> Many have touted smoking marijuana as a safer alternative to cigarettes
Wierd take, given that they are completely different drugs, with completely different effects on the brain, with the only similarity being that they are both ingested via smoke.
And any kind of smoke isn't good for the lungs. I'm tired of people pretending that Marijuana is that wonder drug that's somehow "healthier" than smoking. It's just less unhealthy, which still makes it unhealthy.
Sitting in traffic is unhealthy, eating junk food is unhealthy, living with excessive heat is unhealthy, poverty is unhealthy, too much water is unhealthy.
Lots of things are unhealthy. Some of those are many degrees worse than others, and some only in certain context.
Some things you can actively avoid though. And inhaling smoke on a regular basis is one of them.
I'm particularly sensitive about this topic because I live in a country in which my tax money is used to finance treatment of illnesses that people self inflicted due to smoking.
For me, though, some amount of harm is built-in to our condition.
We will eat junk sometimes, we will be sedentary sometimes- we might even overindulge sometimes.
For me, marijuana is recreational, like alcohol.
If a recreational session of marijuana is better for humans than a recreational session of alcohol, then I would actively promote that- since we are all keenly aware of how prohibiting all recreational unhealthy things goes in reality. “Perfect is the enemy of good”, in this case I might say that “perfect is the enemy of improvement”; maybe theres a better quote for exactly this.
Knowing that its better on your lungs than smoking, which was socially acceptable 20 years ago, goes a long way to helping.
Though I also agree with other commenters, its a low bar and the frequency of recreational drug use vs casual smoking is an apples to oranges comparison
> If a recreational session of marijuana is better for humans than a recreational session of alcohol, then I would actively promote that-
Well it's not: if someone smokes near me, I am smoking with him. Not so with alcohol.
And I’m sure there are those who cringe when they see you but into a sweet for the same reasons. People optimize for lots of things in their life that are not always health, and that’s ok.
Eh, I want to agree with you because smoking is disgusting to me, but honestly in most countries is so heavily taxed these days that smokers are a net fiscal positive, even if the NHS pays for their health care.
What about life expectancy? If smoking makes you die 10 years earlier, that's ~10 years of pension savings for social insurance. Sure, an unlucky few may get lung cancer at 50 and cost a lot of money but most smokers will die, retired, of cheap ailments like COPD or hypertension without fully realizing their social security investment.
Yes, public pensions make smokers even more fiscally positive on expectation.
(However in my adopted home we don't have public pensions like that. Your pension pot is yours, and if you keel over, your heirs get it. But smokers are still fiscally positive.
I brought up the NHS as a short-hand for any kind of healthcare system where the general taxpayer foots your medical bill.)
There are neurogenic, anti-tumor, and anti-inflammatory properties and no direct chemical addiction mechanisms as present in nicotine.
Additionally your statement about "any kind of smoke" while kind of true does not recognize the disproportionate concentration of carcinogens specific to cigarette smoke.
It also misses the disclaimer that nearly as many cannabis users vape and consume edibles (roughly 70%) as do smoke (only 79%) which is certainly better than smoke, even before you add the benefits of water filtration and cooling common for marijuana users.
I hear you, but coming from someone that spent about 20 years of his life smoking 4-8 joints per day, who quit smoking to use precise equipment to make filtered vapor at roughly ambient air temperature for the last 5 years, and also who just spent 2 years abstaining completely, you are comparing apples and lasagna.
Nicotine is absolutely addictive. Ask anyone who uses an e-cigarette. Vape liquids typically do not contain MAOIs yet are quite difficult to get off - less than smoking though, likely due to the longer activation duration.
Nicotine being the addictive part is also why many smokers are successfully able to make the switch to e-cigarettes.
Nicotine by itself is at most very lightly addictive.
> Nicotine being the addictive part is also why many smokers are successfully able to make the switch to e-cigarettes.
I don't think we can draw that conclusion. Just because something helps you get over an addiction doesn't mean it's the addictive part.
Compare and contrast the absolute ineffectiveness of nicotine plasters for getting people off their cigarette habit. (Even though they are a great nicotine delivery mechanism otherwise.)
Similarly, I don't think anyone ever got addicted to nicotine plasters.
I did and while I like Gwern's writing, I think in this case it's plain wrong. I say this as a smoker who switched to e-cigarettes for a few years and then quit cold turkey. Switching was easy. The first 72 hours of quitting was a nightmare.
I think it's horrible to tell people nicotine is not addictive. Quitting is very difficult.
A quick Google offers plenty of alternative study results.
