I can speak as someone who previously smoked for a decade+ and then quit. I started because some friends who smoked offered me one and I was dumb enough to say yes. Horrible. But there was a very nice immediate head rush/high. And then that led to friends continuing to offer cigarettes and me continuing to be dumb. And then addiction takes hold and it goes from there.
I probably didn’t actually BUY my own smokes until I’d already smoked more than a carton off of other people offering.
And it is a HARD drug to quit. Still to this day when I smell someone smoking a cig I immediately get the “awww fuck I could really use one of those right now” urges
I smoked occasionally while drinking at bars/parties. Bought a few packs to smoke/share. Never smoked outside of those times and at worst it was maybe every other week.
I guess I had a decent addiction tolerance.
Elementary school always warned us that people would offer us free drugs. This whole time, people have joked that no one is going around giving away free cocaine and heroin. Turns out, it was cigarettes they were trying to warn us about
This but unironically lol
As a non-smoker, I get that sensation when I smell a cigar or cigarillo - a sweet scent of tobacco.
But cigarettes? What’s even to smell? It just smells like an ash toilet
It just smells like an ash toilet
IMO that’s part of why so many people (me included) fall for this shit: “there’s no way I’ll become addicted to this horrendous shit, no harm in bumming another one to look cool”.
Yeah I used to think cig smoke smelt like disgusting ass before I smoked. After I smoked it still smells like ass but it smells like GOOD ass
It’s like when you’re hungover after a rough night and you’re not really TOO hungry but you know you should eat something or you’re going to suffer even more later today so you go rummaging around in your freezer and eeeeh there’s not really much there, but then behind the bag of frozen vegetables there’s one lone frozen burrito and oh good fucking LORD that burrito right in this moment is the best 5/5 top quality food you’ve ever eaten in your entire life. Cigarettes will smell like that burrito forevermore
After you smoke cigarettes for a while the smell becomes good to you
But if a million flies love to suck on shit, it has to be good, right?
Yeah from what I’ve heard that feeling never goes away. I remember someone who quit smoking telling me how good secondhand smoke smells.
I was in the military, and smokers got breaks.
It does have a felt effect, but is very mild. The thing is that the body loves nicotine, and even if you’re not consciously getting high, your body is getting high. That’s why vapes were able to become popular.
The body loves it so much, the smoke stops smelling bad to you.
And finally, the fact that it smells bad & keeps people away is a GOOD thing.
I’d rather smell like smoke than body odor after being in the field for a week or two with no showers.
I never did any of that stuff, but after what they have to do, I can think of few things, that you could do as soon as you got back, that would be better than a cigarette.
smokers got breaks.
When I quit smoking, I pretty much stopped going to parties, conventions, dance clubs, and concerts. Having an excuse to get out of the crowd and noise and decompress for ten minutes every couple of hours made “going out” so much more tolerable for me.
Don’t forget the nicotine fix.
Easy. Say you’re going for a smoke and then don’t actually smoke.
Did this at work all the time. I want to hangout and chat too
You and your rational solutions… You are clearly not addicted.
Yeah, chances are one day that’d lead to smoking again. Likely pretty quickly.
I (also military) used to grab a cup of coffee and bring it out whenever the smokers went out (though I had to start doing half a cup, because the smokers took a lot of breaks).
Then one chief established there would be no more “smoke breaks” for the smokers, but everyone would get regular breaks (and the smokers could take theirs outside). People (including the smokers who had been taking breaks all along) started making jokes about taking their “union mandated” breaks. And the smokers just went out twice as often.
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Add coffee for an even more enjoyable shit
Experiencing the constipation, stress, and fatigue commonly associated with a nicotine withdrawal? Try nicotine!
Dang, I should try these things out.
(joking)
cool another post on Lemmy about not understanding addiction
Its about not understanding why people get into it in the first place, not why they don’t quit after. You can’t have an addiction if you never try it in the first place.
I feel like it’s not hard to understand in a general sense. Could be carelessness, depression, ignorance that it will be easy to quit, peer pressure, culture, etc. People make irrational decisions all the time, no matter how “dumb” or “smart” they are.
I agree with you, I’m just saying I think thats what anon was questioning.
I just watched Casablanca for the first time a couple of days ago, and as someone that hates smoking, I just don’t get how it came to be everywhere back in the day. Ingrid Bergman is probably the only non-smoker in the entire movie! Both her (breast, 69) and Humphrey Bogart (esophageal, 57) died of cancer.
Growing up with two smoking parents that’d both gladly hotbox their kids, my brother and I, when we drove anywhere was just awful. I really don’t get how you can do that to other people without feeling ashamed.Well, back in the day cigarette companies paid to be in the movies. This timeline puts it back to the very first “talkies” cigarette companies were already shouldering their way in and making sure that they were associated with sex and cool. Everyone was smoking on screen because films were big tobacco ads.
That first set of parenthesese were really confusing until I read the rest of the sentence.
“(breast, 69)” out of context does seem a bit 👀
For a second I thought you were making a disparaging remark about her being a woman!
For a split second I thought this was going to be a comment about a link between smoking and breast sizes (in some weird units).
When I get super terrible, a single tablet (2mg) can make me feel better. Doesn’t even make me feel like I need another. Fine for weeks
They called it a peace pipe for a reason. We’re the ones that went and capitalized on it and made it horrible and deadly addictive.
I don’t smoke myself but you need to know that cigarettes are super-processed crap. They intentionally add more poisonous shit to them. Even I like the smell of loose leaf tobacco smoked in a pipe, or in a quality cigar. The reason people first started smoking tobacco is because it smells good. But you’re right that’s not cigarettes.
