My Thoughts On Cannabis & Cigarettes

[TorturedSoul]

All I know is if you like to get high, and you smoke cigarettes... before you know it...

You'll be panting when you perform some really difficult task or other - you know, like walking up eight or ten stairs? But who cares.

You'll cough more in a good day than someone with the flu does the entire time that they're sick. But who cares.

Food won't taste all that great. But who cares.

You'll smell like an ash tray. But who cares.

Your skin will age about 13.5 years for every ten years of actual time. But who cares.

You know you'll probably die young - and badly. But who cares.

Yeah, who cares... Here's something to care about:

One of these days, sooner or later, you'll be hanging out with a few friends, and someone will pull out some wicked good stuff, there, pack a bowl... and IF you can even manage to hit the thing, while everyone else is laughing and having a good time... You'll be wishing your lungs still worked well enough for you to manage to get a halfway decent buzz.

I'm not going to tell you to quit. I'm not your daddy, and I'm definitely not your momma. But I'll tell you what, I sure wish that I had done so 30 years ago.

 

[SwAggNiFiCeNt]

re: My Thoughts On Cannabis & Cigarettes

All I know is if you like to get high, and you smoke cigarettes... before you know it...

You'll be panting when you perform some really difficult task or other - you know, like walking up eight or ten stairs? But who cares.

You'll cough more in a good day than someone with the flu does the entire time that they're sick. But who cares.

Food won't taste all that great. But who cares.

You'll smell like an ash tray. But who cares.

Your skin will age about 13.5 years for every ten years of actual time. But who cares.

You know you'll probably die young - and badly. But who cares.

Yeah, who cares... Here's something to care about:

One of these days, sooner or later, you'll be hanging out with a few friends, and someone will pull out some wicked good stuff, there, pack a bowl... and IF you can even manage to hit the thing, while everyone else is laughing and having a good time... You'll be wishing your lungs still worked well enough for you to manage to get a halfway decent buzz.

I'm not going to tell you to quit. I'm not your daddy, and I'm definitely not your momma. But I'll tell you what, I sure wish that I had done so 30 years ago.

My wife's step dad passed away earlier this year from cancer related to smoking cigarettes for his whole life. And it wasn't a pleasant death either. Won't get into the details but I will say he suffered alot and in a short time he was gone. Last couple of months was pretty useless just dying infront of his partners eyes. There's 2 things that they should make illegal instead of cannabis. That's alcohol and tobacco. Don't know for sure about the stats but I'm almost willing to bet they are the number 1 and 2 leading cause of death. Hope i don't offend anyone who drinks or smokes. If I did, I apologize. But this is my humble honest opinion on the matter.

 

[TorturedSoul]

I hesitate to say that things like that should be illegal. This country saw what happened when alcohol was made illegal. That had all kinds of bad effects.

I do think that there should be complete accountability - not just in regards to the manufacturers, but the consumers, too.

Alcohol: If someone gets tanked and wipes out a whole microbus full of kids who are on their way to church (RiP, Buddy - I wish you'd have had a chance to live past age 12) because he's too wasted to realize that it's Sunday morning instead of Saturday night, that son of a bitch ought to end up on death row where the state punches his ticket, instead of one of the grieving parents having to do it after he spends a few months (or, I suppose, a few years these days) in jail.

Cigarettes: Here's one my parents were bad about. If you've got kids, and they're playing on the floor in the living room, and one of them looks at the sun shining through the window and sees a layer of smoke... and he keeps putting his head lower, and lower, and lower, wondering how low he has to go in order to see the bottom of that heavy layer of smoke - and he bumps his head on the floor before he gets to the bottom of it? Yeah, that ought to be criminal. I'm pretty sure Mom would agree, and if Dad were still alive, I think he would, too. They just never thought about that kind of stuff back in the day. First time I walked into the kitchen, opened the drawer, grabbed a pack of Dad's Kools, and went outside and fired one up... I didn't even cough :icon_roll. At least I was getting my smoke through a filter at that point. BtW, I was eleven years old. If I'd been caught, they'd have taken turns beating me silly. Wish they had caught me. I didn't look at it as... well... IDK, it was all around me. <SHRUGS>

You smoke in a vehicle when there's a kid in there? Yeah, that ought to get you arrested. Slap on the wrist? FELONY!

