When I get super terrible, a single tablet (2mg) can make me feel better. Doesn’t even make me feel like I need another. Fine for weeks
They called it a peace pipe for a reason. We’re the ones that went and capitalized on it and made it horrible and deadly addictive.
My question exactly… I genuinely don’t get it
Like many things, it’s an irrational decision to start at some point, and then addiction keeps you doing it. I have tried out a few drugs in my teenage/young adult years, including some “hard” ones, which ended up genuinely being one-off curiosity things for me. But the one that I simply wasn’t able to kick until last year was nicotine. It really is scarily addictive for something so widespread and legal. (Alcohol was also hard, but easier for me).
That, and the part about “no high” is just not really true, even after you develop a dependency/addiction (with rapidly diminishing returns, of course). But especially when first starting to vape/smoke, there are very much effects beyond placebo. It hooks into a lot of your neurochemistry, and like most things that do, you feel that. To the point that, e.g., many people that consume weed with tobacco, will think the initial wooziness they feel is already due to the weed, when really, it is a tobacco hit. The weed effects generally come afterwards.
Of course, the effect is not at all as intense as alcohol or other drugs, but there are effects. There are also, to my knowledge, some indications, that a lot of people with ADHD use it to self-medicate, since it seems to affect them differently, like other drugs do, too.
Of course, the effect is not at all as intense as alcohol or other drugs, but there are effects. There are also, to my knowledge, some indications, that a lot of people with ADHD use it to self-medicate, since it seems to affect them differently, like other drugs do, too.
Sounds plausible; nicotine is a stimulant by means of triggering the release of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin. That is pretty much what an ADHD brain lacks.
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the reason is in the post. it’s highly addictive. quitting is basically impossible without professional assistance
Nicotine is a stimulant.
A drunk cigarette is quite nice ngl, usually makes the hangover worse though
Nicotine does have a high, that’s why. It’s subtle and a bit similar to caffeine
As someone who has done a lot of drugs, nicotine having “no high” is just bs. Yeah it’s mild, but take a few drags very quickly and find out.
Smoked 2 cigs way back when.
Only coughed with no benefits.
Was it Clinton that didn’t inhale?
Charlie Wilson.
Texas Democrat known for partying hard, and was investigated (by Rudy Giuliani) for a party he attended in Vegas.
“The girls had cocaine, and the music was loud. It was total happiness. And both of them had long, red fingernails with an endless supply of beautiful white powder…The Feds spent a million bucks trying to figure out whether, when those fingernails passed under my nose, did I exhale or inhale, and I ain’t telling”
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Can confirm. Ruinied my life. Ironically it was alcohol that destroyed me.
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(´･ᴗ･ ` ) Thanks mate.
Edit: Currently dry for over 2 years. Although I still do amphetamine, kratom and benzos (to come down) on the weekends. A big reason is that I obviously cant drink anymore, ever and before I was on sertraline (SSRI) I did mdma every few months. LSD was the drug I disliked the most, btw if anyone cares. Didnt have a bad trip but by hour 10 it was extremely exhausting.
Besides the chemical addiction part, it’s also a genuinely social one as well.
Smoking areas are designated places where strangers talk to each other. Asking for a light or offering one is a super simple way to break the ice. My dad quit cold turkey several times but he always fell back into the habit hanging with his friends
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My grandfather picked up smoking in WWII because non-smoke4s didn’t get any breaks from digging trenches.
It took over 50 years, but WWII still managed to kill him.
Still a big reason a lot of joes start smoking. If you don’t have nicotine and alcohol issues going in, the Army is happy to issue you some.
The Air Force may have split from the army in 47, but some traditions carried over.
Wouldn’t be at all surprised if most of those AAF guys had a flask in the bomber jacket. Gets cold at altitude you know.
Also, nicotine serves as a pretty fair appetite suppressant and stimulant, thus why some of us fell into the habit in early college. Easier to justify the cost of a meal a day and a smoke than it is for the supplies to make three squares a day, at least in a food desert.
