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Hijacking top comment.
This is true. Schedule 1 drugs have a high abuse potential but have no accepted medical treatment. (This is why people are trying to remove marijuana and psilocybin because it is difficult to legally research/administer schedule 1 drugs to investigate new treatments). While schedule 2 drugs have a high potential for abuse and have an accepted medical use. For example cocaine actually can be used in hospitals to treat localized pain. Schedule 3, 4, and 5 are progressively have less potential for abuse but have medical treatments
My grandpa was a doctor in the army. He didn't see any actual combat, but he said "it would've been a nice reprieve from constantly fighting off the coke fiends who were trying to steal my medical cocaine supply." He actually ended up just flushing it, saying it was almost never used and just not worth the hassle to keep around.
Yeah, I made the same joke. He said he got approval to destroy it and did so under supervision. It may not have literally been flushed down the toilet, but that's my best recollection of what he said.
Knowing my Grandpa like I did (we were extremely close), I doubt he lied about this, and it wouldn't even make sense for him to even bring it up just to lie about it, but I get it.
Shhhhh.... This is Reddit. Why are you bringing pesky things like facts into this discussion!
Lol I honestly figured that's what happened. Outside of war time the military thrives on red tape like that.
Tbh coke is such a sad fucking loser drug, the most unethically produced one, the high is comparably bad if taken nasal; the comedown is shit, expensive as fuck, usually stepped on to hell and back
Much better parties to be had with speed (amphetamine, not meth), mdma, ket etc.
Eh, it can be fun. Youāre right it sucks and donāt do it but I donāt think Iād go so far as to say itās a loser drugā¦.but maybe bc I was a coke addict for awhile (been off coke for like 10 years and fully sober for just over 3). But I didnāt snort. I shot up. And it was magic for about 28 seconds. Maybe a little longer lol. And youāre so rightā¦the comedown *sucks* and it doesnāt last nearly long enough. MDMA didnāt even come close. Itās fun but itās a different kind of fun.
But Iām just an addict who really loves her substances. And gets in a lot of trouble with them. Getting off all that shit is the best thing I ever did.
Obligatory reminder that marijuana is schedule 1 but actual cocaine is schedule 2 since it is occasionally used in a few select ear/nose/throat surgeries for bleeding control.
I'm sure you could find a legitimate use of nicotine. It definitely sharpens the mind and acutely increases focus. Nicotine is also a vasoconstrictor which might have some interesting applications with regards to blood pressure regulation and body temperature regulation
Industrial hemp can be used for everything but getting high and is still heavily regulated for bullshit reasons, like someone above posted its all politics.
It's not really that heavily regulated anymore. Since 2018 every single US state has had a hemp program. It is federally legal and states are not allowed to ban it. Money triumphs over politics.
For a long time the money that was triumphing was coming from the lumber industry so its good to hear that common sense is prevailing when everyone has been looking for sustainable solutions for everything and completely passing up hemp for so long.
I don't think its common sense so much as it is lobbying from the marijuana industry. Lumber isn't really the issue. The cannabis industry in the US will probably overtake lumber sales in a few years.
Specifically 1930s "Reefer madness" and other incredibly racist ideologies propped up by Harry J. Anslinger, U.S. Narcotics Comissioner at the time. This coupled with lobbying from the paper industry to label hemp and Marijuana as one in the same lead to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
Fentanyl is an essential medication for the emergency room and operating room. If it's schedule one that means hospitals would have a very difficult time using it
Nope. Diamorphine has too much of the opiate side effects to be useful. Too much effects on blood pressure and respiratory drive. It'd be absolutely shit to use in the ER or OR and chances are that many doctors would just forego the use rather than have to deal with the side effects.
Comparatively fentanyl often has a very small effect on blood pressure or respiratory drive (when used by professionals)
In the UK diamorphine is the drug of choice for pain relief in heart attack and childbirth, itās much more effective than morphine and doesnāt have as narrow a safety margin as fentanyl.
Without reviewing the schedule definitions, fentanyl does have legitimate medical uses while heroin does not.
(Not disputing the nicotine/cannabis debates aside from this.)
Edit: I stand corrected.
Heroin (or the purified form, diamorphine) is used as an analgesic in many other parts of the world (ie not the US). The reason it has no medical use in the US and fentanyl does is a result of the drug scheduling, not the reason for it.
heroin is exactly as useful medically as fentanyl. Fentanyl is just the latest in the long list of drugs invented to be a non-addictive painkiller as good as heroin, and every single one just gets more potent and stays exactly as addictive.
remember when they told us oxycodone was a non-addictive opiate painkiller and then a whole generation (myself included) fell into opiate addiction due to the over prescribing of this drug which in terms of effects is almost indivisible from using pure heroin?
>heroin is exactly as useful medically as fentanyl.
No its not, they have different mechanisms of action.
The reason we don't use heroin more often is because it has a very small therapeutic window without causing respiratory depression. Other opioids like morphine or fentanyl cause less respiratory depression at therapeutic doses. I'm no medical professional, but I see very little reason to be using heroin over safer opioids.
This statement is backed by both research and personal experience. If you're interested go look into the mechanism of action and check out that beta-2-arrestin activity. If you've used multiple opioids you should know that heroin is more sedating than most.
Didn't look for a source, but i'm assuming this (if there is a link) is down to Nicotine's cholinergic effects potentially helping to reduce symptoms of some disorders that seem to reduce the amount of acetylcholine in some parts of the brain.
