Smoking (I know, I know) is the flagship controlling ban of the Righteous. The methods used in that indoctrination are the same ones used for all the later bans so it's one worth studying even if you agree with it. One aspect already set in place for them with smoking was the notion that every smoker is addicted to nicotine. The tobacco companies started that. There is no better way to boost sales of a legal product than to tell people they will suffer horrible withdrawal symptoms if they stop.
People who undertake regular exercise often appear to become addicted to it. There is a real chemical reason behind it - exercise can produce pleasurable feelings in the brain so people will take that early morning workout because it makes them feel good. It's classed as addiction even though there are no external chemical substances involved. That addiction is, quite literally, all in their heads. It's never worked on me. Exercise without actually achieving anything other than the exercise itself has never appealed.
With heroin, the addiction is a chemical dependency and can be very hard to break indeed. Some people try it now and then and don't get addicted. Others try it once and can't then live without it. I've never tried it so I know as little about it as I do about weightlifting or throwing the hammer.
Smoking I know about. It's also called an addiction but it's somewhere in between exercise and heroin. Nicotine, we are told, is highly addictive. I've heard tell that smoking one cigarette will make you a smoker for life. It's apparently all about the nicotine.
Yet if you take one of these 'addicts' and give them nicotine gum or patches, only around one percent of them will manage to stop smoking. Which is odd because if it's just a nicotine addiction, then how you achieve the transfer of the chemical to your brain should be irrelevant. As long as the nicotine addict gets his nicotine, why would he go back to the burning leaves?
Electrofag, on the other hand, is something increasing numbers of smokers have switched to. Some to get around the smoking ban, some as a route to stopping, some as a fun way to give the local Righteous high blood pressure and palpitations. Some for a combination of reasons.
Electrofag, we smokers believe, does two things. It provides nicotine with none of the horrible nasties like tar and so on, and it feels reasonably like smoking. It does not affect the 'nicotine addict' label because it's still nicotine. Why, though, should it be more effective and more readily accepted by smokers than a patch? You can stick a patch on in the morning and you're set up for the day. No batteries and no liquids and no matches and no tobacco. Why doesn't that work? Hell, with a patch applied in the evening you could be 'smoking' while you sleep! For an addict, that should be a dream come true.
Well, the Righteous don't like Electrofag. ASH, whose aim is to get us all onto nicotine replacement therapy, don't like this particularly effective one. They prefer the ones that don't work. They are still working on the tobacco version of methadone and they won't look past that because it's profitable.
A couple of tips in the comments led to this article, which describes research that claims Electrofag releases no nicotine at all. If that's true (IF) then what does it mean?
Well, it would be the final nail in the coffin of nicotine as a chemical dependency addiction. Many smokers have switched entirely to Electrofag and suffered no withdrawal symptoms. You cannot cure a real chemical dependency with a placebo. Try giving a heroin addict saline instead of methadone and see what happens. IF Electrofag is releasing no nicotine, then it is not, and was never, the nicotine we were addicted to. Nor is it any other component of tobacco smoke because the only other things coming out of Electrofag are propylene glycol and steam. All it's doing is clearing your sinuses.
In which case, the patches and gum are doing nothing at all to combat smoking, which explains why they're not even as effective as the average placebo. ASH has backed the wrong horse.
I don't think it is true that Electrofag produces no nicotine but I haven't personally tested it. I get different levels of effect from different strength liquids - but then, that placebo effect can be really powerful, especially if the part I'm actually 'addicted' to is still there. Which part? If the report is true then there is nothing left but PG and steam, neither of which were in the original tobacco product.
This would suggest that what smokers are 'addicted' to is the same as what compulsive joggers are 'addicted' to. A pleasant feeling associated with a particular action. Nothing more. If you can really replace the entire contents of tobacco with a bit of food-additive and steam and get the same result then there was nothing in the tobacco that was addictive. It was the action, not the substance.
The ramifications of this are devastating and mean I will be staying well away from secluded woodland for the rest of my days. It means that there is no need for any of the NRT at all. The entire industry should collapse as soon as people realise this. It means there is no need for the tobacco industry at all. Not even to provide nicotine for NRT and Electrofag. The entire industry will collapse as soon as word gets around. It means ASH should be disbanded at once. They are not required at all. If all smokers need is the act of smoking, then Electrofag with its flavoured steam is the only thing we'd need. We wouldn't need any actual tobacco products of any kind at all.
