Is smoking good for you?

@Ionus,

you tell me Mr facts, what r his chances? tell us all, funny u never post anything that's constructive, u just laugh at disabled people and rant B.S. cause u think u are smarter than everyone!!!

It seems your post disappeared as i posted, just like anti-smoking facts

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@spendius,

BBC have their heads so far up their own asses that they fail to see any facts unless supported by the majority (I know a few bbc reporters and believe me they are obnoxious idiots, who think the world revolves around them, cause they scam all the licence fee in the uk )

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@BDV,

I fail to understand what you think the profit is in getting people to stop smoking. If you believe that the government and society in general is just in it for the money, then smoking must be bad for you. Smoking means more sales of paint and carpet to refurbish smoking rooms, more sales of smoking paraphernalia, more taxes from cig sales, more medical tests and treatments and of course more profits for the tobacco companies. If profit is the entire motive for government action, the government should be funding smoking campaigns, not anti-smoking campaigns. The exception would be if smoking is so bad for you that the government loses money on health care. If the government is altruistic, then it is bucking all those vested interests above. Why would they do that unless they were absolutely convinced that smoking is bad for you? No matter whether you think the government is good or bad or somewhere in between, there is no reason to take any action to dissuade smoking unless there is a real, well proven health risk.

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@BDV,

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The reason that i started it was simple, is there any benefits to smoking?

Is there any benefit to being addicted to any substance to which you may not always have automatic access?

I had two experiences with the addictiveness of tobacco when I was younger that taught me to never mess with people and their cigarettes.

The first one was when I worked at an emergency respite home for kids who'd been removed from their parents' custody by the courts and they were living in a safe house until the court decided where to put them - back home or in foster care.
There was a girl named Darlene. She was about fifteen and a heavy smoker. I was twenty-two and hadn't had kids yet, so I was still learning to what extent they'd go to get what they wanted. She did something wrong - I can't remember what, but Wanda - the other houseparent decided to punish her by taking her cigarettes away from her for a period of a couple of days. I found a butcher knife from the kitchen missing and when I went into Darlene's room, found her rocking back and forth in the corner with it. She'd taken it to 'kill Wanda' because she was keeping her cigarettes from her.
I gave her her cigarettes back immediately.

Another time I was staying over at my friend Chacy's house. She was trying to quit smoking. Let's just say that it wasn't our usual fun weekend and Sunday morning I got up to find Chacy crawling around on the floor looking for old/stray butts so she could get her fix. I drove to the store and bought her some cigarettes.

This bullshit about nicotine making you smarter and look cool is just that - bullshit. If people don't have it, they look like what they really are - addicts.

Not to say I don't like smokers - I generally do because they're somewhat rebellious and that appeals to me - but let's call a spade a spade.

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@aidan,

That's just the sort of thing Rebecca which shows what non-smokers are like.

There are benefits from smoking. They are proven. Brain activity is stimulated. Nicotine is used medically.

You have extrapolated from individual cases to a general conclusion which is intellectually inadmissible. There will be many other factors in the two cases you mention. In the first case you start with a problem kid. You might as well start with Norman Bates and stop staying in hotels.

What were you doing in that job when you admit knowing nothing about kids. Were you addicted to working? A lot of people have come to a sticky end due to working.

And then it turns out you like smokers after all. Which is evidence of a much more convincing nature than that of two isolated incidents in which unmentioned other factors are in play.

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@BDV,

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what r his chances?

About the same as an american indian who was in smoke filled houses all his life - dead before 40.
It seems your post disappeared as i posted, just like anti-smoking facts What are you talking about ?

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@spendius,

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There are benefits from smoking.

There are benefits in some people dying.

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You have extrapolated from individual cases to a general conclusion which is intellectually inadmissible.

Do it enough times and you have statistics and even in a few cases it is admissable if later proven to be right.

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@Ionus,

Everybody knows what statistics are like Io in the hands of the prejudiced.

Suppose we took two societies of, say, 100 million under modern conditions with all other things equal except one bans smoking and the other doesn't. Which would you bet on the exchange rates? I know which I would.

If what's good for the individual has priority over what's good for the collective explain war to us.

How do people smoke 40 Woodbines a day from 12 to 88? You can't do that with arsenic. You are in danger of putting disease down to smoking when there are many other factors involved.

Somebody gets ill after a lifetime of bad diet and 40 years of welding and if they smoked they are placed on your list of smoking related illness. And who by? The medical profession of course which has a vested interest in caring for large numbers of gaga octogenarians and getting the money off them which ought to go to their kids.

You're hand wringing. And I would say it's inconsistent with your signature line.