I personally know people who were addicted to nicotine patches. One reason they are likely not as addictive as smoking is because they take much longer to reach noticeable concentrations in your bloodstream. Vaping also takes longer than smoking but not nearly as long as patches.
Compare this to oral vs IV drug use.
Edit: I will add that while I do strongly believe nicotine is addictive, I also believe smoking is more addictive and that it is primarily all the other chemicals in tobacco smoke that cause most physical harm to the body.
> I did and while I like Gwern's writing, I think in this case it's plain wrong. I say this as a smoker who switched to e-cigarettes for a few years and then quit cold turkey. Switching was easy. The first 72 hours of quitting was a nightmare.
Are you implying that by smoking I caused irreversible changes to my brain that meant I was now capable of being addicted to the pure nicotine in the ecig that I switched to? I switched entirely to ecigs for two years before quitting.
My brother is still addicted to his ecig despite numerous attempts to titrate down.
> Are you implying that by smoking I caused irreversible changes to my brain
Yes. Once an addict, always an addict. ('Irreversible changes to a brain' are quite common. You remember having smoked, for example...) More importantly, this was something emphasized before, and so it is irrelevant to bring it up as a supposed counterexample.
While permanent changes to a brain are a thing, I don't think being addicted to smoking means you are addicted to drinking so I don't follow the "logic." You're stating that nicotine is not addictive unless you were previously addicted to nicotine in the presence of MAOIs, in which case nicotine on its own is addictive now?
I fail to understand how nicotine on its own would satisfy an addictive craving created by a different chemical or combination of chemicals, if it isn't addictive itself.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean about a previously emphasized counterexample either. Could you elaborate?
> I fail to understand how nicotine on its own would satisfy an addictive craving created by a different chemical or combination of chemicals, if it isn't addictive itself.
It's pretty hard to get addicted to nicotine patches, if you never smoked.
I suspect that if I took up nicotine patches now, years after quitting nicotine (e-cigs), it would be similarly difficult - but not impossible - to get addicted.
I don't see this as an argument that nicotine is not addictive - just that different routes of administration are more or less addictive, similar to IV vs. oral opiate use.
as a non smoker, I followed Gwern's micro dosing experiments with nicotine. Small 0.5mg 1/2 tablet doses when doing a task I wanted to reinforce.
Then I found myself taking a one or two of these 1mg tablets during the day when driving as I want to increase good habits when driving. Then habitually whenever I felt like it, sometimes with a coffee and a book. They were the weakest mg you could get, and there was no direct feeling of their effect. I did feel increasing anxiety which lead to physical symptoms during this time, but the tablets didn't seem to make any direct effect on the anxiety, I didn't take the nicotine to calm down and I didn't connect the two together (its only now writing this comment that I'm thinking they may be connected)
So it was definitely addicting, however, when the box ran out, stopping seemed to be instantaneous and painless. I did quit because I realised I wasnt using it as I wanted to initially and it was becoming a habit. I do remember a couple of times looking for the tablets, checking to see if there wasn't some in the car. mild. The feeling of anxiety is gone now too.
So I'm not sure if I would say I was addicted, but maybe I was. It was certainly habit forming!
As someone who smoked, vaped and quit - nicotine is extremely addictive. Like, by far the most addictive substance I have ever used.
When you abstain from nicotine, you will get physical withdrawal symptoms. Nausea, headaches, heart racing, that type of thing. But you'll also get psychological symptoms - paranoia, anxiety, irritability.
I know for a fact it's the nicotine because:
1. Vaping contains a lot of nicotine, too, and it satisfies the craving.
2. You can actually feel the nicotine hitting your blood when you relapse.
3. Nicotine patches remove the withdrawal symptoms.
According to who? Certainly going from a 21 mg patch to nothing will give you withdrawal - I know because I tried it.
Nicotine patches aren't perfect, and the reason they might be less addicting is because there's no hit. It's a constant stream of nicotine which ends up feeling like no nicotine at all. Instead, it feels like it's just preventing the affects of a lack of nicotine, i.e. it's inhibiting withdrawal. But it's not giving you the effects of nicotine.
Like when you smoke a cigarette you immediately feel relaxed and happy and it's a very sudden effect. But with nicotine patches since there's no curves you don't get that.
> Instead, it feels like it's just preventing the affects of a lack of nicotine, i.e. it's inhibiting withdrawal. But it's not giving you the effects of nicotine.
Nope. I never smoked, but tried patches, and I certainly felt the effects. (And I didn't have any withdrawal that I needed to inhibit.) My non-smoking friends who tried had the same experience.
Okay sure, for you, someone who didn't smoke and therefore did not become accustomed (tolerant?) to the immediate effects of a nicotine hit.