I wonder if they already knew this and were terrified it would get out. Is that why the author of the study showing that Electrofag is just a mini steam cleaner is demanding that they be withdrawn until they produce more nicotine in the steam? Before we spot it? It makes no sense to demand that nicotine be added to a device that already works to take people off tobacco. If there's no nicotine and it's working anyway, why add it in? It's to keep up the illusion of nicotine addiction. Without that, the game's up.
If it's true that Electrofag produces only flavoured steam, it should be a wet dream for ASH because all smoking and all nicotine use would stop and we'd all have fresh, gleaming sinuses. Instead, they hate the thing and have mobilised to destroy it. Does that make sense when placed alongside ASH's stated mission? No, but it does when placed alongside their financial statements. ASH get most of their money from taxes and tobacco-free smoking already means no tax. A nicotine tax is possible but if we find we don't need the nicotine after all, what then? A steam tax? Even Labour would have trouble with that one.
That article is a powerful rebuttal of the idea that we are all nicotine addicts and utterly destroys any suggestion of harm caused by Electrofag. It claims it's not even generating nicotine! There is nothing left in it that can be accused of being harmful. And yet, at the end of the article...
Meanwhile other profs in California have recently stated that eCigs - or anyway ones which actually emit nicotine vapour - are still a major health hazard owing to the phenomenon of so-called "third hand" smoke.
The Righteous are now running in circles. They claim we are addicted yet their nicotine patches don't work, and the one thing that does work does not - they claim - produce nicotine. In the same article, we have 'there is nothing but steam coming out of these things' and 'they cause third hand smoke' - but how can they cause third hand smoke with just steam?
(Third hand smoke is comprehensively debunked already, so there's no need for me to go on about that aspect.)
It is a joy to behold as, in their frantic scrabble to justify over-reaching with their insane urge to ban, they eat each other with claim and contradictory claim vying for position within a single article!
Total collapse is not far away now.
I'm going to buy a small bottle of nicotine-free smoky-juice and give this a try. Small bottles are very cheap.
16 comments:
"One aspect already set in place for them with smoking was the notion that every smoker is addicted to nicotine"
Indeed. More addictive than heroin and cocaine aparently.
Another they use is that everyone wants to give up smoking. It's in every communication they ever put out.
I'm currently ploughing through a massive pile of paperwork from a FOI about ASH Scotland's rant from the Lottery. All talk of smoking in the home (the grant was given to look at ways of banning smoking in the home) is littered with smokers who are 'not ready to quit' or 'need more help to quit'.
Nowhere do they consider that quite a lot of smokers don't want to quit, they enjoy it and want to be left the f*** alone.
Lots of theories, but other substances in tobacco smoke may be habituating, eg MAOI like chemicals.
I can certainly tell "full strength" juice eg. 24 or 36 mg but usually use home diluted 6 or 9 mg equiv. and get no withdrawal anxiety or skittishness as I did with analogs. BTW you can make your own 0mg juice easy enough - but put a few drops of vodka in the mix to replace the missing "throat hit"
"This would suggest that what smokers are 'addicted' to is the same as what compulsive joggers are 'addicted' to. A pleasant feeling associated with a particular action. Nothing more."
Like shopping. BAN CREDIT CARDS!
Humans are creatures of habit. Many different habits. We have them for many different reasons. The bansturbators want us to have only pre-approved habits.
On the day that ASH takes over paying my mortgage, they can start telling me what i can & can't do in my home. Until that day comes, they can FRO (fuck right off) & shove their reports where the sun don't shine.
Well UDBU we have set the cat amongst the pigeons. There is a paper out that by Professor Martin Jarvis and I quote: "Hardcore smoking defined by four criteria (less than a day without cigarettes in the past five years; no attempt to quit in the past year; no desire to quit; no intention to quit), all of which had to be satisfied. Results Some 16% of all smokers were categorised as hardcore."
That is me.
