Nicotine Content: wrong all along?

[mushrat]

I agree..thts because the 100+ extra chemicals they add to the cigareetes...

[Sonthert]

1. Mushy, Look on the back of any package of food or beverage. Any time you see "Natural" or "Artificial Flavors", you can assume that there are 100 or so chemicals added to that, too. Doesn't mean nothing, its a statistic they throw around to sound scientific and scare the jeebies out of people aren't as educated in medicine or chemistry. 2. Water does little to filter the hookah, thats true. Eissenberg has said as much, my research shows as much. It does seem to increase the reflux rate of some of the vaporized components.

[hookah whore]

When we went to a hookah lounge, we were told that we would have to smoke 100 (not ten) bowls to equal one cigarette. Is that true?

[ghostofdavid]

No.

[Calcartman]

[quote name='hookah whore']When we went to a hookah lounge, we were told that we would have to smoke 100 (not ten) bowls to equal one cigarette.  Is that true?[/quote] It is the other way around.Your bowl of shisha is dozens of cigarettes worth of nicotine.But much less tar (in theory).

[SanguineSolitude]

calcartman there is no way youre estimate is correct. if there was that much nicotine in a head of shisha then im pretty sure it would be alot more addictive than it is. all my smoker friends light up a cig after a bowl because it doesnt satisfy their nicotine craving. if they had just experienced dozens of cigs worth of nicotine why would this be? and why would it be that most of us who smoke hookah, even regularly, are not addicted. myself i smoke around 4-5 times a week usually 2 heads a session. so lets see thats 8-10 packs in your estimate? how would i not be addicted and heavily so. did you actually even think through what you were saying? logic is key my friend.

[Whiteshadow]

I'm not worried about nicotine. I have this thing called will power, I've stopped smoking weed, dipping, smoking cigs, chronic masturbation, and who knows what else cold turkey. the tar is what I'd be most worried about, so someone do a calculation of tar in a cig vs shisha and I might start acting concerned

[Calcartman]

[quote name='sanguinesolitud']calcartman there is no way youre estimate is correct. if there was that much nicotine in a head of shisha then im pretty sure it would be alot more addictive than it is. all my smoker friends light up a cig after a bowl because it doesnt satisfy their nicotine craving. if they had just experienced dozens of cigs worth of nicotine why would this be? and why would it be that most of us who smoke hookah, even regularly, are not addicted. myself i smoke around 4-5 times a week usually 2 heads a session. so lets see thats 8-10 packs in your estimate? how would i not be addicted and heavily so. did you actually even think through what you were saying? logic is key my friend.[/quote] Logic is key, you are correct.Simply becuase you observe a smoker light up a cigarette after a bowl of shisha, and do not feel addicted, does not indicate that there is less nicotine in the bowl.FACT:.5% by weight.that is key.Read your box of shisha, .5%.The mass of the tobacco in your bowl, times .005 (.5%) will give you the amount of nicotine.Is any of that in dispute? Now, your 50g box of shisha is not 50g of tobacco, and I cannot tell you how much of that is tobacco, but I can tell you that whatever it is, multiplied by .005, will give you the amount of nicotine (in grams).Multiply that by 1000, and you will have the amount of nicotine in milligrams.1 cigarette = ~1.7 milligrams of nicotine.Now that I've repeated that, what makes you think your head of shisha is not addictive?Everyone has a different addiction threshold, a point at which they will become physically or psychologically addicted to X substance.You may not have hit that threshold in shisha, or maybe you have and you don't know it. Try stopping for a month, or two, or whatever length of time you would consider a sign that addiction has not taken place if they were cigarettes.[b]As for your friends who light up a cigarette, let me ask you this.How many puffs do you take on a bowl of shisha before it is burned? [/b]Im sure I take hundreds. I bet a bowl of shisha can get 200 puffs (inhales) minimum. But maybe you think otherwise.In any case, it is signifigantly more than it takes to inhale one cigarette. Meaning, while a bowl of shisha may have MUCH more nicotine, the amount of nicotine per inhale is far less. Smoking a cigarette burns up that 1.7mg much quicker, and much more completely, than a coal.Just food for thought.

