holy christ, that's a lot of work.
It's not hardship at all if you enjoy what you are doing. Most of the time (except near deadlines or occasionally when dealing with customers) is like a play.
I'd dump the cigs and get a nicotine patch, though. They do well for me.
Nicotine, while important and the best known, is only one medicinal component of tobacco smoke. For example the significant
MAOI B effect is not due to nicotine. Further, the strong upregulation of glutathione, catalase, SOD, telomerase, DHEA, testosterone, pregnenolone,... are result of yet some other unknown components of the smoke. Other components of smoke, such as low dose CO and NO act synergistically with nicotine on vascular system and have anti-apoptotic effect on neurons. Even nicotine itself, taken in a cyclic natural feedbacks controlled manner of smoking is more effective than the blunt, desensitizing effect of the patch which over time downregulates cholinergic systems (tobacco smoke "paradoxically" upregulates it in the long run, while, like nicotine patch, stimulates it in accute use). This ancient medicinal plant was far more honed over the last eight thousand years of lifelong use by couple blllion test subjects than anything Pfizer or J&J can put out after few (often rigged) tiny trials.
If you follow up some links given earlier, you will find that to this day, after over half a century of intense research, they still can't show a single experiment where tobacco smoke would cause any harm to test animals, even at doses several times greater than what humans smoke. All that happens to smoking animals is that they live ~20 percent longer, stay thinner, perform
better on cognitive tests, tolerate stress and hardships better,... The only couple ways to cause harm, short of outright smoke asphyxiation,
related to smoking is to either spike the smoke with radioactive tracers (duh) or via
"recovery period" where they keep animals smoking heavily from young age, then in middle/older age take them off tobacco completely, causing major biochemical meltdown and various damages (including obesity,
cancers), reducing their lifespan to about the level of never-smoking test animals. Hence, quitting is at least as bad, likely worse, for your health and longevity than never starting. On the other hand, starting smoking later in life seems to be Ok. For example, the
oldest man on record, a Japanese guy Shigechiyo Izumi who lived to almost 121, started smoking at age 70. The oldest human on record (french lady Jeanne Louise Calment who lived to 122, she died shortly after doctors convinced to quit), smoked since her teens. These two smokers were the only two humans ever who celebrated their 120th birthday. As to the youngest age to start smoking, Semai people of Maylasia begin smoking at age 2, just as they wean from nursing, then smoke worry free their whole life. To the amazement of the researchers, as reported in [BMJ, p.580, Feb 26, 1977] by Dr. G.Y. Caldwell, a thorough medical exam of all 12000 adult Semai, which included chest X-rays, didn't find a single lung cancer among them.
Edited by nightlight, 15 September 2008 - 10:25 PM.
