On cigarettes

Despite having never smoked a single cigarette in my life, I have an intensely strong reaction to a very specific brand. Early in high school I met my first crush, and one summer learned that she liked me back. She was my first everything. And the scent of a lot of that teenage exploration was the awful but sweet smell of her parents’ basement, stained with that brand of cigarette.

I have no clue what brand it is. But if I ever smell it in public I am teleported back there and find myself aching terribly with youthful nostalgia.

When I was a 20-something big-4 consultant traveling weeks on end for work, I took up smoking for exactly the reasons you suggest. I had nothing to do in my down time and knew nobody, but I could sit in hotel bar with a smoke and strangers would trail over.

Yep, I’m old enough to have been working when you could still smoke in hotel bars. In Monaco you could order a pack of Marlboro Reds at your dinner table back in 2006.

This reminds me of the "It looks just as stupid when you do it" anti-smoking poster[0], which was meant to dissuade smoking, but actually goes kind of hard.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/1suta15/...

In college, I wanted to test my resolve for addiction, so I started smoking a pack a day for six months. The idea was to see how hard it is to quit so that I could better understand what people go through. Never took, though. Every cigarette was gross to me from the first one down to my last day. I threw away the box on the last day and never had a single moment where I wanted another one.

Instead of learning about addiction, it taught me a ton about socializing. Sharing a cigarette with a romantic interest is such a low friction way to be able to keep close enough to have a conversation, and subtly reinforce intimacy. And after I quit, I would bring a pack to any party I went to and not tell anybody until someone was asking. There was a double whammy of providing one for a stranger, and saving a friend from having to donate one.

By the end of the night, when everybody was either trying to bum one or find someone sober enough to make a run to the gas station, my reputation for both having cigarettes and not smoking made me pretty popular. It was also really nice that when people praised me for it (mildly; "that's really cool of you, man") my stock response was "yeah, no worries. I know how great it would be if someone had a Dr pepper for me when I was dry", which made a lot of people offer me my favorite soda all the time.

I still can't stand smoking, and have only had a dozen or so in the decade since then, strictly for ingratiating myself to people. But there is nothing out there like cigarettes for socializing. I'm with a lot of other commenters here in wondering how much we've lost by stigmatizing it without ever reconciling with the (trivial, in comparison) benefits.

My grad school supervisor (requiescat in pace) lamented the decline for a similar, very minor reason: he always thought that getting up, going outside, smoking a cigarette, and coming back in was the perfect amount of time for a class break. Ten minutes was too long, five too short.

I find the reduction in smoking cigarettes fascinating at a societal level, in a similar way to a few other topics: toxoplasma gondii, widespread use of SSRIs. Probably some others I'm not recalling.

This must have had an effect, beyond health. Surely? It's hard to research because it gets crowded out (understandably) by all the negatives from smoking and all the improvements to health from the reduction of it.

But nicotine does have an effect on the mind. Certainly some positives (concentration, I believe) and I'm sure some negatives too. So the idea that a society would, over the course of a few decades, quite sharply reduce it's use of a particular drug surely must have had some interesting knock-on effects.

I've heard some people wonder if the rise of ADHD diagnoses could be related. That in the past all the ADHD folks would smoke and self-medicate, without even realizing. I have no idea if that's true.

When talking about the health impacts of smoking, most people (the article included) focus on the lung cancer aspect but gloss over the general heart and lung impacts.

Upon banning smoking in public areas, my city and the surrounding municipalities encountered an immediate and statistically significant (~10%) reduction in heart attacks.

Have to wonder what in todays world could replicate the social aspect of smoking. Something that gets people to step away from their work for a moment, keeps your hands busy and phone away and encourages people to talk to each other.

Smoking doesn't actually look cool, but you might need to have quit before to really see it- smokers are sucking on something that's essentially unpleasant to relieve the discomfort of the first pangs of withdrawal.

If you can put yourself back in that moment with honesty, and remember the hope and inevitable disappointment that this will be a 'good cigarette' ... lol that is not cool

Some sources suggest cigarette smoking is cool again. E.g., https://www.wsj.com/health/cigarettes-popularity-celebrity-s...

I smoked for 20 years, loved every minute of it and looked cool as hell

I vaped for a while and my take was that you felt worse in general with the ability to feel better on command for a little bit.

It may be the remnants of addiction speaking, but there was something about vaping that elevated certain scenarios. I loved standing at a tall place and watching the cloud dissipate into the scenery as my eye balls and body relaxed from the nicotine. Whether it was a cityscape or a high hill, it was just lovely and I remember it fondly.

The very last time I vaped, I was in the smoking lounge at the Singapore Changi airport. It was a rough room with harsh dystopian concrete benches. In the ill lit space, I sat down and took my last drags. As I inhaled, a middle aged Chinese business man in a suit sat down next to me and silently enjoyed his cigarettes. Then we went our own ways without saying anything. I thought it was a good last time.

Also, I'm sorry, but at least for me and a friend we found it hilariously easy to quit vaping. We simply just "stopped" and that was that. I found it much more painful to quit caffeine (which induced in me a fortnight of withdrawal symptoms, sore bones and fevers).

What I find interesting about cigarettes is that it created a whole new set of legislation requiring things to be non-flammable or at least flame-retarding.

The tobacco industry lobbied for this, because they didn't want to be held accountable for the deaths related to say a smoldering cigarette that lit a house on fire.

And those products themselves really weren't that healthy, as the flame-retardant added to say your couch would off-gas for a LONG time.

Now cigarettes (at least in the EU and in the USA) have 3 speed bumps in them, so they don't completely burn. They stop at each of these, and you need to suck more to overcome these bumps.

i love smoking!

Cigars can fuck off? Because we hate being classy or what?