A tobacco addiction works by screwing with your brain's ability to perceive pleasure. The result is that most cigarette smokers do not get pleasure added to their lives by tobacco. It's just that they need to keep smoking just to keep getting themselves back up to feeling normal.

With the amount of caffeine addicts in the world I'm surprised at the hostility towards nicotine.

Similarly, people are much more against caffeine in the form of sugary energy drinks than caffeine in the form of tea, because energy drinks are bad for you while tea is moderately good for you on the whole.

I'm a smoker myself (quit a few times, for periods up to a year, I will quit again, but damn that addiction is going to chase me for life).

I'm not "vehemently" opposed to e-cigs, but I don't like them either. When they first appeared, I saw a few friends switch to e-cigs, and considered perhaps getting one for myself. But after a week or two, every single one of them "cheated" and occasionally smoked a real cigarette, citing that it just wasn't really the same. By now, nearly all of them have switched back to smoking real cigarettes.

Then I realized, e-cigs just keep the cravings and addiction going. I knew I wanted to quit, and quit for real. For me personally, from experience, only the first week or so of quitting is the hardest, after that the craving subsides (for some people this takes longer). Then comes the period where you're really happy you're no longer a smoker, feel cleaner, smell more things (not always good, but very worth it, and sign of progress). Then comes the long stretch where you just need to never, ever smoke a cigarette again, for the rest of your life. Because even just smoking one, after half a year, weakens that resolve, and I should consider myself "on notice" for at least a couple of weeks, because the threshold for smoking another one becomes so much lower, and before you know I'm back at step 0. It's (for me) not particularly hard on the day-by-day basis, it's the part that you can't ever give in to it again, for the rest of your life, that makes it hard to keep up.

That's why I don't like e-cigs. For someone who is really addicted, it just keeps the door open to fall back to regular cigarettes any time, because you don't do anything about the habit and nicotine addiction, you just make it less unhealthy as long as you stick to e-cigs only.

The only positive thing I have gained from smoking, is learning what addiction really means, therefore understanding other people's addictions better, and decidedly staying away from other addictive substances.

One of the more interesting bits of trivia about nicotine and caffeine is it is the mode of delivery that makes nicotine so addictive. If you smoked caffeine it would be as addictive as nicotine. Given we now have vaping it should be possible to smoke caffeine - I haven’t looked, but I would not be surprised if someone out there is selling smokable caffeine.

Yes, but it's worth noting that the increased risk of heart disease from smoking is due to more than just nicotine.

It in not only smoke that is harmful as people who chew tobacco suffer an increase in mouth cancer. While vaping should have a lower risk than smoking, it is not risk free. Since it is so new we won’t know for sometime how dangerous it is.

Of course that selfish harmful-to-others behaviour is going to attract condemnation.

When caffeine contains the above and my act of consumption means others also inhale those chemicals (SHS) then I'll care about caffeine as much as I do tobacco smoke.

Are you meaning to suggest that they have the same pharmacokinetics, or similar acute or chronic use symptoms?

This is where the whole "cold turkey" thing comes from and why quitting is so difficult for so many people

I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug, just as some people are addicted to gambling or facebook or video games. Some people just get addicted to anything that once gave them a positive emotion.

Edit: well you edited your comment twice since my reply, so I'll be right back with some information for you.

Overall synopsis: http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/cigarettes-o...

Mainstream overview: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/17/cigarettes-more-add...

> Nicotine is a drug found naturally in tobacco, which is as addictive as heroin or cocaine: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/tobaccocancer/ques...

Onset of addiction: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117976

Finally, understanding addiction of nicotine: https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/content/featured-study-understandin...

I experienced zero addiction for the first three months, and even after the full two years addiction was mild. I reduced my dose gradually over two weeks. There were no physical withdrawal symptoms, and only minor craving which went away after a few months abstinence. I'm no expert on heroin addiction, but I find it hard to believe it's equal to nicotine. Perhaps whole tobacco would be different.

It springs from the interaction between the two; different drugs have different addictive qualities, different people have different susceptibilities to those addictive qualities. Individual extreme outliers -- in both the more easily addicted and less easily addicted directions -- for any particular drug are to be expected, and don't disprove the general feature.

The only people who claim that are ones who haven't been addicted to cigarettes :-)

If you're only smoking once a month, the nicotine isn't building up enough to make withdrawal a problem. I'm not even sure there's enough nicotine in one cigarette that you would notice any withdrawal symptoms. And in a month, the nicotine from the previous cigarette is long gone.

Besides that, the hardest part of quitting is getting rid of the habits around it, and if you're only smoking once a month, you're not forming any habits. Try smoking a cigarette with your coffee first thing every morning for 6 months, and see if you still believe it's not addictive :-/

That said, I'm sure the strength of the effect can vary from person to person.

I do agree with you that the occasional cigarette can be very pleasurable.

I generally think everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want to themselves, as long as they're not being influenced by others in a way they can't control or are not fully aware of, which is what advertising and marketing generally is.

When you add in underlying physiological effects like chemical addiction to nicotine and sugar (and an ignorance of), this is clearly a case where individuals freedom and security is being infringed upon.

