fruits or not.
Drinking two liters of coke or two liters of orange juice will equally hurt you.
Well, the excess sugar will equally hurt you. But the orange juice gives you fibre, vitamins, etc. that the Coke doesn’t. So drink the orange juice.
Because it is waaaay easier to bully minorities, esp. in democracies? If you take something away from the majority, you run a huge risk of loosing in the next election...
> Not practically possible in regular democracies.
In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical? Not arguing, just curious.
>In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical?
Insane levels of homogeneous demographics and group think. Think like HOA or school board chock full o' Karens doing something wild. That's the kind of situation you'd need.
Benevolent dictatorship with a veneer of democracy? Or any system that does motivate pushing for long term actual solutions, not just chasing votes for next election cycle.
This makes me wonder, in democracies there are stuff you simply cannot ban. What is the solution?
Restriction of rights is a spectrum. For example, we know that driving cars carries some (very small) risk. If we banned driving, fewer people would die (from car related accidents). This must be balanced against individual rights and social outcomes. If we banned cars, how many people would lose their jobs? How many people would be unable to get to hospital? It's like that banning cars would cause more harm than lives it saves. This is an extreme scenario to illustrate not all bad things should be banned.
Smoking is more nuanced. For the most part (as long as public spaces and spaces with children are appropriately regulated), smokers hurt only themselves. In countries with public healthcare, this can increase care costs, but most studies now find that because smokers die much younger, their combined lifetime costs are actually lower. Old people are very expensive to care for. So the question becomes: to what degree do we want the state preventing people from hurting themselves? Where does that authority end? Alcohol? Sugar? Fatty foods? Less than eight hours of sleep? Not exercising? Too much TV and iPad? Social media? Not reading enough books? This is, IMHO, a slippery slope. For reasons of ideology and pragmatism, I do not support regulation for "victimless" activities, unless there are significant social costs/harm. This means I support legal tobacco, marijuana, MDMA, alcohol, and and many other drugs. I also support the right to partake in extreme sports, eating junk food and sugar, and not exercising.
The implications of this particular study are very difficult to morally and legally navigate. If smoking while young can make children age slightly faster, surely there is a moral imperative to prevent those who are 15 and younger from smoking? I believe that is the case in most of the West already. However we also know that parents who don't exercise and eat poorly also tend to pass along these habits to their children. Should we also ban parents from eating at McDonalds?
Generally, you discourage them with taxes or other restrictions. Most developed countries have very high taxes, and various legal restrictions, on tobacco, say. Many have high taxes on sugar.
There aren't really _that_ many things which fall into the "clearly harmful, but people won't give them up" category; tobacco, alcohol, sugar, maybe meat (this one can be, and has been incessantly, argued both ways to an extent), would be the big ones.
You can bann cigarettes for 18yo and under and then increase the age limit once a year by a year.
You really have to force it to get hooked on tobacco. Dunno how many would bother without convenient access.
Just tax them. Countries are already doing that.
Why do we need to ban them? If people want to smoke them, let them. The tax can take care of externalities.
(And I say that as someone who hates smoking.)
Australia has taxed cigarettes so much that a thriving black market has started that nobody seems interested in policing.
Alcohol appears to be going in the same direction.
Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find.
Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach.
Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
>Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find.
The taxation level that maximizes revenue or minimizes harmful noncompliance never satisfies the moralizing people who wanted the thing you're discussing (whatever it is) punitively taxed in the first place.
If your citizens are hooked on an addictive product, you can jack up the taxes.
Please check the earlier posts in the discussion you are commenting on.
Even if you have the most addictive substance on the planet, the black market puts an upper bound on how much you can tax it.
I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm saying the motivation isn't moral.
The externalities of smoking is cheaper healthcare because most smokers die of heart attack and stroke right around retirement age.
There's lots of different externalities. Eg smoking also produces smelly smoke.
Externalities also depend on context. Eg your example of cheaper healthcare only works when healthcare is priced by pooling payments. If you have a system where an actuary looks at each case individually (well, a system designed by an actuary does) and assigns a premium, then it doesn't matter what other people are doing: you are paying for your own risk (and competition between insurance providers keeps the system honest).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance for a corner of that insurance market that works on the latter system.
Even if you insist on pooling, you could pool smokers and non-smokers separately.
Granted in many places regulations force health insurance providers to do the naive pooling where your statement can be true. Similar, or even more so, for pensions.
Tax.
lace 1/100 (or some other number, 1/1000?) cigarettes with a lethal dose of cyanide
They hiked the taxes so high on cigarettes in Australia, they basically created a cigarette mafia. Look it up. It's out of control.
It's to do with complete lack of will to enforce. You can open a dodgy tobacconist shop, get shut down with a ridiculously low non-personal penalty, and open another one two doors down.
Funny thing is, in Australia it's been like that for a long time, black market cigarettes have been around for a lonnnggg time.
I always wonder about the heroin comparison. I just doesn't check out for me. Feels inappropriate. Heroin has pretty pronounced withdrawal symptoms, which are (AIUI) mostly physical withdrawal. At least from personal experience, nicotine withdrawal doesn't do anything to me. I just recently spent a day in an ICU, and had no craving at all. Same for longer smoking breaks, like a week or two. No craving. However, I sometimes miss the socialisation / being occupied thing, which is plain mental addiction. Maybe I am special in this regard, but I doubt it. Most "nervious" smokers I met were, IMO, "protesting" against the fact that they are currently not free to do what they wanted. You can hype yourself up a lot without actual physical reasons.