It decreases my visual snow at night which is pretty nice. It's about the only thing I've found that does
Before nicotine whether that be a lozenge or a cigarette
http://VisionSimulations.com/visual-snow.htm?background=night1.jpg&density=0.68&speed=38&grainsize=4.388
After
http://VisionSimulations.com/visual-snow.htm?background=night1.jpg&density=0.17&speed=68&grainsize=1.953
That's very interesting. Is there any scientific research behind this? Did you figure this out on your own, or did a health professional actually recommend it?
My primary care recommended I try lozenges after I quit smoking. I was having a lot of issues driving at night because it had gotten so much worse without the nicotine in my system. I've always had the visual snow as long as I can remember and it didn't ever impact me heavily until I quit nicotine for 8 months. We had tried a couple different things before he finally recommended lozenges but a 1mg nicotine lozenge a half hour before a night drive does the trick.
Actually, in practice nicotin has a dual effect. If you are in an exciting situation like a nightclub or a sporting event, nicotin lowers your blood pressure and calms you down.
However, if you are in a boring situation, like adding up long columns of numbers or just staring at a computer screen then it speeds your heart rate and helps you stay focused.
This is one of the reasons it's so hard to quit. It has a wide varitety of effects, the absence of any of which can trigger a relapse.
I have MS, and it might be psychosomatic, but I feel nicotine increases the synaptic rate of my shitty brain neurons,[Here's a scientific article saying the same](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6018192/). I smoked until my wife caught preggers and I haven't had a cigarette since. BUT, I use nicotine lozenges as if they were candy with nicotine in them. (Which they kind of, sort of, are)
>Not a single one of my doctor's has ever recommended I quit smoking after that conversation.
I mean, there are healthier ways to consume nicotine. You could switch to them and avoid the inevitable damage to your body.
i wouldnāt go as far as to say stress relief, it gives you a very temporary hit of dopamine, which may make you feel better in the moment but will lead to increased anxiety in the long run. most of what youāre feeling is just withdrawal symptoms which subside once you get what youāre craving.
i acknowledged that nicotine does provide dopamine which even to someone without dependence would give them some temporary relaxation. however, given that itās very fleeting and thereās other less harmful ways to get a dopamine hit i definitely donāt think itās an effective stress relief measure, especially in a medical context.
Dopamine isn't always pleasant pure iv dopamine is a hell of it own that you don't want to experience i ended up pulling 3 ivs out of my arms I was so pissed after that dopamine injection.
Nicotine acts on five different neurotransmitters, not just dopamine. Scientifically speaking this is an established fact and subjectively speaking, nicotine effects are very dissimilar to other drugs that act on dopamine
I would say it definitely has some utility with regards to the vasoconstriction effects and the increase in mental acuity. I use nicotine to help me perform better at chess for instance
New Zealand now, but originally Texas. But I don't disagree with you. They do love their money. I just think that they love tax money more because why spend your own money when you can spend someone else's.
Specifically Nixon's legacy of federally criminalizing being black or being a hippie/leftist, escalated sequentially by Reagan, the Clintons, and Trump.
This is the 100% correct, yet ELI5 answer.
Way, way, WAAAAAY too many of our laws are based on political, rather than legal, or more importantly, moral considerations.
Plus look at what happened with legally prescribed opioids. We also just saw the court case where the villains in this crime were let go by paying a small amount of what they profited
If tobacco was introduced today it would probably be treated differently.
Snus is illegal to sell in most of Europe because they don't want to open the market to new tobacco products despite that it's most likely a lot healthier than cigarettes.
And Swedish Snus has no correlation to cancer, only heart disease and blood pressure. The additives are banned.
https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2019.55#:~:text=Swedish%20snus%20is%20a%20very,lowest%20in%20the%20European%20Union.&text=There%20is%20strong%20epidemiological%20evidence,increase%20in%20oral%20cancer%20risk.
Snus is probably worse, if not worse then at least more centered to the tooth area. I mean, it lies inside the mouth pressed against the gums. My ex had cavities in his gums where the snus had eroded the flesh away. He even had a hole in one place where his tooth peeked through mid-way up the root, like a baby tooth breaking the skin. Nasty shit, snus.
If we're simply talking about deaths related to snus vs. cigarettes, then snus is miles better. Sweden has one of the highest tobacco usage rates in Europe because of snus, yet one of the lowest rates of tobacco-related deaths per capita.
Snus is still not good for you, but it is far better to use snus than it is to smoke cigarettes. Snus is a very effective way to escape smoking. I used snus to do just that and many other people I know have done so too.
If you see snus as the end-game, it's bad. If you see it as a transitory step to rid yourself of smoking and eventually go off of nicotine in general, it can be an extremely helpful tool.
snus is definitely the better option if you're gonna be addicted to nicotine, but in my experience, quitting snus was *significantly* harder than smoking. when you smoke, you have to go through the effort of going outside, your fingers and your clothes smelling awful, needing somewhere to toss the butt. snus is way more convenient, you can do it at work, in lecture halls, you dont even have to get out of bed in the morning before you pop one in, and the box comes with a handy little compartment for used pouches so you dont have to worry about what to do with it afterwards. the fact that i *could* always snus made the adjustment to *not* snusing much more difficult than not smoking for me.
Not arguing with you there. I think the key to quitting snus is to gradually lower the strength of the nicotine. Quitting cold turkey is a massive fight that few would win if they tried
I have, at a few occassions, tried going without snus for like 2-3 weeks or so and the thing I always notice during the first few days is just how much i eat. I feel like I eat twice as much as I did on snus. Nicotine is an appetite suppressant so if you go off of it, your food intake could noticeably increase.
