OT Up In Smoke

[Chris Craig]

Your father was exactly right. However, my grandfather who smoked a lot of unfiltered cigarettes and drank a lot of Alabama moonshine, died at 77. He also ate a diet that only Alabama rural people could eat, high in pork fat. Grandma kept a coffee can on the stove where she saved her cooking rendered grease such as bacon grease. The grease went into everything including pie crust, red eye gravy, biscuits and so forth.

Oh yes the grease can

 

[Propagandist]

I smoked for a long long time. One day perhaps 5 or so years ago, I felt a cold coming on and I thought to myself: "I shouldn't smoke today. It'll make the cold worse." The second after that thought left my head, all I could think of was cigarettes. I began to reconsider: "One cigarette will be fine." Then I was like: "WTF! Have I no control?!?" I didn't smoke that day thinking of cigarettes the entire time. Next morning, I opened my eyes and the first thing that I thought of was cigarette. That upset me. Fuck that. Driving, bored out of my mind, I was thinking: cigarette cigarette cigarette. After I ate: cigarette. After a sip of a beer: cigarette. Walking down the sidewalk: cigarette. The rain is falling: cigarette. Cigarette cigarette cigarette. It was dizzying and totally worse than I'm portraying it. Addiction is an incredible brain/body disease.

I had not smoked, but I was so irritated by my thought weakness, that I vowed to stop forever. A pack a day to zero. I chewed a couple of packs of that nicotine gum in the beginning to take the edge off but that was it. Occasionally, I'll smoke a cigar (maybe one or two a year at the most) or some weed but that's it, but I have zero interest in cigarettes. For those of you trying to quit, try and watch your own body and mind betray you. It's fucked. Maybe it'll motivate you like it motivated me.

 

[Further]

I smoked between 1/2 and 1 pack a day from about 16 years old till 37 with a few couple month attempts of to quit. At 37, had my last cigarette, my last tobacco of any kind. 7 years later I am amazed how much smoking repulses me now. The smell of people who smoke is vile now. I was one, it's not personal, but I truly find that oder revolting now.

I smoke cannabis once or twice a year now. I don't have a problem with it in theory, I just don't usually enjoy it.

I love my beer, wine, spirits, but in moderation. I usually have one alcoholic beverage a night. maybe once a week I will have 2 or 3. Once every couple months I'll have 4-6 drinks. That is my preferred vice.

 

[Lanny]

I smoked between 1/2 and 1 pack a day from about 16 years old till 37 with a few couple month attempts of to quit. At 37, had my last cigarette, my last tobacco of any kind. 7 years later I am amazed how much smoking repulses me now. The smell of people who smoke is vile now. I was one, it's not personal, but I truly find that oder revolting now.

I smoke cannabis once or twice a year now. I don't have a problem with it in theory, I just don't usually enjoy it.

I love my beer, wine, spirits, but in moderation. I usually have one alcoholic beverage a night. maybe once a week I will have 2 or 3. Once every couple months I'll have 4-6 drinks. That is my preferred vice.

I smoked cigarettes as well as quite a bit of weed.
First I laid off cigarettes. Then it was weed which I've kept off somewhere around half a century because of my security clearances and now because I feel like I'd be missing out on reality by seeing through the colored glasses of weed.
I drank a lot in my younger years but just sort of naturally tapered off until now I have about one drink every week to once a month. Had a glass of beer tonight but left half of it on the table and it was an excellent beer, Tsing Tao. Two or three times a year I have a glass of high quality scotch mixed with ice. Nearly every new year my wife and I share a bottle of Dom Perignon. Two or three times a year I have a great cognac with some fruit. And maybe once a year I have a surprise drink such as a bloody mary or a margarita or a screw driver or something else. Oh, the other day my wife and I had a terrific wagyu NY steak dinner at home and split a bottle of Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon. We each had a quarter of the bottle with half remaining in the refrigerator.
Yep, I am no longer the lampshade on his head life of the party.

 

[GhostOfPGA]

I smoke weed, quite often. Mostly blunts and through a bong.

Never smoked a cigarette though.

 

[MARIS61]

So people are already coming down with severe lung diseases/ailments and other health threats from vaping and the CDC has issued warnings while they study the dying people, mostly in their 20's and 30's.

Will vaping stay legal or will it be legislated off the market?

 

[Lanny]

So people are already coming down with severe lung diseases/ailments and other health threats from vaping and the CDC has issued warnings while they study the dying people, mostly in their 20's and 30's.

Will vaping stay legal or will it be legislated off the market?

It will be regulated like cigarettes.