Just a few specific scenarios. There are too many to list even taking into consideration the average length of one of my posts. Basically, I'm one of those "live and let live" kind of people, lol. You're (supposedly) a thinking, reasoning organism - do whatever the <BLEEP> you want to. As long as that thing does no harm to another. Above and beyond that, though? Responsibility. Culpability. If I whack you up side the head with my Louisville Slugger - and I wasn't "legally provoked" - I'm probably going to jail. Why, then, should it matter what tool I happen to use?!?

I don't think cigarettes, alcohol, baseball bats, Heckler & Koch MP5SDs, or anything else ought to be illegal. But I think PEOPLE... should be held ACCOUNTABLE... for their ACTIONS.

Instead of putting those goofy Surgeon General's warnings on a pack of cigarettes, how about an ingredients list, FFS? Let's see what the one on this pack says, shall we? "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health." (The improper capitalization is not mine :rolleyes3 .) Yeah, imagine that, if you quit smoking you'll have less health risks. Boy, there's a f*cking newsflash...

Cigarettes and cigarette smoke contain over 4,000 chemicals, including 43 known carcinogens and 400-odd other toxins. Among many other things: formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT(!). Try putting that sh!t into a package of hot dogs, lol, and not including it in the list of ingredients - and see what happens to your company. I can't think of anything else that's sold to be consumed by humans that you can go to the store and buy that doesn't have to have a list of ingredients on the package. List it. List it all. Better include a handy dandy magnifying glass along with those cigarettes. If you're the CEO of a tobacco corporation - or even the night janitor who sweeps the floors - and your company puts things into the products you sell for the sole purpose of increasing the addictiveness of those products... You ought to be adjudged guilty for all of the criminal actions that those substances cause. If some single mother's kid isn't getting the nutrition that it needs because she can't lay off the cigarettes and spend the money on a gallon of milk, and your company is dosing her cigarettes with something that makes them more addictive than they'd otherwise be, YOU should be thrown in jail for child abuse. I figure that tobacco company employees/principals ought to be getting out of prison right around the time of the heat death of the universe.

Err... [/RANT]

 

[AnimaSola]

Imo all drug possession for personal use should be legal like portugal has been for over 10 years.

For those looking for clues about how the U.S. government can tackle its domestic drug problem, the figures are enticing. Following decriminalization, Portugal eventually found itself with the lowest rates of marijuana usage in people over 15 in the EU: about 10%. Compare this to the 40% of people over 12 who regularly smoke pot in the U.S., a country with some of the most punitive drugs laws in the developed world. Drug use of all kinds has declined in Portugal: Lifetime use among seventh to ninth graders fell from 14.01% to 10.6%.- Lifetime heroin use among 16-18 year olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%.- And what about those horrific HIV infection rates that prompted the move in the first place? HIV infection rates among drug users fell by an incredible 17%, while drug related deaths were reduced by more than half. "There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,"

 

[SweetSue]

In every state that went legal, whether for medical or for both med and rec, the statistics are so shocking it should have forced our hands and sped up the process nationwide.

Sales of alcohol - down, and significantly so, in excess of 25% reduction. Prescriptions for opioids -down. Teen use of cannabis - down. Prescriptions for antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs - down. Traffic fatalities - down. The list goes on.

One day our 16-yr old son took off to be with his buds, and about half an hour later he bounced back into the house to grab something he'd forgotten, with a cigarette he'd stuck behind his ear. Nobody yelled or lost it. Instead, from the far side of the living room Dad quietly commented "Nice cigarette there. We weren't aware you'd taken up the habit."

"Oh shit," the boy replied with a chagrined twist to the facial features, "I forgot about that. Don't worry, I can quit anytime I want."

"Sure you can," Dad came back, "I've been quitting for the last thirty years."

The boy reached up, pulled that cigarette down, sheepishly snapped it in half, and went on with his day. As far as I know he's never taken the habit up.