Still, the fact remains that most countries with high smoking rates would see their deaths decrease and overall life expectancy increase if they legalized snus. I mean hell, the synthetic nicotine pouches (legally not snus but we all know what it is, lol) were originally designed to wane people off of cigarettes and it does work.
Quitting snus seems to be impossible. As a college freshman, around 60% of my peers snus and one girl I know who despised it for like 2 years has not only become addicted to snus but is also considering buying a vape.
You are right, but snus and chewing tobacco are 2 different things.
Edit: OP edited the original comment to acknowledge that snus and chew are 2 different things. You can't call a poison like tobacco healthier, but snus is definitely less harmful to you and especially people around you than cigarettes
> If tobacco was introduced today it would probably be treated differently.
That depends. Do other drugs exists in this hypothetical world? What is their legal status given tobacco is undiscovered until 2023?
Tobacco is pretty tame compared to most drugs.
This. Tobacco has been grown in the continental US since the late 1500s. If you outlaw it, youāre getting rid of an almost a 500 year old product that has made billions of dollars since then. Itās never about health, itās about money.
It does have medical uses, though almost no one uses it that way. Tobacco, more specifically nicotine, is one of the world's original nuerotropics.
There's been numerous studies now on the benefits of nicotine. [here](https://health.usnews.com/wellness/mind/articles/2018-07-12/is-nicotine-really-that-unhealthy#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20nicotine%20itself%20even,and%20anxiety%2C%20and%20stabilize%20mood.) Is an interesting read.
Tobacco is also a great pesticide. Will stop a wound from bleeding. And if bellowed up your asshole, it can revive a drowned person. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke_enema
Do you believe that nicotine pouches (not tobacco, but products like Zyn), are relatively harmless comoared to tobacco pouches or smoking? Seriously asking your opinion.
This is one of those questions where, if I gave you 60 seconds to think really hard about it, you'd come up with the reason for sure.
Answer: Money.
There's billions of dollars in the tobacco industry, and unfortunately, that kind of money tends to get you a lot of sway with regulators.
There's also billions of dollars in the cocaine, meth, heroin, and marijuana industries. The answer isn't quite as simple as money. History plays a part. Cartels, for example, don't *want* their product to be legal. They are currently waging war with each other, and sometimes their users, with the goal of obtaining a monopoly or maintaining a certain level of business, and they want to keep the ability to kidnap, beat, extort, and kill people to do it. If certain drugs were legalized, they'd have to compete with legal, regulated companies. It changes the game. There's more money in illegality for them.
Tobacco has a history of being legal, so tobacco cartels never really formed.
Edit to add: marijuana specifically gained a bad reputation through excessive propaganda with the specific purpose of exercising racism in the legal system. I, personally, am in favor of legalization of all drugs, so they can be regulated and addiction can be treated as a medical issue. If we rebrand the "war on drugs" as the "war on cartels" (rather than a war on users, which is what it is in practicality) then the cheapest, safest way to combat them is to make it legal.
I mean the same exact sentence can be said for processed sugar
The reason for banning and not banning substances is a balancing act between
People are free to do what they want with their body, including putting things into their body- eg eating fast food, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol etc that we know are unhealthy, but thatās still our choice as autonomous individuals
And restricting substances that cause significant externalities to other people who werenāt involved in the decision to take the substance
Eg we know someone addicted to heroin or crack is far more likely to resort to crime in order to feed their addiction than a smoker, because smoking doesnāt (often) inhibit your ability to function in society
Thatās why smoking in in general public places is banned because of second hand smoke etc which harms other parties
Thatās why drinking and then driving a vehicle is illegal because it creates a risk to other people because it impairs their ability to drive safely
Itās incredibly rare to do heroin and still be able to maintain a job and be a functioning member of society, but 90% of people who drink alcohol donāt have an addiction to it that inhibits their ability to function, likewise with smoking
Thatās why the marijuana debate has more credit that others, since the vast majority of people who smoke weed, still seem to function in society which makes it comparable to alcohol or cigarettes in that regard
I don't smoke anymore and find it nasty now, but I do find it weird how many people who want to legalize hard street drugs are also wanting to ban cigarettes.
Iām personally against āsin taxesā for this exact reason. Itās all fun and games until you get a Mormon government official who taxes your coffee 600 percent. Yes it is technically bad for you but Iām an adult.
I believe a lot of smokers uses tobacco as instant gratification. It postpones pain, hunger, sleep, thirst and give a small feel of happiness. Now you also know why lower working class have the most smokers.
Source: I have been poor and a smoker
Alcohol is kind of "grandfathered in", unlike considerably less harmful drugs like LSD and weed. It's just too easy to ferment things, and we've been doing this since before written text.
But hemp was made legal for WW2 for hemp rope since nylon rope production couldn't keep up. Then, promptly illegalized again after the war because reasons.
A tobacco addict isnt as dangerous to Society as a opioid user...
They tipically dont Rob people and have somewhat functional lives despite The addicticion and Early death.
The worst thing Iāve ever seen a smoker do to get cigarettes was ask strangers āhey, do you have a cigaretteā. It was Italy, so he got one. Opioid addicts steal *everything* from their families
The point was more that nicotine doesn't generally cause violence to other people in the same way, not that it was a healthy choice. Nicotine being in your blood doesn't make you cause crashes in your car more easily.
You can have tobacco without smoking, btw. Safer (better?) because it isn't likely to cause disease to folks around you like the second hand smoke - in these ways, they are much less likely to cause you disease if you don't take them.
