No hate or downvotes from me, sorry if it seems that way. Perhaps it’s my current mood or imagination, but the Lemmy crowd seems a bit more reactionary and prone to strongly worded dismissive comments than Reddit.

I’m also seeing a lot more downvoting of comments here that don’t seem all that controversial. I’d rather hear why someone disagrees with a post than the rush to silently downvote, but I can’t control that either. People are wound up these days.

…why are you replying this to me and not the one that is denying it?

I repied to you because of your reply to Jake_Farm. Jake_Farm stated:

How the fuck do you hit rock bottom solely on nicotine?

To which you responded:

It’s more addictive than meth. If you can imagine somebody hitting rock bottom on meth then it should be easy enough to wrap your head around it. Especially when cigarettes contain added chemicals to make it more addictive than nicotine alone.

By inference you are claiming that nicotine is more addictive than meth and I’m just pointing out that isn’t correct — you can’t use tobacco and nicotine interchangeably in discussions, whether talking about addictiveness, harm, or just about any aspect of their short and long terms effects. The addictiveness is drastically different, the cardiovascular effects are vastly different, the effects on lung function are vastly different.

To your credit, the overall conversation is about tobacco and I should have clarified that my point applies to everyone in this conversation who is talking about nicotine and tobacco in the same breath.

To clarify, the addictiveness of nicotine ≠ the addictiveness of tobacco. Even aside from the additives used by the tobacco industry, tobacco naturally contains an array of MAO inhibitors and other compounds that work in harmony with nicotine causing it to be far more addictive than nicotine itself. Pure nicotine is much farther down the scale of addictiveness, classed as a “weak reinforcer” in studies.

If you are interested in the subject, I highly recommend reading the studies and posts by Maryka Quik, director of the Neurodegenerative Diseases Program at SRI International. I first found out about her in an interesting article published in Scientific American — LINK.

If the government insists on high rates of taxation for the reason that the product has a high potential for harm, then shouldn’t the use of that tax revenue be mostly, if not entirely, re-directed towards harm reduction programs around that substance or product? How can anyone possibly argue any other use for that revenue? When the revenue generated by ‘sin taxes’ is used for other unrelated purposes, they are effectively exploiting the users by recognizing that they will continue to be a source of revenue because the product is habit forming or addictive. The last time I checked on the revenue generated by tobacco taxes, only ~11% was spent on harm-reduction programs related to tobacco use and the remaining 89% was just paying for other government projects totally unrelated to tobacco.

To suggest that the solution is to further raise the taxation rates rather than properly allocating the current revenue is immoral and illogical IMHO.