When the day comes that we can structure our society such that might does not make right, I'll agree with you, we should relax our laws and encourage more a more libertarian outlook. Until then, centers of power and capital need to be constrained by our legal system to protect the vulnerable.

As an example, the park nearest my house has a guy who comes by occasionally on some busy weekends to sell pot truffles. I'm sure he makes a modest living, but I have no worry about people getting dangerously hooked. If we were to let Coca Cola put the cocaine back in, though? Or to let 7-11 sell hash and crack, with prominent placards outside and a billion-dollar ad budget? No thanks.

My other half-serious plan is for licensing. Imagine that to be able to legally buy and take LSD, you have to take a 12-week class with practical exams where you drop acid with your instructor. I can think of no better way to remove the appealing mystique of drugs than to make kids turn up after school every Wednesday for a semester and have some teacher drone at them about mechanisms of action and key safety considerations.

Have we ever seen that play out for hard drugs, when capitalism is also allowed to work on treatment and rehab?

Most people put themselves firmly in a pro- or anti- legalization camp, but in reality there are major problems (and solved problems) with both approaches.

Fully legalize and you'll encounter this horrible scenario where big companies emerge to profit off addictions. They'll lobby governments domestically and abroad. They'll engage in all kinds of shady practices to protect their businesses, just as cigarette companies have. (the oft-proposed solution to the flawed status quo)

Don't legalize and you'll miss many opportunities to help addicts, allow the black market to continue, etc. All the things you're already familiar with. (the status quo)

It's complicated.

I find it disingenuous to vilify cigarettes and smoking when alcohol is considered not just okay but popular and socially acceptable. In social routines, as a non-drinker, I am an outlier.

Neither alcohol or cigarette smoking appeal to me. I personally find being around a smoker to be slightly more annoying than being around drunkards. But neither is pleasant.

Still, although I personally wouldn't be directly affected by alcohol prohibition, I am glad that I didn't live during the United States' experimentation with prohibition and I don't want alcohol prohibition today. Similarly, I don't particularly like the current prohibition of narcotics due to secondary effects. I also don't like where things are with tobacco—wherein smokers are essentially painted as evil or weak, and certainly not partaking in a habit they actually enjoy.

It would be different if smoking only affected the smoker, but as it affects the wider population (such as higher overall health care premiums), it deserves stricter controls.

And the "collective cost" argument is silly, because it can be applied to any personal liberty that negatively affects health.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s8yqj3EL7A

1) From your link, "The study doesn’t cover the many other ill effects of breathing somebody else’s cigarette smoke, of course, which include asthma and possibly cardio-pulmonary disease." So not debunked exactly.

2) Penn & Teller are entertainers (and illusionists). They present controversial opinions for the sake of a TV show. It is not journalism and shouldn't be accepted at face value.

ETA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller:_Bullshit!

Penn says, "right now, as I sit here, there probably is danger in secondhand smoke".

Asthma sufferers, for example, have all sorts of additional breathing difficulties when forced to breathe smoke (of any kind).

Heart disease is a bigger killer than cancer in many countries.

Plenty of non smokers also get cancer.

Obesity through junk food is a problem as well. It's being addressed separately.

If you want to do something disgusting do it in private.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...

Of course things are more nuanced, when it comes down to the matter of lifestyle and individual choice.

But it's kind of beside the main point. Which is: when it comes to their tireless efforts to tear down nearly any reasonable safeguards (whether in the form of health warnings on packaging, or access to minors) -- and especially the extent to which they resort to FUD and blatant anti-intellectualism to achieve these ends -- the tobacco lobby simply has no case.

I can and do limit my sugar intake but for a treat once in awhile I'll buy one of those extremely expensive yet extremely tasty imported dark chocolate bars and eat one little square as treat per day for a long while. I bet if I ate the whole bar in one sitting I could reignite my sugar cravings, but its just a gram or so of carbs so I'm good.

The counterexamples are I suppose e-cig vape people could just sniff the bottle, or people who drink one unit of soda no matter if its a 6 oz mini can or 64 oz giant cup.

Given the tobacco companies have historically been guilty of pretty much every evil known to mankind I would not be surprised to discover the "unit size cigarette" is at least partially constrained geometrically to maximize addiction, and a smaller or larger dose would result in lower addiction rates.

There might be a maximal addiction dosage of dark chocolate, but non-unit consumption of candy bars is so normal that it might not work as an addiction strategy.

Now no one smokes, but we have an obesity/diabetes epidemic, and people bring in homemade cookies or brownies every day.

I can just imagine the uproar if anyone proposed a sugar free office though.

Should we mandate showers too? I've known some people who didn't practice proper hygiene and had a rather repulsive smell. Maybe we should forcibly scrub them down.

Is that true? How many "social smokers" are there? I ask, because I do not know.

And, as the Surgeon General made clear:

http://www.theonion.com/video/surgeon-general-smoking-fine-a...

I quit nearly cold turkey (one month ramp down) and didn't touch one for about a decade. A few years ago I went through a "social smoking" phase for a few months where I'd bum a couple while out drinking, or during the day here and there. Maybe totaled like ten cigs a week or so.

There is a huuuuge difference. Social smoking is real.

The Chamber is pro heroin. Sounds nonsensical, doesn't it?