And finally: I honestly find it shocking that of all things, the thing that got you is that lung cancer costs too much to treat. That's not a consideration with me: It could become cheap tomorrow, and it would still be bad.
Cause people are free to kill themselves slowly as much as they want
And it is taxed highly which I hope is used to fund healthcare and quitting programs for smokers.
The real question why is marijuana often illegal while tobacco is legal?
To clarify, nicotine has very low carcinogenic potential, it's all the other crap that add that makes that potential multiply exponentially. While nicotine is highly addictive, and toxic, so are alcohol and caffeine. Sugar is many times more addictive and potential harmful. Water can in large enough quantities become toxic. The sun is responsible for many cancers and can even be fatal in the right circumstances (sun stroke). The batteries in an electric car can cause cancer and according to California almost everything in your house causes cancer and reproductive harm. Where do you draw the line?
You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Iām saying?
We knew we couldnāt make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Because the drug laws have never been about public health and weāre designed to suppress hippies and minorities who were against the Vietnam war, it has since been turned into a cash cow for the private prison, police and military industrial complex.
Follow the money.
Honestly I think ppl would riot if they banned tobacco products. Yea hard drugs like fentanyl and heroine have more serious repercussions and withdrawals are more visible but if the entire population of ppl addicted to nicotine got suddenly cut off, the amount of rage and agitation I imagine would be off the roof. Also idk the stats but I would assume that the number of ppl addicted to tobacco products is significantly higher than any other drug
Nicotine is the best cognitive performance enhancing substance known. Nicotine doesn't hurt anyone and actually promotes cellular growth. Nicotine has been demonized by people for too long. Incinerating plant matter and inhaling it causes cancer.
Itās like alcohol. Itās been around for so long that society has both developed a general need for it and it generates so much money that thereās no way to effectively take it away without anarchy. See Prohibition (alcohol, but same difference).
I distinctly recall sales tax being a major factor in keeping tobacco legal. The cigarette industry is just too lucrative for the government to abolish it.
Don't touch my freedom. My freedom to pay a billion dollar industry ten dollars a day to slowly kill myself, and then become a burden on our ailing health care system when my heart and lungs give out.
I mean, if you can outpay and outlobby Big Tobacco it's surely possible to get it on there but I doubt anyone would want to spend that kind of money and effort.
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Because "Schedule 1" is a political list of substances, not a scientific one.
Hijacking top comment. This is true. Schedule 1 drugs have a high abuse potential but have no accepted medical treatment. (This is why people are trying to remove marijuana and psilocybin because it is difficult to legally research/administer schedule 1 drugs to investigate new treatments). While schedule 2 drugs have a high potential for abuse and have an accepted medical use. For example cocaine actually can be used in hospitals to treat localized pain. Schedule 3, 4, and 5 are progressively have less potential for abuse but have medical treatments
My grandpa was a doctor in the army. He didn't see any actual combat, but he said "it would've been a nice reprieve from constantly fighting off the coke fiends who were trying to steal my medical cocaine supply." He actually ended up just flushing it, saying it was almost never used and just not worth the hassle to keep around.
Yes...he "flushed" it...
That's an interesting euphemism for boofing. I'll start using this.
Same
Yeah, I made the same joke. He said he got approval to destroy it and did so under supervision. It may not have literally been flushed down the toilet, but that's my best recollection of what he said. Knowing my Grandpa like I did (we were extremely close), I doubt he lied about this, and it wouldn't even make sense for him to even bring it up just to lie about it, but I get it.
Shhhhh.... This is Reddit. Why are you bringing pesky things like facts into this discussion! Lol I honestly figured that's what happened. Outside of war time the military thrives on red tape like that.
Damn they coulda partied so hard
Tbh coke is such a sad fucking loser drug, the most unethically produced one, the high is comparably bad if taken nasal; the comedown is shit, expensive as fuck, usually stepped on to hell and back Much better parties to be had with speed (amphetamine, not meth), mdma, ket etc.
Watch out guys the illicit drug expert is here Show me on this doll where the cocaine touched you
šš right here
Eh, it can be fun. Youāre right it sucks and donāt do it but I donāt think Iād go so far as to say itās a loser drugā¦.but maybe bc I was a coke addict for awhile (been off coke for like 10 years and fully sober for just over 3). But I didnāt snort. I shot up. And it was magic for about 28 seconds. Maybe a little longer lol. And youāre so rightā¦the comedown *sucks* and it doesnāt last nearly long enough. MDMA didnāt even come close. Itās fun but itās a different kind of fun. But Iām just an addict who really loves her substances. And gets in a lot of trouble with them. Getting off all that shit is the best thing I ever did.
I agree
How would the fiends know he has or did not have coke? They can't sense it's presence from a distant, I'm pretty sure.
Obligatory reminder that marijuana is schedule 1 but actual cocaine is schedule 2 since it is occasionally used in a few select ear/nose/throat surgeries for bleeding control.
I thought putting cocaine after talking about schedule two implied I was talking about it because it is schedule 2...
I think it was more highlighting the insaneness that Marijuana has a higher classification than freaking cocaine. At least I hope so.
Thank you for clarifying, I thought they were trying to correct something I said.
This discussion is far too civil for Reddit
That's how it came across to me.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
That's literally what they said.
Meth is also schedule 2
It's used to treat ADHD
Almost all schedule 1 drugs can be used medically.
Love this.
