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Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, but I think cigar and pipe smoking are a perfectly valid way to get nicotine on your own terms while avoiding addiction. I have never seen someone cowering in the rain cradling a big cigar to get their fix.

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Cigar smoker here, and back when I had more time on my hands, I went through a pretty heavy cigar phase. Cigars are impractical as addictive agents, because they're very expensive and take a long time to consume. But they exhibit at least some mildly to moderately addictive properties. Back in grad school I found myself moving up the ladder from the occasional cigar a week, to the cigar every day, to the two to three cigars a day. I wouldn't say I needed them, or that the urge to smoke clawed at me every waking second. But I'd build my entire morning routine around the first cigar, my afternoon and evenings around the second and third, and so on. A day without a cigar left me pretty restless and unfocused. If that's not addiction, per se, it was something resembling dependence.

Cigarettes are more insidious tobacco delivery vehicles, but cigars aren't exactly health supplements.

Nicotine supplementation, absent the tobacco, is an interesting subject worth further study and consideration. On its own, given Gwern's and other research, it seems no more dangerous or addictive than caffeine (for example).

Cigar smoker here. Cigars take between 45 minutes and an hour and a half to get through; a little long for a fix. You can get smaller cigars, but they're mostly cigarettes sold as cigars to escape the higher taxes.

This is exactly how I quit a pack-a-day cigarette habit in my 20s: smoking a pipe. It allowed me to get some nicotine in, but was such a pain to pack/light that I eventually gave it up -- by that time I was sufficiently de-habituated from cigarettes that I never went back to smoking, except for a few times when I got really drunk (another habit I eventually gave up).

Well, you're not really supposed to take the cigar smoke back into your lungs, so maybe that has something to do with it.

My dad ends up doing this pretty often. He "quits" cigarettes for a while, but eventually starts smoking cigars, surreptitiously at first, with increasing frequency until he reverts to regular cigarette smoking again.

I used to smoke Black and Milds exclusively, and you would have found me out in the rain smoking mine. I was completely addicted to them. And of course there's no pharmacological reason to think that cigars or pipes would be less addictive than any other form of tobacco. The reason that you don't see people smoking them as often is that they aren't the social norm for smoking in public.

If you want a way to take in nicotine with lower risk of addiction, get an e-cig.

I think the trick is just moderation. I go through about a single pack of cigarettes a year, typically only smoking during stressful or intense periods, typically over periods of time shorter than weekends. Seems to work out fine.

cigar smoker here. As others described, they are mildly addictive, but quite different from cigarettes. I smoke for nearly 17 years, started from having too much free time in a foreign country on my first expat assignment. During this time I moved from occasional smoke once a month, to a regular smoke once a week. There is however, one obvious trend that I noticed, whenever I have too much free time and cigars nearby, I would smoke one. As in, 1-2 cigars a day during vacations. On the other hand, if I am out of cigars, I forget about them for weeks and do just fine.

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