(Ex-)Smokers: What is smoking tobacco products like?
I lost my father to it, we're struggling to get my mom to quit who survived a heart attack some 15 years ago, just had a thyroidectomy, and is recently diagnosed level 2 COPD. I have never smoked in my life, and I hate the thing with a passion. But I also wonder that is it that makes people smoke, especially tobacco products like cigarettes, despite the slew of horrible things it does to your body. To this day I've been asking people this question, and because Turkey is big on smoking, there is no shortage of people to ask, and it's been only once that I got a positive answer regarding the experience: one particular college-goer told me that it was "tasty". Apart from that, from what I've heard to date, I've collected that all that cigarettes do to you is to give you a fix of nicotine, and the rest is practically slow suicide (and homicide if anybody's present about you while you smoke).
So, help me please: tell me why you smoke. This is one of the biggest curiosities of mine to this day.
Settle in, @cadadr, as I weave a tale of ancient lore.
Eons ago in the heady years of the early 2000s, shortly after we cracked the human genome and boy bands roamed the earth, I partook of my first cigarette. It was a Camel Blue and it tasted like I was inhaling hot, soiled buttcrack hair. Shortly thereafter I came of age and began purchasing them regularly. At first it was a combination of things: Social pressures, anxiety, depression, whatever you want to call it, but what it all ultimately came back to was wanting to feel "good". See at the time I had recently realized I had spent the entirety of my adolescence eating as a coping mechanism for the then-undiagnosed anxiety and depression. I had ballooned over the many years as a result and, though I wasn't the most rotund man to ever walk the earth, I was definitely not healthy.
Cigarettes offered a two-fold out: For one, I could replace my nasty eating habits with a short smoke break. For two, those same smoke breaks would help curb my appetite in general. I hedged my bets and decided I would smoke until life got better (it wouldn't, for a long long time). Quickly (as in within a week or two of smoking regularly) it became a habit. I no longer did it because I wanted to feel good, I did it because it was time to do it. I could manage my eating, but now I was a slave to these paper tubes of deadly chemicals and rat feces.
This did not concern me. You may be asking yourself, "But Jake, you were and are aware of the horrible effects cigarettes have on the human body. Why did it not concern you?" It didn't concern me because life only seemed to get worse. I developed a bit of a smoker's cough and became fidgety and even more anxious when it was time to smoke. I was fully aware of these cause of these symptoms, but actively chose to ignore them because...what was the alternative? Go back to eating every time I was sad? Or worse, keep up with the positive progress I'd made with my eating habits and have no alternative to make me feel good?
Fuck that noise, said now-22-year-old-Jake-who-had-recently-switched-to-Pall-Mall-Reds. It was here, in the deepest depths of my despair and in the more tortuous throes of my alcoholism, that I hit rock bottom. Cigarettes began to leave an acrid taste in my mouth, even after brushing. I no longer smoked because I enjoyed it. I no longer smoked because I wanted an alternative to feel good (this had been replaced with alcohol by that point, a problem that had fully gorged itself upon my poverty). I smoked because I always had, as far as I was concerned. It wasn't even something I thought about.
At 23 I met my now-wife and her daughter (who was, but is no longer, allergic to smoke). My now-wife made me feel like food made me feel when I was a teenager, except at all times instead of only when I was eating her.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
It was quite the turning point! I was no longer armed with a need to feel good; I had traded that weapon for a coughing 6 year old and an obligation to keep her safe. For me, that was all I needed to quit. I am not the average example in this respect. Quitting for me was simply a matter of finding the proper vice to replace it with (which ended up being the most beautiful woman I've ever met who will 100% hold the blunt for me to hit while I'm mid-fight in Overwatch), but for a great many people it's more than that. Smoking becomes a part of your personality. For the vast majority of addicted smokers, quitting is tantamount to throwing out their whole personality and starting from scratch. Smokers like to congregate with other smokers, where they talk about smoking. They complain about smoking. They envy the clear-lunged youth (though perhaps derisively, sometimes) and the many years ahead of them while their own years dwindle on the horizon. These types of things create a sort of impromptu community, where you can feel an instant bond with someone when they pull out a bic after you ask, "Got a light?". Most of the time that type of bond doesn't exist elsewhere in that person's life, or if it does they don't see it because it's clouded by other struggles.