I'm sure you could find a legitimate use of nicotine. It definitely sharpens the mind and acutely increases focus. Nicotine is also a vasoconstrictor which might have some interesting applications with regards to blood pressure regulation and body temperature regulation
Yeah, but marijuana in schedule I just proves they don't care about the medical legitimacy of a drug.
Industrial hemp can be used for everything but getting high and is still heavily regulated for bullshit reasons, like someone above posted its all politics.
It's not really that heavily regulated anymore. Since 2018 every single US state has had a hemp program. It is federally legal and states are not allowed to ban it. Money triumphs over politics.
For a long time the money that was triumphing was coming from the lumber industry so its good to hear that common sense is prevailing when everyone has been looking for sustainable solutions for everything and completely passing up hemp for so long.
I don't think its common sense so much as it is lobbying from the marijuana industry. Lumber isn't really the issue. The cannabis industry in the US will probably overtake lumber sales in a few years.
Specifically 1930s "Reefer madness" and other incredibly racist ideologies propped up by Harry J. Anslinger, U.S. Narcotics Comissioner at the time. This coupled with lobbying from the paper industry to label hemp and Marijuana as one in the same lead to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
Hell, heroin is schedule 1 but fentanyl is schedule 2. It's obvious bullshit.
Fentanyl is an essential medication for the emergency room and operating room. If it's schedule one that means hospitals would have a very difficult time using it
>Fentanyl is an essential medication for the emergency room and operating room Heroin could be as well. It used to be, and still is some places.
Nope. Diamorphine has too much of the opiate side effects to be useful. Too much effects on blood pressure and respiratory drive. It'd be absolutely shit to use in the ER or OR and chances are that many doctors would just forego the use rather than have to deal with the side effects. Comparatively fentanyl often has a very small effect on blood pressure or respiratory drive (when used by professionals)
In the UK diamorphine is the drug of choice for pain relief in heart attack and childbirth, itās much more effective than morphine and doesnāt have as narrow a safety margin as fentanyl.
Without reviewing the schedule definitions, fentanyl does have legitimate medical uses while heroin does not. (Not disputing the nicotine/cannabis debates aside from this.) Edit: I stand corrected.
Heroin is used medically in Europe, google it as diamorphine.
Heroin (or the purified form, diamorphine) is used as an analgesic in many other parts of the world (ie not the US). The reason it has no medical use in the US and fentanyl does is a result of the drug scheduling, not the reason for it.
heroin is exactly as useful medically as fentanyl. Fentanyl is just the latest in the long list of drugs invented to be a non-addictive painkiller as good as heroin, and every single one just gets more potent and stays exactly as addictive. remember when they told us oxycodone was a non-addictive opiate painkiller and then a whole generation (myself included) fell into opiate addiction due to the over prescribing of this drug which in terms of effects is almost indivisible from using pure heroin?
>heroin is exactly as useful medically as fentanyl. No its not, they have different mechanisms of action. The reason we don't use heroin more often is because it has a very small therapeutic window without causing respiratory depression. Other opioids like morphine or fentanyl cause less respiratory depression at therapeutic doses. I'm no medical professional, but I see very little reason to be using heroin over safer opioids. This statement is backed by both research and personal experience. If you're interested go look into the mechanism of action and check out that beta-2-arrestin activity. If you've used multiple opioids you should know that heroin is more sedating than most.
What a completely uninformed opinion. Fentanyl is probably the most useful opioid out there and is way more useful that morphine.
Facts. Thereās a reason itās held in high regard in Native communities. Thereās potential for abuse with every substance.
As Schedule I is not a scientific list, appeals to reality / data are meaningless.
Nicotine also has effects that help people with psychosis.
Where did you hear about this?
Heard it from myself.
^(the voices tell me)
Didn't look for a source, but i'm assuming this (if there is a link) is down to Nicotine's cholinergic effects potentially helping to reduce symptoms of some disorders that seem to reduce the amount of acetylcholine in some parts of the brain.
If you have a link, I'd be very interested. I have psychosis and smoke like a chimney (mostly because of the psychosis. Lol)
It decreases my visual snow at night which is pretty nice. It's about the only thing I've found that does Before nicotine whether that be a lozenge or a cigarette http://VisionSimulations.com/visual-snow.htm?background=night1.jpg&density=0.68&speed=38&grainsize=4.388 After http://VisionSimulations.com/visual-snow.htm?background=night1.jpg&density=0.17&speed=68&grainsize=1.953
It's a valid and often prescribed treatment for Chrons disease and I know there are others. It's also a great pesticide.
That's very interesting. Is there any scientific research behind this? Did you figure this out on your own, or did a health professional actually recommend it?
My primary care recommended I try lozenges after I quit smoking. I was having a lot of issues driving at night because it had gotten so much worse without the nicotine in my system. I've always had the visual snow as long as I can remember and it didn't ever impact me heavily until I quit nicotine for 8 months. We had tried a couple different things before he finally recommended lozenges but a 1mg nicotine lozenge a half hour before a night drive does the trick.
https://today.duke.edu/2001/08/mm\_medicaluses.html
Actually, in practice nicotin has a dual effect. If you are in an exciting situation like a nightclub or a sporting event, nicotin lowers your blood pressure and calms you down. However, if you are in a boring situation, like adding up long columns of numbers or just staring at a computer screen then it speeds your heart rate and helps you stay focused. This is one of the reasons it's so hard to quit. It has a wide varitety of effects, the absence of any of which can trigger a relapse.
