It's true that smoking was promoted as healthful by parties with a financial interest. By clearly harmful, I mean that the indicators I listed should inform one's common sense that it is likely to be harmful, because physical senses perceive many things about tobacco smoke as unpleasant.
For example, lore is replete with stories of young people's initial experiences with smoking involving coughing, choking, turning green and feeling nauseous or vomiting. There's also the fact that nicotine has long been known to be a poison as strong as cyanide, and has been used for insect control by Europeans as far back as 1763.
The same can be said for exercising: you’re out of breath, your heart is racing, you can get dizzy and nauseous, you’re covered in sweat, and the next day all your muscles are aching. Surely, such an activity can’t be healthy!
Of course after the first few sessions you’ll start to get used to it, and actually feel better after exercising. Just like how you feel better after smoking once you’re addicted.
It seems like a stretch to compare the most normal activity ever, moving your body, to intentionally ingesting poison.
For one, if exercise makes you dizzy, nauseous, sweaty, and all your muscles ache, you are either severely out of shape are overdoing it.
I smoked for a fair portion of my life. The main motivation for addicts is to relieve the craving for tobacco. It’s pleasurable in some ways other than that, but cigarettes did not leave me feeling well most of the time.
No, not an easy habit to kick and that’s exactly the issue with cigarettes. Even though they’re not really that pleasant, they chemically trick your body into wanting them.
Extremely vigorous sports is different than your average exercise. I’m still happy to assert that it’s a twisted analogy - If you compare the feeling from exercise to cigarettes, it’s obvious that they are not qualitatively similar, despite the fact that each involves some unpleasant sensations.
Another significant thing to note is that over time, exercise clearly has positive effects on your body – you feel healthier, more muscular, lose weight, breathe easier. Cigarettes do not have a healthy effect on your body over time, and it doesn’t take a doctor to tell or modern medical technology to tell they are staining your teeth, making your breath bad, making you cough, and so forth.
This was not lost on Europeans went tobacco was first introduced.
This is an odd view on the nature of physical addiction. I personally know more smokers that hate their smoking than smokers who are ambivalent or actually enjoy it.
I think addiction itself acts as a vastly profitable and effortlessly marketable boogeyman today, moreso than a Sisyphean defect of the human condition, if you catch my drift...
> "[...] the wound itself is its own healing when seen from another standpoint." [0]
> "As for smoking tobacco, Shapiro argues that quitting is hard because smoking does not disrupt the smoker's life, not because of the mild effects of nicotine on the brain" [1]
etc. I expect up-in-arms responses to views like mine, but even neuropharmacologically, speaking there is really less of a danger to ~"the disease known as addiction"~ than there is to codifying addiction as a metonym for "sepulcher for all the lost people". I say this for all substances, even something as malicious and unforgiving as carfentanil..
For example, lore is replete with stories of young people's initial experiences with smoking involving coughing, choking, turning green and feeling nauseous or vomiting. There's also the fact that nicotine has long been known to be a poison as strong as cyanide, and has been used for insect control by Europeans as far back as 1763.