I can't speak for the Turkish, nor can I speak for anyone else, but I smoked because I needed to feel good, and I wasn't able to stop a moment before I found a healthier alternative.
King wrote a story about that, I think it was 'the 10 o'clock people' - the smokers all coming outside the office buildings around 10am to have their first smoke break. Of course, being a King story, these smokers were the only ones who could see the zombies and other horrors walking the world... but that 10 o'clock crowd, that's real. You get to know the other smokers really fast, and they are never assholes, because smokers need to pool their misery when being shunned by the other 99% of society. It's a circle of instant-in friends you can join at any time in any city even if you can't speak the language.
Fun fact: that story is in my list of top 10 favorite King works.
Hey Jake please accept a digital hug from me :) I am glad that you found the woman of your life and that you are happy and healthy!
Ever get the urge to 'sink your teeth into something'? Like a good steak? A rabid craving for some particular kind of food, like you often see comedians joking about when talking about pregnancy? It's like that... except it comes around once an hour or even once every fifteen minutes. Once it's there, it won't go away, even fifty years after you quit. It's now a permanent part of your brain.
Smoking is like eating and drinking - it feels, to your brain, like a third kind of consumption mechanism that provides you with nicotine. This manifests as improved cognitive function, mild light-headedness, and a giant release of stress. Smoking just calms you down, chills you out, and helps you relax - or at least, that's what it does for me. I'm sure there are different reactions from different people just like with any drug.
Quitting smoking is exactly like quitting drinking (any liquid, not alcohol) or quitting food. Try fasting for one straight week, and you'll have some idea of the tricks your mind can play on you to keep you eating/smoking. You'll be just fine on your diet until something sets you off, then you crash the car heading for the drive-thru.
Sadly, from what I have read years ago, this is more than a metaphor, it is the truth: nicotine creates its own receptors in your brain and begets a new kind of need for itself. I recall learning this in a slide shown in earlier years of my school life... gosh
Pipe tobacco is pretty cool. I liked cleaning, preparing and keeping it lit. It's the ultimate ritual and takes a long time. If you do it right, the smoke comes tasty and cool into the mouth. You don't breath it in, so it's all about the flavor. You absorb it through the membranes of the mouth, though.
Plus, you feel like Gandalf.
The tobacco itself will produce the same subjective effects as in any of its presentation. I feel a paradoxical increase in agitation accompanied by a decrease in anxiety.
In my opinion, for long-term smokers, the main effect of nicotine is reducing the feelings caused by its own withdrawal. You don't gain as much from it as you gain from cannabis or clonazepam, for example. It's a shitty drug, but extremely addictive. And that is one of the reasons why I quit.
Fellow piper here. It's a much better experience than cigarette smoking as the tobacco actually has a flavor and the hobby itself is geared more towards sybaritic pleasure than as a nicotine delivery mechanism. The general ritual around having to load up and clean a pipe also, I find, makes the whole activity less likely to be addictive since you can't really get a "quick" fix of pipe tobacco.
Supposedly it also has a way lower rate of lung cancer. That said, you're still taking in a bunch of smoke at the end of the day. Even though you're not inhaling it, it still elevates your risk of oral (rather than lung) cancer (cigars do this too, this is how Roger Ebert died).
And unlike cigs, it also smells better and doesn't leave your room reeking like an ashtray. It is still smoke though, so if you make a habit of it then it will eventually start to stain your furniture as well as your teeth. Eventually it will seep into your upholstery, plaster, window panes, etc. But being as how I probably clean my house 5 times more often than I smoke in it, it hasn't really been a problem for me. Though I mostly just do it outside and probably no more than once every 2 months or so.
I never really cared for the nicotine fix itself that much. I'm only a rare smoker so it always hits me really hard. If I smoke too much I get sick (which I did for the few weeks after the 2016 election). A normal amount makes me feel extremely "sharp." It's a different type of alertness from caffeine. I don't feel more awake, but more like my senses have all been turned up in acuity. It's pretty cool but I feel like any situation where I might need that sort of sharpness, I'd benefit even more from having decent cardio which kind of undermines the premise of smoking. . .
If there were such a thing as "nicotine-less pipe tobacco", I would be very comfortable smoking it every once in a while. But when I started smoking a pipe once a day, and felt bad/off when I didn't, it bothered me.