But, as a cessation tool, which is what they are, this has been my experience.
And, I would be hesitant about using nicotine patches or something like Zyn recreationally. Nicotine, even by itself, is harmful to the cardiovascular system over a long period of time.
Where are the long time studies on vaping? I regularly read news about vaping with new findings on it being unhealthy... Not gonna defend smoking but also not gonna defend any other loser behavior regarding drugs.
Coffee isn't nearly as self destructive as smoking or marijuana. Moderation is key for everything. Unfortunately the alcoholics I know and the weed addicts aren't the biggest fans of moderation. I lost friends to both so yea. Also I can't make people passively consume coffee. People who smoke weed are often extremely inconsiderate on who they affect with that.
In your mind, is every person who drinks an alcoholic? Is every person who consumes cannabis an addict?
I lost my dad to alcohol and tobacco. The biggest cannabis users in college would often (not aleays) drop out of school. So I am not blind to the downsides of these drugs.
However, I also recognize that there are a zillion people out there that drink alcohol or consume cannabis in moderation, and feel no desire to lump them all into a category of "losers", nor treat them with contempt or disrespect. To each their own.
What do you think is the harm of vapor that, for instance, begins it's life at 163 degrees, is filtered for particulates through water, and then cooled by flowing through ice and can be as low as 25 degrees depending only on breath speed?
I'm not saying it's nothing but I'm also not going to pretend it's any worse than, say, living in a wildfire state.
Are you saying that is comparable to a 800 degree ember 4 inches from your mouth?
You say "harmless" but I'd rather say "non toxic".
To illustrate: cannabis will not create gaping holes in your brain like mercury would, but although I'm convinced there are valid reasons to use cannabinoids for medical purposes, I'm also convinced that recreational use (especially at a young age) has a terrible impact on brain development and personnality developpment.
My personal take is that the proportion of people that subjectively enjoy cannabis at the cost of feeling okay with very bad life decisions is high enough to warrant extreme carefulness when decriminalizing it. The typical example is the stoner apathy that turns into amotivational syndrome.
Re reading your comment I see that it was mainly to get this off my chest. Hope you don't mind.
Oh, yes, cannabis does seem to have an effect on people's judgement. Though it might be a bit hard to establish the direction of causality.
I just meant that the direct damage smoking either plant does to your brain pales in comparison to direct damage the tar causes to your lungs.
> I'm also convinced that recreational use (especially at a young age) has a terrible impact on brain development and personality development.
> [...] high enough to warrant extreme carefulness when decriminalizing it.
I suspect you can get most of the benefits of decriminalizing (like removing a funding source for organised crime) whilst avoiding most of the downside you mention, by slapping on an appropriately high tax on the stuff.
The main limit is that if your tax is too high, it encourages (too much of) a black market. But I'm fairly sure there's a tax that's high enough to keep the consumption of most youngsters and poor people low, whilst still avoiding much of a black market.
I explicitly mention youngsters and poor people, because as conceived the tax is a paternalistic instrument to protect people from themselves. Rich people don't need our protection, they can fend for themselves.
But I'm not sure there's not something better. Notably because a very high tax de facto creates a black market, but even a moderate tax is actually often high enough to create a black market for poor people, which in turn are already the one paying the highest price (health wise) of environnemental diseases (junk food, tobacco, alcohol, not exercising, and cannabis).
Just learn from the lessons drawn from alcohol and tobacco.
Compared to the cost of production, many countries have quite substantial taxes on alcohol and tobacco, but there's generally not that much of a black market for eg beer. (There might be more of a black market for distilled spirits, but those are also taxed more.)
I think in germany you can start to drink at 16 but only very light stuff like cider. What I heard is that when they're 18 and have the legal right to buy vodka they know what not to do with it. In contrast to the usa where you have to wait until being 21, so you manage to get your hands on some at 16 but then it has to be worth it so you take strong stuff and end up with higher problematic consumption rates.
I could imagine benefits of limiting strong cannabis strains until some later age. It also destroys the transgressive nature of the smoking act.
It actually starts at age 14 for some stuff. And if you are with your parents (and not in a restaurant), I think it's up on them to decide, even if you are younger than 14. At least in practice.
Where I grew up, it's a fairly common tradition to let even primary school kids have a sip of Eierlikör (German Egg Liqueur) for New Year's Eve.
Britain has some interesting rules, too. I think their legal drinking age for beer in a pub is lower, if you are also having a meal with your beer.
Wierd take, given that they are completely different drugs, with completely different effects on the brain, with the only similarity being that they are both ingested via smoke.