I’d be with you if second and third hand smoke wasn’t a thing. And also if I didn’t just kick nicotine a month back for causing severe pain in my hands and wrists.
The theory that when you smoke, the nicotine binds to surfaces the smoke touches, causing cancer to anyone who comes near surfaces that nicotine has touched.
It was a "truth" run around in the 80s as we were discovering the nature of radiation, so lots of war on drug "research" papers got published functionally saying nicotine and radiation are the same thing.
I mean, nicotine does saturate things when you smoke in an enclosed area. It’s impossible to paint over the stained walls of a smoker’s house without chemically stripping them first, because all the accumulated tar will just seep through the paint and leave brown stains. There’s no way that shit’s healthy.
Normally I'd agree, but cigarettes in particular are a product that is designed to be as addictive as possible with a laundry list of negative health impacts and virtually zero positive ones. Combine that with the fact that you aren't just putting it in your body but the body of anyone within breathing distance of you, there's a strong case to be made for banning them outright.
Put it another way, if cigarettes are legal then marijuana, LSD, MDMA, and a whole host of other drugs should be legal too.
Cigarettes != tobacco. Tobacco is an ingredient in cigarettes, and not the only one, not by a long shot. Literally dozens of additives are included in cigarettes, many of which are designed to make them more addictive.
Secondly, modern tobacco absolutely was "made" the way it is, first through selective breeding and then genetic modification to (among other things) increase Nicotine content. Much in the same way that modern weed is far stronger than the stuff grown 50 years ago, so too is tobacco.
Combine that with the fact that you aren’t just putting it in your body but the body of anyone within breathing distance of you,
That’s part of responsible use. I’m ok with only letting smokers smoke in specialty ventilated & filtered areas. Easy for me to say, I don’t smoke. But if any adult wants to make an informed decision to, that should be their choice.
Put it another way, if cigarettes are legal then marijuana, LSD, MDMA, and a whole host of other drugs should be legal too.
Black people tend to primarily smoke menthol, disproportionate to other races. I’m too lazy to link, but you can Google it and find studies pretty easily.
Because African American smokers tend to favor menthol over other types of cigarettes.
“In the 1950s, less than 10% of Black smokers used menthol cigarettes. Today, after decades of tobacco industry targeting, that number is 85%. Menthol cigarettes continue to be heavily advertised, widely available and priced cheaper in Black communities."
That logic doesn’t flow, though. You need to compare number of current illegal users vs number of users before it was illegal.
Have you heard of the US prohibition on alcohol? It’s a pretty famous counterexample to your argument showing that it absolutely does not reduce usage.
Maybe not for other laws, but it makes sense for drugs. The important thing is that people should have the right to breathe non-poisonous air, and forcing smokers to hide their smoking achieves that.
This ban is on the sale of menthol infused cigarettes. It wouldn’t criminalize smoking menthols and there’s plenty of other ways to infuse cigarettes with menthol or buy a synthetic alternative.
If your point is at all that this prohibition would in any way, shape, or form help fulfill that goal, that is incorrect.
I’ve read the comment chain, it just seemed like you were implying that this ban would achieve some kind of beneficial outcome.
It’s fine if I’m wrong, that’s okay. I’ll take that loss. That’s not my point. I just think this ban has no positive effects whatsoever and I’m just hoping people realize that if true.
This apparently is an objectionable point to bring up… not sure if your downvotes are the “all or nothing” aspect, or the spotlighting of the blatant racist aspect, but it seems people don’t want to see this at face value :/
I’m with you though. The selective targeting is wrong. Equal ban or no ban is the right position to take IMHO.
I down voted it because I don’t think the government should ban substances. Not cigarettes, not alcohol, not marijuana, not psychedelics, and probably not a bunch of other drugs too. The government’s job is not to play mommy and daddy for a nation of adults. Our citizens are entirely too eager to strip away their own liberty these days.
The specific ban in question on this particular post isn’t a general matter though… it’s targeting minorities…
That kinda makes it a moot point in my opinion on wether or not prohibition is appropriate in general, because regardless of where you fall on the matter of bans or liberties, the specificity of the intended targets is wildly inappropriate, because it’s racist/homophobic, so I kinda disregarded the last point they made entirely :)
I spent half my life legally smoking tobacco and illegally smoking weed.
I moved a quarter of a country away for the mental health of legally smoking tobacco and legally smoking weed.
I WILL NOT be dragged back into a life where one of my vices give me crippling fear of imprisonment.
Get off your fucking high horse. Mind your own fucking business. Stop asserting your will over others. Live your own fucking life. Let me live my fucking life.