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@spendius,

You must have answered my post before you stimulated your brain with your morning dose of nicotine.
I did NOT say Darlene was a problem kid. Her parents and home were the problem she was being removed from and yes, you could extrapolate from the fact that her parents were problematic to her that she herself would suffer from problems, but that's not always the case either - so you've come to a general conclusion about Darlene which is intellectually inadmissible. I wish I could remember what she'd done wrong to merit Wanda taking her cigarettes from her- I seem to remember it had something to do with use of the telephone at an inappropriate time. Anyway - she was not generally a problem- and even when she misbehaved, I remember thinking it wasn't even that serious. The point I was making is that her behavior definitely degenerated when she did not have access to cigarettes - to the point that I immediately reinstated that access to her.

And I didn't say I didn't know ANYTHING about kids when I was working at the job spendius. I've been around kids my entire life - I knew a lot about kids at that point- in theory and in practice. What I didn't know yet, because I had not had my own kids and hadn't ever lived full time with children for whom I was responsible, having leisure to watch and observe them in their myriad facets of behavior and acquisition, was the fact that most children will take things further to get their way or what they want than any sane adult is prepared to. This girl, who was perfectly sane when she had her cigarettes, turned into someone who was willing to do something insane to get them back when she didn't have them.

And my question is a general one- in what way is it ever beneficial for someone to be dependent upon a substance which may not always be available to that person?

And you cannot compare smokers to nonsmokers in terms of intellectual stimulation. You can only compare your nonstimulated intellectual self with your stimulated intellectual self.
Maybe nonsmokers are nonsmokers because they don't need an outside stimulus to intensify their experience of environmental stimulus and the intellectual processing of that stimulus.

I'm a nonsmoker because it hurts my throat. I don't think I'd be any more creative or intellectually capable if I were walking around with my brain stimulated by nicotine. I just think I'd be the same with a sore throat.

I smoked a couple of cigarettes last month - just to try it again and because every person I was sitting with was smoking except me. It was okay when I was doing it - but it didn't do anything to my head - and even though I brushed my teeth three times and ate breakfast the next day, I could still taste the stale cigarette taste on the roof of my mouth. I didn't like it.

I do seem to like smokers. A lot of my friends and my favorite sister smokes. But I don't think the majority of people who smoke are any more intellectually astute or creative than the majority of people who don't smoke. And I think the intellectually astute and creative people who do smoke would be intellectually astute and creative even if they didn't smoke.

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@aidan,

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You must have answered my post before you stimulated your brain with your morning dose of nicotine.

Oh--very droll Rebecca I must say. I bet you had a little teeheehee when you thought that up.

As far as I'm concerned Darlene was a problem kid. Just going on what you said about her. Unless I'm out of date and what I think are problem kids are normal now and the normals are the problems. Smoking at 15, in a home for waifs and strays, behaving contrary to the rules, getting her ciggies confiscated, stealing a knife and playing with it thinking a lot, getting caught and getting her ciggies back off the kind one. I don't think of that as normal. I came to my conclusion only on the basis of what you said about her. It is perfectly admissible.

You came to an inadmissible conclusion saying she was addicted. She might have been trying it on. See how far she could push you. Acting it up and taking a stand on the ciggies. Seeking attention. Some of them, even normals, can make their behaviour degenerate at the drop of a hat. They've seen actresses do it thousands of times in soaps and movies when the director calls "action". I've seen it done lots of times. In the pub even. They can turn it on and off like a tap.

What did Wanda say when she found you had caved in because of your soft-hearted empathy. Which I admire by the way. I can't stand Wanda types myself. She should be a traffic warden. Get a uniform.

She might have been just as willing to pick a fight with Wanda over some other issue. Lights out say. You make the fatal mistake of thinking you know what a 15 year old female person is thinking. They're a bit tricky in my experience.

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And my question is a general one- in what way is it ever beneficial for someone to be dependent upon a substance which may not always be available to that person?

Well- speaking generally there are a lot of things which we become dependent upon which might not always be available to us. Isn't that the very method women use to lead us poor saps by the nose. Germaine Greer said so. And she's a famous professor at Oxford and a TV personality. PhD and rags to riches in a foreign country. A computer crashing is a bit of a downer. Imagine the Gov't pulling the plug on TV which I think they should at least consider. There's sugar and spice and all things nice which might not always be available to us. I shudder to think what would happen if alcohol was taken away.

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And you cannot compare smokers to nonsmokers in terms of intellectual stimulation. You can only compare your nonstimulated intellectual self with your stimulated intellectual self.

That might be valid but only by ignoring what the nonstimulated self can make of ideas which occur to the stimulated self. If the self is never stimulated it has no ideas coming from that realm to work with. The ideas are not forgotten when nonstimulated. If they were never had they couldn't even be forgotten. The imagination is in a permanently nonstimulated state. And does it show.

