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Comment by jhgvh | Hacker News Reader

Tobacco companies have paid out countless nine figure sums, smoking in public has gone from universal to mostly illegal, cig taxes have skyrocketed, etc…

Tobacco has been treated as a crisis, and I have no doubt that if cigarettes had been invented by one specific family, that family would be hated.

Weird that you don’t know any of this.

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True, but it still shows that lobbyists have a lot of influence. Even if it means hundreds of thousands of death people every year. Same goes for Alcohol. And maybe also specific types of food.

What’s weird is that people still think tobacco smoking is about nicotine being addictive and dangerous, when it is literally everything else in the smoke that makes it extremely addictive and mortally dangerous.

Can you please tell me which of these mandatory warning messages you feel fails to convey that cigarette smoke, on the whole, is dangerous?

https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/labeling-and-warning-st...

The nicotine is what makes it addictive, but everything else makes it deadly.

This distinction is well known here in Sweden where we have snus, and also lower rates of lung cancer and cigarette use than the rest of Europe by a LOT.

Though at the same time I would wager a larger rate of gum disease and mouth cancer than the rest of Europe by a lot.

Going by a quick skim of the 2022 WHO oral health numbers, Sweden[0] doesn't seem significantly worse off oral-health wise than Germany, Holland, or the UK. In fact it's oral cancer incident rates appear a bit better. Though the UK doesn't have great cancer incident rates, it's periodontal disease rate seem to be significantly lesser than the other three (perhaps due to close monitoring as a result of the "bad British teeth" stereotype).

Sweden male tobacco use percentages are slightly higher than the other three countries, which might be a function of the population additionally using non-cigarette tobacco substitutes perhaps as was mentioned by others.

[0] https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/country-profil...

Not cancer. Because it's, again, not the nicotine that causes the cancer. Snus does NOT increase cancer risk.

It decreases cavities by a lot (presumably because the bacteria doesn't like the environment anymore), but also destroys your gums. All in all, depending on your dosage it could be a wash or even positive for your oral health.

It's absolutely disgusting, but it's not dangerous :P

It's not known in Australia where you have to have a prescription to buy a vape but can buy cigarettes freely. Apparently they're relaxing the prescription requirement later in the year but still only pharmacies will be allowed to sell them.

That is not true. It is the interaction of nicotine with various monoamine oxidase inhibitors that makes tobacco smoking addictive, to an extent that it could be stated that it is the MAOIs entirely causing the addictive behaviour: the exact same MAOIs are also found in coffee, after all.

Why are nicotine pouches and vapes addictive, then? The answer lies in the flavourings, which themselves have psychoactive properties, likely also through MAO inhibition.

God this Gwern junk will never die. There's tons [0] of evidence that nicotine is addictive on its own.

> Why are nicotine pouches and vapes addictive

It's the nicotine.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nicotine+addictive+site%3Anih.gov&...

I'm not here to argue, but all top 5 links for me are about smoking. I've not heard of people being addicted to nicotine patches for example, especially non-smokers.

https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/health-effects-tobacco-...

Nicotine Addiction: Neurobiology and Mechanism: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32322429/

Neurophysiology of Nicotine Addiction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22454789/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02247412

I looked into this previously, though it was a while ago so I no longer have the sources to hand. Nicotine is still addictive on it's own but when given to non-smokers in a non-tobacco form it's notably less addictive than smoking. Still addictive but far closer to coffee than cigarettes.

Some of this can be explained by different consumptions methods. For example in lozenges, gum and patches nicotine enters the bloodstream much slower than smoking or vaping so even if you consume the same overall amount the peak is lower slowing adaption. But that couldn't explain it entirely.

No, it's because nicotine is an addictive chemical.

https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/health-effects-tobacco-...

You will have to supply something to back up such a wild statement. Nicotine has been shown to be extremely addictive all the way from humans down to single neurons in a petri dish, for decades.

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