Yep. Cigarettes smell and taste terrible, but I love the smell of pipe tobacco and cigars. I enjoy smoking a cigar a few times a year. Though, the smoke only smells good in the moment. Once it permeates clothing, it reeks just as bad as cigarette smoke the next day.
For some reason clothes soak up the nasty smells the most, but to my nose the room ends up smelling quite nice for a few days. Talking about cigars
I’ve never smoked one inside, other than in a cigar shop smoking lounge. I would never do that to my house lol.
They intentionally add more poisonous shit to them.
What and why
tar, formaldehyde, and benzene are all added to cigarettes. Tar is a binder, the formaldehyde is a preservative, and benzene is an accelerant. The problem is that all of these things are toxic and/or cancerous.
Smoking loose leaf tobacco is the healthiest way to do it if that’s what you want to do. The little foam filters in cigarettes do nothing and the additives added to processed tobacco make it much more unhealthy.
Thanks for the info :)
OP discovers addiction. Doesn’t realise he probably has one himself.
OOP?
Smoking is becoming cool again because seeing a 50 year old man vape is pathetic.
Yeah fuck him for switching to something not nearly as harmful.
Because it’s a drug that makes you feel good?
Also: I am now convinced that a sizable portion of the Population is neurodivergent in a way that Nicotine does A LOT more for them than “a slight calming effect”.
I read that the MAOIs in Tobacco can enhance the effects of nicotine.
Thus, if you really want the fix, the effects will be much stronger.
TL;DR: Show me someone with any hard-to-quit habit, and I’ll show you someone that’s self-medicating for something.
This is tragically under-appreciated in our society. Especially when it seems everyone is converging on some kind of self-diagnosis, and collectively coming to a “hey nobody’s normal” conclusion. We’re so very close to framing help as “harm reduction for nicotine” and “maybe it’s also neurodiversity and/or trauma”, but we keep missing the mark and argue about vapes instead.
Also, as the greentext suggests, I personally think we’re way past the point where people that can avoid starting or can quit easy, have already done so. What you see these days is a rather hard-core use cohort that has complex addiction to work through.
So… yeah. Helping a friend quit? Please work with them to consider the jenga-tower of adverse psychology that a-pack-a-day might be holding up. It could be way harder to pull off than either of you think.
90% of schizophrenic people smoke. It helps their illness. I don’t know if the mechanism has been discovered.
Fascinatingly, tobacco has been used as “traditional medicine” by native populations for centuries. In psychedelic ceremonies, it’s very common to have a tobacco component. So I’m sure there’s a link between tobacco and the psyche.
ADHD and cigarettes pair so nicely. 3 mins of turning off the world every hour is why I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to quit. Being a single unit item is why things like vaping never worked for me either. I had a small amount of luck with cans of fizzy drinks, but I’d need an insane amount and 2 weeks off work with none of my usual triggers for a chance.
Apparently there are some people that live under the illusion that nicotine doesn’t actually do anything, I saw one of these guys in another thread. I’m sure whoever placed them under that illusion did it with good intentions, but the implication that there are people getting hooked on it every day just to look cool is so funny
People say the same about caffeine. All it means is you have a high tolerance to something. Doesnt mean addiction but it could be part of it.
Nicotine makes my whole body vibrate and I would describe it as feeling quite high for about 2 minutes
That goes away when you become a regular smoker.
I kinda miss this feeling, I vape 50 mg (or is it really?) salt and I hardly feel anything
Interesting. It makes me feel like I suddenly became super heavy, like the Earth’s gravity just dialed up a notch. Oddly, if I were already high on cannabis, a toke of nicotine would take away some of the weed buzz. I know I wouldn’t be “more sober” with both, but it feels like it (which makes me then think that I wasted that weed by doing both.)
I wanna hear everyone’s experiences. I’ve always been curious what drugs (including nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol) feel like to other people.
Caffeine doesn’t affect me. Never drank coffee regularly any time in my life, but any time I’ve attempted to use caffeine from any source (including some pretty strong energy drinks) to either wake up, or stay awake, I haven’t felt any different at all.
When I was a teenager, we would smoke weed then smoke cigarettes really fast to get a head rush on top of the weed. It’s how I got addicted.
Same. Literally chasing highs for like years in high school. Such a dumb idea. Let’s get really good at doing all the drugs!
Don’t give up! I’m still improving.
Oh it does also make me feel heavy. I usually have to sit down for a moment if I hit a friend’s vape
Because it’s a drug that makes you feel good?
More specifically, its a stimulant that makes your brain more active and helps you cut through your exhaustion. Like caffeine, its a “work drug” designed to crank more units of labor out of you in a limited time span, at the expense of your overall health and well-being.
That’s why capitalist countries have been so loathe to outlaw it, when compared to the creative/transgressive stimulants like LSD and THC.
Lol as a non smoker when I take a rip I feel so lightheaded and awesome. No wonder people get addicted
I know what you mean. As a non drinker I love getting drunk every week.
non drinker
every week
Pick one.
Thatsthejoke.jpeg
Oh :/
All I get is a scratchy throat, a bad cough and an awful taste in my mouth. I get addiction, I don’t get how people start smoking. Why do they power through this? Just to belong? Be one of the cool kids?
It’s cool
I picked up a vape off the street a few days ago to disassemble and see how they work. I definitely get that nicotine craving they are talking about. The slightest whiff of that things odor is enough to make you curious to more. Ive had to put it in a jar to avoid the sweet smell
Because dying from smoking weed isn’t available in all places…
Tried in high school. I wanted to be able to smoke even if i didnt have or couldnt smoke weed. Thankfully a couple days in cigarettes made me vomit and I stopped without looking back. Wish I had been able to do that the first time alcohol made me vomit.
