Comment by sph
9 hours ago
I've been a heavy cigarette smoker for 12 years (pack a day min.). When I switched to vaping, I vaped continuously the entire day.
There is no human on earth that can smoke continuously the entire day for very long. A pack a day smoker means smoking one every ~30 minutes circa.
My step-father’s parents smoked a carton a day. Each. They started smoking before breakfast and stopped just before sleep. Their trailer home had a 2-3’ cloud of haze below the ceiling and every surface was sticky. I’m not how many years they smoked like that, but probably decades.
As a kid, I could not breathe in there. This would have been late 70s. No way they could have afforded that habit at today’s prices.
That is crazy. How long did they live? It would be fascinating if someone could live a long life despite smoking so much
Mid to late 70s? Their last years were nothing but medical issues (from the smoking, plus excessive drinking) and poor health. Certainly kept me from starting to smoke.
It would be fascinating if someone could live a long life despite smoking so much
Genetic variation probably has a bigger role than we'd like to admit. There are definitely outliers. I know smokers who lived into their 90s, and non-smokers who died much younger. The sibling comment says they lived into their 70s, which is probably average.
...and then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Health_and_life...
Calment continued smoking in her elderly years until she was 117
2-pack-a-day smoker here (~40 cigs per day), for over 10 years (twice that if you consider the time I was 1 pack or less a day).
I stopped smoking and started vaping for a while (~1.5 years) and went back to smoking after some bad vape experiences. At some point, even the smell of the liquid would cause me nausea.
My health is surprisingly good despite the habit. I walk every day, and I can do longer cardio without loosing breath or feeling tired. I'm either lucky or sitting on some ticking time bomb that went unnoticed so far.
I definitely recommend not starting on either though.
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John Wayne is said to have chain-smoked 5-7 packs a day? If you can smoke a cigarette every ~30 mins, that's 2/hour (actually about 1.5 packs/day), but if a cigarette takes 10 minutes to smoke and you chain-smoke, that's 6/hour (4.5 packs/day). So it's doable but John Wayne was significantly out of breath the last 10+ years of his life, perhaps from having an entire lung removed.
A lifelong chain smoker will smoke a cigarette in 1-2 minutes and light up another. 3-5 minutes is a relaxed casual smoke. Cigarettes were modified a decade or so ago to ensure that they go out quickly if not actively smoked. It's not even possible anymore to keep a cigarette burning for long enough for it to take 10 minutes.
This is all pedantic. The point is that you can chain smoke quite a lot if you're dedicated. I've never met anyone who smoked more than two packs a day regularly or maybe three on a crazy night out of drinking and smoking. 4-5 is crazy.
Lucille Ball's voice changed dramatically over the course of the 6yr show from heavy smoking. Their show was sponsored by cigarette companies and she used to hand out cigarettes on a platter to guest when they came over to her house.
I went to a Black Keys concert in 2007 or so that was sponsored by Camel cigarettes and they were giving out free packs of their newest variety at the door.
had one lung removed, and the other was probably close to worthless from smoking
I don't know how they did it but 50 years ago some people did seem to smoke non-stop. Of course they were still an exception. Of course when they cigarettes were dirt cheap you could let atleast a few burn up with just a puff or two off it also. These days they are so expensive from taxes that setting it down and breathing for a second instead of smoking can feel like burning money.
I'm 55 (UK) and recall the '70s. Loads of people were hardened chain smokers, including my Dad back then and on through to the early noughties. Chain smoking was not an exception at all but it was a dying habit and did trail away. I can remember filling cups with fags for parties to intersperse with the nibbles - you could reach for a handful of crisps or light up or both at the same time. They looked lovely next to the pineapple and cheese hedgehog (you'll have to look that one up!)
He'd go through something like 80 Embassy back then, a day. He gave up in 1984ish and is still trundling along. His Dad died at age 60 of lung cancer.
I gave up about eight years ago after 30 odd years at roughly 20 a day. I definitely did some damage and will eventually have to find out how much. I don't have a near permanent cough and at least five major bouts of 'flu per year anymore. I did have a short bout of Covid in 2021 and I suspect it might have been really nasty if I was still a smoker then.
There was a rumour/some basic statistics that smokers were at more risk in bad cases of Covid but nevertheless were proportionally less likely to have heavy Covid.
Smoking was so huge in Britain. People think smoking was big in America, but the UK it's like a culture in and of itself
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> There is no human on earth that can smoke continuously the entire day for very long
Out of curiosity how old are you? I remember plenty of places in my younger days where it was commonplace for people to light up their next cig off of their current one pretty much nonstop
It's just lighting and inhaling. It does not take any extra time