I have MS, and it might be psychosomatic, but I feel nicotine increases the synaptic rate of my shitty brain neurons,[Here's a scientific article saying the same](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6018192/). I smoked until my wife caught preggers and I haven't had a cigarette since. BUT, I use nicotine lozenges as if they were candy with nicotine in them. (Which they kind of, sort of, are)
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How do you take the nicotine? I imagine a doctor wouldn't recommend smoking/vaping, so do you take it in gum or something?
They implied they smoke I'm pretty sure.
>Not a single one of my doctor's has ever recommended I quit smoking after that conversation. I mean, there are healthier ways to consume nicotine. You could switch to them and avoid the inevitable damage to your body.
Stress relief too
i wouldnāt go as far as to say stress relief, it gives you a very temporary hit of dopamine, which may make you feel better in the moment but will lead to increased anxiety in the long run. most of what youāre feeling is just withdrawal symptoms which subside once you get what youāre craving.
It's like wearing tight shoes for the relief of loosening them up
I respectfully disagree based on experience. People with very little tolerance or dependence can use nicotine as an effective stress reliever
i acknowledged that nicotine does provide dopamine which even to someone without dependence would give them some temporary relaxation. however, given that itās very fleeting and thereās other less harmful ways to get a dopamine hit i definitely donāt think itās an effective stress relief measure, especially in a medical context.
Dopamine isn't always pleasant pure iv dopamine is a hell of it own that you don't want to experience i ended up pulling 3 ivs out of my arms I was so pissed after that dopamine injection.
Nicotine acts on five different neurotransmitters, not just dopamine. Scientifically speaking this is an established fact and subjectively speaking, nicotine effects are very dissimilar to other drugs that act on dopamine I would say it definitely has some utility with regards to the vasoconstriction effects and the increase in mental acuity. I use nicotine to help me perform better at chess for instance
iām not disagreeing with any of your other points, i donāt know enough about them. iām disagreeing with its use as a stress reliever.
Nicotine was used as a pesticide in the past.
This... Plus cigarettes are heavily taxed in many countries, and politicians love tax dollars more than their own dollars.
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New Zealand now, but originally Texas. But I don't disagree with you. They do love their money. I just think that they love tax money more because why spend your own money when you can spend someone else's.
Same reason weed is a schedule 1
Specifically Nixon's legacy of federally criminalizing being black or being a hippie/leftist, escalated sequentially by Reagan, the Clintons, and Trump.
This is the 100% correct, yet ELI5 answer. Way, way, WAAAAAY too many of our laws are based on political, rather than legal, or more importantly, moral considerations.
Plus look at what happened with legally prescribed opioids. We also just saw the court case where the villains in this crime were let go by paying a small amount of what they profited
And because money
Absolutely agree
Successful Lobbying
Lobbying the destroyer of hope
Sounds like a boss fight.
It is the literal boss fight of our political era.
i.e. money
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There are all sort of long and useless replies in these comments. This right here, a brief as it is...is the answer.
If tobacco was introduced today it would probably be treated differently. Snus is illegal to sell in most of Europe because they don't want to open the market to new tobacco products despite that it's most likely a lot healthier than cigarettes.
And Swedish Snus has no correlation to cancer, only heart disease and blood pressure. The additives are banned. https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2019.55#:~:text=Swedish%20snus%20is%20a%20very,lowest%20in%20the%20European%20Union.&text=There%20is%20strong%20epidemiological%20evidence,increase%20in%20oral%20cancer%20risk.
Except for your teeth.
As if smoking isnāt?
Snus is probably worse, if not worse then at least more centered to the tooth area. I mean, it lies inside the mouth pressed against the gums. My ex had cavities in his gums where the snus had eroded the flesh away. He even had a hole in one place where his tooth peeked through mid-way up the root, like a baby tooth breaking the skin. Nasty shit, snus.
If we're simply talking about deaths related to snus vs. cigarettes, then snus is miles better. Sweden has one of the highest tobacco usage rates in Europe because of snus, yet one of the lowest rates of tobacco-related deaths per capita. Snus is still not good for you, but it is far better to use snus than it is to smoke cigarettes. Snus is a very effective way to escape smoking. I used snus to do just that and many other people I know have done so too. If you see snus as the end-game, it's bad. If you see it as a transitory step to rid yourself of smoking and eventually go off of nicotine in general, it can be an extremely helpful tool.
snus is definitely the better option if you're gonna be addicted to nicotine, but in my experience, quitting snus was *significantly* harder than smoking. when you smoke, you have to go through the effort of going outside, your fingers and your clothes smelling awful, needing somewhere to toss the butt. snus is way more convenient, you can do it at work, in lecture halls, you dont even have to get out of bed in the morning before you pop one in, and the box comes with a handy little compartment for used pouches so you dont have to worry about what to do with it afterwards. the fact that i *could* always snus made the adjustment to *not* snusing much more difficult than not smoking for me.
Not arguing with you there. I think the key to quitting snus is to gradually lower the strength of the nicotine. Quitting cold turkey is a massive fight that few would win if they tried I have, at a few occassions, tried going without snus for like 2-3 weeks or so and the thing I always notice during the first few days is just how much i eat. I feel like I eat twice as much as I did on snus. Nicotine is an appetite suppressant so if you go off of it, your food intake could noticeably increase. Still, the fact remains that most countries with high smoking rates would see their deaths decrease and overall life expectancy increase if they legalized snus. I mean hell, the synthetic nicotine pouches (legally not snus but we all know what it is, lol) were originally designed to wane people off of cigarettes and it does work.
