Damn, sorry, the last link should be this.

Moderator?
;-P

fixed

tanks!

If you are inhaling smoke from a pipe, cigarette, cigar, joint, hookah or otherwise, it's not going to make a whole lot of difference if the tobacco is "natural". At least in terms of health - tobacco tastes soooo much better when it isn't loaded with chemicals.

So I reckin' that if your mom wants to cut back, swapping out the Parliaments for American Spirits is a purely lateral move.

Shane, if the American Lung Association is opposed to the idea of "healthy smoking", it's because there is no healthy smoking. Really, there's not.

I think extremely highly of the research and public information from the ALA, which was so accurate and helpful that it helped me quit after nearly 15 years of a pack-and-a-half-a-day habit. They avoid hyperbole and they are interested in lung health. They are a great organization.

It wouldn't surprise me that 'natural' tobacco has higher levels of some noxious agents. Many of the additives added by cigarette makers are added only in order to reduce or ameliorate the harshness and toxicity of tobacco in its unprocessed state - render it easier to smoke, in other words.

In any case, it doesn't really matter whether it's 'better' or not. It's not the additives that kill you.

Tell your mom to smoke whatever she wants. This won't help her to quit, but it might demonstrate to her that what looks like another easy way out won't work. On average, it takes a smoker six to eight attempts before they make a successful permanent quit. Each time you try another strategy, you learn a little bit about your own psychological and physiological response, which helps you prepare better for the next attempt. So let her do this if she wants to try it. She'll learn something - if only that regular cigarettes are carefully designed to get you smoking and keep you smoking for your entire life, and that includes using additive agents to mellow them out.

As long as you're inhaling nicotine smoke from burning tobacco, you're a smoker.

What helped me:

Freedom From Smoking
WhyQuit.com

Thanks, cmonkey and Miko. Really. Smoking is a REALLY unpopular subject (not many comments here!) and can get you lynched over on MeFi (as I know from experience.) Most smokers don't want to think about it, never-smokers don't know about it, and most ex-smokers don't want to go there. So, thanks. I'll pass the info and links on to dear ol' Ma (who already has COPD and whose mother died of complications of emphysema 30 yrs AFTER quitting and whom [my grandmother or "Gam"] I helped nurse through dying for a year...) and makes sure Mom thinks about it.

Commercially raised tobacco usually has a lot of metallic pesticide powders, containing arsenic and antimony, among other long lasting inorganic poisons, applied early in cultivation, to reduce the incidence of loss, particularly leaf damage, by aphids, beetles and similar insects. You can obtain flue cured organic tobacco, sometimes raised entirely under muslin, or in greenhouses, from various sources, although it is going to require "roll your own" (RYO) gumption on your mother's part. The N. rustica varietal linked above is very, very strong, but a smooth, sweet smoke, if a very pricey one.

My own experience with very high nicotine tobacco (Balkan Sobranie and Sobranie Black Russian) cigarettes is that a habitual smoker's nicotine needs are satisfied entirely, for several hours, by the amount of nicotine delivered in a single Sobranie cigarette. When I smoked, I typically was a 3/4 to 1 pack a day man, smoking Kent Kings, but when I treated myself to Sobranies, I was quite happy with 4 cigarettes a day, typically one with morning coffee, another at lunch, another after work on the way home, and a final one after dinner.

So, while there is no "safe cigarette," your mother may well be on to something, with her desire to move to something other than her regular fags. But beware, the high nicotine content of some of the products I've linked are not for the faint hearted. I've seen a couple drags of a Black Russian put grown men of many years smoking experience into chairs, slightly green, with racing hearts. High doses of nicotine are nothing to play with, and one can become habituated to them, too, over time. This will not make quitting easier in the long run, if that is her goal.

Ultimately, quitting is quitting. Sooner or later, in the words of Sesame Street's Ernie, "You've got to put down the ducky, if you want to play the saxophone."

most ex-smokers don't want to go there.

My experience is that a significant plurality of ex-smokers leap at the chance to evangelize.

Every time I see those natural tobacco I see the word "Addiction Free" instead of "additive free". I'm sure they do that on purpose.

And seriously, if you're a smoker, it's not the trace amounts of formaldehyde or aresnic that's gonna kill you. It's the tobacco. Healthy tobacco is a contradiction.

Thanks for the additional feedback.

I'm rushing off, but: Regarding formaldehyde and such, it is pretty nasty. It's the "excito-toxin" effect, very popular even in food these days.

See, toxins ramp up your body processes as your system tries to get rid of the poison. You get a minor high from the physical excitement. You become somewhat addicted to the minor high.

So they poison you to excite and addict you. This seems pretty obviously, blatantly heinous to me, and adds to the addictive properties of tobacco as well.

The same principle applies to allergic addictions. Many people are allergic to milk or wheat but addicted as well. When I went vegan the majority of my zits FINALLY disappeared. Which makes sense, since all other species ween themselves from mother's milk when young, and the body isn't really equipped to process it after. Casein, the milk protein, is heavily linked to cancer as well these days, especially breast cancer.

I'm pretty militant about people talking about "cutting back" or "trying to quit", because ultimately they are deluding themselves, that's not how it works for 99.9999% of smokers. They have to WANT to QUIT, if they don't, than nothing they do is going to work.

And even if they do, there's no saying they've quit forever, even if their last smoke was six years ago.

I want to quit. And I don't want to start again.

It does look like evangelizing, dersins, but for me it's really the excitement of having an opportunity to help someone do what really seems impossible and what I thought was impossible, until I did it. Smokers tell themselves and each other all the time that it's impossible to quit, that they're hopelessly addicted, that it doesn't matter anyway, that they're probably gonna die of cancer or lung disease, and that they don't care. If you've ever been a smoker, you know exactly the kinds of conversations I'm talking about. You end up believing that shit, even when you really want to quit, and you think you'll never survive the quitting experience - at least not with your personality intact.

When I finally was successful in quitting, it was largely only because of the voices of people like myself who had gone before me, who knew what the hell they were talking about and had the energy to convince me I could do it - even though all my still-smoking friends were jeering at my efforts and placing bets that I'd backslide within a few days.

Addiction makes people act funny. When it looks like someone's got a glimmer of interest in getting off the sticks, I want to be one of the voices that assures them that they absolutely can, because I know they're hearing dozens of other voices, from inside their own heads and elsewhere, telling them that they can't - they're too weak, too addicted, too old, too sick, too needy - and they never will.

Maybe it's 'evangelizing', but in my case it was definitely life saving rather than soul saving.