Poll: Do you smoke?
I'm not ordinarily a big fan of polls, but I was intrigued by my own curiosity. I wondered how prevelant smoking is among hackers.
On one hand, I would think that Hackers would smoke less because they might be more realistic about avoiding the long term effects of smoking than a non-hacker would be. On the other hand, all Hackers are indeed human and there are a lot of them that do make choices that aren't that great for their physical health (e.g. sitting in front of a computer for 18 hours a day!)
Do you smoke (cigarettes)?
162 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadOn a tangental note, while listening to the BOS/NYY game last night one of the announcers mentioned that Joba Chamberlain goes through 6-8 Red Bulls in the dugout during every game. Nasty if true (they were BOS announcers so who knows).
Now smoking is shown as a very deadly habit and many commericials (mostly from philip morris and their new requirements) on quiting and destruction caused by cigs.
but I probably wouldn't do it anyway. I hate being around people smoking, and not just because it sometimes makes it hard for me to breath. It smells so bad.
same here.
You put your combustible material in a machine that heats it up until it smolders, and collects the resulting vapors in an airtight plastic balloon. Then you remove the balloon from the machine, put it to your mouth, and inhale the contents.
With a pipe or bong, you burn the material with a fire, and suck the smoke directly into your lungs. The difference with a bong is that the smoke passes through water first, which cools it and removes some of the heavier debris.
vapor != smoke
There is some research that shows there is still tar in the vapor, albeit less.
It's worth starting and enduring the pain of quitting just to be able to come back and feel that glorious mind blowing forbidden pleasure of the first one back. The power trip in not starting again is also delightful. I like having a cigarette about every year or so. A few times I quit, I was lured back, but I've only had one full cigarette since June of 2008.
Smoking is definitely not a good lifestyle for the long term. But as very occasional guilty pleasures go, it's truly top-notch.
I'm not a regular smoker, but most of the cigars/cigarettes/pipes/hookahs I've puffed on in my life have been in a social context.
Pity about that whole lung cancer thing.
As I got a little older, the "cool kids" smoked, so it gave a shy kid some openings for socialization.
I quit 5 years ago, and it was easily the hardest thing I've ever done. Some mornings I still wake up and reach for my pack before I'm fully awake
There are certain things some people enjoy that I do not understand the appeal of. Among those are smoking cigarettes, drinking urine and self-flagellation.
Wow. One of these things is not like the others... I mean, drinking urine?!
:)
I find all of those things about equally difficult to understand. Perhaps empathy is not one of my strengths.
Pretty sure that if you enjoy self-flagellation, you're doing it wrong.
I actually have an interesting story that has to do with this. Last summer I was taking a newer smoking cessation drug named Champix. The drug works by binding with the same receptors that nicotine does, and prevents nicotine from having its effect. You take this drug while continuing to smoke, and about two weeks later, cigarettes lose their lustre. You still want the buzz, but you don't get a thing out of smoking.
Now here's the interesting bit. Without the buzz, cigarettes tasted gross again. I mean really gross. I didn't want anything to do with them. They smelled differently as well. Obviously I'm only relating a personal experience, and I can't say whether other people experience the same thing.
And to whom it may concern, I found the drug had other side effects (which may have also been related to smoking cessation), which lead to my smoking again. I lasted about two months, all in all, but throughout the entire period I was mood swinging like crazy. In the end, I found the solution worse than the problem, and decided to stop taking it.
DON'T DATE ROBOTS.
Kicked it cold turkey almost a year ago. :)
The smoking itself didn't do that much for me, so I pretty quickly gave it up.
I think this is a bit off. The best explanation for smoking the first time is social pressure. Maybe the first few times. After that, the best explanation for smoking is nicotine addiction. When you are used to the effect of nicotine, smoking a cigarette makes you feel good.