But I agree that smoking a pipe is usually much less of a problem than smoking cigarettes. Especially if you're a clumsy fool like me and takes more than 5 minutes to light it up hahaha. I've seen old-school pictures of shirtless men smoking huge pipes during floods and such... they're probably intaking more harmful stuff than cigarrete smokers!
AFAIK the jury is still out on how much of smoking being bad for you is the effect of nicotine alone versus the effect of chronically scorching your sensitive mucous membranes with hot smoke and steam. I think there is some kind of interaction effect between the two there (like, the nicotine worsens the cancer risk incurred by the heat) that they have a hard time pinning down.
The other fun thing is that nicotine by itself is supposedly only very mildly addictive. It seems like it doesn't really become habit forming until it's delivered along with the MAOIs and other compounds. These are naturally present in tobacco, but big tobacco specifically cultivated strains that were high in these and then went on to include more additives, like ammonia, that would also dramatically increase the nicotine's addictiveness. (Really classy bunch those guys).
This probably has some implications for smoking cessation tools, like gum or vaping, since they use the pharmaceutical grade nicotine without all the "bonus" stuff. This is also part of the reason people think vaping or juuling might not be as bad as smoking.
I have yet to see a person look cool while compulsively inhaling on a vape and leaving a trail of cotton-candy smoke behind them though. One of the nice things about pipes is that the nature of the activity demands that you smoke slowly while most vapers I see are really sucking that stuff down in a way that's the opposite of chill or relaxing. (And that's setting aside the fact that they leave the scene smelling like a unicorn fart (I imagine)).
But can’t vapes have a “dignified” smell, such as oak, bourbon or even tobacco?
Not that there's anything wrong with sweetness. To each his own.
They could, but they don’t. There’s also something different about a leaf, which is a natural product with provenance and terroir, versus a juice that’s just designed to have a certain tuned flavor. Tobacco aficionados have tastes for varietals and vintages just like wine or whisky people do.
Be careful with that. ;)
The trick is, don't have it around you. See, it starts bumming them from friends at a bar to try it out, or because you like it. Someday, though, your smoking buddies give you that look of, 'dude, that's the 50th free smoke I've given you this year' and you realize you're being a bum... so you buy a pack.
Never. Do. That. Ever. That's how it gets you.
If it's around your home, you'll come up with excuses to use it. Birthday, new years, job promotion, whatever. Then, one fateful day, something bad will happen. You'll have stress, get fired, whatever it is that sets you off. You'll reach for it to improve your mood. In that instant, you are fucked forever, as if shot by Cupid's arrow. The moment your brain associates it with feeling better, it'll never let it go.
Keeping a hookah or some tobacco around isn't a death sentence, and smoking occasionally need not be addictive. It is, however, not unlike having a loaded gun in the house somewhere. The odds go up that something bad can happen.
You're one of the lucky ones. I've known a handful of people like that, where the nicotine just doesn't grab them like a virus. Most people, that would have gotten them hooked by now.
I do like the flavor of good tobacco, that's a pleasure beyond the nicotine even for non-smokers, and you don't have to inhale to get it.
Sorry to hear about your father, and good luck to your mother in quitting. I quit smoking tobacco products about a year ago (after 20+ years of smoking) and am vaping instead, but slowly lowering the nicotine (down to 3mg/mL now from 12mg/mL initially) with the intention of quitting entirely eventually. And even though I have no intention of starting smoking tobacco again, I do still really miss it. Why?
Well... right off the bat, I think you have a somewhat mistaken impression of smoking tobacco. It's true that most commercial cigarettes generally taste terrible and are largely about just getting your nicotine fix once you're addicted, but that's not the whole picture or an entirely accurate one of smoking in general, IMO. Well aged cigars and flavored pipe tobacco can be incredibly tasty, aromatic and pleasurable to smoke even ignoring the addiction to nicotine aspect. I used to have a humidor and decent collection of rather expensive aged cigars from all over the world, and definitely miss smoking them the most.