Side note: my mother and I asked Dale within a day of his moving into the house that he please refrain from smoking indoors. For the entire twenty years of our marriage that he did smoke, he did so outside. Every cigarette, regardless of where he was. In a room full of smokers Dale would go outside on a porch to have his own.

Why did he quit? Our daughter and I convinced him that it was worth it, after his first heart attack put him in the hospital, without a single cigarette for ten days. In ten days the addiction to the components is behind you and what you're left with is the habits you've created that trigger the desire. We requested he stop right then and there, since he'd been trying to do so for decades.

He died 14 years later from complications of diabetes and CHF. He once told me, right before he fell into the death spiral, that he hadn't had a single day go by that the urge to have a cigarette didn't dog him. It's amazing what the power of love can accomplish.

 

[TorturedSoul]

he hadn't had a single day go by that the urge to have a cigarette didn't dog him.

I believe it. Dad admitted the same thing near the end. Mentioned he wished he had one. I'd have given him one - and physically attacked anyone who tried to prevent him from smoking it - but by that point his lungs were so shot, all he'd have been able to do would have been to look at it.

I think if/when someone gets old, their reproductive organs shrivel, any children that they have are adults... they're at the age when, every day, you kind of have to be pleasantly surprised that they made it one more - because they're well past "average life expectancy" - and they've obviously got nothing to fear from any kind of possible "long-term health issues" from consuming a substance... That they ought to be allowed to consume any of them they wish. What's it going to hurt, lol?

And the same holds true (in my mind) for the terminally ill. Even if... A person has a projected six weeks to live. "Hey, bud, if you do that {whatever}, you could drop dead five minutes later." <SHRUGS> Just how cheerful are you feeling, anyway, laying in bed hooked to $100,000 worth of machines, watching the calendar? Five minutes of pleasure beats six weeks of suffering.

It's a quality vs. quantity thing. And THAT is important. If it wasn't, we should be chasing down all those mountain climbers & parachutists, and throwing them into cells - where they'd have a "nice" long life.

 

[Snoflake]

I hesitate to say that things like that should be illegal. This country saw what happened when alcohol was made illegal. That had all kinds of bad effects.

I do think that there should be complete accountability - not just in regards to the manufacturers, but the consumers, too.

Alcohol: If someone gets tanked and wipes out a whole microbus full of kids who are on their way to church (RiP, Buddy - I wish you'd have had a chance to live past age 12) because he's too wasted to realize that it's Sunday morning instead of Saturday night, that son of a bitch ought to end up on death row where the state punches his ticket, instead of one of the grieving parents having to do it after he spends a few months (or, I suppose, a few years these days) in jail.

Cigarettes: Here's one my parents were bad about. If you've got kids, and they're playing on the floor in the living room, and one of them looks at the sun shining through the window and sees a layer of smoke... and he keeps putting his head lower, and lower, and lower, wondering how low he has to go in order to see the bottom of that heavy layer of smoke - and he bumps his head on the floor before he gets to the bottom of it? Yeah, that ought to be criminal. I'm pretty sure Mom would agree, and if Dad were still alive, I think he would, too. They just never thought about that kind of stuff back in the day. First time I walked into the kitchen, opened the drawer, grabbed a pack of Dad's Kools, and went outside and fired one up... I didn't even cough :icon_roll. At least I was getting my smoke through a filter at that point. BtW, I was eleven years old. If I'd been caught, they'd have taken turns beating me silly. Wish they had caught me. I didn't look at it as... well... IDK, it was all around me. <SHRUGS>

You smoke in a vehicle when there's a kid in there? Yeah, that ought to get you arrested. Slap on the wrist? FELONY!

Just a few specific scenarios. There are too many to list even taking into consideration the average length of one of my posts. Basically, I'm one of those "live and let live" kind of people, lol. You're (supposedly) a thinking, reasoning organism - do whatever the <BLEEP> you want to. As long as that thing does no harm to another. Above and beyond that, though? Responsibility. Culpability. If I whack you up side the head with my Louisville Slugger - and I wasn't "legally provoked" - I'm probably going to jail. Why, then, should it matter what tool I happen to use?!?

