I referred to cigarettes as "poison" in a recent post, and know some cigar smokers who agree with my assessment.

These people claim the 'tobacco" (when they say it, you can hear the quotation marks around it, BTW) used in cigarettes is of the lowest possible quality, and is soaked in a witches brew of chemicals deisnged to make it addictive, and that also make it horribly unhealthy. Formaldehyde and marcury are among the ingredients found in a cigarette.

The same cigar smokers will tell you that quality tobacco used to make cigars is "untreated" and far more pleasant, safe and non addictive than the 'tobacco" used in cigarettes.

Not having smoked in a long time, I can't say I know, but since there are some people here who use tobacco in non-cigarette form I decided to ask ther opinion on the tobacco verses 'tobacco' issue

I smoked cigarettes for a really long time and could never get into cigars. Purer tobacco or not, they were just plain nasty. I don't smoke anymore but I do fire up a pipe every now and then. It's used more like incense though. I only use two types of tobacco that my grandfather used to smoke.

It doesn't really answer your question, but boards are slow so I'm posting it anyway.

Good cigars are much better than cigarettes, but they're also very expensive. Cheap cigars are awful.

A pipe of good tobacco is a great thing, but it's too heavy and too much fuss for me most of the time.

Cheap cigars are, as Droog said, just as filled with chemicals as cigarettes. Your "swisher sweets" or Colts or Phillies or whatever, are just as full of crap.

There are cigarellos, like Meharis, that are all-natural tobacco leaf. Likewise, any cigar that is high-grade (pretty much any hand-rolled) are pure tobacco, with no chemical additives.

Likewise, pipe tobacco that is drug-store bought (Amphora, Sail, Captain Black) has chemical preservatives, though not as bad as cigarettes.  But any decent tobacco (the sort you can't buy at a drug store, only at a tobacconist), is going to be all-natural with no chemicals.

And some basic logical thinking will tell you that "natural high grade tobacco" is healthier than "low-grade tobacco + shitloads of chemical additives + extra nicotine".

Indeed, the amount of nicotine in natural cigars and pipe tobacco, ie. the amount found in actual unprocessed tobacco itself, is not enough for a human being to become physically addicted.  The "epidemic" of tobacco addiction is entirely the fault of industrialized processed cigarettes.

Its not true that people didn't smoke before WWI, and cancer rates went up after people "started smoking" then; rather, what IS true is that before WWI you didn't have mass-produced cigarette industries, people rolled their own cigarettes or smoked pipes or cigars, and it is true that cancer rates skyrocketed after cigarettes began to be industrially mass-produced (and filled with additives and preservatives).  There's no coincidence there.

RPGPundit

Is there any ecidence to support claims that the tobacco industry was genetically engineering "super tobacco" with higher nicotine levels to increase addiction? I heard this but don't know if it's true or just an urban myth. Personally I'd believe it, given the sheer evil we've seen from the tobacco industry.

And you fine tobacco afficiandoes don't have to declare war on me for that, I'm not talking about fine tobacco, I'm talking about cigarettes. After decades of lying to congress and the public in america tobacco execs were caught telling people in eastern europe they should encourage smoking in their populations as a way of killing people before they got old enough to retire and draw pensions.
They were openly telling the leaders of some eastern european countries that tobacco would kill off a lot of their citizens and reduce the amount of time they spent on pensions, helping the economies of these countries. Talk about fucking evil.

Speaking of governments encouraging smoking, in the most excellent computer RPG Deus Ex there were packs of cigarettes, cigarette vending machines and cigarette ads, some incredibly outrageous. It was never clearly said so in the game but the blunt force implication was that the government was encouraging smoking to kill off the 'surplus population".

Some of the ads were incredibly outrageous, like the ones for "Super .45s: Tje only brand recommended by the surgeon general himself" and the once called "Holy Smokes" that had a picture of jesus smoking a cigarette with the tagline "It's savioriffic."

No, I didn't make those up.

Um, as per usual, you're a bit mixed up.

First, they weren't trying to genetically engineer a supertobacco; they just were pumping extra levels of nicotine into the cigarettes themselves, making them addictive on purpose.  At some point they realized the industrial processing they used enhanced the nicotine levels and caused addiction, and after that, they decided to intentionally augment those processes to make sure people stayed addicted to cigarettes. So, no real need to create a different tobacco plant itself.

