Ever since I heard of electronic cigarettes I’ve been expecting them to appear on the market as an aid to quitting smoking, or at least a way to mitigate the harm.
Inhaling smoke to get nicotine is a lousy delivery system. Nicotine is bad for your health, but cigarette smoke has scores of other harmful chemicals and carcinogens. What’s worse, the smoke affects non-smokers. I was visiting a lovely woman about her home care, but the ingrained cigarette smoke in her apartment was impossible to ignore. There’s no way a smoker can keep it 100% away from their family.
The e-cigarette seems like a harm reduction no-brainer, so what’s the hold up? AlterNet follows the money from Big Tobacco to Big Causes and catches them sharing a drag of tobacco tax funds.
Some of my best friends are smokers. I love you. Take care, and if this is a way to cut the risk then let’s get e-cigarettes right behind the counter with the Camels.
Recurring Nightmare 
Cigarettes are so damn addicting,they make opiates look like cotton candy.
I quit cigarettes in 1981,and cigars and pipes in February of 1985.
Believe it or not I still sometimes have dreams that I was smoking cigarettes(not pipes or cigars though)and I feel lousy about it(in the dream),so look at the long term effect it has.
I remember getting a physical when i worked for the Feds from a US Public Health Service doctor back in 1980 and he was a huge fat guy who was smoking and blowing it in my face.Imagine that today.
He must’ve been a real star in med school-I pointed out two lumps on my leg and he said it was nothing.It was lymphoma.
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My father conspired to smoke as infrequently as possible and always outside the apartment (later house). He even had my mother hide them so they weren’t visible. I believe he began smoking years before he arrived in the States. What forms/brands were available in Palestine in 1949 ?
Apparently when he was hospitalized for congestive heart failure, and then had bypass surgery and a valve replacement, he was not given any patches or gum, but detoxed from the “vice”… and I’m told he has not returned to smoking. It’s been about 7 years….
I have worked with addicts giving up alcohol, cocaine, heroin, methadone, etc.(trying to be alphabetical) and more than one has told me that ridding themselves of the tobacco/nicotine was the most difficult.
And, yes, I know people who have gone to jail for stealing cigarettes… Granted some were planning on selling them …
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