I can’t imagine how smoking is good for one’s health. Though in the generations before me they gave out free cigarettes on airplanes to relax the nervous flyers.
Nicotine is addictive. It’s hard to quit. I smoked. I enjoyed it. It was like a form of affection - hot smoke down my esophagus. I always told people they’d have to tie me to a tree for a week to get me to quit. Then I had a heart attack and spent a week in the ICU. Slept through the worst of the withdrawals I guess. But as I left the hospital I told everyone that was my week tied to a tree. I was done.
Based on my research, people suspected since Shakespeare’s time that smoking isn’t good for people.
In 1946, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company ran a Camel cigarette ad campaign with the slogan, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette”.
Of course they had no way of knowing the dangers back then.....but wow.
As far as being addictive, in the early 2000s I came to work at 6:30 one morning, with the wind blowing 20 knots or so and with the wind chill it was 13 degrees.
Walking between two buildings freezing my butt off I encountered at least 4 or 5 people tucked into recesses in an attempt to shelter from the wind.....all were smoking.
I realized at that point if people needed to smoke that bad the addiction must be terrible.
“Nicotine is addictive. “
People say that and three years ago or so Harvard tried to show it but they couldn’t. In the usual double blind they pumped nicotine into people and when they cut it off there was zero withdrawal and the nicotine group and the placebo group were indistinguishable. Smoking is addictive as hell but nicotine may not be the culprit.