I’ve worked at a cleaning job where the smokers were allowed to go outside whenever. Some even went on a smoke break several times per hour. The nonsmokers like me on the other hand were reprimanded if we sat down and drank something outside of the scheduled break. I complained, but the boss was a smoker and just told me they need their smoke break but I don’t need coffee… One coworker whom I talked to about that even said they started smoking because of this and because the non-smokers were expected to work more and cover for the smokers on their cigarette breaks.
I had a job where breaks were working breaks unless you were a smoker. That’s when I went from only smoking socially to being a regular smoker.
Yeah, my coworkers take smoke breaks together and I genuinely think I missing some important socialization because I don’t smoke
When I smoked, we had people that would just come and hang out for the break and the conversation. Go for it, it’s fine. Just don’t complain about smoking or you won’t be welcome, predictably enough.
This is what I used to do, the smoking area outside was a nice little shaded area, i just generally stood upwind of the smokers or slightly askew to avoid the 2nd hand smoke. No one gave me shit, I was just asked occasionally if i smoked.
One of my colleagues will even occasionally ask me “Heading for a smoke, wanna come along?” I just love chatting with him, I’ll try to stand upwind so I don’t catch as much second-hand smoke, he gets some company too, everyone’s happy.
Take a cup of coffee or tea and go with them. There are multiple modern addictions that you can choose from.
Take a sparkler to hold, so you can ask for a light
That’s actually very good advice
I never understood this argument.
Colleague goes for a smoke break? I go with them, just don’t smoke.
I can speak as someone who previously smoked for a decade+ and then quit. I started because some friends who smoked offered me one and I was dumb enough to say yes. Horrible. But there was a very nice immediate head rush/high. And then that led to friends continuing to offer cigarettes and me continuing to be dumb. And then addiction takes hold and it goes from there.
I probably didn’t actually BUY my own smokes until I’d already smoked more than a carton off of other people offering.
And it is a HARD drug to quit. Still to this day when I smell someone smoking a cig I immediately get the “awww fuck I could really use one of those right now” urges
As a non-smoker, I get that sensation when I smell a cigar or cigarillo - a sweet scent of tobacco.
But cigarettes? What’s even to smell? It just smells like an ash toilet
It just smells like an ash toilet
IMO that’s part of why so many people (me included) fall for this shit: “there’s no way I’ll become addicted to this horrendous shit, no harm in bumming another one to look cool”.
Yeah I used to think cig smoke smelt like disgusting ass before I smoked. After I smoked it still smells like ass but it smells like GOOD ass
It’s like when you’re hungover after a rough night and you’re not really TOO hungry but you know you should eat something or you’re going to suffer even more later today so you go rummaging around in your freezer and eeeeh there’s not really much there, but then behind the bag of frozen vegetables there’s one lone frozen burrito and oh good fucking LORD that burrito right in this moment is the best 5/5 top quality food you’ve ever eaten in your entire life. Cigarettes will smell like that burrito forevermore
But if a million flies love to suck on shit, it has to be good, right?
After you smoke cigarettes for a while the smell becomes good to you
Elementary school always warned us that people would offer us free drugs. This whole time, people have joked that no one is going around giving away free cocaine and heroin. Turns out, it was cigarettes they were trying to warn us about
This but unironically lol
Yeah from what I’ve heard that feeling never goes away. I remember someone who quit smoking telling me how good secondhand smoke smells.
I smoked occasionally while drinking at bars/parties. Bought a few packs to smoke/share. Never smoked outside of those times and at worst it was maybe every other week.
I guess I had a decent addiction tolerance.
Because it’s a drug that makes you feel good?
Also: I am now convinced that a sizable portion of the Population is neurodivergent in a way that Nicotine does A LOT more for them than “a slight calming effect”.
Because it’s a drug that makes you feel good?
More specifically, its a stimulant that makes your brain more active and helps you cut through your exhaustion. Like caffeine, its a “work drug” designed to crank more units of labor out of you in a limited time span, at the expense of your overall health and well-being.
