Alcohol has gourmet attributes and is a good social lubricant. The question is more around whether those two attributes warrant ingesting what is essentially poison.
I don't think I've ever heard a cigarette smoker comment on the taste of their cigarette (cigars are the exception here) and the high, especially for regular smokers, is near non-existent. So for cigarettes the initial appeal is much less obvious.
I'd assume most people start smoking due to social pressure/trying to fit in.
Alcohol is regarded as lowering inhibitions, which allows people to express themselves honestly and break down boundaries while returning to the normal social order the next day.
While alcohol does lower inhibitions, it is generally only acceptable after work or at the odd outing/party. A smoke break is acceptable during work and might be the only time different departments and levels from management to floor workers interact on a day to day basis.
Not responding as an argument, just to share my perspective (as I’m holding a lit cigarette in my hand).
I’ve definitely described the flavor of my cigarettes. I switched to my current brand because I liked the flavor more than my previous brand, which I described as having no flavor (and of course it did, just not flavor I found offputting), which was preferable to previous brands I’d smoked. I’m leaving out brand names here mostly because this is a way we reinforce our addiction and I don’t want to give anyone inspiration to try something else.
I have only once smoked to address social pressure. I was 12 at the time, I hated it, no one pressured further. When I started smoking of my own volition, I was 15. I did it privately out of curiosity because I was terribly bored. I didn’t like it, then I did it out of habit. It happened like that.
A lot of my smoking friends preferred one brand over an other and even refused to smoke some brands. But I wouldn't classify that as being 'gourmet' in the same way as alcohol is.
A similar example is mineral water:
I have preferences around which mineral water I drink. I even dislike waters very high in minerals and will only have them if there is no choice. But in the end water is just something I drink to satisfy a physical craving; it is not something I will consume as part of a gourmet experience (although some 'artisan waters' have tried to market themselves that way...).
You won't hear many smokers say things like: "OMG have you tried the new XYZ cigarettes? The subtle flavours of tar and nicotine are just to die for!" (and the same is true for water)
There's also no 'craft cigarettes' market, or cigarette tasting tours and whatnot.
My dad smoked through my entire childhood. I don't like the smell of stale cigarette smoke, but smoke drifting from a lit cigarette smells good to me, and reminds me of being around my dad as a kid.
Smoking is magnitudes more addictive than alcohol. Regardless, a lot of people do ask why anyone would drink alcohol, given that it offers up an enormous array of detrimental health effects, the possibility of addiction and social troubles (DUI, violence, etc), and as a mental "holiday" altered state is an incredibly poor mechanism.
Alcohol hangs around because it was accessible in earlier eras. There will come a time, I suspect in the very near future, when it will look ridiculous. Where having a `drink' will be an anachronism.
Virtually everyone who smokes for any reasonable duration will become addicted and almost all do so enough to substantially effect their health and longevity whether they know it or not. Most of the people who consume alcohol do so casually and not to excess.
Essentially the chance of dying in a given year due to alcohol if this were anything like a random chance is around 1 in 2000 whereas the chance of dying from smoking is around 1 in 77.
This is something like the difference in danger in riding a motorcycle 100 miles and base jumping.
Of course its not random at all whereas taking up smoking is extremely likely to result in becoming a life long smoker and suffering the average ill effects its perfectly possible for most people to enjoy a sane amount of alcohol infrequently.
Consumption of intoxicants of some variety seems to have been a feature of humanity for the entirety of human history. The expulsion of smoker from reasonable things to be in human society has only happened after we realized its predictable massive effect on human health. There just will never be the same impetus with alcohol.
>Virtually everyone who smokes for any reasonable duration will become addicted and almost all do so enough to substantially effect their health and longevity whether they know it or not.
This sounds right enough, but can you cite your sources for it?
> At least 61 per cent of people who try their first cigarette become, at least temporarily, daily smokers, suggests an analysis of survey data by Queen Mary University of London.