I don't think cigarettes, alcohol, baseball bats, Heckler & Koch MP5SDs, or anything else ought to be illegal. But I think PEOPLE... should be held ACCOUNTABLE... for their ACTIONS.

Instead of putting those goofy Surgeon General's warnings on a pack of cigarettes, how about an ingredients list, FFS? Let's see what the one on this pack says, shall we? "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health." (The improper capitalization is not mine :rolleyes3 .) Yeah, imagine that, if you quit smoking you'll have less health risks. Boy, there's a f*cking newsflash...

Cigarettes and cigarette smoke contain over 4,000 chemicals, including 43 known carcinogens and 400-odd other toxins. Among many other things: formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT(!). Try putting that sh!t into a package of hot dogs, lol, and not including it in the list of ingredients - and see what happens to your company. I can't think of anything else that's sold to be consumed by humans that you can go to the store and buy that doesn't have to have a list of ingredients on the package. List it. List it all. Better include a handy dandy magnifying glass along with those cigarettes. If you're the CEO of a tobacco corporation - or even the night janitor who sweeps the floors - and your company puts things into the products you sell for the sole purpose of increasing the addictiveness of those products... You ought to be adjudged guilty for all of the criminal actions that those substances cause. If some single mother's kid isn't getting the nutrition that it needs because she can't lay off the cigarettes and spend the money on a gallon of milk, and your company is dosing her cigarettes with something that makes them more addictive than they'd otherwise be, YOU should be thrown in jail for child abuse. I figure that tobacco company employees/principals ought to be getting out of prison right around the time of the heat death of the universe.

Err... [/RANT]

Love the way you think. Honestly you hit the nail on the head. Making alcohol and cigarettes illegal is by far one of the dumber ideas I've read. We all know what criminalizing alcohol does and then try it again?!?! Nope bad idea. Would be just as bad if not worse to criminalize cigarettes. People aren't stupid. We know the health risks of smoking. It's been proven. We know it's a huge risk to smoke but many of us do anyway. It's a personal liberty we are afforded. Don't smoke around your kids, don't blow it in their faces. If you want to smoke tobacco that's your own prerogative but just because you know someone or heard of someone who died from smoking don't push your agenda on me. I'm sorry your loved one died. Death is never funny or something to be maid light of. Also never use that person's death to guilt people into a different behavior. Yes we all know your chances of dying from lung cancer are much higher if you smoke but don't use fear and guilt as a way to get me to stop smoking. Education is much more affective.

On another note cannabis should be legalized lol I feel like this is a universal feeling here. Again on another side note I'm getting you are from the south lol not a lot of northerners are pro death penalty lol just ran across another post from you and like your writing and the way you think.

 

[TorturedSoul]

There's that whole "cost to society" thing to consider, too. Look at how much of other people's money ends up getting spent because of a thing. Cannabis ought to sell for cost plus a reasonable profit. I'm thinking 12 to 15 percent above cost would be just about perfect for all concerned. What's it cost to grow a lid these days, $50? Okay, sell an ounce of cannabis for around $57.50. Cost to society is pretty much nil after you decide not to count all the paranoia-, hate-, and greed-inspired foolishness.

Cigarettes, lol? Yeah, they should still be legal (IF they can be somehow made to pass the standard FDA requirements that any other substance has to go through!). But they ought to cost around $125 per pack, IMHO. And, yes, I am a smoker. This isn't someone who doesn't smoke typing....

 

[Snoflake]

Yea smoking is bad and by educating people we can reduce the number of smokers which means less people dying from lung, throat, mouth, etc cancer. That's great! I don't want people to die, I want people to be able to choose for themselves. When you alleviate choice all you have is 1984 or drones. Once choice is taken out of the equation we become drones. What kind of life is that? Should we make incentives for people to not smoke or to quit? Yea I think that might be a great idea but don't make it so that one of my adult freedoms is squashed. Again I sense you are a southerner, I am as well. Texas needs to get on board the medical marijuana train. We have a lot of people who are very pro cannabis but unfortunately there are a lot of scary conservatives who refuse to see the good cannabis can do. I find myself as a vey middle of the road kind of person. I don't subscribe to any political party, but I am always a supporter of legalizing marijuana. I don't see how people can keep telling themselves there's nothing good about cannabis. My dad had brain surgery last year, two months after he had a stroke and a brain bleed. His recovery was very arduous and difficult. Today I brought him a pen of Harlequin (high CBD, low THC) he loved it. There's so much we can learn from cannabis and so many way we can benefit from it. Why aren't we doing more?