That’s why capitalist countries have been so loathe to outlaw it, when compared to the creative/transgressive stimulants like LSD and THC.
TL;DR: Show me someone with any hard-to-quit habit, and I’ll show you someone that’s self-medicating for something.
This is tragically under-appreciated in our society. Especially when it seems everyone is converging on some kind of self-diagnosis, and collectively coming to a “hey nobody’s normal” conclusion. We’re so very close to framing help as “harm reduction for nicotine” and “maybe it’s also neurodiversity and/or trauma”, but we keep missing the mark and argue about vapes instead.
Also, as the greentext suggests, I personally think we’re way past the point where people that can avoid starting or can quit easy, have already done so. What you see these days is a rather hard-core use cohort that has complex addiction to work through.
So… yeah. Helping a friend quit? Please work with them to consider the jenga-tower of adverse psychology that a-pack-a-day might be holding up. It could be way harder to pull off than either of you think.
90% of schizophrenic people smoke. It helps their illness. I don’t know if the mechanism has been discovered.
Fascinatingly, tobacco has been used as “traditional medicine” by native populations for centuries. In psychedelic ceremonies, it’s very common to have a tobacco component. So I’m sure there’s a link between tobacco and the psyche.
Apparently there are some people that live under the illusion that nicotine doesn’t actually do anything, I saw one of these guys in another thread. I’m sure whoever placed them under that illusion did it with good intentions, but the implication that there are people getting hooked on it every day just to look cool is so funny
Nicotine makes my whole body vibrate and I would describe it as feeling quite high for about 2 minutes
That goes away when you become a regular smoker.
Interesting. It makes me feel like I suddenly became super heavy, like the Earth’s gravity just dialed up a notch. Oddly, if I were already high on cannabis, a toke of nicotine would take away some of the weed buzz. I know I wouldn’t be “more sober” with both, but it feels like it (which makes me then think that I wasted that weed by doing both.)
I wanna hear everyone’s experiences. I’ve always been curious what drugs (including nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol) feel like to other people.
When I was a teenager, we would smoke weed then smoke cigarettes really fast to get a head rush on top of the weed. It’s how I got addicted.
Oh it does also make me feel heavy. I usually have to sit down for a moment if I hit a friend’s vape
Caffeine doesn’t affect me. Never drank coffee regularly any time in my life, but any time I’ve attempted to use caffeine from any source (including some pretty strong energy drinks) to either wake up, or stay awake, I haven’t felt any different at all.
I kinda miss this feeling, I vape 50 mg (or is it really?) salt and I hardly feel anything
I read that the MAOIs in Tobacco can enhance the effects of nicotine.
Thus, if you really want the fix, the effects will be much stronger.
ADHD and cigarettes pair so nicely. 3 mins of turning off the world every hour is why I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to quit. Being a single unit item is why things like vaping never worked for me either. I had a small amount of luck with cans of fizzy drinks, but I’d need an insane amount and 2 weeks off work with none of my usual triggers for a chance.
Smoking a cigarette feels like you’ve been standing your entire life and you just sat down. Then it feels like nothing and the world hurts when you don’t have it
This is actually a very good description of how a shot of heroin feels, when you have a habit. It’s just much moreso than cigarettes.
Awww man I was really looking forward to heroin in my later years.
I haven’t smoked in 15 years, and I could start again tomorrow. I love smoking and still miss it.
Thats a good streak, dude. Keep going :)
Yah, remembering the feeling of being knifed in the chest still keeps me from going back.
Have you tried smoking cigarettes instead of knives?
4 years free myself!
I quit smoking cold turkey almost 10 years ago. I promised myself I can start smoking again when The Fall happens.
That’s good! The nitrites in cold turkey are probably super bad for your lungs.
I’ll see myself out…
Well done, I know that feeling even though I’m only on my 2nd year without cigarettes after smoking for 30 years.
Five, hundred, cigarettes.
A friend of mine started smoking because it was the only way to take regular breaks from his construction job.
I just went out with the smokers when they were taking smoke breaks. I only ever got shit about it from two bosses and everyone else backed me up so they dropped the issue.