I’m glad I live in a country with universal healthcare. Your point is made completely erroneous by the fact that everyone’s taxes are paying for your cancer treatment. This “fuck you i’ll do what i want” mentality is literally antisocial conservative garbage.
So, the team that I’m seeing at Brigham & Women’s in Boston has a testing protocol called invasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing or iCPET, which involves putting a tube into a large vein in the neck, putting a heart catheterization through that, then putting a tube in an artery in the wrist. This allows monitoring and comparison of blood pressures inside the heart vs. outside the heart as well as comparison sampling of arterial blood vs. venous blood. In addition to this, they apply EKG heart monitoring and respiratory monitoring via a gadget you hold in your mouth and breathe through. With all this insanity in place, they put you on an exercise bike until you can’t stand it anymore.
What they find on this test is a combination of two things. First, the pressures inside the ventricles of the heart do not increase in response to increased physical activity the way that they should. “Low ventricular filling pressure caused by preload failure.” And second, the DEoxygenated blood returning to the heart has too much oxygen in it, indicating poor oxygen uptake on a cellular level, which they hypothesize is caused by mitochondrial problems.
The treatments include a drug called pyridostygmine, which increases acetylcholine neurotransmitter to increase autonomic nervous system response to physical activity (and therefore increase blood return to the heart). Or a drug called midodrine, which also supports blood pressure. Plus supplements to support mitochondrial function like CoQ10, creatine, and ALCAR.
I’m not cured and back to where I was prior to getting sick by any means, but I’m able to hold down a full time job, which prior to treatment I most definitely would not have been able to.
Thank you very much for your answer. Very interesting therapies they are testing and I’ll have a look if there are similar studies done here in Germany. I wish you all the best for your future and really hope, that they will find a way to completely treat it.
Thanks for the well wishes. Also last year I participated in a clinical trial with this same team at the Brigham. The drug trialed there is called bocidelpar. It targets a mitochondrial receptor called PPAR-δ. We’re still waiting on the results of that trial to be released and it’s probably a good 3-5 years away from FDA approval in the US if all goes well. So here’s hoping for the best
Vz.58s don’t normally have wood grain to speak of, the furniture is made of Bakelite that has wood shavings mixed in. Commonly called “beaver barf”. That is what is in the opening picture.
I’m an otherwise pretty healthy person who gets knocked out by anything respiratory. My entire life, ever since I was a kid, if I get a cold, the flu, anything, it’s going to be weeks to months of feeling terrible. I always hated how casual everyone around me was with their illness, like oh, it’s just a cold, yeah, well that cold is going to have me unable to sleep for the next 2 weeks and feeling generally awful for at least the next 2 after that, so please wash your hands after you sneeze on them. Twice now I’ve had the flu and taken over 4 months to recover and stop feeling like my lungs were filling with fluid every time I did any type of exercise.
My daughter is in a similar situation. It’s very frustrating to take her to some kids event and have kids around who are coughing and sniffling. I get it, it’s minor and they want to enjoy this event. But if my daughter gets sick, she’ll be nigh incapacitated for the next week or two by this “minor illness”. That “light cough” will have her coughing so hard that she vomits. She’s basically relegated to laying around and reading or watching TV. It makes school tough and is a fairly large part of why we homeschool.
Ugh, that sucks. I suspect I have some underlying condition because whenever I actually stop being lazy and do cardio like running I’ll cough for days afterwards. I love running and used to run almost daily but got sick of constantly having a runner’s cough. But all my medical checkups have been great and I feel like if I complain about the fact that when I get sick it takes forever to recover and cough when I exercise it’s going to be too vague of a complaint for them to do anything about or care.
Heh, that was the first symptom that got me on my very long road to diagnosis. I would cough after strenuous exercise and sex. But that was it. I didn't smoke or engage in anything that should cause a cough, I was young, etc. Took a looong time before I finally saw a pulmonologist who could recognize bronchiectasis on a CT, which I apparently had already had for years at that point. Bronchiectasis, in relatively young people, is almost exclusively caused by cystic fibrosis, so that got the ball rolling on the long path to diagnosis.
Some doctors may not like to know that they are your second opinion or third opinion, but it kind of saved me continuing to go to different doctors.
Not to say that you have anything so serious. It's extremely unlikely that you do. In fact, the most common cause of a mysterious cough is post nasal drip, if I recall correctly. I just think that people are less aware of these sorts of possibilities than they ought to be. I literally laughed when my pulmonologist first suggested I might have CF.