 

[TorturedSoul]

I sense you are a southerner

No, I just hate the thought of being packed in like sardines into little boxes in great big cities with a passion, lol, and when I think of what'll happen when the whole food and utility infrastructure breaks down, I feel the urge to make sure my self-defense items are in good working order.

Why aren't we doing more?

Greed. There's more than a little unwillingness to take responsibility, too. In fact, I have not decided which is the most significant factor in this (and so many, many other things).

 

[Skullman420]

That's the reason I switched to ecigarettes about 4 years ago. I could feel the tobacco beginning to slowly kill me.

I do however still use a tiny bit of tobacco in my joints. Just think they taste better that way.

It's a European thing I guess

 

[Snoflake]

That's the reason I switched to ecigarettes about 4 years ago. I could feel the tobacco beginning to slowly kill me.

I do however still use a tiny bit of tobacco in my joints. Just think they taste better that way.

It's a European thing I guess

No I get it. I managed an e-cigarette store for a couple years and I had completely stoped smoking. There's a lot of controversy around it but at the end of the day vaping is probably less harmful than smoking cigarettes. You're still inhaling something into your lungs so not great but better than the alternative. I'm curious what the long term effects of vaping are. There's still talk about those of use who still smoke cannabis in a traditional form (flower) and what the long term effects it has. This is a great conversation and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Both of y'all are both so well spoken or well written lol I find that I am more well written than I am spoken. Guess that comes from years of writing term papers and research papers, oh and my dad having a masters in journalism and mom having a masters in English lol I'm thinking about lighting up a bowl of white widow and watching Sherlock? What do y'all think?

 

[Snoflake]

No, I just hate the thought of being packed in like sardines into little boxes in great big cities with a passion, lol, and when I think of what'll happen when the whole food and utility infrastructure breaks down, I feel the urge to make sure my self-defense items are in good working order.



Greed. There's more than a little unwillingness to take responsibility, too. In fact, I have not decided which is the most significant factor in this (and so many, many other things).

Sherlock and a bowl of white widow? I think that sounds like a lovely Saturday night.

 

[Skullman420]

No I get it. I managed an e-cigarette store for a couple years and I had completely stoped smoking. There's a lot of controversy around it but at the end of the day vaping is probably less harmful than smoking cigarettes. You're still inhaling something into your lungs so not great but better than the alternative. I'm curious what the long term effects of vaping are. There's still talk about those of use who still smoke cannabis in a traditional form (flower) and what the long term effects it has. This is a great conversation and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Both of y'all are both so well spoken or well written lol I find that I am more well written than I am spoken. Guess that comes from years of writing term papers and research papers, oh and my dad having a masters in journalism and mom having a masters in English lol I'm thinking about lighting up a bowl of white widow and watching Sherlock? What do y'all think?

At least I'm not having that constant caught anymore so it has done wonders to my health

 

[Snoflake]

At least I'm not having that constant caught anymore so it has done wonders to my health

Yea that does suck. I use whitening toothpaste and get my teeth whitened recently so there's that and constantly trying to keep my clothes from smelling like smoke. Not a lot of upsides to smoking when you look at it lol I do know a lot of people who smoke marijuana that don't smoke cigarettes and I understand it. I also know a few who only eat edibles because they don't want to inhale anything. Purely a preference, I enjoy all forms personally.

 

[TorturedSoul]

That's the reason I switched to ecigarettes about 4 years ago. I could feel the tobacco beginning to slowly kill me.

I got a couple of those, Mark Ten XL brand, via "get a device/cartridge for a dollar" and "get any cartridge two-pack for a dollar" coupons a while back. How long did it take you to stop trying to light one of those things, lol (or is that just me)?

