[hymen0ptera]

It feels like there's a premeditated process, here, in terms of timing.

1. Tobacco Cigarettes emerge as public health scare in the late 1990's.

2. McDonaldsization of Coffee via Starbucks in the late 1990's.

3. Cigarettes taxed and regulated with punishing costs and counter-media-manipulation.

4. Bindings introduced to market coffee with free wi-fi, boosting high-end coffee's incidental exposure to novice internet users at a time when caffeine is very-nearly required to negotiate the ever-expanding terrain of new technologies. (it's just good business, of course)

5. Millions of former nicotine addicts herded away from nicotine to expensive, premium high dose caffeine alternatives, serving as stimulant to wean many down off of nicotine cravings with new habits.

6. 20 years later, with ordinary tobacco cigarettes habits all-but-destroyed, across two generations of former users, and new technologies now well established, coffee habits can wind down. A mild campaign against coffee is introduced. See: acrylamide, poor stock performance, racial sensitivity incidents in liminal zones of large franchise chain restaurants.

7. Emerging technologies, now ready for maturity may be re-introduced with new players. These entities work to re-normalize a newly engineered and tested concept in managed synthetic addiction, with status symbol oriented marketing plays.

Why vaping is anything is beyond me, but I feel like this represents the fundamentals of a broader subversive program to phase out agricultural-plantation-oriented modes of daily-use otc psychoactives that play vital roles in common universal social norms that cut across a wide array of global cultural customs.

[scythe]

If you've ever tried nicotine you'll quickly understand why caffeine could never substitute for it. Sure, they're both stimulants. But nicotine decreases anxiety. Caffeine increases it.

[hymen0ptera]

Actually, they both do the same thing, but attack different sides of the mood slope.

Which you'd know, if you ever stopped to consider how to adjust your mood with either.

Caffeine introduces anxiety and irritability on downslope, after about two half-lives, or 12-ish hours (6 hour half life). On the up slope, caffeine provides a long slowly declining period of alertness and performance. The initial buzz comes on strong and tapers off over time.

People seek caffeine to perform. But a slow sinking feeling appears near the end of the day.

Nicotine modifies mood on the other side of the bend, with it's presence evening out irritability with immediate relief. The trail off goes unnoticed until a sudden urge kicks in, to bump one's self back up onto the plateau.

Nicotine is sought to cure or cool an immediate pang, which leaves the impression of easing into relaxation, which degrades silently until suddenly noticed as an urge to re-up.

The perception of nicotine is downtime, even though the dosage process and serum curve is the usual spike and tapered downslope, people learn modify the nicotine downslope differently, by catching the drop-off before cravings become desperate.

Which is why cigarettes are designed as they are, and achieve product success the way they do. Metering doses at an almost hourly rate, with twenty dose packs marketed to afford exactly that behavior.

Coffee, as a liquid, is readily either sipped or chugged as needed, and has different preparation and consumption habits, so its marketing is different.

Caffeine's downslope is handled differently, since the withdrawal effects, are separated by longer distances of up to 48 hours, and because circadian rhythms are more drastically effected. Consuming in the late afternoon results in insomnia, so the better choice is to cure the anxious late day mood disruptions with food and alcohol, and stave off withdrawal (vasodilation migraines, etc) the next morning.

[scythe]

I use both regularly. I never notice the "downslope" of caffeine, although maybe that's my tolerance.

The neurology is totally different. Caffeine primarily affects the heart rate via adenosine (A1R) antagonism. Nicotine binds to the ion channel nAChR which is expressed all over the brain and the nervous system. Full agonists of nAChR cause convulsive seizures, while antagonists are paralytic, but nicotine is a partial agonist, producing a sort of stability.

That's why nicotine is anxiolytic: it interferes with spikes and droughts of acetylcholine, smoothing the highs and lows of neural activation. The brain responds by "sensitizing", changing acetylcholine more dramatically in response to stimuli, and increasing the density of nACh receptors. That's why nicotine withdrawal is so awful: every mood is enhanced and you can't calm down.

By contrast, caffeine, which primarily affects the A1 receptors that are expressed in cardiac neurons and smooth muscle tissue, is obviously never anxiolytic. A faster heartbeat does not produce calmness. The faster heartbeat increases the availability of energy in the brain and muscle, producing wakefulness. It has some other effects in the brain, particularly the basal forebrain, where inhibiting A1 also promotes wakefulness, but the cardiac effects of A1 dominate its practical effects to the extent that A1 agonists (opposite of caffeine) have never been implemented as sedatives because of their tendency to produce life-threatening drops in heart rate and blood pressure.

You'd think, having studied this so much, I'd be more responsible, but humans are a funny animal. Anyway, there's no way a pure stimulant is going to substitute for an anxiolytic that takes effect in ten seconds. It makes sense in zero realities.

[itronitron]

>> nicotine decreases anxiety

decreases intensity of the anxiety and duration as well, when measured in years.