This is actually stronger than the original statement. A substantial minority who even try smoking become smokers.I think it ought to be considered a given that people who smoke are physiologically addicted to nicotine. Having many relatives who smoke currently or have in the past. Smoking in America has been so pervasive that most of us likely have direct knowledge of smoking by either smoking having family members who smoke.
To clarify imagine a funnel. In step one 61% who try smoking become daily smokers. In step two some percentage n of those who become daily smokers become addicted to smoking.
Virtually everyone who smokes for any reasonable duration will become addicted is a statement about step two and asserting that n is somewhere near 100% based on knowing a plethora of smokers, hearing about how smoking effected them, and watching their struggles to quit and reading about the physiological effects of smoking. It isn't a very scientific analysis and I'm open to more clear numbers if you have them.
61% seems strange to me. It's anecdotal but almost (more than 95%) all my friends in university tried at least once, and yet only roughly 15% became smokers.
Trying a cigarette once is something that is very very common, at least in France.
In 2014 34% of the french smoked I think it is down to around 27% but e-cigarette use is up so part of the decline might be down to that.
Going to the other end percentage who have tried smoking. This is harder to pin down because tobacco use by youth is illegal and its hard to ask kids to be honest about breaking the law even when its supposed to be anonymous. It looks like between 20%-30% self report trying tobacco in school here and in France although I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this was substantially wrong. Not as wrong as 95% is though.
I suspect you like most people don't really closely associate with enough people from your school days to be called a useful sample, you don't actually know how many of them tried nicotine products, and you don't know how many of them ultimately spent some of their life smoking. What you have tried to do is make a rough estimate of how many people you know and tried to bring to mind the ones you had seen smoking.
It's not shocking that a large portion of people that try a very addictive and at one time socially acceptable drug have gone on to become addicted.
Not OP, but this is one study I have came across, which postulates that cigarette addiction is quick to develop, and doesn't take years of smoking to develop.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444329/
From the abstract:
New research has overturned the dogma that cigarette
addiction takes years to develop. Studies of adolescent
smokers show that symptoms of addiction, such as
withdrawal, craving for cigarettes and failed attempts at
quitting, can appear within the first weeks of smoking.
To account for these findings, scientists have developed
a new theory positing that the brain quickly develops
adaptations that counter the effects of nicotine. These
adaptations lead to withdrawal symptoms when the effects
of nicotine wear off. The results highlight the
importance of boosting government funding for antismoking
campaigns, particularly those aimed at youngsters.
The author of the paper (Joseph R.DiFranza, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, USA.) wrote in May-2008 issue of Scientific Americanhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/2008/05-01/
outlining his research findings.
The article Hooked from the first cigarette in this issue isn't available online, but if you are subscriber of SciAm checkout this issue.
The question is... what is a sane amount of alcohol? It’s surprisingly carcinogenic. It’s just the alcohol industry, much like the tobacco industry of yesteryear, has successfully suppressed this info.
That's already been tried before, and it resulted in the US government deliberately poisoning people, widespread organised crime, and a lot of methanol poisoning.
Turns out it's really hard to ban something you can make in a 20 gallon drum from yeast and sugar.
The decline in smoking has absolutely been accompanied and/or caused by a massive array of state coercion, from requiring all their advertising to prominently state "THIS WILL KILL YOU" to limiting who's allowed to sell it to banning it in almost all public spaces. (Which isn't even mentioning the "softer" approaches of massive state-funded PR campaigns against it.)
It seems quite likely that absent all of these, smoking would still be as popular as it ever was.
Alcohol has enormous benefits over smoking and has pretty much been in hand for the entirety of civilization.
If people drink like a normal smoker smokes its considered a problem. If your having a couple morning drinks and taking shot breaks at work people would view that as extreme, yet that was/is a norm for smokers.
The thing is that its not so much explicitly smoking, but cigarettes that are the major problem. Cigarettes have so many additives and distort the natural tobacco to enhance the addiction that they themselves create the bulk of the smoking related issues. Using a natural tobacco product at the same frequency as normal / social drinking wouldn't have nearly the terrible health impacts as what happens to typical cigarette smokers and would likely be seen in a similar vein were it not for the negative attention brought on by cigarettes.