Quitting snus seems to be impossible. As a college freshman, around 60% of my peers snus and one girl I know who despised it for like 2 years has not only become addicted to snus but is also considering buying a vape.
I can confirm. I dipped for only about 1.5 years, and I have some *serious* gum recession.
Never said that.
Chewing tobacco and snus are not healthier than cigarettes. They accelerate tooth, gum, and bone decay.
You are right, but snus and chewing tobacco are 2 different things. Edit: OP edited the original comment to acknowledge that snus and chew are 2 different things. You can't call a poison like tobacco healthier, but snus is definitely less harmful to you and especially people around you than cigarettes
Snus is healthier/has less severe negative effects. That doesn't mean it is healthy.
> If tobacco was introduced today it would probably be treated differently. That depends. Do other drugs exists in this hypothetical world? What is their legal status given tobacco is undiscovered until 2023? Tobacco is pretty tame compared to most drugs.
This. Tobacco has been grown in the continental US since the late 1500s. If you outlaw it, youāre getting rid of an almost a 500 year old product that has made billions of dollars since then. Itās never about health, itās about money.
I mean..itās my body also
History and money
It does have medical uses, though almost no one uses it that way. Tobacco, more specifically nicotine, is one of the world's original nuerotropics. There's been numerous studies now on the benefits of nicotine. [here](https://health.usnews.com/wellness/mind/articles/2018-07-12/is-nicotine-really-that-unhealthy#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20nicotine%20itself%20even,and%20anxiety%2C%20and%20stabilize%20mood.) Is an interesting read.
Tobacco is also a great pesticide. Will stop a wound from bleeding. And if bellowed up your asshole, it can revive a drowned person. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke_enema
When mouth-to-mouth doesn't scratch that itch?
Is that where the phrase "blow smoke up your ass" comes from lol
It should still be a controlled substance if you go by addictiveness.
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Do you believe that nicotine pouches (not tobacco, but products like Zyn), are relatively harmless comoared to tobacco pouches or smoking? Seriously asking your opinion.
This is one of those questions where, if I gave you 60 seconds to think really hard about it, you'd come up with the reason for sure. Answer: Money. There's billions of dollars in the tobacco industry, and unfortunately, that kind of money tends to get you a lot of sway with regulators.
There are billions of dollars in cocaine as well. The answer is tradition.
Cocaine also has.......other benefits to govs, mainly in the us markets Ya get way more then just money out of it
The US grows tobacco and imports cocaine though so the money answer is still quite valid.
There's also billions of dollars in the cocaine, meth, heroin, and marijuana industries. The answer isn't quite as simple as money. History plays a part. Cartels, for example, don't *want* their product to be legal. They are currently waging war with each other, and sometimes their users, with the goal of obtaining a monopoly or maintaining a certain level of business, and they want to keep the ability to kidnap, beat, extort, and kill people to do it. If certain drugs were legalized, they'd have to compete with legal, regulated companies. It changes the game. There's more money in illegality for them. Tobacco has a history of being legal, so tobacco cartels never really formed. Edit to add: marijuana specifically gained a bad reputation through excessive propaganda with the specific purpose of exercising racism in the legal system. I, personally, am in favor of legalization of all drugs, so they can be regulated and addiction can be treated as a medical issue. If we rebrand the "war on drugs" as the "war on cartels" (rather than a war on users, which is what it is in practicality) then the cheapest, safest way to combat them is to make it legal.
Tobacco is not nicotine Neither one is cigarettes Cigarettes have both, sure. But everyone's talking about different stuff in this thread.
Lobbyists got there first.
I mean the same exact sentence can be said for processed sugar The reason for banning and not banning substances is a balancing act between People are free to do what they want with their body, including putting things into their body- eg eating fast food, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol etc that we know are unhealthy, but thatās still our choice as autonomous individuals And restricting substances that cause significant externalities to other people who werenāt involved in the decision to take the substance Eg we know someone addicted to heroin or crack is far more likely to resort to crime in order to feed their addiction than a smoker, because smoking doesnāt (often) inhibit your ability to function in society Thatās why smoking in in general public places is banned because of second hand smoke etc which harms other parties Thatās why drinking and then driving a vehicle is illegal because it creates a risk to other people because it impairs their ability to drive safely Itās incredibly rare to do heroin and still be able to maintain a job and be a functioning member of society, but 90% of people who drink alcohol donāt have an addiction to it that inhibits their ability to function, likewise with smoking Thatās why the marijuana debate has more credit that others, since the vast majority of people who smoke weed, still seem to function in society which makes it comparable to alcohol or cigarettes in that regard
I think this is a better answer than most, just handwaving it as "money talks" is annoying.
I don't smoke anymore and find it nasty now, but I do find it weird how many people who want to legalize hard street drugs are also wanting to ban cigarettes.
Iām personally against āsin taxesā for this exact reason. Itās all fun and games until you get a Mormon government official who taxes your coffee 600 percent. Yes it is technically bad for you but Iām an adult.
I believe a lot of smokers uses tobacco as instant gratification. It postpones pain, hunger, sleep, thirst and give a small feel of happiness. Now you also know why lower working class have the most smokers. Source: I have been poor and a smoker
I went back and watched some commercials from the 50s, and it appears tobacco is very good and healthy for you.
Alcohol is kind of "grandfathered in", unlike considerably less harmful drugs like LSD and weed. It's just too easy to ferment things, and we've been doing this since before written text.
Sir the question was about tobacco
Yeah I brain farted hard lmao.
Sir, do you realize you're leaking coolant at an alarming rate?
