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[martinuzz]

Was he talking about himself? I did ask:

Also, what does rent and an obscenely long working week have to do with the ethics of gory cigarettes?

Nah i wasn't talking about myself. Over here, it's not even really done to work more than 40 hours a week, due to a long tradition of labor unions and extra taxition of extra hours over 40. And if you do work 40h for minimum wage in the Netherlands, you can afford the rent of at least some basic appartment, or social rental house.
Unfortunatly there's quite a few places both in the EU as well as in the US where people do work two full jobs to try and make ends meet.

What does this have to do with the ethics of gory cigarettes?
Why do we on the one hand endorse and encourage 1 out of 5 people of working age to go through life like a walking pharmacy, taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping pills, and pumping their kids full of methamfetamines, oh sorry, I mean Ritalin, just so they can 'participate in society' (read: slave at their underpaid, underappreciated job / don't take up to much attention in an overcrowded classroom), but on the other hand demonize those people who choose to find their relief, and perhaps an outlet for a bit of rebellion in a cigarette? It's not like a lot of those drugs are very beneficial to your health, it's just that there's not much long term research done yet for most pharmaceutical psycho-active drugs, and a lot of money to be made by pharmaceutical companies.

I mean sure, smoking comes with health hazards. It's statistically nowhere as lethal as riding a motorcycle though, and comparable to the health risks of long term exposure to stress, or eating red meat, pork and or junkfood every day. Not to mention alcohol.
Yet we don't go about putting biker roadkill photographs on every motorcycle, or put colonal cancer pictures on your grocery's freezer and give people buying meat the stink-eye.
And we tell each other to work harder and sleep less, to meet that next deadline. If you make it perhaps you'll get a nice bottle of wine in your Christmas giftset.

I mean, these horror pics, really? There's too much hypocrisy.

[Reelya]

Smokers believe that smoking helps relieve stress, which is wrong, of course – it's just the withdrawal symptoms going away.

It's not wrong. There are numerous pharmaceutical benefits attributed to nicotine.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC526783/
http://discovermagazine.com/2014/march/13-nicotine-fix

People with depressive-spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and adult ADHD tend to smoke heavily, which suggested to researchers that nicotine may soothe their symptoms. Common to all these disorders is a failure of attention, an inability to concentrate on particular stimuli and screen out the rest. Nicotine helps. Researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse have shown via functional magnetic resonance imaging that nicotine activates specific brain areas during tasks that demand attention (Box 1). This may be because of its effects, shared with many other addictive drugs, on the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. “Schizophrenia is a disorder largely of the dopamine system,” says John Dani of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dopamine signals in the brain occur in two modes—a kind of background trickle, punctuated by brief bursts. “It's thought that schizophrenics have a hard time separating that background information from important bursts. We've shown that nicotine helps to normalize that signaling by depressing the background but letting the bursts through well,” he says. “I'll be surprised if there's not a co-therapy [to help schizophrenics] that takes advantage of nicotine systems in less than a decade.”

[Antsan]

Ninja:

You have to first manipulate (or influence, or heavily suggest, or any other synonym you like) the active majority of your population to form an instinctual, reflexive antipathy towards something, before something like a general ban on consumption of that something can truly succeed.

But why bother? Let people kill them if they want! Just make them pay for it themselves. Making them quit because it's bad for themselves is classic nanny-state behaviour, no?

1) Why would we bother with national healthcare?  Why would we bother with health education? Why would we bother with industrial safety regulations?
2) I know people who've become addicted to smoking solely because it was "a cool and hip thing to do" back when they were young, stupid, susceptible to social pressures, and didn't know about the real dangers of smoking at all, because knowledge of just how dangerous smoking really is has became widely known only fairly recently.
3) Why is "nanny-state behaviour" a bad thing here, in your opinion? Addiction is a really dangerous thing, and the best way to combat it is to prevent it from happening altogether. The singular person always underestimates the strength of addiction, but the society - and state, as the acting representative of said society - as a whole, has that knowledge, and thus can utilize their powers to prevent that singular person from doing something they would, most likely, heavily regret in the future.

I mean, with that sort of knowledge, you can justify people using hard drugs - like heroin, if they "pay for themselves". Yet, I'm pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of governments of Earth are, in fact, opposed to letting people do that.