Edit: to be a little more helpful, you might want to try something like an Aerobika flutter device and/or a nebulizer (you'd need a prescription). They're good for helping to clear out the lungs, and you don't need to have some sort of special condition to use them.
Wow, this is interesting! I really need to stop brushing it off and actually do something about it, but it’s just so much easier to ignore things sometimes :)
They’ve already banned menthol in California and it did nothing. Alternatives are already being marketed and sold and some of the better ones recreate the exact same effect but cost $1.20 more per pack at the low end. To put it simply, this is dumb as fuck.
This way smokers have to pay more so the demand will decrease, tobacco industry gets less money, and the economic burden on public health and environment can be financed with the additional tax income.
Addicts will always find a way to justify their addiction. Price of smokes goes up? Welp, looks like Ol Johnny Blacklungs is going to buy less food this month.
So we shouldn’t tax cigarettes then? It sounds like you’ve identified that addiction can quickly become a public health crisis if wealth inequality could cause addicts to choose their vice over food. We could fund programs to help addicts get help, but we would need to raise tax revenue.
If the government insists on high rates of taxation for the reason that the product has a high potential for harm, then shouldn’t the use of that tax revenue be mostly, if not entirely, re-directed towards harm reduction programs around that substance or product? How can anyone possibly argue any other use for that revenue? When the revenue generated by ‘sin taxes’ is used for other unrelated purposes, they are effectively exploiting the users by recognizing that they will continue to be a source of revenue because the product is habit forming or addictive. The last time I checked on the revenue generated by tobacco taxes, only ~11% was spent on harm-reduction programs related to tobacco use and the remaining 89% was just paying for other government projects totally unrelated to tobacco.
To suggest that the solution is to further raise the taxation rates rather than properly allocating the current revenue is immoral and illogical IMHO.
There’s a reason why people tend to hit rock bottom before they finally kick their drug addiction. If they don’t have the means, they will attempt to find it. Your logic is flawed, and only serves to disproportionately impair the poor while bolstering the very industry you fight.
How the fuck do you hit rock bottom solely on nicotine?
Tobacco, the main ingredient in cigarettes, is more addictive than meth. If you can imagine somebody hitting rock bottom on meth then it should be easy enough to wrap your head around it. Especially when cigarettes contain added chemicals to make it more addictive than tobacco alone.
Also, I would be inclined towards believing that the habit is mostly spread through peers. Price as a barrier to entry wouldn’t be effective at preventing peer pressure if they’re your first supplier.
To clarify, the addictiveness of nicotine ≠ the addictiveness of tobacco. Even aside from the additives used by the tobacco industry, tobacco naturally contains an array of MAO inhibitors and other compounds that work in harmony with nicotine causing it to be far more addictive than nicotine itself. Pure nicotine is much farther down the scale of addictiveness, classed as a “weak reinforcer” in studies.
If you are interested in the subject, I highly recommend reading the studies and posts by Maryka Quik, director of the Neurodegenerative Diseases Program at SRI International. I first found out about her in an interesting article published in Scientific American — LINK.
Okay thanks, but we are talking about tobacco. I understand that I messed up the terminology, but why are you replying this to me and not the one that is denying it?
Edit: Wait…you do know that cigarettes contain tobacco right?
…why are you replying this to me and not the one that is denying it?
I repied to you because of your reply to Jake_Farm. Jake_Farm stated:
How the fuck do you hit rock bottom solely on nicotine?
To which you responded:
It’s more addictive than meth. If you can imagine somebody hitting rock bottom on meth then it should be easy enough to wrap your head around it. Especially when cigarettes contain added chemicals to make it more addictive than nicotine alone.
By inference you are claiming that nicotine is more addictive than meth and I’m just pointing out that isn’t correct — you can’t use tobacco and nicotine interchangeably in discussions, whether talking about addictiveness, harm, or just about any aspect of their short and long terms effects. The addictiveness is drastically different, the cardiovascular effects are vastly different, the effects on lung function are vastly different.
To your credit, the overall conversation is about tobacco and I should have clarified that my point applies to everyone in this conversation who is talking about nicotine and tobacco in the same breath.
Yeah I definitely flubbed the terms, but if you extrapolate what I’m saying it should be obvious I was talking about tobacco. And I feel like the people in this conversation are so eager to hate on me that they’ll just incorrectly use this as evidence that I’m wrong lol
No hate or downvotes from me, sorry if it seems that way. Perhaps it’s my current mood or imagination, but the Lemmy crowd seems a bit more reactionary and prone to strongly worded dismissive comments than Reddit.
I’m also seeing a lot more downvoting of comments here that don’t seem all that controversial. I’d rather hear why someone disagrees with a post than the rush to silently downvote, but I can’t control that either. People are wound up these days.