 

[Mediocre Man]

Honestly thought I'd be the only never used vote

 

[bigbailes]

I'll smoke a cigar from time to time but have actually never touched a cigarette. Watched both my dad's parents die of emphysema and man that looked like a painful way to go. Never realized it until I was older, that my grandma smoked pretty much until the day she died, through all the asthma and other crap, she couldn't quit her smokes. I know I cigars are bad for me but I'll have maybe one a month. I will drink maybe once every other week and living in Texass, weed still isn't legal, but I never really got into that stuff when I was in my younger days either.

 

[Hoopguru]

This is a definite reason to take lobbyist money out of the equation and implement Term limits.
And its both Dems and Repub's that guard their investments and future millions they make while in congress.

Tobacco and E-Cigarette Lobbyists Circle as F.D.A. Chief Exits

Dr. Scott Gottlieb addressing the rank and file of the Food and Drug Administration during his first week as commissioner in May 2017.CreditCreditJeanine B. Hartnett/U.S. Food and Drug Administration
By Sheila Kaplan and Matt Richtel
Dr. Scott Gottlieb became commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in 2017 with an ambitious plan to reduce cigarette smoking, a habit that kills nearly half a million Americans each year, by shifting smokers to less harmful alternatives like e-cigarettes.

But he was quickly embroiled in an unexpected crisis: the explosion of vaping among millions of middle and high school students, many of whom were getting addicted to nicotine.

Dr. Gottlieb will depart at the end of this month, following his sudden announcement last week that he would resign, with his plans to toughen regulation of both vaping and smoking unfinished and powerful lobbying forces quietly celebrating the exit of a politically canny administrator who aggressively wielded his regulatory powers.

Opponents are already swooping in, making their case to Congress and reaching out to the White House. A coalition of conservative organizations that oppose government intervention in the marketplace has harshly criticized Dr. Gottlieb’s crackdown on e-cigarettes. Retailers, including convenience store and gas station owners, are on Capitol Hill lobbying against guidelines Dr. Gottlieb proposed on Wednesday to restrict sales of most flavored e-cigarettes to separate adult-only areas and to require age verification of customers.

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This pivotal moment in regulation of smoking and vaping comes just months after Altria, maker of Marlboro cigarettes and the nation’s largest tobacco company, with a market value of $100 billion, bought a 35 percent stake in Juul, the nation’s dominant vaping company whose valuation soared on the investment to $38 billion.

Juul’s alliance with Altria has given it access to a far more muscular, experienced political player. Altria gave $500,000 to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee, and spent more than $10 million on lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Dr. Gottlieb has expressed anger that Juul and Altria were negotiating their financial deal in secret, while each was making promises to the F.D.A. that he believes the deal broke. The investment in Juul means that Altria, with net sales of cigarettes and other products last year amounting to $25.4 billion, is now selling flavored e-cigarettes, which it had told the F.D.A. it would stop doing, he s“Proponents of vaping, who support these companies,” he said in an interview, “ought to realize just how much these companies are putting their short-term business objectives ahead of any long-term goals for these technologies to be effective tools for adult smokers.”

The question is whether Dr. Gottlieb’s successor will continue his policies and enforce them. On Tuesday, Dr. Norman E. “Ned” Sharpless, director of the National Cancer Institute, was named to replace him in an acting capacity and is in the running to succeed him permanently.

Dr. Gottlieb supports Dr. Sharpless, who said he would continue his predecessor’s policies. Alex M. Azar II, secretary of health and human services, said in a statement Wednesday that the administration backs closing off children’s access to e-cigarettes, while making them available to adult smokers trying to quit.

enforcing limits on flavored e-cigarettesto protect teenagers. “What that tells you is I got broad buy-in into that,” he said in an interview.

When he became commissioner in May 2017, his goal was to move smokers to less harmful alternatives, such as e-cigarettes. That July, he allowed e-cigarette companies to keep their vaping devices and nicotine pods on the market for an extra four years before they would have to prove their products would benefit public health.

Juul’s popularity with teenagers mounted.

In an interview, he recalled the morning in August 2018 when Mitch Zeller, the director of the agency’s tobacco control unit, brought him the bad news: Vaping was up 78 percent among high school students and 48 percent among middle school students, with 3.6 million youths reporting they had used e-cigarettes, according to the 2018 National Tobacco Youth Survey.

A few weeks later, Dr. Gottlieb called youth vaping an epidemic,and gave e-cigarette makers 60 days to show how they would curb youth vaping, or risk having their products pulled from the shelves. Juul pulled mango, crème and other flavors off the shelves but continued to sell them on line.

The conservative leaders now fighting restrictions on flavored e-cigarettes include Grover Norquist’s anti-tax group, Americans for Tax Reform, the R Street Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council Action, a nonprofit. In a letter dated Feb. 4, a coalition of these and 13 other groups urged President Trump to “halt the Food and Drug Administration’s aggressive regulatory assault on businesses who sell and consumers who rely on less harmful alternatives to cigarettes in the United States.”

