While it is true tobacco smoke contains many carcinogens and toxins that are the likely sources of many cancers, there is evidence that nicotine itself promotes tumor growth and proliferation.
Nicotine also accelerates atherosclerosis and vascular disease.
The parent comment asked for a citation, so I added a citation which is peer reviewed and discusses some of the very points made in the grandparent comment. There are quite a few more peer reviewed papers on the topic.
So then I guess the next question is if it's worse than caffeine or sugar or alcohol; and, if that's enough to require legislation to regulate what people put into their bodies.
As for sugar, that's an interesting debate. Sugar is pretty bad for you. The short answer seems to be that sugar kills more people than tobacco and nicotine and lots of other things. But sugar comes in many forms and is hard to regulate, I guess. It's a tough one for sure.
Alcohol is legislatively regulated by requiring labels on the box and limiting age of consumption. Tobacco has legislation of the same, as well as advertisements.
Potentially. What would be the harm in further regulation? I feel there is no benefit to a lack of regulation. But that's just my opinion. If my legislators were to ask me if I thought we should have more regulation on nicotine advertisement, I would say yes. Which is what we have legislators for.
Caffeine is relatively benign compared to nicotine. Nicotine poisoning[1] really is a thing. Also, the LD50 dosage of caffeine is ~150-200mg/kg while for nicotine it’s in the range of 0.5-1mg/kg and for children it’s much lower, at 0.1mg/kg. Given these numbers, nicotine is a far mor pernicious substance than caffeine.
> Also, the LD50 dosage of caffeine is ~150-200mg/kg while for nicotine it’s in the range of 0.5-1mg/kg and for children it’s much lower, at 0.1mg/kg. Given these numbers, nicotine is a far mor[e] pernicious substance than caffeine.
What? That doesn't follow at all. You want to compare the LD50 (and other effects of consumption) to the amount normally consumed, not to the LD50 of some other substance. "LD50 is 1 mg/kg" is completely meaningless if you can't consume more than 0.005 mg/kg.
Let’s make it simpler. If a toddler weighing 5 kilograms ingests a cup of coffee, the risk of death is minuscule. But if the same toddler were to ingest a single cigarette (I.e eat it), the toddler will almost certainly die without timely medical intervention.
If you read the Wikipedia page I’d previously linked to[1], it has this quote: “58% of e-cigarette calls to US poison control centers were related to children 5 years old or less.”
I’d personally witnessed a tragedy like this in my neighborhood many years ago, and because of that, I don’t let people come with packs of cigarettes into my house, because I’ve got a toddler.
It doesn't really matter if an addiction kills you or not, the question is whether the dependency is strong enough to take away from other activities in your life.
Addiction is generally a result of some failure in a person's social life and social structure that negatively impacts them to the point of developing a coping mechanism.
What kills smokers is the uncountable number of toxins in tobacco smoke.