Real Talk About Nicotine

Hrayr Karagueuzian on radioactive particles in cigarettes
UCLA

Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about cigarettes, nicotine and the evil CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), a branch of the evil Federal government. It's great stuff, but he left out my favorite theory about lung cancer: 

It's the radioactive lead in the fertilizer that is used on tobacco plants in the field. Some dude did a study many moons ago and found that lung cancer lungs were full of radioactive lead.

Google found a bunch of links that apparently confirm my theory.

The post had a couple of terms that I had to look up:

• Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are a class of drugs that inhibit the activity of one or both monoamine oxidase enzymes: monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) and monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B). They are best known as effective antidepressants, especially for treatment-resistant depression and atypical depression.[1] They are also used to treat panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, Parkinson's disease, and several other disorders.
• Nootropics, also known as “smart drugs” are a diverse group of medicinal substances whose action improves human thinking, learning, and memory, especially in cases where these functions are impaired.

Smokin'

Ukrainian service members in the Donetsk region prepare shells for an M777 howitzer near a front line on June 6 [File: Stringer/Reuters]

Funny how the story on Ukraine suddenly changed from 'Ve vill defeet ze Russians' to 'Ukraine is getting their ass kicked'. Ukraine must not be doing too badly, after all they still have cigarettes.

Smoking and Food, Part 2

Yami Nu looking yummy
Sports Illustrated 2022

Handwaving Freakoutery echoes my sentiments about weight and smoking, but does it with numbers and pictures.

Dick Allen smoking a cigarette
Sports Illustrated 1972

You can still see people smoking in European TV shows, but seldom, if ever, in American ones. You can see what it used to be like here.

Diet

I've been trying to lose some weight this year. I am having some success, but it's slow going. Something I've noticed is that if I restrict my diet enough to lose weight, I am always right on the verge of being hungry. What is supposed to be a full meal is not really satisfying. Being a little hungry is not bad, but combine that with being tired, I am liable to become apparently angry. Internally, some little thing will irritate me and I will start making rude remarks, remarks that people around me interpret as anger.

So now I'm wondering, if this is a common phenomena, and I think it is, how is this different than for us that it was 50 or 100 years ago? Was life not so irritating back then that we were able to absorb a little irritation without lashing out? Or were we all not such pansies back then, and a little rude behavior was not something that bothered us? Or is it that modern life has become so much more irritating?

Teacher don't you fill me up with your rules, don't you know that smokin' ain't allowed in school.

BROWNSVILLE STATION SMOKIN' IN THE BOYS ROOM
Keith McDonald

Now that I think about, smoking was ubiquitous 50 and 100 years ago, and one of the common complaints we hear from people who quit smoking is that they gain a bunch of weight. Could it be that nicotine is an appetite suppressant? I hear kids these days are wearing nicotine patches, not because they are trying to quit smoking - they never started, but because they appreciate the calming effect of the drug. (Seems to be a real thing.) The few times I tried smoking, I never noticed any such effect, but that might just be me. Or maybe I enjoyed being cranked up all the time and wasn't interested in any calming effect.

Smokin' in the Boy's Room is like a high school anthem. Turns out there are at least three versions of this tune. 

There's this one by Brownsville Station from 1973 (don't remember them, though I should), 

the one by Mötley Crüe from 1985 and 

a recent one from LeAnn Rimes from 2014.

Times, they are a changin'

Willamette Week Harvest Issue

Saw this tabloid cover and I thought we are finally making some progress. This morning I open the homeowner's association newsletter and this headline jumps out at me:

DISPOSAL OF CIGARETTE BUTTS AND ROACHES

Gol durned dope fiends, trashing the landscape with their butts and roaches. The world is going to hell, I tell you. Nixon was right, we need to stomp out this menace to society before we find ourselves up to our necks in this stuff.

And just in case you have a vague recollection of the title, here's the origin.

Bob Dylan The Times They Are A Changin' 1964
KokomoJoe
I haven't heard a recording that sounded this bad since the days of actual tape recorders.

Update May 2022 replaced missing video.

SMOKE! SMOKE! SMOKE! THAT CIGARETTE

A toe tapping romp through (mostly) vintage cigarette TV advertising with music by Asleep at the Wheel. Also featured is the earliest filmed ad for Admiral Cigarettes, an 1897 Edison film, and a Fred & Barney from the Flintstones smoking Winston Cigarettes.  

Inspired by Dustbury.
Previous posts about cigarettes.