Also, not that I advise smoking cigarettes, but you can avoid burning your throat and lungs with good technique. Don't just suck on it like you are sucking juice through a straw; you will inhale too much smoke too quickly. Instead, only loosely touch your lips to the end of the cigarette, and inhale slowly. That will both let air mix with the cigarette smoke and give it some time to cool. If you do it right you should not burn your throat or lungs at all and the experience should be purely pleasurable.
(Damn... I'm going to talk myself back into smoking if I'm not careful.)
That being said, It's a nasty/expensive habit and I don't recommend it to anyone. Anecdotal evidence: of the 600 or so people at the last startup school, I saw maybe 4 people light up, so it can't be very prevalent among good hackers.
Ever since I've considered it a reasonable way to judge a company. Maybe a good interview question: "So, how many of your programmers smoke?"
I wonder if one of the desks where you can stand would also have helped - I never had the chance to work at one of those.
Moreover a cigarette provides a nice time-frame and the illusion of of doing something. You can have a "one cig break" or a "two cig break". And you have something to do while thinking, which helps with the process (at least it does for me).
That said, I'm eagerly awaiting someone curing that whole "lung cancer" thing ...
According to my priorities and what I know about it, tobacco is not tempting. It's apparently highly addictive, it's intrusive on other people (though I sometimes enjoy fresh tobacco smoke when I'm drunk,) it leaves a terrible stale smell in rooms, carpets, clothing, hair, and upholstery, and it makes a person's mouth taste disgusting to anyone who kisses them. I'm sure some of that is just individual taste that other people might disagree with. Does that make me seem like I'm from whole different world?
You hit the nail on the head when you said "knee-jerk pro or con attitudes towards recreational drugs". That is what alienates me. Unfortunately, for every enlighted fellow-self-medicating person like you, there's 1000 idiots who just want an excuse to be holier-than-thou. Extra points if the person telling you off is clinically obese!
I don't know .. the thing with tobacco is it's just so fucking useful. It's the thing to do next, anytime, anywhere. Smoking is what you can do while you pace around, dreaming of world domination. It's what you can do together with a cute girl you just met. It's what you do after sex. It's what you do while drinking. While driving. After you arrive. After closing a deal. It's just .. the universal activity. How do you replace it?
I quit smoking a few years ago. I didn't replace it with anything and it worked out fine. I'm actually happy I'm no longer pacing, drinking 6 coffees per day, and drinking pitchers of beer at Zeitgeist every night (the smoker's choice of outdoor beer garden in SF). Personally I turned every dumb little event into an excuse to smoke. "Narrowly avoided a parking ticket! Got to the meter in the nick of time. Time to remember this experience with a smoke."
I don't know what point i'm trying to make other than I think a lot of smokers are kidding themselves about whether or not they just have a bad habit or a legitimate drug addiction. I was kidding myself. If this might be you (not the OP, just anyone reading) try Alan Carr's "quit smoking the easy way." It's the only thing that worked for me.
But I hate those holier than thou former smokers as much as the next guy so I'm going to limit my comments on the matter.
Read it, actually. Great book. But the problem is, I don't want to quit.
I like smoking! It's part of me. I feel no need to justify it. Obviously I am concerned about the health effects but do try and mitigate where I can, plus have some faith that cures will emerge.
Don't really know what else to say. Oh yes, do-gooders..
I hate those do-gooders too. However, I'm in Australia and I pay fucking 40c+ tax for every single cigarette. I am not kidding. This fact fills me with a righteous fury, which is frequently and hilariously unleashed upon anyone who dares question any aspect of my behaviour.
Funnily enough, in Japan, where I'm not taxed for smoking, I'm much better behaved.
How much are cigs in Australia these days? I just noticed the ones I used to smoke here in SF are up to 7 dollars a pack at my corner store. ($5.50 when I quit)
I had the opposite experience in Japan. I smoked the most there. The smokes were cheap and you could smoke nearly anywhere. It was weird if you didn't smoke - and this wasn't even 10 years ago.
Yeah, Japan is fantastic, that's half the reason I moved there : ) Smoking section in McDonalds! Awesome! Prices there are 320Y for a 20-pack. I get my friends to send me cartons when they remember, but it's no big deal.