I’m pretty sure that legally they can’t discriminate against you and deny you extra breaks just for not smoking, because otherwise there they are saying that smokers need (as in absolutely require) more breaks than non-smokers, and therefore saying that smokers are protected class, which obviously they’re not and gets into a whole quagmire.
I would love someone to try and litigate this.
This is what I miss when I switched to an ecig. Even if you get given the same breaks as a smoker, what are you going to do, sit inside? Then people will still bug you.
But as a smoker you get to go outside, the smoke smells horrible to non-smokers so the number of people who can bug you is reduced (Moreso now since less people are smoking), and that break can truely be a ‘turn off brain from work’ sort of break.
Take the ecig outside?
Were you smoking your e-cigarette inside? What a dick move.
Please absolutely do feel free to go outside, I no more want to smell like blueberry raspberry then I want to smell like smoke.
Some of y’all have never been addicted to anything and it shows.
Yeah you say that like it’s a character flaw.
“You’re worthless suckers have no vices”
I’m saying that the person in the green text is judging people for going through something they have literally no experience with.
Obviously addiction is bad, but that doesn’t mean the people who become addicted are stupid or make bad decisions. The way addiction works means there is no choice. If it was as simple as making a choice addiction wouldn’t exists.
I think the issue they’re having is why are there still young people that smoke, regardless of income, demographic, race, area, every category has some amount of young people smoking. You can’t explain them ALL away by lack of education, unideal upbringing, etc etc.
My mum always said when I was growing up she believes no one will smoke soon since we have so much education on it in school. Yet I’m 37 and teens are still starting smoking. I live in what is considered a fairly rich and well educated area. They’re not addicted before they start. They do have a choice. It is as simple as making the choice not to start. They’re not in a situation that they don’t know better.
We shouldn’t have as many people under 40, under 30, under 20 smoking as we do.
They’re not in a situation that they don’t know better.
I would like to draw your attention to this truckload of stupid shit teenagers have done despite knowing better. Let’s not underestimate the capacity of the developing mind in making bad decisions despite having all information necessary to evaluate exactly how bad the decisions are.
“You’re worthless suckers have no vices”
Vices are social taboos, not iron laws. And if you haven’t ever transgressed, I gotta wonder what kind of life you’re living (particularly in a society that’s puritanical in its ethics)
So unless you commit a crime of some kind you are not a real person? I don’t understand what arguement you’re trying to make
This MF’ER so scared, they ain’t never even jaywalked 🤣
Jaywalking isn’t actually a crime anywhere other than the United States so no I’ve never jaywalked.
I commit crimes on a daily basis. I’m skeptical of people who follow all laws without thinking. Do you really never speed while driving or jaywalk?
No one is questioning why addicted people keep smoking. We’re questioning why non-addicted people start smoking.
Need to shit? Smoke a cigarette quickly and you will soon be shitting. Need to relax? Long slow drags of a cig will relax you? Need to perk up lots of short quick puffs will raise ypur energy levels (note do not do this if holding back a shit)
Experiencing the constipation, stress, and fatigue commonly associated with a nicotine withdrawal? Try nicotine!
Add coffee for an even more enjoyable shit
Dang, I should try these things out.
(joking)
It certainly does have an effect, albeit much less than hard drugs. I’ve smoked twice. The second time I decided to try a cigarette with a beer to see why people liked it so much. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to never try smoking again.
Basically why I am extremely hesitant to try most drugs. Either I don’t like it, or I DO like and and want to keep trying it… either way the odds of it being a good thing for me long term are pretty sketchy.
Chemically addictive drugs aren’t worth it. Ones that aren’t physically addictive can just be pleasant and then you don’t feel any particular compulsion to do them beyond the desire to do pleasant things.
Not saying to go out and do some drugs or anything, just sharing that plenty of people have done things like hallucinogens, found it to be a fun and worthwhile experience and then never felt the need to do it again.
Agreed. Just not worth it.
