GUS (Gave Up Smoking) is a community support diary for Kossacks in the midst of quitting smoking. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are quitting or even thinking about quitting, please -- join us!
The GUS Library at dKosopedia is organically evolving, and stocked with free-range information: quit-smoking links, helpful GUS diary writing tips, and the GUS Buddy List.
Buyer has the floor: grow lettuce, dry it, and sell it in plastic baggies?
Congressman Buyer (R-IN): Do you realize if you take that lettuce, dry it and roll it and smoke it and you go ahead and you smoke your lettuce, do you realize that you're going to end up with similar problems than if you were smoking tobacco? It's not the nicotine that kills. It's the smoke that kills.
When it comes down to inhaling heated combustibles, the congressman from Indiana has a point. But there's an important aspect of his analogy that is missing: nicotine. It's either that, or else the big drug scourge in my neighborhood can be found not in alleys, crack houses, and abandoned loft spaces, but at the salad bar of my local Pizza Hut. I'd say that Buyer' comparison of lettuce to tobacco runs face first into the sneeze shield.
Admittedly, this news is almost six months old (heh). But hell, no one else diaried it! And when a youtube search brings the results "smoking lettuce," one must investigate. More of this story can be found here (link to HuffPo, June 11, 2009):
The legislation that he is arguing against gives the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate the content, marketing and advertising of cigarettes and other tobacco products. The bill had passed the Senate in April of 2009, in a stunning and rare display of bipartisanship (79-17). President Obama signed the bill into law on June 22 (The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act).
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Apple Voids Warranties of Smoking Mac Owners (link to channelinsider.com)
The Consumerist reports receiving at least two complaints from Mac owners who were refused warranty service because the owners were smokers.
In both cases, the owners were denied having their Mac computers repaired because they were contaminated with nicotine, carbon monoxide and other cancerous agents. The owners told the Consumerist that their local Apple store first, then Apple corporate, said smoking by the machines owner or having a smoker in the home of the machine’s owner was enough to void the warranty.
Found in the comments section of The Consumerist are gripes over Apple contract forms that specify cigarette residue as a "biohazard." Because it's not like you're smoking plutonium or anthrax, right? It's just little old tobacco.
Perhaps a more legitimate complaint is based on... um, lack of general public knowledge as it concerns the effects of residual smoke on electronic components. The honest truth is that in thirty years of having smoked cigarettes around amplified musical instruments and studios with expensive electronic gear, I'd never given the issue a thought. That is, until my sound engineer buddy Brian told me about a year ago why cigarette smoke is verboten in recording studios. Simply put, just like the human body, cigarette smoke screws up the innards of the gear.
I find it serependitious that GUS now has a Saturday morning diary, led by resident chemist GUSsack last starfighter, on the elements. Chemical reactions. Of course smoking affects my lungs... I'd always accepted that. So why would I naively conclude that this same cigarette smoke would not chemically affect non-living elements?
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Technically, the following video is not an anti-smoking PSA. It is NSFW. Voice talent and noted "Alaskan smokologist" Tom Megalis offers this funny and honest view of certain aspects of smoking:
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GUS 1.5 approaches! It's the new group quit date of December 15, which means that if you're a smoker who is reading this... a GUS diary? Well, of course you're thinking about quitting! And with a common quit day, GUS 1.5 gives you the opportunity to join other Kossacks in beating this son-of-a-bitch addiction.
Of course, if you don't want to wait until mid-December to quit smoking... well, the sooner the better!
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