Second, what you're talking about when you say "eastern europe" is really a study Phillip Morris did for the Czech Republic, which concluded that the Czech state actually saved money from the smoking rates it had, as people died off earlier and ended up costing the state millions and millions of dollars less in long-term health care.

PM has since apologized for the study, said it was in terrible bad judgement etc., and many people condemned them for it. But you know what? Absolutely no one has been able to refute it. Its not like they lied. What they said was, fundamentally true. A case of Freakonomics if ever you saw one, but they weren't lying, it wasn't wrong, it was just statistically true.  I don't see why the Anti-tobacco Taliban should be able to argue that "Tobacco costs the state millions in health care" and claim that this is a good excuse for them taxing the shit out of us, when in reality the vegetarian fucker next door who runs three miles a day is going to cost the state far more, statistically speaking, than Joe Two-Packs-A-Day, because Joe is going to die at age 63 after a two year stint with cancer, while Vegetarian Fucker is going to die at age 82 after a 20 year long slow chronically ill decline into helplessness that the state will have to subsidize, spending the last 10 of those years as more or less a vegetable.

So was the study cold-hearted? Sure.
But it was also true, and proved that the anti-tobacco gangs' main argument for raising taxes was based on a lie.

RPGPundit

...as long as you guys are talking about tobacco...

 There is a short story by Alan Dean Foster called "Pipe Dream" in the book METROGNOME & OTHER STORIES  that was inspired by a pipe smoker.
 Specifically this lover of pipes used to respond to the question "What are you smoking ?" by saying :
 "Ah, its not what. Its whom."


- E.W.C.

Quote from: Koltar...as long as you guys are talking about tobacco...

 There is a short story by Alan Dean Foster called "Pipe Dream" in the book METROGNOME & OTHER STORIES  that was inspired by a pipe smoker.
 Specifically this lover of pipes used to respond to the question "What are you smoking ?" by saying :
 "Ah, its not what. Its whom."


- E.W.C.

Don't stink up my threads, toad.

Quote from: RPGPunditUm, as per usual, you're a bit mixed up.

First, they weren't trying to genetically engineer a supertobacco; they just were pumping extra levels of nicotine into the cigarettes themselves, making them addictive on purpose.  At some point they realized the industrial processing they used enhanced the nicotine levels and caused addiction, and after that, they decided to intentionally augment those processes to make sure people stayed addicted to cigarettes. So, no real need to create a different tobacco plant itself.

Second, what you're talking about when you say "eastern europe" is really a study Phillip Morris did for the Czech Republic, which concluded that the Czech state actually saved money from the smoking rates it had, as people died off earlier and ended up costing the state millions and millions of dollars less in long-term health care.

PM has since apologized for the study, said it was in terrible bad judgement etc., and many people condemned them for it. But you know what? Absolutely no one has been able to refute it. Its not like they lied. What they said was, fundamentally true. A case of Freakonomics if ever you saw one, but they weren't lying, it wasn't wrong, it was just statistically true.  I don't see why the Anti-tobacco Taliban should be able to argue that "Tobacco costs the state millions in health care" and claim that this is a good excuse for them taxing the shit out of us, when in reality the vegetarian fucker next door who runs three miles a day is going to cost the state far more, statistically speaking, than Joe Two-Packs-A-Day, because Joe is going to die at age 63 after a two year stint with cancer, while Vegetarian Fucker is going to die at age 82 after a 20 year long slow chronically ill decline into helplessness that the state will have to subsidize, spending the last 10 of those years as more or less a vegetable.

So was the study cold-hearted? Sure.
But it was also true, and proved that the anti-tobacco gangs' main argument for raising taxes was based on a lie.

RPGPundit

No, you're just blasting shit at me without cause, as usual. There WERE allegations that RJR and PM were trying to enhance the addicitve properties of tobacco by various means, like the plant eqv. of selective breeding and even genetic engineering. These seems to have disappeared years back, so I'm not sure if they were false, a court put a gag order on it or the evidence and the people who had it were eliminated by agenst sent by big tobacco, like Karen Silkwood was eliminated by agents of Kerr McGee.

I really love cigs. I like pipes, I'm cool with hookahs, and I've done cigars and cigarellos before, but cigs are wonderful. There's a tremendous tactile pleasure in smoking a cigarette that's specific to them.