Nicotine not unhealthy, it's the smoke only?

12 Comments

I read on a couple of websites that with smoking, it's not the nicotine that harms your health at all, that it's just the smoke itself and the toxins in cigarettes. I always thought and have read that it's both the nicotine and smoke that's harmful. I'm reading now on a few sites that it's only the smoke that hurts your health, and that nicotine alone if anything is good for your health. Of course you can't believe what you read on every site and that it can be hard to determine which sites are more true or not. So what are some of y'all opinions on this?

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Comments ( 12 )
  • xxLucifer
    5 years ago

    Nicotine isn't bad for your health in small amounts, but it is addictive and as such you should be careful using products that contain it. High doses of nicotine though can be harmful.

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      5 years ago

      I'll probably just get some nicotine gum then, so I can have my nicotine and no longer harm my lungs with the smoke and all the other toxins I've been breathing into my lungs. I've been trying to quit smoking but haven't been able to yet.

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      • princess42
        5 years ago

        me too !! have smoked 3 cigs in the last 4 days i'm proud of myself,,
        it's not that difficult, i've just convinced myself it's rlly gross and it makes me feel bad

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  • Boojum
    5 years ago

    When I was in my early teens back in the seventies, my family were Seventh Day Adventists. The local church had an anti-smoking campaign once, run by some guy who travelled around with an audio-visual presentation. At that point, I wasn't interested in starting to smoke, but because my mother was vehemently anti-smoking, I had to go.

    Shock was a big part of the guy's schtick, so there were lots of disgusting slides of what smoking does to lungs and what people dying of lung cancer look like. But what most clearly sticks in my mind is how at one point he showed a little bottle of what he said was pure nicotine, and then a white mouse in a little mesh box. He put a drop of nicotine on the mouse's skin, and the creature went into convulsions and died in a couple of minutes.

    Which just shows that nicotine is definitely highly toxic. However, as with any toxin, the most important thing is the dose received. Arsenic is a trace element in many foods and virtually everyone consumes a tiny amount every day, but eating a teaspoon of pure arsenic will definitely kill you. Coffee and chocolate also contain substances (caffeine and theobromine) which are toxic and can kill people in high doses, but it hardly ever happens.

    The dose of nicotine received by smoking, chewing, vaping, nicotine gum or any of the other smoking-cessation products available is not harmful. Nicotine affects the nervous system, but it doesn't actually cause permanent damage to living tissue, and a healthy body is capable of removing nicotine from the blood without damage. The reason smokers are killed by their addiction is the fact that tobacco smoke is a cocktail of literally thousands of different substances, many of which are toxic and cause damage at the cellular level.

    In spite of my mother's efforts, I smoked heavily for about twenty years. The only way I was able to stop was by the use of a primitive form of vaping that came on the market in the UK back in the nineties.

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  • RoseIsabella
    5 years ago

    Nicotine is addictive as can be, and it probably increases anxiety.

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    • xxLucifer
      5 years ago

      Actually smoking can calm and relax people.

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      • CozmoWank
        5 years ago

        That's because it eases one's nicotine craving.

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        • xxLucifer
          5 years ago

          No. I smoked a few times, never enough to actually get addicted and I still felt calmer and more relaxed while smoking.

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      • Ellenna
        5 years ago

        Wrong, it's a stimulant, but will calm you down if you're hanging our for your next toxic dose of it

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        • xxLucifer
          5 years ago

          Wrong, it's a stimulant and relaxant. Nicotine has paradoxical effects. It depends on the person and method of intake.

          Also nicotine by itself isn't very toxic as long as you don't overdose on it.

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          • Alvex
            5 years ago

            Nicotine is a stimulant, but it relaxes you when you ingest the nicotine after the nicotine withdrawal starts kicking in, since the nicotine withdrawal does anything but relax you. You ease the anxiety with a stimulant because the withdrawal makes you even more anxious. The way to feel most relaxed is to quit smoking but to wait about a month or so until the withdrawal fades away, because you won't feel relaxed without nicotine until about a month after your last smoke, sometimes longer.

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      • RoseIsabella
        5 years ago

        That's how I felt when I smoked, but the last few times I did it made me feel kinda yucky.

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