Princess Chelsea - The Cigarette Duet

The video is amusing, the tune is not bad. There is a message in there but it's barely noticeable. Some people (rumor has it) are using nicotine patches for the effect (the nicotine high, such as it is), not because they want to quit smoking. I mean these folks never smoked, so there was no quitting involved.

Smokin'

U.S. Army Cpl. Jacob Bath enjoys a cigarette during a break on Forward Operating Base Farah, Farah province, Afghanistan on April 7, 2009. U.S. Air Force photo by Jonathan Lovelady.

I was stunned when I came across this photo on Military Photos dot net. It was the first time on that site that I had ever seen a member of the US military smoking.

System console for the AN/FSQ-7 computer system, circa 1960. It includes the OA-1008 Situation Display with a light gun (at end of cable), cigarette lighter, and ash tray (left of the light gun). 

The AN/FSQ-7 computer system was part of the Defense Department's early warning radar network. Photo by Joi Ito.

Today I'm looking at US radar systems and I come across this photo of a radar operator's console from 1960, where the cigarette lighter and ashtray are standard equipment. What a difference 50 years makes.

Now that you mention it, it's kind of funny that new cars still come equipped with ashtrays and lighters. The ashtray in my nemesis, the Chrysler Sebring, fits in a cup holder, and is removable, so maybe even the auto industry is changing.

Cigarette Litter

There was an article in the The Oregonian (our local paper) the other day about last year's one day effort to clean up the world's beaches. What was interesting was how prominently cigarette butts figured in the story. While they don't make up much of the mass (probably about 0.1%) they are the most numerous kind of litter the pickers found.

So this idea popped into my head: what we need is a personal cigarette butt receptacle, a butt collector. Something a smoker would carry with them just like the pack of smokes and a lighter, that would give them a place to stash the butt when they were done with it.

Well, if it's such a good idea, someone else has probably already thought of it. A little web search turned up an anti-cigarette-litter site, which had a link to a company that sells personal ashtrays, but that wasn't quite the ticket. A little more looking turns up a bunch of public service type videos complaining about people throwing out their cigarette butts. Well, that's very nice, but it doesn't really help.

What we need is some good examples. We need some videos of people disposing of their cigarette butts properly. If we are really serious about this, we need to make it easy for people to dispose of their cigarette butts. Give them an empty receptacle every time they buy a new pack, and let them drop off their old one. Give them a nickel for each butt they turn in. That might work. Pay them a dollar off their next pack of smokes for each full receptacle they turn in.

In terms of the state of human affairs in the world today, this is pretty small potatoes, but it is one problem we might be able to do something about.

Cigarettes & Liquor

Twister Liquor Store, Pampatar, Venezuela

At lunch today my friend Marc tells us about liquor pricing in Venezuela. He goes in a liquor store and as you might expect they have three sizes of liquor bottles: small, medium and large. Also, as you might expect, the small bottle is the cheapest, the large bottle is the most expensive and the medium size bottle falls somewhere in between. However, when he (or more likely his wife) checks the price per milliliter he is surprised to find that the small bottle is still the cheapest.

Now this is completely backwards to what we have come to expect in the US. The bigger bottle is supposed to be the "economy" size. By putting liquor in a larger bottle, the producer saves on packaging, and this cost savings is supposedly passed on to the consumer. There was even a bit of a scandal a few years ago when it was discovered that this was not necessarily the case. That is why you seen the price per ounce displayed with prices in grocery stores.

Marc asks the clerk about this, and given the language barrier and all it takes some doing, but eventually he finds out that she is aware of this discrepancy. Their logic down there is slightly different than here. Poor people can only afford to buy the small bottles, so they sell them as cheap as possible. People who have enough money ("rich people") to buy the larger bottles do not mind paying a little extra in order to get one big bottle instead of a bunch of small bottles. So they are paying for the convenience of having the big bottle. Weird.

And cigarettes? In Venezuela there is no such thing as a "carton of cigarettes" or even a pack. Cigarettes are sold individually. I have seen this in some convenience stores here a few years ago. Haven't seen it recently, but I haven't been in one either.

Update November 2016 repaired broken html

Cigarette Making Machines

High Speed Cigarette Making Machine

After I wrote my last post about this, I got to wondering if there were any machines available that could automatically produce a hundred cigarettes. What I found was a bunch of hand operated devices for making a one cigarette at a time. A little more searching turned up the behemoth in the picture. It weighs 4 tons and can produce 6,000 cigarettes per minute. Who in their right mind needs 6,000 cigarettes a minute? That is like eight million cigarettes a day! Okay, to keep all the smokers in the US supplied with a pack a day, you would need a couple hundred of these machines.

