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[scriver]

A calming buzz

[PTTG??]

I recommend taking up beekeeping instead.

[scriver]

Calming, not panic inducing

Also beekeeping too involves a large amount of smoking

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Frumple]

Just to clarify, what's in the "pro" category of smoking/tobacco products?

Well... it's a stimulant, apparently, if not exactly a relatively healthy one to use. With what that brings to the table. Also chock-full of poison, which I seem to recall has some uses (that doesn't involve putting the stuff inside a human) that aren't directly harmful to people? Seems about it, so far as pros go.

[nenjin]

The Euros in my family always claim it aids with digestion.

[Enemy post]

Just to clarify, what's in the "pro" category of smoking/tobacco products?

According to Phillip Morris, it makes old people die sooner so you don't have to pay for their healthcare.

[ChairmanPoo]

Just to clarify, what's in the "pro" category of smoking/tobacco products?

According to Phillip Morris, it makes old people die sooner so you don't have to pay for their healthcare.

Irony aside this is how it worked for decades. Tax the hell out of tobacco = extra income for the state. Plus when they are 50-60 smokers will end up dying of cancer therefore you're off paying pensions.
Of course, a few years down the line effective&expensive cancer treatments started to pop up and it ceased to be profittable to encourage smoking, as those people would expect to be treated

[Reelya]

nicotine reduces schizophrenic symptoms. A lot of people with certain mental disorders are also heavy smokers, and one growing theory is that they're self-medicating. Which might not be a bad trade-off. If you consider that you might lost 5 years of life on average but you gain 30 years of being able to function in society better.

Vaping, if it reduces lung cancer risk might make that deal better.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/315446.php

So no, the "no nicotine" thing might end up being a puritanical attitude that doesn't take into account why people smoke: it's not just a lack of willpower or addition, many people smoke because it helps them with real, preexisting conditions:

Many previous studies have also found a link between schizophrenia, the CHRNA5 gene, and smoking. Nearly 90 percent of people with schizophrenia smoke, most of them being heavy smokers, and 60 to 70 percent of people with bipolar disorder also smoke.

Additionally, research has shown an association between the number of cigarettes smoked per day and a polymorphic variation of the CHRNA5 gene.
...
 To begin, Maskos and team examined mice that had the CHRNA5 gene and displayed neurocognitive behavioral impairment in social interaction and sensorimotor tasks.

Specifically, they examined these mice that had a single-nucleotide polymorphism in the CHRNA5 gene - the alpha 5 nAChR subunit - which has been found to increase the risk for both smoking and schizophrenia.

Using brain imaging techniques, they found that these mice also had hypofrontality. The mice had decreased neural activity in a way that is similar to the hypofrontality found in patients with schizophrenia and addiction.

Finally, researchers administered nicotine to these mice, which reversed the hypofrontality. By acting on nicotinic receptors in brain areas related to healthy cognitive function, chronic nicotine administration reversed the cognitive impairment.

[ChairmanPoo]

you gain 30 years of being able to function in society better.

Eeh, for certain definitions of "function in society" and "better", your mileage may vary, etc...  I've known a few over the years, and I can tell you that smoking did NOT turn these people into functioning members of society.

As far as I know  there is no actual consensus on this matter. I've treated people with schizophrenia occasionally but I didn't really go into the mental health aspects. We did try to avoid meddling with tobacco addiction insofar as possible because of concerns of them becoming unstable & tried to keep an eye on steroid use for same reason, but really, this shit was outside our turf as far as we were concerned so we mostly sent consultations to the relevant team. As far as I know noone will actually recommend schizophrenic patients to start smoking if they weren't doing so beforehand.

[Cathar]

Irony aside this is how it worked for decades. Tax the hell out of tobacco = extra income for the state. Plus when they are 50-60 smokers will end up dying of cancer therefore you're off paying pensions.

We know since Foucault that is not how the system works. Taxes on tobacco is biopower 101, and are meant to kill the industry, with funding the state as a added benefit.

Also for the benefits of smoking : I like to smoke. That is enough for me to buy it, and want to buy more. And even tho I wouldn't recommend smoking to anyone, this is an activity I enjoy and would like to continue doing so.

Taxes make it difficult, but cultivating tobacco is allowed here as long as I don't sell it, so that's what I started last year.

[Reelya]

As for "smoking did NOT turn these people into functioning members of society", that's like proving a negative. You don't know how they'd be if they didn't smoke.

Since lab results seem to show cognitive improvement with nicotine in animals with the same gene defect as many schizophrenics have, and the level of that genetic defect in humans is also correlated with real-world nicotine intake, then it's a pretty good bet that they're avoiding worse cognitive impairment than they have now, by regulating themselves with nicotine.

Additionally, if you're seeing people in a clinic it's because they're relatively far gone, so they're not necessarily a representative sample. Schizophrenics who smoke who were turned into "functioning members of society" aren't the ones in your clinic, which would mean the sample in inherently biased. If the sample you're basing the efficacy of a treatment on is restricted to the sample of all the people for whom the treatment didn't work, then you can't use that as valuable information as to whether the medicine works or not, in general.

Also, see what percentage of your schizophrenics smoke. If it's less than the 90% average for all schizophrenics smoking then that might say something in itself - you're somehow seeing a higher proportion of non-smoking schizophrenics than random chance would have it. That in itself might prove the point about smoking reducing the severity of schizophrenic symptoms.

[ChairmanPoo]

I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm a haematologist. I deal in blood and chemotherapy, not mental health, so of course my anecdotal experience is not representative: the people I saw are the poor sods who happened to have schizophrenia AND some manner of blood cancer. 

Really, I said as much in my post. Mental health is NOT my field of choice. That being said... as far as I know, from when I studied this in medical school, and for what I've talked at times with psychiatrists (eg during consultations concerning the people above), they might hesitate before recommending someone with schizophrenia to stop smoking (depending on the circumstances), but they certainly did NOT recommend them to start smoking.

I was checking the current recommendations in medscape (which is my general medicine go-to guide btw. Poor man's Up to Date insofar it's actually free, but not really any worse), and I found an interesting tidbit

Smoking tobacco products induces the liver enzyme CYP1A2 (though nicotine patches, nicotine inhalers, and chewing tobacco do not); this enzyme metabolizes a number of antipsychotic drugs, so that, for example, patients who stop smoking while being treated with clozapine or olanzapine often experience increased antipsychotic levels; a patient who has stopped smoking may have a variety of complaints, and checking drug levels can help determine their etiology

That's a strong confusing factor for smoking cessation and  schizophrenia (and mind you, I think withdrawal alone is likely a strong confusing factor by itself.



Also, more relevantly: I looked up the NICE guidelines for schizophrenia, and, sure enough, they DO NOT recommend to smoke, and they DO recommend smoking cessation.

Offer people with psychosis or schizophrenia who smoke help to stop smoking, even if previous attempts have been unsuccessful. Be aware of the potential significant impact of reducing cigarette smoking on the metabolism of other drugs, particularly clozapine and olanzapine. [new 2014]

[scriver]

I would say it's a lot more likely mentally ill people smoke because they're stressed out and cigarettes gives them a couple of minutes of calming buzz, just like, say, lower class people.

[ChairmanPoo]

I would say it's a lot more likely mentally ill people smoke because they're stressed out and cigarettes gives them a couple of minutes of calming buzz, just like, say, lower class people.

Yah, that's what I tend to suspect as well.

By the way... there might be certain "conflicts of interest" concerning the "self medication
hypothesis". Just sayin'