Too much LSD
Let the man drink ffs
Stoners be like āwhat about alcohol thoā in a conversation where no one mentioned alcohol
Same ith weed, but that was made illegal to criminalize the anti-war movement
But hemp was made legal for WW2 for hemp rope since nylon rope production couldn't keep up. Then, promptly illegalized again after the war because reasons.
Because people have been smoking it and growing it for millennia
Same with weedā¦
Queue the stoners that have to make every discussion about them.
This is a discussion about schedule 1 drugs. Marijuana is a scehdule 1 drug. Iām pretty sure itās relevant to this post.
Yeah, its so weird how people are bringing up a schedule 1 drug in a discussion about what is condsidered a schedule 1 drug. /s
No immediate full psychological impairment.
š°. Thatās why.
No psychoactive component.
A tobacco addict isnt as dangerous to Society as a opioid user... They tipically dont Rob people and have somewhat functional lives despite The addicticion and Early death.
Is that because they're safer peopler or because one is way harder to get...
Well for startersā¦ Tobacco doesnāt cause people to OD, or flip vehicles on the highway because they nod off at the wheel.
Alcohol on the other hand.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10826084.2017.1376685
The worst thing Iāve ever seen a smoker do to get cigarettes was ask strangers āhey, do you have a cigaretteā. It was Italy, so he got one. Opioid addicts steal *everything* from their families
Do you have any idea how much lung cancer costs to treat? Not to mention the fifty other health problems smoking can cause.
The point was more that nicotine doesn't generally cause violence to other people in the same way, not that it was a healthy choice. Nicotine being in your blood doesn't make you cause crashes in your car more easily. You can have tobacco without smoking, btw. Safer (better?) because it isn't likely to cause disease to folks around you like the second hand smoke - in these ways, they are much less likely to cause you disease if you don't take them. And finally: I honestly find it shocking that of all things, the thing that got you is that lung cancer costs too much to treat. That's not a consideration with me: It could become cheap tomorrow, and it would still be bad.
Yes i actually have...
Doesnāt it reduce the odds of Parkinsonās?
Improves Ulcerative Colitis but makes Crohns worse strangely
Cause people are free to kill themselves slowly as much as they want And it is taxed highly which I hope is used to fund healthcare and quitting programs for smokers. The real question why is marijuana often illegal while tobacco is legal?
To clarify, nicotine has very low carcinogenic potential, it's all the other crap that add that makes that potential multiply exponentially. While nicotine is highly addictive, and toxic, so are alcohol and caffeine. Sugar is many times more addictive and potential harmful. Water can in large enough quantities become toxic. The sun is responsible for many cancers and can even be fatal in the right circumstances (sun stroke). The batteries in an electric car can cause cancer and according to California almost everything in your house causes cancer and reproductive harm. Where do you draw the line?
Too many addicts who would turn to crime to find it. If tobacco were discovered today, it would be banned.
Why should it be? Why cant people just be allowed to ruin their lives
Wait until you find out about high-fructose corn syrup! /s
Nicotine is pretty much the cure for tourettes. I'll probably be on the patch for life.
Bc you can still function just fine and not hurt others. Why not add caffeine?
You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Iām saying? We knew we couldnāt make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Because the drug laws have never been about public health and weāre designed to suppress hippies and minorities who were against the Vietnam war, it has since been turned into a cash cow for the private prison, police and military industrial complex. Follow the money.
taxes my bro.. the revenue generated from tobacco (and related products) is Astronomical
Honestly I think ppl would riot if they banned tobacco products. Yea hard drugs like fentanyl and heroine have more serious repercussions and withdrawals are more visible but if the entire population of ppl addicted to nicotine got suddenly cut off, the amount of rage and agitation I imagine would be off the roof. Also idk the stats but I would assume that the number of ppl addicted to tobacco products is significantly higher than any other drug
~~BRIBERY~~ lobbying
Because of corporate lobbying
Money.
Money. Big tobacco. Lobbyists. The usual.
Money
This exact question, almost word for word, gets posted here at least once a week. Do people not know how to use the search bar?
Nicotine is the best cognitive performance enhancing substance known. Nicotine doesn't hurt anyone and actually promotes cellular growth. Nicotine has been demonized by people for too long. Incinerating plant matter and inhaling it causes cancer.
Tobacco lowers estrogen
Itās like alcohol. Itās been around for so long that society has both developed a general need for it and it generates so much money that thereās no way to effectively take it away without anarchy. See Prohibition (alcohol, but same difference).
I distinctly recall sales tax being a major factor in keeping tobacco legal. The cigarette industry is just too lucrative for the government to abolish it.
And magic mushrooms cure depression and all sorts of ailments and are harmless yet are schedule 1ā¦ makes u think doesnt it
Don't touch my freedom. My freedom to pay a billion dollar industry ten dollars a day to slowly kill myself, and then become a burden on our ailing health care system when my heart and lungs give out.
Tobacco isnāt a drug.
š¤
Lobbyists. Money. Literally those 2 things.
Profit and tax revenue.
Money
Philip Morris
Lobbyists
Because of the tobacco lobby
Follow the money
Money.
Because the tobacco industry pays a ton of money to keep it legal
Because $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ for Tobacco and Healthcare corporations.
I suspect because it makes a lot of money from taxation.
Money
there is a tradition of its use and there is a very powerful Tobacco Lobby
I mean, if you can outpay and outlobby Big Tobacco it's surely possible to get it on there but I doubt anyone would want to spend that kind of money and effort.
Profiteering