But even cigarettes are not so one-dimensional as you make them seem. When I first started smoking cigarettes, even though they made me cough and tasted terrible, I greatly enjoyed the way they made me feel lightheaded and relaxed. They were basically a socially acceptable (and legal) way to get a small high for a few minutes a couple times a day. After smoking for a while that lightheartedness went away, but the feeling of relaxation never did and actually became even stronger. That was likely due to the addiction, and instead of getting "relaxed" by the nicotine it was just reducing my irritability by satiating the craving for it, however the ritual of taking a break every so often to go outside for a smoke was also a huge part of it as well. The ritual was also one of the reasons I found it so hard to quit, even with other nicotine supplements (patch, gum, etc), which I tried many many times over the years. It wasn't until trying vaping, where I could maintain the ritual surrounding smoking and still get a bit of nicotine in my system, that I was able to stop smoking cigarettes.
And even though you touched on it ("practically slow suicide"), I think that is another aspect of smoking that is perhaps a bit taboo to talk about but really should be discussed and considered more openly, IMO. At least for me, smoking cigarettes was a bit of weird combination of masochism and a guilt free method of slowly killing myself. In some perverse way I enjoyed the way cigarettes made me feel terrible, from the uncomfortable hit of inhaling hot smoke, to the itchy, sore throat afterwards and even the coughing in the mornings. And smoking definitely was a way for me to essentially slowly commit suicide but without having to really consider those uncomfortable emotions, familial considerations and existential issues that come up when considering overt suicidal actions... while also simultaneously removing some of the culpability from myself should it result in my death. All of which is why I suspect being in a better place emotionally was also necessary for me to start down this path to quitting.
Thanks for your kind words! And for sharing your experience.
I did watch a couple videos about cigars recently, and AFAIU they are not much different than cigarettes with regards to the harm they cause; tho I can understand how they mighy differ in taste and effect.
IDK, what I read here, and what I watch happen to people, well... even the best, most favourable description is faaar off tue worth it territory. I'd rather be perpetually depressed, sober and without any mental clarity, whatever that is, than run the slightest risk of going through what I saw people go through. I feel like offensive words are trying to make it through my teeth, so I'll leave it at this: I am deeply mad at my dad, for he consumed himself the way he did. I recently found out that mu brother felt the same...
I am reminded of the phrase, "harboring resentment is letting someone else live rent free in your head." And in your father's defense, one thing worth considering is that ignorance of the harm tobacco could do was likely at play through a majority of his life. While I can't speak to Turkey, at least here in the North America (and Western Europe), up until rather recently tobacco was even falsely, but widely touted as having tremendous health benefits. E.g. "4 out of 5 Doctors recommend Camel brand cigarettes for lung health!" So while the anger at your father is understandable, I don't think you can entirely blame him or others of his generation from smoking... or even continuing to smoke, since nicotine addiction is incredibly powerful and tremendously hard to break.
I am a former hard drug addict (ketamine, cocaine, speed/meth... basically using anything I could get my hands on short of heroine and crack) and IMO, honestly none of them were even remotely in the same league as nicotine in regards to their addictive properties. Sure, coming off the hard drugs was difficult and an acutely uncomfortable process, but eventually that subsided and I haven't ever really been tempted to restart using again since. But tobacco/nicotine? The cravings for it never really go away (apparently even decades after quitting). And it's also incredibly easy to restart again with the temptation lurking around every corner... every time you get stressed, pass by a convenience store, or see someone else smoking, that twinge of desire pops up again and you can't help but thinking, "What's the harm? Just one more pack won't kill me." But if you give in to that temptation, even in a moment of weakness, it's all too easy to fully fall into habit again.
p.s. "even the best, most favourable description is faaar off tue worth it territory" Ultimately, taking into account all the health risks, maybe not... but smoking a fine, well aged cigar can be borderline orgasmic in terms of the sensory experience and relaxation it provides IMO. And life is a roll of the dice already; Even lifelong vegetarian, physically fit, teetotalers can still die of cancer, an aneurysm or get struck by a bus in their mid 20s. And to me, that sounds like a life devoid of most of the simple pleasures I enjoy, so I would prefer to keep at least some of my vices (e.g. marijuana, alcohol, unhealthy foods, etc), even if they ultimately are going to shorten my lifespan. Quality and enjoyment of life > Length.