I still like cigarettes better, but I'm trying to use the Chinese(?) sticks more and the cigarettes less. Which isn't working all that well... The twin-packs of cartridges are around $7 locally - but I can buy one of those tiny bottles of "high strength" nicotine/menthol liquid for about $5, and use a thin rod to pop the top off the "disposable" cartridges and lift the little rubber piece out, add 30 drops of the liquid, stick the little rubber piece and cap back on the cartridge, and it's full again. Probably works out to around 50 cents per refill.

But it apparently isn't the same, because when I run out of smokes and grab one of the imitation jobs... Before I know it, I'm grabbing a paper and hunting through the ashtray <YUCK!>...

I do however still use a tiny bit of tobacco in my joints. Just think they taste better that way.

It's a European thing I guess

Must be. I've smoked cigarettes for about 76% of my life, and I couldn't stand it when I tried mixing. Tried half and half, mostly cannabis, and mostly tobacco when I did. Think I might have been in HS when I read that the thing was big over in Amsterdam or some place like that, and figured maybe it somehow potentiated the cannabis buzz. Didn't do anything for me but waste a couple grams of cannabis, lol (took a few hits, out the window the went).

But I'd be the first to admit that there's no accounting for taste - and that everyone's is different. My favorite cold drink is dill pickle juice, followed closely by freshly squeezed lemon juice (with lots of salt and NO water!). And I doubt those would rank in most people's top ten (err... thousand, lol?)....

 

[TorturedSoul]

There's a lot of controversy around it but at the end of the day vaping is probably less harmful than smoking cigarettes. You're still inhaling something into your lungs so not great but better than the alternative.

Yeah, but I wonder how much of the (obvious) ill effects from cigarettes come from the tobacco and how much actually comes from everything else that the companies put in there.

I've thought about trying to grow my own tobacco a few times, but not very seriously. It'd probably take more room than I have. These days, I often make a couple packs last a week (or, if I'm really broke, one pack). But when I could afford it, I tended to average around three packs/day. That's probably a lot of tobacco plants. And I'd need to figure out a way to steam(?)-extract menthol, too.

I also (again, briefly and not very seriously) thought about trying to grow Nicotiana rustica (aka "Aztec tobacco" and "wild tobacco"), because it's the most potent strain of tobacco known (it's sometimes used in pesticides). It has anywhere from three to nine times more nicotine, depending on which other strain of tobacco it is being compared to. Apparently, lol... a little dab will do you. But then I pictured myself with a big bag of it (my fellow cannabis growers can probably guess where I'm going, here ) and quickly getting back to the "I don't need to worry about the price of the thing any more" consumption levels. And that would probably lead directly to a massive nicotine-induced coronary. So... no, probably not a wise thing for me to contemplate.

OtOH, I suppose every drag off of one of those cigarettes would give that ever-so-slight dizzy rush that I used to get when I'd try very hard to quit and not smoke for, IDK, a day, maybe two, and then break down and go buy a pack of Kools, be fiending so bad that I'd tear the filter off of the first one and hotbox it.

Rambling...

I'm curious what the long term effects of vaping are.

Much undoubtedly depends on what substance is used for the carrier, and what other ingredients are in it (if any).

Nicotine isn't exactly a wonder drug, lol... But it's not nearly the demon that it's made out to be (and actually has several health benefits). I'm not saying it'd be smart to consume it on a regular basis or anything. OtOH, I'd be willing to be that, if they somehow managed to live through all the other health (and violence) issues that routinely killed them centuries ago - IOW, the average life expectancy was more comparable to what ours is now - that their rates of cancer among smokers would be far less than what ours is. Because they basically grew tobacco, chopped it up, fermented it (I suppose), and... that's it, here's your tobacco. None of that, "Hey, Chuck down in the lab just figured out that if he put substance #352-A on sawdust, those white mice continue to eat the sawdust until they fall over dead! Let's add some of that to our cigarettes, we'll sell three times as many as we do now" stuff back then.

There's still talk about those of use who still smoke cannabis in a traditional form (flower) and what the long term effects it has.