I’m fortunate in that I’ve tried several things and never really got hooked, but if there was one that could eventually hook me it would be nicotine or opioids.
I believe the head rush effect is mostly when you first start and after that it diminishes and then you’re just dealing with the withdrawal.
This is correct. Though if you go a day or two without smoking you get the head rush back again for only that first smoke which is the insidious part about it
It’s like a lot of other drugs. You never get that initial high back, but you keep chasing it.
Sounds pretty much like the computer games I played as a kid and how I remember them lol
Cigarettes and coffee, man. The diner I used to go to (20+ years ago) had a single “non-smoking” table in the middle of the restaurant, the tar turned the walls yellowish (it was a 24 hour diner and closed once a year for a few days to deep clean the place), and there was always a haze. I didn’t smoke personally, but I spent a lot of time there.
When the smoking ban hit, it hit that place hard. A few weeks after it went into effect, I went there and thought they had changed the coffee they used because it wasn’t nearly as good. I asked the waitress, and she said it was the same, you just didn’t have all the cigarette smoke to go with it anymore. Turns out they used the exact same coffee as every other diner in town, they just had a constant nicotine-laced aromatics to go with it.
I was in the military, and smokers got breaks.
It does have a felt effect, but is very mild. The thing is that the body loves nicotine, and even if you’re not consciously getting high, your body is getting high. That’s why vapes were able to become popular.
The body loves it so much, the smoke stops smelling bad to you.
And finally, the fact that it smells bad & keeps people away is a GOOD thing.
smokers got breaks.
When I quit smoking, I pretty much stopped going to parties, conventions, dance clubs, and concerts. Having an excuse to get out of the crowd and noise and decompress for ten minutes every couple of hours made “going out” so much more tolerable for me.
Easy. Say you’re going for a smoke and then don’t actually smoke.
You and your rational solutions… You are clearly not addicted.
Did this at work all the time. I want to hangout and chat too
Don’t forget the nicotine fix.
I (also military) used to grab a cup of coffee and bring it out whenever the smokers went out (though I had to start doing half a cup, because the smokers took a lot of breaks).
Then one chief established there would be no more “smoke breaks” for the smokers, but everyone would get regular breaks (and the smokers could take theirs outside). People (including the smokers who had been taking breaks all along) started making jokes about taking their “union mandated” breaks. And the smokers just went out twice as often.
I’d rather smell like smoke than body odor after being in the field for a week or two with no showers.
I never did any of that stuff, but after what they have to do, I can think of few things, that you could do as soon as you got back, that would be better than a cigarette.
vaping is the new cool thing. I wasn’t super socially present through high school, but I know that lots of the kids there do vape in the bathrooms and stuff and it’s seen as cool somehow
I just watched Casablanca for the first time a couple of days ago, and as someone that hates smoking, I just don’t get how it came to be everywhere back in the day. Ingrid Bergman is probably the only non-smoker in the entire movie! Both her (breast, 69) and Humphrey Bogart (esophageal, 57) died of cancer.
Growing up with two smoking parents that’d both gladly hotbox their kids, my brother and I, when we drove anywhere was just awful. I really don’t get how you can do that to other people without feeling ashamed.Well, back in the day cigarette companies paid to be in the movies. This timeline puts it back to the very first “talkies” cigarette companies were already shouldering their way in and making sure that they were associated with sex and cool. Everyone was smoking on screen because films were big tobacco ads.
You’ve obviously never been a smoker 🚬 sweet sweet nicotine, i miss u so!
Fuck I miss cigarettes!
I feel this so hard lol. I have never returned to smoking but vaping was such a ‘cleaner’ way to get a nic high. I tell myself that nicotine has power over me and if someone put a vape in front of me I’d hit it in a heartbeat
Still messes up your lungs though
I’d argue it’s worse. I’ve met people that never stop vaping. I’ve even know some sleep vapers.
I’d say if you used it as a 1 to 1 replacement for smoking it’s probably better, but if you hit it 10 times as often as you’d smoke a cigarette you’re going to be worse off
More quickly too, based on what I’ve read.