But I'll allow that an unstimulated imagination might have a higher capacity than some stimulated ones. I'm saying that one imagination has more capacity when stimulated than when not. And that the choice to stimulate it can be bought in the shops which is to say with the approval of the government. Those choosing not to, for whatever reason, are less stimulated than they might be and less interesting companions as a result. It's a well known theory and I find it pretty true.

And there are different tobaccos too. Turkish tobacco was banned here a few years ago. And rumours have it that Churchill's cigars were light reefers.

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Maybe nonsmokers are nonsmokers because they don't need an outside stimulus to intensify their experience of environmental stimulus and the intellectual processing of that stimulus.

Maybe they are scared of letting their imagination loose a bit like David Lynch did with icing sugar consumed by the pound. One doesn't make Eraserhead on bog standard stimulation. Or write A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.

One writes I Did It My Way on bog standard stimulation.

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I'm a nonsmoker because it hurts my throat. I don't think I'd be any more creative or intellectually capable if I were walking around with my brain stimulated by nicotine. I just think I'd be the same with a sore throat.

It hurts everybody's throat at first. I think you would be more intellectually stimulated but not much with these tipped mild things. Not enough for you to notice.

But there you go--you do seem to like smokers you say. You should too. They have put their health and finances and, these days, their reputation second to being interesting to you.

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@spendius,

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Oh--very droll Rebecca I must say. I bet you had a little teeheehee when you thought that up.

I'm glad you found it so. I did have to chuckle as I typed that.

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As far as I'm concerned Darlene was a problem kid. Just going on what you said about her. Unless I'm out of date and what I think are problem kids are normal now and the normals are the problems. Smoking at 15, in a home for waifs and strays, behaving contrary to the rules, getting her ciggies confiscated, stealing a knife and playing with it thinking a lot, getting caught and getting her ciggies back off the kind one. I don't think of that as normal. I came to my conclusion only on the basis of what you said about her. It is perfectly admissible.

You're right. My view of 'normal', I have to admit, has probably become very skewed over the years.
Although this might be true too:

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Unless I'm out of date and what I think are problem kids are normal now and the normals are the problems.

I know I very often feel a little abnormal because my life experience seems to have been so different from those of a lot of the people I run into - but again - the population of people I see every day probably gives me a skewed view of the norm.

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You came to an inadmissible conclusion saying she was addicted. She might have been trying it on. See how far she could push you. Acting it up and taking a stand on the ciggies. Seeking attention. Some of them, even normals, can make their behaviour degenerate at the drop of a hat. They've seen actresses do it thousands of times in soaps and movies when the director calls "action". I've seen it done lots of times. In the pub even. They can turn it on and off like a tap.

I've told you this before spendius, but I'll say it again. You really should work with kids. If you don't need to work or get paid - you should volunteer. You display a wonderfully insightful and nuanced understanding of them.

But I don't think Darlene was trying it on. I think she was actually physically and painfully craving a cigarette.

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What did Wanda say when she found you had caved in because of your soft-hearted empathy. Which I admire by the way. I can't stand Wanda types myself. She should be a traffic warden. Get a uniform.

I don't remember what she said in that particular instance, but I do remember that eventually she did say to me, 'I thought you were a nice girl from a good family,' when I made a different decision from what she'd have done regarding one of the kids.
But you know, it was inevitable. I was a Yankee (from NJ no less), and that was strike one against me as far as she was concerned as she was this sixty year old southern woman from Appalachia who wanted to believe that the war between the states hadn't settled the issue of slavery 120 years before. A lot of these kids were poor and black and she was racist toward them. I couldn't stand to watch it. Uniform's right - she should have been wearing SS insignia.

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That might be valid but only by ignoring what the nonstimulated self can make of ideas which occur to the stimulated self. If the self is never stimulated it has no ideas coming from that realm to work with. The ideas are not forgotten when nonstimulated. If they were never had they couldn't even be forgotten. The imagination is in a permanently nonstimulated state. And does it show.

But I'll allow that an unstimulated imagination might have a higher capacity than some stimulated ones. I'm saying that one imagination has more capacity when stimulated than when not. And that the choice to stimulate it can be bought in the shops which is to say with the approval of the government. Those choosing not to, for whatever reason, are less stimulated than they might be and less interesting companions as a result. It's a well known theory and I find it pretty true.

Huh? And what I'm saying is that different brains are activated by different stimuli. I have a good friend who seems to need chemical stimulation whereas I do not. We've been friends since the age of eight. When we were teens he got heavily into pot, etc., etc...and introduced me to it. It didn't do anything for me- I mean NOTHING- except hurt my throat. But he could be smoking and I could not be smoking and we could both be listening to the same music and/or watching the same movie and we'd both find it amazing and funny in the same way.
I'm not saying my brain was better because I didn't need chemicals or that his brain was better because his could employ these chemicals in a way mine couldn't...we were just different.