> Alcohol hangs around because it was accessible in earlier eras. There will come a time, I suspect in the very near future, when it will look ridiculous. Where having a `drink' will be an anachronism
Why do you think this? It seems an extremely puritan outlook, I'm a bit sceptical that puritanism is saleable without enforcement of society-wide religious norms. Smoking, sure, but smoking is not at all like alcohol consumption.
Given that I think cannabis, MDMA, pyslocybin and other drugs are far superior to alcohol, I don't think most people would categorize my beliefs as puritanical. If anything it's puritanical "old ways" beliefs that keeps alcohol as the primary drug despite an enormous array of extreme negatives.
I understand where you're coming from, but I feel like this ignores practicality and, coupled to that, social use. You can go on numbers related to health, or raw effectiveness, but those numbers don't measure practicality.
MD, mushrooms (and acid et al) are far too powerful (yes, you can take very small doses, but in general). To look at it coldly, they're just not at all practical, regardless of them having, I would say, far fewer direct negative health effects. Indirectly though, things that immediately change people's mental state to such a degree are I would say more dangerous than alcohol.
With alcohol, I can go and have a small amount with family or friends or colleagues, for a short period of time. I can do it home, with a meal. And the actual drinking of it is core. It's not like taking one the above drugs: I take the drug then I am mentally altered to a large degree, possibly for a long period of time. In the case of a selfish drug, like cocaine or an amphetamine, I can function, and the effects a shorter, but there's no social aspect. The actual sitting down with others to spend time imbibing is central.
Cannabis obviously has this in common, so I think that's a very fair comparison. And just to stay on topic, so does tobacco. It's not just the effect of the drug that's attractive, it's [what I think is fair to say is] the social ritual associated with it. It helps that taking those isn't quick (it's not just slipping a pill), that's a feature.
> Smoking is magnitudes more addictive than alcohol.
No it is not magnitudes more addictive. Alcohol is extremely addictive, 1 in 12 Adults in the US has an alcohol problem [1] and withdrawal can literally kill you, unlike nicotine.
1 in 12 adults had met the criteria for abuse or dependence at some point. 1 in 12 aren't present drinking themselves to death and it is highly likely that this figure that has gone up substantially has more to do with our screwed up society and less with the properties of alcohol.
Notably 90% of Americans have drank alcohol at some point without becoming addicts which one can't be said of nicotine.
I was looking at the wrong article there was a clickbaity article in Washington Post that 12% of Americans were alcoholics which is based on a based on
National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions-III (NESARC-III) which is about your entire life and I got my wires crossed.
1 in 12 being 6% seems fairly accurate and supportable
Your other points aside (I agree, they should probably at least include some citations to their statistics), this article is from 2015, so I don't think anyone is making it about 2020/covid other than you.
I understood and was pointing that out (given that GP appeared to be insinuating things about 2020, but to be clear the list of one-sided talking points you posted puts no effort into citing sources for its "facts", so the technicalities of the 12% number (what qualifies as abuse, for how long, etc) are left for the reader to interpret.
I got 12% and 1 in 12 and the
National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions-III survey which IS your entire life mixed up in my head and was arguing that point not about 2020 specifically.
Your stats in absolutely no way counters my claim about addiction.
Almost everyone who smokes to any degree becomes addicted and a regular user. Tens (100 million+) of millions of Americans drink occasionally with no addiction.
Alcohol is a dangerous drug in every dimension, and I specifically said that. But their addiction profiles are dramatically different.
This is an absolutely ridiculous claim given the number of people I know who've had a first cigarette and not touched a second. Business Insider claims 76% of the population have smoked and 24% have become addicted, while 92% have consumed alcohol and 14% have become addicted[0]. That's nowhere near "almost everyone", it's 31%, and 15% for alcohol.
Addiction rates are lower than people think; heroin, even, is lower than you'd assume (the rate I remember seeing was about 25%, in-line with nicotine).
Of course, 1/4 is still a HUGE amount of people, and an absolute health crisis.