1) National healthcare is not prohibitory. I don't see the parallel. The same goes for health education. Industrial safety regulations is about dependency and how it can but should not be exploited, not about the decisions single people make for themselves. There's a difference between forbidding drunk driving and forbidding drinking at all.
2) Yep, that's a bad thing, but as far as I remember that's not because doing drugs is inherently cool, but due to advertising. The advertising for tobacco has been getting a lot more demure in the last decades (at least here in Germany, due to regulation) and strangely enough most teenagers today don't seem to think that smoking is cool at all.
3) Education on addiction is just abysmal. It's mostly completely unrealistic and thus for everyone who ever actually makes experiences for themselves (so those who are in the most danger of becoming addicted) completely unreliable. Making out weed to be highly addicting to scare people away will not have the intended effect – it'll only make it all seem like uninformed idiocy perpetrated by stuck-ups who just don't like that you might be using some of your time for something else but productivity. That's the most important reason why people underestimate addiction – the dangers are completely misrepresented and thus, when people look for these supposed bad effects of addiction, they don't see them. They're looking in the wrong place.

[Reelya]

The best way to "anti-advertise" something is to make it appear that it's something old people do. Create anti-smoking adverts where the smokers are all your parent's age. Kids will definitely "uncool" the idea.

The lab research on pure nicotine is pretty interesting in how affects the brain, and usually in a good way. e.g. smokers die from Parkinson's disease die at 1/3rd the rate of non-smokers. That stuff actually works better than the "official" treatments for a range of mental illnesses. Also, pure nicotine has a much lower addictiveness than the chemical cocktail in cigarettes does. Since a bunch of debilitating psych problems seem to respond favorably to nicotine, and sufferers of those conditions also tend to smoke heavily, we can put two-and-two together and guess that they're probably self-medicating for preexisting conditions.

Taking these things into account, we should definitely take a look at how we treat smokers as pariahs. The hard-core smokers are likely to be the ones with pre-existing conditions such as schizophrenia which respond very favourably to nicotine. Just taking away their cigarettes to "help" them, or taxing them to the stratosphere, is ignoring the range of issues at hand that affect those people.

We tend to treat smoking as a pure moral failing, because we discount what smokers say about how it regulates their mental states. Say this stuff is the stuff that prevents you having a schizophrenic episode. Just like any medicine, you'd be willing to pay any price, and you'd offset the health risks of the medicine vs the short-term benefits to quality of life. It's unnecessarily cruel to try and shame these people into stopping smoking, without developing adequate treatments for the same conditions. It only makes us feel smug about it.

[Antsan]

If nicotine is usable as a medicine, it should be used and distributed as a medicine.

I'm for not treating any drug users as pariahs. Drug use has its place in society – finding that place and forming it so it isn't a bad place can only happen when discussion about the stuff is open and honest. With heavy antagonism everyone involved is pressured to be dishonest and drug users have incentive to not be open about their drug use or abuse.

[Loud Whispers]

Those pics on the packages are mostly good for psychiatrists' bankrolls.
All those poor kids with PTSS from viewing those mutilated corpses, waking up screaming in the middle of the night.

What kid wakes up screaming in the middle of the night from corpses?

[Sheb]

Face with a strike of the garbage collectores, Parisians recycle their trash as barricades.

[Sheb]

Also, apparently that refugee center fire was neither ISIS nor Nazis.

[Loud Whispers]

I thought we already established they were refugees

[scriver]

With their candles of junk we will kindle our flame
On the tomb of our trash shall our barricade rise

[TempAcc]

Kebab is a fire hazard, remove kebab.

[Loud Whispers]

Fire makes lamb into kebab

[Antsan]

Also, apparently that refugee center fire was neither ISIS nor Nazis.

What the heck.

[Loud Whispers]

Also, apparently that refugee center fire was neither ISIS nor Nazis.

What the heck.

You lot who bet neo-nazis, gib euromoney pls

[Grim Portent]

Were the guys who committed the arson Muslims who weren't practicing the fast, Christians, Atheists, Cultists of Cthulhu or what? The article doesn't seem to say but it strikes me as interesting to find out why tensions were bad enough that 'small' meal portions set them off.