And actually - I'm gonna boast here. I have a friend who is a BIG time smoker and he goes on about it like you do. I know he will never quit - and I told him this because you can watch him smoke and SEE that he enjoys the very action of smoking, aside from what it does for him mentally (he's also very creative and intelligent) and once we were sitting and talking about Truman Capote and he said, 'I haven't had a cigarette for three hours and I haven't even wanted one the whole time we've been talking.'
Do you really only find other smokers more interesting? Or do you think it might be that you feel less constrained about smoking yourself with other smokers and so you find that circumstance more stimulating (for yourself) and less boring?

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But there you go--you do seem to like smokers you say. You should too. They have put their health and finances and, these days, their reputation second to being interesting to you.

I think I like smokers for the same reason I like teaching in a prison-
Laughing

(that's a joke, sort of). They're people who buck convention, live on the edge and are different from me. I maybe wouldn't want to actually be them, but they're more interesting to be around than your typical, wholesome all-American boy scout.

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@aidan,

That will have to await the morrow.

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@spendius,

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Everybody knows what statistics are like Io in the hands of the prejudiced.

Your prejudice would be that of a smoker ?

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If what's good for the individual has priority over what's good for the collective explain war to us.

Different situations call for different approaches.

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You are in danger of putting disease down to smoking when there are many other factors involved.

Can you agree that smoking decreases circulation, all other things being equal ?
Many people get ill from smoking and who has a vested interest in denying it ? Smokers and the tobacco industry.

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You're hand wringing.

You are in denial. You assume your position is the correct one and then go on to justify it.

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And I would say it's inconsistent with your signature line.

Make sig line is about accepting death not denying life.

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@Ionus,

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Everybody knows what statistics are like Io in the hands of the prejudiced.

Your prejudice would be that of a smoker ?

I've no prejudice. It's pleasureable. It's an objective physical effect. Tobacco gets me mildly stoned. Those are prejudiced who eschew the effect and need to justify their puritan attitude to the pleasure calculus.

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If what's good for the individual has priority over what's good for the collective explain war to us.

Different situations call for different approaches.

Nation means war. We are always at war. Peace is when we are reloading our weapons. Europe took off in science and finance and art after tobacco came in. I don't think it was a coincidence. Of course there were other factors.

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Can you agree that smoking decreases circulation, all other things being equal ?

I wouldn't know.

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Many people get ill from smoking and who has a vested interest in denying it ? Smokers and the tobacco industry.

I don't deny it. Many people smoke too much. And do other things in combination. Mild cigarettes migh be a problem in that the dose is too weak and so a larger dose of other substances is needed to get the kick. And the paper in ready-mades has chemicals in it which, I'm told, hand-rolling papers don't. It's a complex picture. If people getting ill and dying takes precedence over society's needs I would say we are busted.

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You're hand wringing.

You are in denial. You assume your position is the correct one and then go on to justify it.

I'm not in denial. I know the risks.

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@spendius,

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I've no prejudice. It's pleasureable.

That is a paradox. The nature of the animal is to be prejudiced to what is pleasurable.

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Europe took off in science and finance and art after tobacco came in. I don't think it was a coincidence. Of course there were other factors.

Europe didnt take off on tobacco...the americas did.

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Can you agree that smoking decreases circulation, all other things being equal ?
I wouldn't know.

It does. Poor circulation esp in organs is a major cause of disease and in limbs is the number one cause of amputation.

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I know the risks.

Then I am happy for you to smoke so long as you dont try to convert anyone to what I regard as an unhealthy life style. Which brings us to my main objection, the tobacco industry is a drug industry that should pay for the expense it causes to society. Currently it is the smoker, but it should be the industry who pays the tax.

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Its very much injurious to health ...

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@sreejaa,

That's true too.

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@aidan,

So is food if it is consumed immoderately. And in every case.

I once saw the oldest woman in the world (they said) interviewed. She was 120 odd. She said she had smoked since she was a kid and she was puffing on a pipe during the interview.

Perhaps people like to blame smoking to avoid blaming any other reasons for disease. It's a nice, simple explanation. Perfect for the righteously indignant. And it avoids looking into other factors such as diet, stress and working conditions or living in proximity to roads and airports where non-smokers are thrashing backwards and forwards on un-necessary errands to relieve their nervous stresses and giving the kids playing in their gardens no choice.

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@Ionus,

the most common reason for non-traumatic amputation is.... wait for it.... "Diabetic foot infection or gangrene", sorry its nothing to do with smoking.

Some idiots now are trying to put blame on smokers for the ozone problem too, will it never end?

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@BDV,

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http://www.amputee-coalition.org/fact_sheets/amp_stats_cause.html

Toes are commonly amputated on diabetes sufferers, but I am talking about major limb amputations.... above the ankle/knee, above the wrist/elbow.....Anyway, how many diabetics smoke ?

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Is smoking good for you?

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