JP is beginning to succumb to westerner tastes, though, so looks like the next stop might be China.
The idea of karaoke without cigarettes shocks and appals me! What next, karaoke without alcohol? Way to take all the fun out of everything.
There are a few reasons why I don't smoke. Besides the whole early death thing, the reality is that the "high" doesn't last long enough. You spend 5 minutes smoking and you feel good for maybe 15 minutes more. I just isn't worth the time involved. (Compare this to coffee, which I definitely have a lot of. 5 minutes with the espresso machine gives you something you can drink over the course of a half-hour or longer and with good effects that last for 2-4 hours. A much better investment of time, and it doesn't kill you.)
I also like cardiovascular activities, so a drug would have to be pretty good to risk damaging my lungs. Breathing is nice.
Even a pack-a-day smoker is more likely to die from prostate cancer. Basically, smoking raises your (already high) chance of dying from cancer by something like 50%. I know this. I choose to make the trade-off, since I believe I have a quality of life improvement from smoking. Who knows though, I may change my mind as I get older. I doubt it though, I have too much stress.
Anyway, just spamming "quit!" messages is obnoxious and fruitless. Sorry about my equally rude reply but IMO it's justified.
Nothing really suddenly changed for me. At some point it just seemed like it wasn't as good any more. I figured I would quit for a bit to see how that was, got surprised how hard it was to quit even for a day, and then got scared at how addicted I was and got serious about quitting. It took a couple years of struggling after that and now I wish someone had kicked some sense into me earlier, but I don't know how they could have done that. So I am kind of frustrated in this discussion because I feel like the right thing to do is to really try to convince people to quit smoking, but I don't know how to do that.
LOL....I wish you lived in the same city as me, we could smoke together!
Lung cancer is frankly trivial compared to the bad outcomes associated with lost physiologic reserve due to connective tissue damage and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. An overwhelming number of patients who smoke have bad surgical and medical outcomes attributable to smoking.
Poor tensile strength of connective tissue is associated with skin tears, diverticulitis, impaired wound healing, emphysema. I'm sure you can all spot an 50 year old smoker from a mile away: they're the ones who look like they're 70. That is simply the outward sign of something terribly wrong inside. These folks consistently have bad outcomes in the event of trauma, including surgery of any kind. Surgeries that are usually overnight stays become weeks in the ICU with infections and being stuck on the vent becasue we can't get their oxygen saturation back up after the OR. The loss of physiologic reserve leads to trauma patients who can't be weaned off ventilators, more tracheostomies, more inpatient infections, more of pretty much everything bad.
COPD similiarly decreases the physiologic reserve and leads to poor vent weaning in smokers who go in for surgery of any kind. We had a woman in the ICU last week for a brain surgery; now she's going to get a hole cut in her throat because it's her lungs that can't heal, so she's getting a "prophylactic tracheostomy" because it, believe it or not, causes less damage than leaving an orotracheal tube in indefinitely.
Children of smokers have a higher incidence of asthma.
I couldn't help but read the thread and think "what kind of doctor am I to not tell these folks the same thing I would tell any other smoker?"
To those I offended, I sincerely apologize, that was not my intent. I just don't want to see you or someone like you in the hospital, with complications of poor wound healing or other really ugly outcomes.
Edit: For those looking to quit, the first 3 weeks are pretty shitty, but after that not so bad. I still get the rare craving and occasional dream about smoking, but that's about it.
So far the only noticeable plus for me has been that I don't need to feel like a leper in public since for whatever reason most people are horribly offended by cigarettes these days. I was sort of hoping to develop super powers, though.
P.S. Though I'm Arab, I can't stand sheesha, way too heavy.
Sheesha is hooka, tobacco smoked out of a water pipe.
For evidence, watch "Hell's Kitchen" or "Top Chef" ... or the service door of restaurants/diners/pubs.
I do like the occasional hookah or cigar though. That's something you don't do every day so I think its not bad on the expenses and health fronts.