I have given up for 8 hours for breast cancer charity day and with lots of lollypops was bearable, although concentration was a problem. If I have run out of tobacco at 10.00pm for example and cant be arsed to walk to the garage, I'll live. Finally if I am in a bit of a strop that I can't smoke I'll just remind myself how silly I am being. A good example about addiction to me was if you put a George Best type alcoholic, heroin junkie and a smoker in a padded cell for 24 hours without their poison the smoker would by far and away cope the best. I would prefer to call nicotine "addiction" as more as an embedded habit. However not being able to smoke when I have a drink gets me reaching metaphorically for my baseball bat.
As a former professional footballer I am used to being extremely fit. After training, a match there is definitely a high, I thought the body produced the opiate endorphin.
On Efags ASH are in the pooh as there should be no medical reason why they cannot be used. Banzhaf who has got them banned in the state of New Jersey and 2 others who escape my memory just shows he is not interested in health but his own ego, money and junk science. He is utter scum. In the late 1960s the American National Cancer Institute got together with the tobacco companies to produce safer cigarettes. The then Surgeon General Everett Coop canned the project in the early 70s as he boasted he could get smoking down to zero 2000.
I am happy to concede that smoking will on average lead to 7 years loss of life compared to non smokers, Banzhaf, Coop, ASH et al have and will have blood on their hands for many years to come. Be in no doubt the end game for ASH is the illegalisation of tobacco. The narcotics industry is worth US $135 billion a year with tobacco $500 billion, three times as much. This could completely destabilise society, look at the way cocaine has infected Columbia and Mexico, the future is frightening.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/326/7398/1061?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=smoking&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
In my frequent musing on the nature of “addiction” I’ve often thought to myself that it’s the feelings that people get from anything – be it smoking, drinking, eating, jogging, working, sex, money, or anything, really – that make them want more of it, rather than the substance/activity itself. And, because we’re all different, we all enjoy different things and at different levels, and thus we are all prone to be “addicted” to different things, as in your examples above about heroin and exercise. I’ve often wondered if there’s a personality/chemical basis for this which could indicate any one person’s proneness to be addicted to certain things but not others; or indeed if someone who has never been “addicted” to something is simply someone who has never come into contact with their own personal addictive trigger. I might, for example, be hugely prone to becoming a cocaine addict, but because I’ve never tried the stuff, I’ve never been addicted to it – so there’s nothing for me to brag or feel smug about, or to start spouting off about not having an “addictive personality” (a diagnosis which exists, incidentally, only in popular psychology, and which has never actually been diagnosed as an official condition in medical psychology). It’s just that luck and/or circumstances have meant that cocaine and I have never met.
But going back even further, might what we now term “addiction” – which is universally seen as a Bad Thing in today’s society – simply be an expression of our basic motivation for survival which is driven from birth by the need to get certain good feelings of satisfaction from food, warmth, company, comfort, etc which, in our complicated adult environment has simply been sidetracked by a whole host of man-made substances and activities which, to be frank, simply give even better feelings of satisfaction than those which nature provides? In other words, as Frank Davis pointed out very eloquently in one of his earlier blogs, our bodies will react to what they need, and will react with pleasure and enjoyment to it, i.e. we’ll “like” it, which will make us want to satisfy that need again when our bodies tell us to. Which means, in essence, that addiction (if it can be termed as such under the circumstances) is less of the bad-guy that it’s made out to be, and is, in fact, just the a natural, indeed vital, drive which exists within each and every one of us which is fulfilling some unresearched (because that would entail admitting that there might be a good side to naughty old Mr Addiction, wouldn't it?), and thus as-yet unknown, individual needs.
Might also go a long way towards explaining why people who have been coerced into giving up something like smoking through peer/Government/social pressure (whatever reason they might give to others) are always so damned miserable!
I'm not understanding how this Electrofag is set up then.
Does it deliver the roast chicken or Virginia extract separately from the nicotine extract? Otherwise, I don't understand how you can smell/taste the added flavour but simultaneously avoid ingesting nicotine.
Catinthehat
See, Knew you were smart all along.
Just kept it from us, that's all!
ASH are being manipulated, largely due to the prejudice of their staff.
"Needing help to quit" reads to me much like the buying on bulk of Tamiflu. I hate being this cynical but I really can't think of an alternative.