The only vague factoid I remember about cannabis vs. tobacco from two or three decades ago, when pretty much the only (grant-paid) research studies done on cannabis was done by people who basically wrote their grant applications to show that they <COUGH> weren't interested in showing any positive effects of cannabis... Is that the incidence of lung cancer in cigarette smokers was far higher than in the non-smoking public, but if that cigarette smoker was also a daily cannabis smoker, his/her likelihood of getting lung cancer was far less than those people who only smoked (tobacco) cigarettes. I'm not sure, but I think that the incidence of lung cancer in cannabis smokers who didn't also smoke cigarettes was still somewhat higher than complete non-smokers (smoke, in general, is an obvious lung irritant).

In other words, LMAO, if you are going to smoke cigarettes, make SURE that you smoke cannabis each and every day, too! (Your lungs will thank you .)

 

[MrCanada]

Yeah, but I wonder how much of the (obvious) ill effects from cigarettes come from the tobacco and how much actually comes from everything else that the companies put in there.

I've thought about trying to grow my own tobacco a few times, but not very seriously. It'd probably take more room than I have. These days, I often make a couple packs last a week (or, if I'm really broke, one pack). But when I could afford it, I tended to average around three packs/day. That's probably a lot of tobacco plants. And I'd need to figure out a way to steam(?)-extract menthol, too.

I also (again, briefly and not very seriously) thought about trying to grow Nicotiana rustica (aka "Aztec tobacco" and "wild tobacco"), because it's the most potent strain of tobacco known (it's sometimes used in pesticides). It has anywhere from three to nine times more nicotine, depending on which other strain of tobacco it is being compared to. Apparently, lol... a little dab will do you. But then I pictured myself with a big bag of it (my fellow cannabis growers can probably guess where I'm going, here ) and quickly getting back to the "I don't need to worry about the price of the thing any more" consumption levels. And that would probably lead directly to a massive nicotine-induced coronary. So... no, probably not a wise thing for me to contemplate.

OtOH, I suppose every drag off of one of those cigarettes would give that ever-so-slight dizzy rush that I used to get when I'd try very hard to quit and not smoke for, IDK, a day, maybe two, and then break down and go buy a pack of Kools, be fiending so bad that I'd tear the filter off of the first one and hotbox it.

Rambling...



Much undoubtedly depends on what substance is used for the carrier, and what other ingredients are in it (if any).

Nicotine isn't exactly a wonder drug, lol... But it's not nearly the demon that it's made out to be (and actually has several health benefits). I'm not saying it'd be smart to consume it on a regular basis or anything. OtOH, I'd be willing to be that, if they somehow managed to live through all the other health (and violence) issues that routinely killed them centuries ago - IOW, the average life expectancy was more comparable to what ours is now - that their rates of cancer among smokers would be far less than what ours is. Because they basically grew tobacco, chopped it up, fermented it (I suppose), and... that's it, here's your tobacco. None of that, "Hey, Chuck down in the lab just figured out that if he put substance #352-A on sawdust, those white mice continue to eat the sawdust until they fall over dead! Let's add some of that to our cigarettes, we'll sell three times as many as we do now" stuff back then.



The only vague factoid I remember about cannabis vs. tobacco from two or three decades ago, when pretty much the only (grant-paid) research studies done on cannabis was done by people who basically wrote their grant applications to show that they <COUGH> weren't interested in showing any positive effects of cannabis... Is that the incidence of lung cancer in cigarette smokers was far higher than in the non-smoking public, but if that cigarette smoker was also a daily cannabis smoker, his/her likelihood of getting lung cancer was far less than those people who only smoked (tobacco) cigarettes. I'm not sure, but I think that the incidence of lung cancer in cannabis smokers who didn't also smoke cigarettes was still somewhat higher than complete non-smokers (smoke, in general, is an obvious lung irritant).

In other words, LMAO, if you are going to smoke cigarettes, make SURE that you smoke cannabis each and every day, too! (Your lungs will thank you .)

I've read three different studies done over decades following people who smoked pot vs people who smoked cigs vs people who smoked both. People who smoked pot were healthiest, and the people who smoked pot and cigs were far healthier than just the cigs.

With that said my father passed young of lung cancer and he smoked both heavily for 40 years. Just don't smoke cigs lol.