Cigarette Making Machine

Then I found this machine. It looks to be more like what you would need to be able to produce a carton of smokes for customers on a regular basis. I don't know how much the machine costs, so I don't know if you could make a business out of it, but with the exorbitant taxes on cigarettes, I imagine some people will start looking into it. I think the key is to offer a custom cigarette making service. Customer brings their tobacco to the roller who performs the service of putting the customer's tobacco into cigarettes. Selling ready made cigarettes is where the tax man gets you.

Yes, smoking is bad for your health, but some people are going to smoke anyway. Some people are hopelessly addicted, they couldn't quit if their life depended on it. Then there's all the chemicals and radioactive elements in commercial tobacco that you could avoid by getting your cigarettes custom made using organic tobacco.

Update November 2016 fixed bad html.

Business Opportunity: Custom Cigarettes

With the price of a pack of cigarettes now about $5, I am thinking rolling your own could be saving you some serious money. When I was in Canada some zillion years ago, all the smokers I ran into rolled their own, and not just bums either. I met a truck driver who had a baggie full of smokes. He and his wife would sit down every month or two and roll a thousand cigarettes and that would keep them supplied for a while. I imagine it might be worthwhile for a tobacco shop to roll cigarettes to order for quantities as small as 200. That's what's in a carton. Since most of the price of a pack of ready made smokes is tax, rolling your own, or having them rolled could easily save you a $1000 a year.

On top of that, if you could get organic tobacco, it might be healthier to boot. First of all you get rid of the chemicals that the cigarette companies put in the cigarettes (whatever they are). Second of all you get rid of the radioactive lead, which is probably the cause of lung cancer in smokers. Of course you still get to deal with emphysema, but you can't have everything.

Wrong Again

We had two big measures on the ballot Tuesday: Measures 49 & 50. Wednesday's headline in the Oregonian summed it up pretty well:

ELECTION 2007

MEASURE 49
Yes: 61.9% $4.8 million spent
No: 38.1% $2.3 million spent

MEASURE 50

Yes: 40.5% $3.4 million spent

No: 59.5% $11.8 million spent

Just goes to show that if you have enough money you can pretty much get what you want, and the Measure 49 proponents (I am not sure who they are) and the Measure 50 opponents (the cigarette companies) got what they wanted.

Measure 50 issue is a little more clear cut, so I will start there. Measure 50 would raise cigarette taxes. The extra revenue would go towards children's health care. The money spent campaigning against this measure came from the cigarette companies. I voted for it simply because the cigarette companies were against it. Also, raising cigarette taxes would increase the profit margins for people smuggling cigarettes from Idaho, and we always need more good paying jobs. But it looks like the cigarette companies were able to persuade people raising this tax was not a good idea.

I remember visiting Canada 30 odd years ago and everyone I ran into up there rolled their own cigarettes. One truck driver I met had a baggy with about 30 cigarettes in it. He told me he and his wife would sit down and roll a thousand or so and seal them up in baggies. He would have enough to last for weeks. I do not think I have ever run into an American who rolls his own. The point is I don't feel bad about raising taxes for smokers. If they weren't so lazy, they could roll their own and save $4 a pack. Plain tobacco is not expensive, only when it is rolled into cigarettes does it get taxed.

Measure 49 has something to do with land use laws. I voted against this one just because I do not like people clogging up the ballot with complicated measures that hold no interest for me. Oregon has a set of laws that are supposed to contain urban sprawl and preserve land for farming. A couple of years ago Measure 37 was passed that really upset the apple cart. Measure 49 was supposed to correct it. The whole thing does not make much sense to me. If it was really a case of the state taking away value from land, you would think the courts would have settled it a long time ago. And this business of preserving land for farming is a bunch of hooey. Would you like to know what the biggest agricultural crop in Oregon is? It is grass seed! Criminently, we are trying to contain urban sprawl so we can grow more grass seed for golf courses and lawns? Give me a break!

I do not like urban sprawl, but I would rather see us building compact cities that attracted people to live in them rather continuing on in our inept manner that causes people to move to the suburbs in search of affordable housing.

I saw one sign supporting Measure 49 that said Open Spaces or Urban Sprawl? Open spaces are an illusion, around these parts anyway. There are open fields around here, but they aren't really open, they belong to some farmer, and he has crops planted on it. So you can't just go wandering around in these fields. Of course, any kind of open land does not have houses on it, which means there are no people there, which means there are fewer cars on the road, but that is just a temporary condition. With more people, there are going to be more houses somewhere. Maybe not right here, maybe they will be farther out, which means people will be driving farther to work. I do not see a good end to this.

Update May 2022 reformatted headline.