Both Juul and Altria say they had nothing to do with this message to the president. But in recent years, both companies have donated to Mr. Norquist’s group and to some of the other groups that signed the letter.

In 2017, Altria made contributions to the Goldwater Institute, the Rio Grande Foundation, the R Street Institute, and the Independent Women’s Forum, as well as Mr. Norquist’s group, according to an Altria annual philanthropy report that did not specify the amounts.

And Juul confirmed its contributions to Mr. Norquist’s group, the R Street Institute, where Tevi Troy, Juul’s vice president of public policy, and a friend of Dr. Gottlieb’s, was once a board member, and to ALEC Action. Juul declined to disclose the size of its donations.

he American Lung Association often cites a study indicating that more than three-quarters of African-American cigarette smokers said they prefer menthol cigarettes, compared to less than a quarter of white smokers. Menthol cigarettes make up 35 to 40 percent of the market in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Asked if this effort would continue without Dr. Gottlieb’s leadership, a spokeswoman for H.H.S. declined to comment, but sent links to previous statements in support of the F.D.A.’s tobacco plans.

Dr. Gottlieb has acknowledged it would take years to move a proposed menthol ban forward.

“Big tobacco companies will want to educate whoever takes that position,” said Marc Scheineson, a lawyer who works with smaller tobacco companies. He said that these groups would inevitably try to reverse any move toward a menthol ban, which he called “a Scott Gottlieb priority.”

“He was definitely running this train,” Mr. Scheineson said.

 

[CupWizier]

I smoked for a long long time. One day perhaps 5 or so years ago, I felt a cold coming on and I thought to myself: "I shouldn't smoke today. It'll make the cold worse." The second after that thought left my head, all I could think of was cigarettes. I began to reconsider: "One cigarette will be fine." Then I was like: "WTF! Have I no control?!?" I didn't smoke that day thinking of cigarettes the entire time. Next morning, I opened my eyes and the first thing that I thought of was cigarette. That upset me. Fuck that. Driving, bored out of my mind, I was thinking: cigarette cigarette cigarette. After I ate: cigarette. After a sip of a beer: cigarette. Walking down the sidewalk: cigarette. The rain is falling: cigarette. Cigarette cigarette cigarette. It was dizzying and totally worse than I'm portraying it. Addiction is an incredible brain/body disease.

I had not smoked, but I was so irritated by my thought weakness, that I vowed to stop forever. A pack a day to zero. I chewed a couple of packs of that nicotine gum in the beginning to take the edge off but that was it. Occasionally, I'll smoke a cigar (maybe one or two a year at the most) or some weed but that's it, but I have zero interest in cigarettes. For those of you trying to quit, try and watch your own body and mind betray you. It's fucked. Maybe it'll motivate you like it motivated me.

Good for you. My mother was a smoker and she got lung cancer when she was 56 and passed away at 61 as I just turned 38 the day before she passed. My wife is a smoker and I have been on her case to no avail. My boss was a chain smoker and he was able to quit cold turkey as well. Keep up the good fight.

 

[UncleCliffy'sDaddy]

Good for you. My mother was a smoker and she got lung cancer when she was 56 and passed away at 61 as I just turned 38 the day before she passed. My wife is a smoker and I have been on her case to no avail. My boss was a chain smoker and he was able to quit cold turkey as well. Keep up the good fight.

I never, ever thought I could quit smoking until I read “The Easy Way To Stop Smoking” by Allan Carr. At the risk of sounding like a dewy eyed teen, it changed my life. It sounds stupid but it really works if the reader keeps an open mind. Spend the $13 (or so) and give it to your wife. AND tell her the author encourages her to huff away while she’s reading it! Just a thought from an exsmoker who wants to see more exsmokers.......

 

[crandc]

My quit plan was something I invented myself, probably wouldn't be endorsed by doctor but I haven't smoked for 30 years.

Gottlieb was the only person left in this administration who is qualified and tried to do his job. Surprised he lasted this long.

 

[Orion Bailey]

I thought this was a C&C moment!

 

[calvin natt]

6 vaping deaths: BAN FLAVORED VAPING NOW
290 Mass shootings in 2019: meh

 

[calvin natt]

Is there any doubt that cigarette/tobacco pushed Trumpy to ban flavored vaping? (There isn’t). He’s been bought and paid for more times than stormy.

 

[Chris Craig]

Is there any doubt that cigarette/tobacco pushed Trumpy to ban flavored vaping? (There isn’t). He’s been bought and paid for more times than stormy.

Other flavored tobacco products that are marketed towards youth should also be banned.