But spot-effing-on with regards to the post, Leg-Iron.
LI, I can confirm much of what you write about it being a physical habit as much as/rather than an addiction. I was surprised to find that just using a non-nicotine flavour one evening didn't have me chewing my fingernails to the knuckles. (It was an accident. I took a brand new ecig loaded with just that flavour to the pub for people to try it, and forgot to take my normal one as well.)
I read a booklet some 20 years ago (ironically, about quiting smoking) and it said that nicotine disappears from the human body within 8 hours.
I'm not sure how authoritative this statement is; however the point it was making is that we all effectively and almost always successfully, quit smoking every night we go to sleep. Come the morning, we're defacto non-smokers. So if there's no nicotine in our system, what drives the craving for that all important first fag of the day?
Habit... or perhaps the absence of nicotine? Whichever it is, its not the nicotine itself!
Which kinda unravels the Anti's argument from some what.
O/T
what do you make of this
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6214838&postID=8624287891469399686
There's a letter in the original post and also others about the same thing
Michael Siegel seems to be realising that there's more to smoking than just nicotine. Which, as I see it, shows that he (and all the rest of them) haven't a clue why people smoke.
Lauren Colby (In Defense of Smokers) seemed to have it right in saying that what smokers wanted was smoke.
But I agree with you that it sounds a bit implausible that there's no nicotine in e-smoke. If it's in the cartridges (and they were not assayed, it seems), and it can be vapourised, then it ought to be in the vapour.
I think that one of the reasons why I smoke whenever I drink anything is that smoking helps retain a certain oral equilibrium. Lager is wet stuff, and a blast of hot, dry smoke dries out the mouth again. Same with tea or coffee. Having a cigarette with any of them is essentially just like finishing a hot spicy main course with a cool sweet dessert. Or why salty peanuts are best washed down with some sweet amber nectar. I don't often smoke without drinking anything, because if I do my mouth becomes very dry. Drinking and smoking is a bit like taking a poison, and then its antidote. Or maybe an acid, and then an alkali.
I would recommend reading http://www.truthwillout.co.uk/ and for those who are interested in delving a little deeper to get themselves a copy of Chris Holmes' "Nicotine The Drug that Never Was". I downloaded a copy a while ago and found his theories compelling. According to Holmes smoking is a complex compulsive habit - not an addiction :)
It seems obvious to any smoker that smoking is a compulsive habit rather than a chemical addiction. After 8 hours nicotine is vastly reduced in the body. After two weeks it is impossible to tell (from levels of CO or nicotine in the blood) if anyone was ever a smoker) - this from the antis' own propaganda. How many smokers have given up smoking for two weeks? Then how many have started again 6 months, 12 months, 12 years later? The majority I suspect.
I liken it to eating chocolate biscuits. I can do a week, even a month without having some lovely choccy biccies dunked in my tea. But if someone said, "you have given up choccy biscuits - you will never have one again" (which is what they say to smokers) then I just wouldn't bother. I like chocolate biscuits! The thought of depriving myself of something I enjoy fills me with the same sort of panic I have when I have given up smoking for 6 or 9 months (without undue stress) and then realise - "This isn't just a blip - I'm actually supposed to never smoke again!" and THAT is when I re-start. And I'd be the same way with wine, TV, walking in the woods, having a hand shandy, all sorts. I can not do it for prolonged periods of time. But the fact that I can't say, "I will never do it again, ever, in my life" without feeling a surge of despair and panic doesn't mean I'm addicted to those things.
The anti-scum are, as always, way off-base. And the choccy biscuit analogy is even more accurate, because if I eat chocolate biscuits every day for 3 or 4 days, on the 5th day I feel cravings for them, much as I do with fags. Cravings that are easily ignored, however - as with fags. Does this mean chocolate biscuits are "a drug" which is addictive as heroin?
Chocalate biscuits and wine.
Yes nothing wrong with simple pleasures.
But there are already rumblings amongst the antis about those too.
If they actually succeed in their goal of banning tobacco for good.
They will have to move on to their next "organised persecution".
Otherwise they will be out of a job.
I just feel I dont suit black puritan dress.
Those silver buckles are an odd thing.
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