Memories of the 28th Century

What has been the effect of the dramatic decrease in tobacco smoking in the last few decades? Smoking makes people happier. Has a decrease in smoking made people collectively less happy? Has the decrease in smoking done anything for anyone?

I don't recall having seen anything on this matter before, but let's take a little look at the aggregate, since looking at individuals will just tell us about a few individuals. I just search for online information about the campaign against smoking and found nothing, so for the people who passed the laws and made the regulations apparently that was enough work for them, so they haven't done any follow up to determine whether their actions were effective.

Even worse than finding no answers to my questions, I found that many of the government websites that condemn tobacco use poor logic in their presentations; to wit, they point out correlations between contact with smoke and heart disease without looking into the causation of the heart disease. The actual causation my follow the correlation, but that is not clear without a great deal more evidence.

In the absence of any documentary evidence as too the effects of the decrease in smoking on the American people and out culture, I will examine the matter from my experience.
Before tobacco started to be condemned as dangerous, the United States of American was a wealthy country with an expanding economy. After fifty years of increasing pressure against tobacco use tobacco is still used; although not as widely as formerly, but the U.S. economy is not expanding, and GDP is increasing only because of games being played with the value of money.

In the 1950’s, when about half of the adult population smoked, happiness was more widespread than it is now, when less than a quarter of adults smoke tobacco. And back in those primitive times a family could get by on a just one paycheck.

If we look at China the opposite effect has happened. In the 1950’s only a rather small percent of the population smoked, and the economy was small and weak, and it was further weakened by the Great Leap Forward. At this time more than half of the Chinese smoke, and the economy is huge and it continues to grow.

Yes. That piece of reasoning is flawed, but it does make one wonder whether there might be some economic value to smoking. There is, and getting [people to stop smoking will cost an economy a lot of money. The costs for medical care are minor compared to the costs of more old age pension, when the quitters who might have contracted some disease from smoking live for an extra fifty years, and the people who would have avoided Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s as a result of some of the good effects of smoking come down with those diseases and have to be treated for a couple of decades each.

If we look at this matter on an individual basis, then looks a little more extreme. The heaviest smokers often have some physical or mental problem that nicotine eases. Nicotine is a powerful anti-depressant, and it can be a mood enhancer, and it also is a memory enhancer. If the effects that we can see in individuals were given to the population at large what would be the effect? It probably would result in the society being more productive and thoughtful.

Personally, I have not used tobacco in years, but I do not reject the possibility of using tobacco again or nicotine in some other form, and I certainly am not inclined to restrict the liberties of anyone. I wonder whether I would be more productive, if I took to using tobacco again.

What do you think? Should we encourage people to use nicotine to make the world more productive and creative?

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