> You can hype yourself up a lot
It's likely that you're doing this to yourself by underselling your cravings. Presumably you came out of your ICU visit and began smoking again but you've lied to yourself about the reasons why. The physical aspect of nicotine addiction is extremely well documented.
I agree. I've never done heroin but I understand the withdrawal is absolutely horrible.
I stopped using nicotine this month. I've been using snus which is a Nordic product similar to chewing tobacco. You put it under your upper lip, the type I've been using has significantly more nicotine per dose than a cigarette. Like 2-4 times as much, 25mg per dose.
It was fine. The first day was pretty hard for me, I was sitting next to a lady who kept her snus box on her desk and I really wanted to bum one but didn't. Day two was a bit easier, day three easier still and after that I felt like I was done. I'm on day 16 now and hardly think about it any more.
It's strange because I've been using nicotine for almost two decades and I've been wanting to drop it for most of that time, even did drop it once but blundered and started again a year or so later. I've tried and failed to quit so many times, but the times that it's actually worked have always just felt like a state of mind difference. Like I didn't really want to quit the other times. When I really decide and all doubt is gone it's quite easy to quit. It's just hard to get to that state of mind and keep it.
My experience is that using a method allowing me to gradually lower the amount of nicotine I consume made stopping completely manageable and mostly painless.
Cravings come back when I'm under stress but it's fine. I know I will just stop again the same way I did before. It's made the whole thing guilt free for me which strangely makes cravings much more manageable than when I was beating myself trying to not restart.
Yeah that was my plan B, and I kind of did wean myself off using Oliver Twist chewing tobacco for a couple days. It has about 5mg per dose so much less than the snus I'd been using. Used that for 2 days then cold turkey.
The plan if I failed was to use nicotine patches of decreasing potency. I think you can get those in a sort of kit but I haven't actually found the kit as a product. Anyway the plan now is to just keep it up. I'll avoid alcohol for a while as it makes it more difficult.
I've never done heroin
It is delicious, a real delight. I'd happily become an addict if I could get a reliable reasonably-priced pharmaceutical-quality supply; but of course you can't, bloody puritans.
They do that in the UK - addicts for whom other options like methadone are ineffective can get heroin prescribed and I think it's free too.
A huge part of nicotine addiction is psychological compounded by physical symptoms.
There are certain genetic markers that can make it extremely hard to quit - nothing like you experienced.
I'm sure "smoking" here is a proxy for something else that provokes substance abuse. Cigarettes are surely easier to see than psychological conditions.
What are you basing this statement on?
I'd say 'reasonable conjecture', but elevating it to "I'm sure" is a bit much.
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I can confirm I was too smart for my age in my teens. And to make growing up even faster I smoked as well. Good times, kids these days have to vape as cigarettes are too expensive, not to mention cheap synth drugs.
The times were simpler, it’ll be much harder to do a similar study in the future due to the proliferation of new carcinogenic substances in food, drugs, drinks, etc. All in all we are healthier anyway.
N=892
The number of individuals whose parents smoked during puberty is probably very small given this n value. More research is needed in my humble opinion
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meaning? sample size?
More importantly: as far as I can tell, this is just observational. So they have no clue about correlation vs causation.
And how could you effectively design a study on this when secondhand smoking was practically inescapable up to 1990?
Where shall I even begin?
First, just because it's hard to disentangle correlation and causation, doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and just assume causation into existence.
Second, your objection would equally wreck a study that just looks at correlation only.
Third, presumably quantity matters, even if everybody is getting at least some secondhand smoke, that doesn't mean everyone is getting the same amount. The study found a way to measure this: they are looking at parental smoking, which presumably is connected with higher total amounts of secondhand smoke on average.
The problem with teasing out causation of A leading to B is that you need some mechanism that cuts of the possibilities of B causing A, and some third factor C causing both A and B. It's easiest to do that, if you know that A was caused by the coin flip of the researcher that put subjects into either treatment or control group. But there are other clever approaches, like 'natural designs'.
People may age faster if their mam read fake news during puberty
Or.... smoking may be indicative of people from poorer backgrounds, where health is generally lower. (cant say for sure, but thats the case where I am from)
Statistics 101: Correlation is not causation.
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They say I can live to be 100 years old if I give up all the things that make me want to live to be 100 years old.
It doesn't mean you live longer, it just seems like it.
You can eat salad everyday, never enjoy a drink and then die from some random shit in your 50s anyway. Sadly, I hear stories like that quite often.
I get it, this proves nothing, but I have plenty of people in my family who drank daily, chain smoked and lived until they were into their late 80s / 90s.
It's all probability, not guarantees.
Leading a healthy lifestyle increases your chances, eating like a pig decreases them.
Looking at the outliers and saying "See?! It's all a lie!" is like looking at a lottery winner and concluding that lottery tickets are a sound investment.
What's interesting is the people who are "unfit" and especially obese seem to fair the worst.
Most of the people I spoke of, drank and smoked a lot, but also active to very active, and exercised regularly even in their 80s. Swimming, walking, playing tennis, yard work, gardening. They all seemed to share these things in common.
Being Obese and sedentary seems to be a dangerous undertaking.
I think you may have hit on something there.
Grandpa gave up cigarettes at age 75 or so. Only made it another ten years.
Could outwork teenage me at age 75.
My dad used this argument to justify his smoking/drinking and convince my mom. She died of cancer way too early. Stop for a second and think 'maybe it's asshole behavior' trying to do the same justification to random people on the internet.
Or were involuntarily conscripted in a war of empire and exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam leading to spina bifida and ADHD.
Um, what does that have to do with the topic? Yes, people die of environmental exposure to things. This is about a specific exposure, at a specific age period.