Today’s Wall Street Journal raises a very unPC subject: there are ways to get that wonderful high from nicotine without significant risk of health side effects.
I have pointed out in several earlier blogs that the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer is weak and that the second hand smoking connection is non-existent. The one good study on the effects of smoking, (by my definition a good study has to be Danish or Swedish and use twins) is a Danish study of identical twins where one smoked and the other didn’t. The only difference was that the smoking side of the twins had a higher incidence of lung related problems, like coughing, but not lung cancer.
A different demographic study showed that the low incidence in Japanese lung cancer among smokers may be connected to the low level of nitrosamines in Japanese cigarettes. The Japanese cigarettes have one-seventh the level of nitrosamines in the smoke that the average American and European cigarette has. If you like smoking you can get a Japanese brand in good tobacco stores: Mild Seven #10.
If you like nicotine but don’t need to smoke it, we now know the way to go is snuff with low nitrosamines: Swedish snuff.