Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gooooooore 1247 days ago
Wtf did I just read
1 comments

You just read some extremely refined copium in text form.

This person has some major cognitive dissonance about the health and safety of smoking cigarettes and is dissociating from the dissonance with poetic drivel.

Tobacco is unhealthy to consume. It's okay in small, occasional doses, your body can probably shrug off a few draws from a ceremonial peace pipe like it was nothing.

But smoking every day or multiple times a day is unhealthy and will hasten your demise, and there is no working around that, not even by using organic free range gluten free fair trade halal tobacco grown by vestal virgins in the Himalayas.

Don't be silly. Is your home's air filtered correctly? Did you scratch your face after touching a public doorknob? I hope you're not using "poetic drivel" to justify use of a gas stove when we know it leads to combustion byproducts in the air. You better be eating healthy all the time too, or else only copium is justifying your food choices.

Nobody is saying that cigarettes or nicotine is healthy. The warnings exist and are highly popular. Smoking bans in public places in the many US states are generally very popular in those states. The "poetic" poster talked about how cigarettes are bad multiple times. But as adults with full knowledge of the risks of something, these adults can still engage in these activities in ways that are not posing risks to other. That's what it means to be an adult.

The moral panic around secondhand smoke is what bothers a lot of smokers. Having smoked in the past I will often join smokers to outdoor areas where they smoke just to chat without partaking and the restrictions are often really difficult to work around so I understand where the opinion comes from, even though I'm a fan of the restrictions generally.

The dangers of smoking are not equatable to the dangers of unfiltered house air.

Smoking is a known carcinogen with a known increase in death rate on top of all of the things you listed. In fact smokers probably also have the exact same air quality and environmental dangers that you listed but have added smoking on top of that.

Sure, have fun, it's your life. Smoke away. Just don't believe lies about "organic tobacco" being healthy for you. It's not.

I don't think anyone believes any lies about "organic tobacco" being healthy for you. Cigarettes and combustion are bad for you. It's obvious and the labels and taxes enforce this so that future generations understand what they're getting into with tobacco products. I don't smoke myself and it's because I'm aware of the risks of what's happening.

Offering snark at someone else's conscious bad habit that affects nobody but themselves and other smokers who opt-in strikes me as silly. Smoking has been successfully regulated, though minor vigilance is required to make sure tobacco companies don't try and undo regulation. There are many worse things that Americans partake in all the time that are untaxed, unlabelled, and only minorly regulated that will have much better public health outcomes than continually shining a spotlight on smoking and will be a better use of our collective moral and political capital as a country.

So, you think my responses are simply about how smoking is bad?