[mauvehaus]

As someone who smokes a small single digit number of cigars per year, I can attest that the nicotine buzz is incredible on the rare occasions that I do.

I've never been a regular smoker, but I bet that for someone who was, smoking a single cigarette every few months would be an almost religious experience. You'd be getting all of the sensory associations, plus the chemical stimulation unblunted by accumulated tolerance.

[vbezhenar]

I tried smoking multiple times and never had any good reaction. It's weird to me why people smoke. Is my chemistry differs from others? I even used to smoke for two years once, just for "community" because people I hanged out at time were smokers. For me cigarettes are just weird thing producing smoke. I learned to swallow it and not blew out my lungs, but I never found any amusement with this thing and dropped it eventually.

[Balgair]

Per their use in MREs, yeah, nicotine is a really good drug to have when you're likely to be in combat in the next four or so hours. It drives blood to the core and away from the periphery, it heightens alertness, it increases testosterone, and there are a lot of other effects.

Like all drugs, there are bad parts and good parts to it. Since most people are hopefully never going to be shot, it's positive effects are mostly useless and the long term negative effects will kill you. But if you have a reasonable suspicion that you are going to be in mortal danger soon, yeah, I'd have a cigarette.

[froh]

it may depend on the cigarette brand. they treat the tobacco differently. some will put it under ammonia fumes heh and that modifies the nicotine, cracks it of sorts, which increases the potency by two or three orders of magnitude, like cracking coke just with nicotine.

[datavirtue]

Same here. I'm a light-weight, so smoking a cigarette just makes me jittery and uneasy. Not a pleasant high. A feeling that says: "WTF did you smoke that?"

[Workaccount2]

When you have a hard addiction to cigarettes, just being asleep for 8 hours is enough time to give you a wonderful warm body flush of joy when you have that first cigarette in the morning.

[steve_adams_86]

I had a friend who loved smoking hookahs years ago. 16 or so years ago now, wow.

We’d sit in his yard in summer eating, drinking, soaking in the sun, then in the evening have the hookah out with some relaxing music. Or some prog rock. He loved that stuff.

The buzz really is amazing. I was a serious runner at the time clocking something like 50k a week, and a session on that thing would be felt later on. It was brutal for lung health. I recall being grateful that I could tell how harmful it was because it otherwise might seem compelling to keep doing it.

[Modified3019]

I had an old coworker that said the same thing, calling it nearly like getting a sort of high. He had been gifted some tobacco plants by a local tribal community he had a good relationship with. So basically the only thing he’d smoke was his homemade cigars that was its own involved process. Seems like a great way to limit intake and actually enjoy things. That said, I hate smoking, and find even campfires noxious most of the time so it’s not for me.

Even if you don’t smoke, tobacco plants are definitely something to trying growing in the garden once. They are beautiful and their scent is wonderful and carries quite a ways. They start off as night flowering for hawkmoth pollination, then switch to day flowing for hummingbirds when they start getting fed on by hawk moth larvae.

[Teever]

Talking about nicotine inducing a religious experience. In my 20s I smoked organic pipe tobacco from a bong and holy shit the experience was out of this world, I literally felt like I was flying and had the most insane headrush.

I understand why Native Americans used tobacco in religious ceremonies.

[eru]

Cigarettes only took off when they developed a tobacco with much less nicotine in it. Before it was too intense.

[jajko]

Many drugs have great effects, nicotine from cigarettes on me ain't one of them. 5 minutes of dizzy, uncomfortable, mentally still in the same place.

The worst of both words, while slowly killing you. Which is good, there are tons of great things in life, no need to waste time and hitpoints on such crap.

[0_____0]

Same. Part of the reason the addiction never quite took hold of me is that I could tell that despite the addictive rush they just made me kinda jittery and nauseous. Obviously this varies an incredible amount person-to-person.