In politics most people just critizise each other, but what did your local government actually do a good job on?
The US was able to make smoking cigarettes seem uncool. Compared to a lot of other parts of the world, they seem to have made real progress in cutting tobacco use.
This chart of the rise and fall of cigarette smoking is kind of interesting.
The chart begins in 1900. What happened just before then, to kick off the rise of cigarette smoking? The invention of the rolling machine, in 1880. Machine-rolled cigarettes made tobacco use much more convenient: you didn’t have to roll your own, fuss with a pipe, or deal with the mess of chewing tobacco or snuff. When you make consuming a product easier, people consume more.
The fastest increases in cigarette smoking were during WWI and WWII. What happened then? The US military issued cigarettes in rations. Why did they do that? For the same reason the German army issued amphetamines. Nicotine is a stimulant drug; it helps soldiers stay awake on watch and have more energy to fight.
Here’s another chart. This one is cancer death rates. Lung cancer deaths track smoking rates, but delayed by 20 years – the time the cancer takes to develop and spread in the body.
Smoking peaked and began to decline in the 1960s, before the adoption of anti-smoking laws; even before the 1970 ban on smoking ads on television. One possible conclusion is that the legislative changes were not the cause of the smoking decline, but rather part of a broader cultural response to the devastation of American elders by the cancerous effects of smoking.
A friend of mine recently got back from Europe and was talking about how every restaurant had tons of people smoking in it. It’s so foreign to me. I remember in the '90s you’d be asked “smoking or non” when going to restaurants. Now there just isn’t smoking on restaurants. Even in bars where it is allowed it is pretty minor. Smoking really got cut back a lot.
A major caveat is that vaping is a big problem now. I believe it is marginally (or maybe even substantially) safer than traditional smoking but it’s still just peddling a nicotine addiction to youngsters.
A major caveat is that vaping is a big problem now. I believe it is marginally (or maybe even substantially) safer than traditional smoking but it’s still just peddling a nicotine addiction to youngsters.
Vaping nicotine is probably about as harmful to health as chewing nicotine gum; and vastly less harmful than smoking.
It is certainly a way to take an addictive drug. It is also an extremely convenient one, which makes it more likely that people will use it more heavily. (See also the rise in the popularity of cigarette smoking after the invention of the rolling machine: convenience leads to more consumption.)
However, most of the direct health harms of smoking aren’t from the nicotine; they’re from everything else that comes with it –
- solid smoke particulates
- unburned and partly-burned resins (“tar”)
- carbon monoxide
None of these are in the vapor produced by e-cigarettes.
Inhaling smoke is bad for lungs; no matter whether that smoke is from tobacco, another herb, a forest fire, unsafe industrial equipment, a coal-fired power plant, or a fireplace.
Nicotine itself is not carcinogenic, although it does constrict the lung passages which makes it harder for the lung to clean itself. Chronic use of nicotine vapes may be expected to cause some amount of emphysema due to this chronic constriction. But it’s not gonna cause the massive amount of lung cancer that smoking does, because it just doesn’t contain the high concentrations of carcinogens that cigarette smoke contains.
(I do not use nicotine at all, however I greatly prefer to be around people vaping than around people smoking.)
To be clear, the nicotine part I was talking about is that it is still dirty to get young people addicted to a “drug” (as in an addictive drug).