I completely agree. This is not even a subject that I’m particularly educated on and I’m still waiting for a single substantiated defeator for my opinions on the topic to change my mind.
Then you look at the downvotes and you’d think that you missed a comment that disproved your statement(s).
Okay so here we are speculating about this, but there’s data on this isn’t there? Is it not the case that countries who tax tobacco more have all but eliminated it? I’m not well versed on the subject, but I think it’s a bit silly to just pull this out of your ass as if it were fact. Here’s a link to an ncbi article that talks about it. I’m sure there’s plenty more out there to show one way or the other, so I’m interested to know whether you have anything to back up your stance.
Being that dependent on a substance suggests that practical decision-making and rational thinking, such as adding motivation to quit through price, is certainly not going to be the most effective way to reduce dependency while also further harming those that fail to break their dependency.
Edit: Also I just want to point out, again, that I was never referring to tax. From what I saw there’s not enough conclusive data for me to form an opinion one way or the other on the effectiveness of increasing tobacco tax . All of my comments are about this ridiculously assanine ban, or the increased prices that come as a result of this ban.
This is effectively a Pigouvian tax, and will absolutely keep some people from smoking.
Also higher prices do not necessarily mean the industry is making more money. Far more likely, given the saturation of competition, that they simply cost more to make.
Don’t forget a lot of the cost of a pack of smokes is often more due to taxation than the cost of the product, even if you include things likes all the overhead for marketing and legal and shit.
Would you like a citation on what Pigouvian taxes are, how the cigarette industry is flooded with competition, or that putting further regulations on products makes them more expensive to produce?
I assumed you could Google any of these but I can do it for you. Fair warning, you’ll be getting a “let me Google that for you” link.
Not one of these facts is even remotely controversial so my mind is a bit boggled that you’d even try to contest any of them
That’s not how capitalism works. If the tobacco industry could raise prices and get more money today, they would. Since they haven’t, you have to assume that any increased taxes or burden on them will reduce their profits.
Yes, it might increase prices to the end consumer, because the demand curve will change when the costs change. But that doesn’t mean the tobacco industry is making any more money. If it did, they would already charge more.
“That guy happened to tangentially mention tax so you must’ve been talking about tax, herp derp”
Edit: Is it really that hard to figure out that I started this whole thread in reference to the topic of prohibition as the title suggests? I’m not talking about taxes. I never mentioned taxes. I don’t care that anyone else is talking about taxes.
Prohibition has no net effect on demand, it simply enables black markets. Alcohol use after Prohibition was not higher than pre-prohibition, but did rise to the same levels fairly quickly.
Supply and demand do not have an inverse relationship. Demand exists, and when supply exceeds demand, prices fall. When supply does not meet demand, prices rise. You understand they are related but forgot the actual curve on the graph. Supply and demand can both be low, for instance, as is the case with mega yachts. Supply and demand have no direct effect on one another, though low supply does tend to encourage firms to increase supply to try to compete and meet the demand.
Data during prohibition is irrelevant to this specific discussion, because your claim is that demand goes up when goods are prohibited, which is false, as I showed with my link
I don’t believe you have actually taken Econ 101, given the things Ive seen you say here.
Thanks for proving my point for me. I appreciate it.
Your link shows an estimate of alcohol consumption during prohibition based on mortality, but there is. Zero. Accurate. Data. of alcohol consumption during the prohibition.
The important part of that link was not during prohibition, which is irrelevant, because regardless of demand the number of people with access to alcohol was lower, but rather that after prohibition, usage rates did not surpass pre-prohibition levels.
When supply does not meet demand, prices rise
This is not an inverse relationship between supply and demand. The supply is not affecting the demand, which is what “inverse relationship” requires.
Very reliable. Strip clip loading into (fixed and detachable) magazines was common in WW2. The Vz. 58 is unusual for carrying on the feature into the assault rifle era.
Yes, this is still the ideal way to refill magazines. Though the unique part of the Vz.58 is being able to refill with the clips directly into the rifle, rather than detaching the magazine to refill them. The rifle has a built in clip guide.
Perhaps I’ll show off a handheld 5.56mm clip guide at some point.
You may already know but just to add to things, they were extremely common because machining tolerances weren’t quite there yet to make cheap reliable interchangable magazines. Even once they were starting to be designed to be interchangable soldiers would still need to find a particular magazine that works reliably in their specific weapon. Stripper clips were far cheaper to make and while not quite as fast as changing a mag in a modern firearm but once you are used to it it’s not that big of a disadvantage.
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