Let me also talk about snuff tobacco. You use it by dipping one finger in the powder, sticking it in one nostril, closing the other and breathing normally. It’s quite pleasant and mild if used properly, but most people don’t use it like that. They wanna inhale it like Uma Thurman doing cocaine on Pulp Fiction. Which makes them cough and sneeze a lot, and think that stuff is no good. I love snuff, but I quit it because tobacco is harmful in every form. And now I want some. Thank you, @cadadr!
I am sorry :(
I hope this doesn't make me sound like a jerk, but that does not sound very pleasant.
Of course it doesn't!
It's possible that my description is wrong, ambiguous or incomplete (not my first language). Here you go.
This link seems more complete.
Your English is great. I just think I have a general digust of tobacco products. They just don't appeal to me at all. Probably because I hate the smell of cigarette smoke.
That is perfectly reasonable.
When you smoke rarely smoking a cigarette will actually get you high for 2-3 minutes, like light-headed and feeling good (or nauseous if you smoke too much). That's usually pretty pleasant and will make you want to come back. It goes away very quickly when you smoke more often.
Fun fact: tobacco comes from the American continent. There was no tobacco in Europe before 1492. That's why no one smokes on middle-ages, Ancient Greek, Ancient Egypt or Roman Empire movies. They did have weed, but, AFAIK, that's never portrayed.
Hookah is a subculture thing here in Turkey. I like the smell of it when other smoke it, say when I am passing by a cafe where they are smoking it, or in one of the few times I have had to sit along with smokers. But I wouldn't touch it with a stick even if I was a smoker: literally everybody's smoking on them, the thing you are smoking through has been used by hundreds if not thousands of people before! Also I have heard they are stronger than a pack of cigarettes.
For me, that's alcohol. It won't consume you like cigarettes do if you drink moderately most of the time (tho getting drunk from time to time is quite joyful, if I am honest). It is a great socialising agent and prejudice solvent, especially if you're chugging pints at the right place.
What could cancer do? Before my dad passed away, he and my mom would smoke in the living room. Each time we painted the ceiling and washed the curtains, both various tones of white and beige, they'd go yellow in a matter of weeks. Then after mom started using another room, and to our suprise we discovered it was not the humidity that fucked with the colour of stuff, but the smog the room accumulated throughout the day. In many occasions I have seen old men with white hair, whose moustaches were partly a blondish mixed colour, just because of the smoke of their cigarettes. And to a non smoker, I can tell you have just smoked one from about a metre and a half. Something that strong would definitely fiddle with an organ or two in there.
I was one of the kids who got hooked too young to know any better. First cigarette at age 10, on a Girl Scout campout with some older high school girls who passed them around. Maybe that first cigarette didn't taste so bad because it had a campfire for backup, and some mature coolness layered on, but it's like that moment was permanently etched in my brain.
Started smoking as regularly as I could get away with it, the minute I hit high school.
My mother was horrified and furious, because smoking literally killed her father (3 packs a day with a rheumatic heart defect). That little rebellion might have been part of the appeal, but honestly, smoking never felt good, just less bad. At age 14, I was joking with my friends that it was "suicide on the 30-year installment plan".
I finally managed to cold-turkey quit in my mid-20's, but that's after smoking all the way through public health grad school. There was exactly one other student in the entire program who also smoked, and we got to be pretty good friends - these days, smoking (in the U.S. at least), is a strong social selector for fucked up and/or poor.
All was well for over a decade, until both parents died within a few weeks of each other - I was back to a pack a day within a month. Again, not because smoking felt good, but because it kept the bad under enough control to allow functional behaviour.
I was practically dying to quit. I didn't need the ghastly morning "did I just see some lung with that" cough, the perpetual crawly need for a smoke, the uneven sleep...
But tapering on nicotine products (patches and gum) was vicious. Instant desire to eat everything in sight, black depression, irritability, insomnia, the fact that your immune system goes on holiday the first couple of weeks and it feels like the worst 'flu you've ever had... Certainly, not everyone gets this addicted, where it's so easy to just have a smoke again and feel normal.
After a few failed attempts to quit, I started vaping, and gradually phased out cigarettes over a couple of months.
Going from 36 mg to 24 mg juice was just as bad as dropping down to a pack a day. Finally, I was vaping so much that I hacked (no pun intended) together the current home-brew nicotine mint recipe.
The evidence seems to suggest that aside from the gruesomely addictive properties, nicotine alone isn't much more hazardous than caffeine.