Morality: Allowing the natural extinction of Tobacco

[RedImperator]

RedImp, there is this little thing called "the patch"

Right, and because I never watch TV or go to the drugstore, I've never heard of this miracle device which has failed to eliminate smoking despite its widespread availability and lower per day cost than cigarettes.

Besides that, you've just wiped out tobacco and left hundreds of millions of smokers high and dry, and the extinction of tobacco has wiped out your most economical source of nicotine for the patch. At the same time, demand is going to soar, for it and every other nicotine replacement product. Supplying these drugs to every smoker will cost tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars and it will be logistically impossible to serve every smoker immediately.

I see no reason to assume the patch would eliminate the demand for a tobacco replacement. It would certainly reduce demand, but getting it or drugs like it to every smoker in a timely manner, if at all, will be impossible, and that's very generously assuming all smokers would want to quit. The history of drugs and addiction says otherwise: the availability of cocaine detox didn't prevent the spread of meth, methadone clinics haven't stopped Oxycontin addicts who get priced out of their habit from switching to heroin. And there's an enormous incentive for people to devise a replacement: whoever invents a substitute cigarette for however many hundreds of millions of people are going through nicotine withdrawal is going to get rich overnight.

[Uraniun235]

Are there any synthetic alternatives to nicotine? The nearest thing I can think of as a tobacco alternative is cannabis.

[Darth Wong]

Let me throw in a caveat here: there's not a lot in the history of drugs to suggest that magically making tobacco go away will simply make tobacco addicts get clean and that's that. The classic example is cocaine--in areas of the country where enforcement has succeded in driving up the price out of the range of regular users, it's been replaced by meth. Not an improvement. If tobacco goes extinct overnight, there's going to be a huge market for a synthetic replacement, and absolutely no guarantee that replacement will be better than tobacco. Considering the lack of quality control or scruples on the part of the producers of synthetic recreational drugs, it's very likely to be worse.

I suppose this conjecture depends on whether smokers are just as fucked up as cocaine addicts.

[RedImperator]

Are there any synthetic alternatives to nicotine? The nearest thing I can think of as a tobacco alternative is cannabis.

The only similarity between THC and nicotine is that their most popular delivery systems are through smoke. Nicotine is a mild stimulant, something like caffeine, but it also plugs into pleasure receptors in the brain (an effect which causes the brain to suppress its own production of endorphins; this is the physical mechanism of nicotine addiction). The closest drug I can think of off the top of my head is cocaine. I'm not a chemist so I don't know if a good nicotine replacement is possible, or if its side effects would be better or worse than tobacco's, but I think it's a possiblility you have to at least consider before you wipe out tobacco.

Of course, if you're positing that things like the patch or nicotine gum or similar products are available after the extinction of tobacco, there's already an economical source of nicotine, either synthetic or derived from a related plant. You're 3/4 of the way to a tobacco replacement if you have nicotine--cloves or herbs doped with it, for example.

Let me throw in a caveat here: there's not a lot in the history of drugs to suggest that magically making tobacco go away will simply make tobacco addicts get clean and that's that. The classic example is cocaine--in areas of the country where enforcement has succeded in driving up the price out of the range of regular users, it's been replaced by meth. Not an improvement. If tobacco goes extinct overnight, there's going to be a huge market for a synthetic replacement, and absolutely no guarantee that replacement will be better than tobacco. Considering the lack of quality control or scruples on the part of the producers of synthetic recreational drugs, it's very likely to be worse.

I suppose this conjecture depends on whether smokers are just as fucked up as cocaine addicts.

Nicotine is considerably more addictive than crack cocaine. I don't think I'm going that far out on a limb to suggest if there's a replacement available, a lot of people will take their chances on it rather than riding out the nicotine fits.

[RedImperator]

Sorry couldn't resist doing this...

Try harder next time. Spam obliterated.

[Invictus ChiKen]

Okays, sorry again...

Now then...

YES! I'd let the bloody virus out! An keep a little in reserve in case anyone tried to reboot the system as others pointed out.

[LordShaithis]

Then my elite team of former Green Berets who like their goddamn smokes will drop down from the ceiling and kill you. Haw.

I smoke. Infrequently. Zero to two cigarettes per day. I don't take extra breaks at work to smoke. I don't smoke indoors. I don't smoke around anyone who doesn't like it. And at tiny fraction of the average smoker's intake, I figure the health effects can't be too terrible.

So yeah, kiss my butt. I like my smokes. I'm going to go have one now.

[Lost Soal]

WRT a synthetic tobacco replacement. How long do you think its going to take to develop one then get it passed through safety checks in multiple countries compared to how long it will take to wipe out the crops originally and exhaust the current supply of cig's.

