Rasmus Lindegaard
@rasmus91@fosstodon.org  ·  activity timestamp last week
@sjvn my grandfather died from lungecancer from smoking.

My sister in law smokes. The other one... Has done at times. My father in law does. Whenever my kids ask them why; they give vague answers like: because it's a bad habit, because i like to relax that way etc

Both of my brothers started smoking at a young age. Whenever my children ask them, they give different variations on: "because I'm an idiot, and this is the perfect expression of it" 1/2
Wandrecanada
@wandrecanada@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp last week
@mvilain @sjvn @pluralistic At a much younger age I worked at a neighborhood convenience store. It was the 90s so they sold a lot of cigarettes.

After seeing local addicts daily for a few years and how much money they lost on their addiction I was never tempted to start. One couple bought 3-4 cartons a week. When I did the math it was like buying a small yacht every year.
f15h :mastodon: :coffefied: 🇺🇦
@f15h@mstdn.social  ·  activity timestamp last week
@davva23 @wandrecanada @mvilain @sjvn @pluralistic Closer to 1914, during #WW1: “Tobacco was valued as a #wartime necessity, a fact that the tobacco #industry seized upon in its #advertising that featured #soldiers, flags, and all the trappings of a triumphal nation making the world safe for #democracy. At home, tobacco funds were established to ‘send smokes to the boys’, eventually sending 16 billion cigarettes as part of relief by the war’s end.”
https://csts.ua.edu/wwi/introduction/
zombiewarrior
@zombiewarrior@techhub.social  ·  activity timestamp last week
@mvilain @sjvn @pluralistic

i apologize if you already know this but i am compelled to point out that after the big tobacco settlement a couple decades ago people dug into the 'discovery' information provided and found that scientists at tobacco companies had realized that polonium was absorbed by tobacco plants roots from the soil, and when smoked would create tiny deposits of these alpha particles in smoker's lungs that caused cancer
they realized this in like the 30s, and developed a technique of 'acid washing' that could remove some or all of the polonium, but also removed nicotine, making the cigarettes less addictive
so they never did it
they settled for billions of dollars with the understanding they couldn't be sued again for anything else related to the case
i myself smoked cigarettes for many years and so did my dad (he quit before that specific thing killed him), and i 'quit' many many times (finally for real now)
zombiewarrior
@zombiewarrior@techhub.social  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cavyherd @mvilain @sjvn @pluralistic

so have quit, and stopped, and quit etc
one of the things that always struck me is like, if you haven't smoked or not for awhile, and you have even a couple puffs off a cigarette, i at least, will get completely sick to my stomach and nauseous for awhile afterwards
that really says something about addiction that even after experiencing that every time, you just keep smoking
Noodlemaz
@noodlemaz@med-mastodon.com  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cavyherd @zombiewarrior @mvilain @sjvn @pluralistic I sort of have that but I also watched my dad literally be eaten from the inside by so much cancer, it eventually got through his skin. He wasted away in front of us, only quitting just before an emergency diagnosis.

A product that kills *HALF* of all its users should not be available anywhere on the planet.