I think there's an important difference to make, I know a lot of people who have smoked once or a few times and have not become addicted but I don't know anyone who smoked regularly and didn't become addicted.
On the other hand for alcohol, I know a lot of people who will have a glass of wine whenever they go to a nice restaurant yet are not addicted.
So there's a magnitude of difference. Nicotine is significantly more addictive for anyone who uses it semi regularly whereas alcohol is not as addictive in that case.
"given the number of people I know who've had a first cigarette and not touched a second"
Okay, now exclude people who did that as children, an experience after which they had zero access to cigarettes. That same survey if demanding an adult experience would be much, much closer.
Everyone has a "Jimmy lit up a smoke and I took a drag and coughed my guts out when I was 9" story.
Overwhelmingly people either had a problem smoking (one that they had to quit through extreme effort), or they never smoked cigarettes at all as adults.
The one "exception" I can recall is a "social" smoker who would tell everyone that she controlled it by only smoking when she drank/at social events, a consequence of which was that she sought drinking opportunities at every venue. She was a problem smoker that turned it into also being a problem drinker.
I've smoked tobacco on somewhere between 5 and 15 occasions over a decade since becoming an adult, but I didn't become a daily smoker or addicted to smoking. Am I just an extreme outlier?
I'm some kind of introvert, if i hang out with people, my social "battery" drains and i get tired. I smoke because it gives me much more time before my social "battery" is empty. I don't smoke otherwise.
A person would usually smoke more than one cigarette at an outing, so its more acute than chronic, I'd assume. Not sure what impact that would have in terms of health differences, but in terms of addiction potential it definitely would.
> Your stats in absolutely no way counters my claim about addiction.
There is no standardized addiction metric. The product, the dosage, age of user, and social habits matter significantly. Alcohol is extremely addictive and habit forming it kills 95,000 people a year in the US. I think it is disingenuous to dismiss it is as orders of magnitude less addictive than nicotine.
Most people can smoke a Cigar without becoming addicted to nicotine and a regular user. In the same way most people who are exposed to alcohol in the US don't get addicted.
I used to smoke occasionally. Only when I was drinking, as a matter of fact. I never became a regular smoker. I also don't smoke at all anymore, even when drinking.
To get physiologically addicted to alcohol, one has to drink heavily every day for a year or so. Few people, especially people with college education, do that. One can drink a glass of wine or a cocktail every weekend for life, and form no addiction at all. Such a person can go dry for weeks or months, without any adverse effects.
Nicotine forms a physiological addiction much faster, and then the addict has to have a fix daily, several times. So the exposure to nicotine (which is mildly toxic in the quantities needed) and smoke (which is way more dangerous, and hits the lungs directly) is much more intense and sustained.
One of my friends gave up smoking for exactly a year on a whim, celebrated his success with a cigar, I think largely to rub it in the faces of people who struggled to quit - after a few months smoking again he packed it in permanently. So it doesn't have a strong hold on everybody. A few of my friends reduced their smoking to just a cigar once in a while, others moved to vaping, it is disheartening that then going from vaping to nothing seems to be not really a thing, but at least the vaping doesn't smell atrocious and seems less immediately likely to kill them.
I'd say many people can drink more than that without dependency. I have a whiskey most evenings, but if I run out, I don't have any problems. Sometimes I'll go days or weeks without a drink, just depending on what else is going on.
It is quite simple: someone is offered a cigarette, and they accept. And they have some more, and it is pleasant and social and/or stress relieving (both in ritual and physically: warm smoke in the mouth and throat is pleasant, as is the slight buzz, as is the act). This will often happen at a young age (teens, early twenties), within social settings. And then the addiction and ritual are the thing, and that thing is extremely satisfying. If you do not and have never smoked, then this will seem stupid, and it is, that would be a completely fair assessment: it is unlikely that any smoker will recommend that you become a smoker. Note that many people who give up smoking will replace it with an equally pointless (albeit generally much, much healthier) addiction/crutch that gives a mild buzz and requires some ritual habits (running, for example).