I suspect it would be years, meaning vertually everyone will have gone through their withdrawl already. I say virtually because existing suplies of cig's would undoubtably start hitting the black market, even more than now, with large quantities put aside for the rich who like their smokes.

[FTeik]

As much as I hate smoking, I have to say no. It is not the plants fault, that humans are stupid enough to smoke it.

[RedImperator]

WRT a synthetic tobacco replacement. How long do you think its going to take to develop one then get it passed through safety checks in multiple countries compared to how long it will take to wipe out the crops originally and exhaust the current supply of cig's.

What safety checks? The safety checks that methamphetamines went through? The safety checks that MDMA's cheap, poisonous substututes have gone through? You're assuming the replacement will be legal and the producers scrupulous enough to bother with such niceties, an assumption that has absolutely no basis in history.

As for spreading the virus, plant diseases don't travel very fast compared to human diseases. It will take years, at minumum, to wipe out tobacco, and realistically you're looking at decades. Long before it's totally extinct, the price will skyrocket, of course, but you'll have a nice long period where tobacco is still available but expensive enough to make whoever develops a lower cost replacement a rich man.

I suspect it would be years, meaning vertually everyone will have gone through their withdrawl already. I say virtually because existing suplies of cig's would undoubtably start hitting the black market, even more than now, with large quantities put aside for the rich who like their smokes.

It's also going to be years before tobacco goes extinct completely, giving plenty of lead time for a replacement development. And it won't be like hitting a switch: the price of tobacco will rapidly rise first, keeping it technically available but eventually pushing it out of the reach of poor smokers (which is most of them, if you consider most smokers now live in developing countries). The exact same thing happened to cocaine; cocaine is still available on the west coast and in the midwest where meth has pushed in, but it's turned back into a rich man's drug while the poor smoke meth.

And you're assuming a replacement would have to be developed from scratch, another unfounded assumption. There's any number of obscure, mildly psychoactive drugs out there which haven't hit the market because there's no niche for them. And that's assuming cheap, synthetic nicotine is impossible. It's already possible to synthesize it, and there will be enormous market pressure to make that process economical: not only do the smokers want it, but nicotine in high concentrations is a potent and commonly used insecticide and the chemical industry will be working round the clock to make sure it stays on the market.

[Lagmonster]

As for spreading the virus, plant diseases don't travel very fast compared to human diseases. It will take years, at minumum, to wipe out tobacco, and realistically you're looking at decades. Long before it's totally extinct, the price will skyrocket, of course, but you'll have a nice long period where tobacco is still available but expensive enough to make whoever develops a lower cost replacement a rich man.

I admit that I had to do backflips to present a scenario in which tobacco would be totally wiped out and the morality of allowing it to become extinct would come into question - especially with the constant deluge from conservationists that it is immoral to allow any species to disappear from the earth.

[Lost Soal]

WRT a synthetic tobacco replacement. How long do you think its going to take to develop one then get it passed through safety checks in multiple countries compared to how long it will take to wipe out the crops originally and exhaust the current supply of cig's.

What safety checks? The safety checks that methamphetamines went through? The safety checks that MDMA's cheap, poisonous substututes have gone through? You're assuming the replacement will be legal and the producers scrupulous enough to bother with such niceties, an assumption that has absolutely no basis in history.

I was thinking along the lines of selling the replacement legally in shops like they do with the real thing. Nasically I'm assuming that the Tobacco companies will be the one's researching it since they will want to keep their cash cows.

[RedImperator]

WRT a synthetic tobacco replacement. How long do you think its going to take to develop one then get it passed through safety checks in multiple countries compared to how long it will take to wipe out the crops originally and exhaust the current supply of cig's.

What safety checks? The safety checks that methamphetamines went through? The safety checks that MDMA's cheap, poisonous substututes have gone through? You're assuming the replacement will be legal and the producers scrupulous enough to bother with such niceties, an assumption that has absolutely no basis in history.

I was thinking along the lines of selling the replacement legally in shops like they do with the real thing. Nasically I'm assuming that the Tobacco companies will be the one's researching it since they will want to keep their cash cows.

I'm operating from the other direction: since American drug policy boils down to "all recreational drugs are illegal no matter how mild their effects, except for those which have been grandfathered in (caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol)", I'm assuming the replacement will be developed illegally. The major tobacco companies are all subsidiaries of large conglomerates; they'd certainly try to develop a replacement, but if the feds said, "It's natural tobacco or nothing", it wouldn't be the end of their parent companies.