[MrGuy]

hmmm i dont think that "must be les nicotine in shisha than cigs because my smoker friends need to smoke loads and i don't" isnt valid. if you could get the same effects of shisha (relax, buzz, taste, thick clouds) in the convenience of a cigarette, i think you would spark up as often as themjust my 0.02c

[SanguineSolitude]

since it takes 8 12 ounce bottles of beer to get me drunk versus one 12oz. glass of everclear, one would assume that theres more alchohol in the everclear. im sure you agree this logic is fairly solid, though also not scientific.then why does the same type of statement, that it takes 3-4 20g bowls of shisha to make me feel lightheaded and buzzed versus 1-2 cigs, not also suggest that there is more nicotine in the cigs?it seems very unlikely that a bowl of shisha equals a pack of cigarettes but has much less effect on me than smoking a single cigarette. i understand that this isnt scientific, and i dont have the means to do an actual experiment, but common sense would suggest that if something has a pronounced effect on the body (like nicotine.) then the mixture that has the greater effect would likely contain more of the active ingredient.im not sure what mr. guy is saying. but it seems like he means you dont see people taking shisha breaks outside of their work just to satisfy that craving. i dont know. your little math thing sounds good and all but it also seems very inaccurate.and most of the shisha i smoke is washed and has nicotine of .05%. not that that matters much.in addition do you actually know what the nicotine content refers to? i dont. is it the shisha as a whole? the tobacco portion? or is it a measure of nicotine in the smoke (the only one that really matters) according to wikipedia "Nicotine constitutes 0.3 to 5% of the tobacco plant by dry weight"to be honest im not concerned. i also dont see the point of trying to convince us all how bad smoking shisha is by using some basic math to simplify something even you arent sure of. obviously its carcinogenic and obviously its addictive, theres no doubt there. p.s. dont patronize me, im not stupid.

[MrGuy]

[quote name='sanguinesolitud']since it takes 8 12 ounce bottles of beer to get me drunk versus one 12oz. glass of everclear, one would assume that theres more alchohol in the everclear. im sure you agree this logic is fairly solid, though also not scientific.  then why does the same type of statement, that it takes 3-4 20g bowls of shisha to make me feel lightheaded and buzzed versus 1-2 cigs, not also suggest that there is more nicotine in the cigs?[/quote] everyone knows that alcohol will enter the blood stream at different rates depending on what its with. hence alcopops feeling more alcoholic than other drinks of equivelent content, because sugar gets them in the blood stream quicker.My point i was trying to get across is that a very big (and probably underestimated) part of shisha addiction is the convenience, or lack of. There have been times where i've had a craving for hookah, but its inconvenient or i just can't be bothered to trip to the lounge (don't have my own yet,dam debit/credit cards.) one reason you can't compare the addictiveness of cigs to the addictiveness of shisha is because of convenience of the process. if everytime you wanted a cig you had to go through the process you do for shisha, i bet there would far fewer cigarette addicts.

[Sonthert]

I think cigarettes are more like 1-1.2 mg of nicotine per cigarette. Thats according to Marlboro, anyhow, I couldn't really say otherwise. Hookah Whore:That is a bold-faced lie. Probably. I can't say unless I know what tobacco they are using. Calcartman, yes your figures are correct.The problem is, what I always bring up, and everybody either nods or ignores it completely, everybody is pointing fingers at nicotine ths has so much this more, etc...so what? There are other addictive components in cigarettes supposedly. Cancer rates vary between cigars, pipe tobacco and cigarettes, even though a cigar or pipe tobacco contain far more tobacco and presumably more nicotine.

[SanguineSolitude]

tangiers makes an excellent point. i guess ill just keep smoking and continue to not care about the nic. level.

[hookah whore]

Tangiers, Wow, all this time I have been believing what they told me at the lounge! I'm shocked! Thanks for clearing that up! BTW, the tobacco they use is Nakhla and Al Waha.

[Pyrofeed]

isnt nictotine only a problem in huge amounts anyway, isnt the much lower level of tar in shisha the big deal as compared to cigs?

[Onion]

[quote name='Tangiers']Cancer rates vary between cigars, pipe tobacco and cigarettes, even though a cigar or pipe tobacco contain far more tobacco and presumably more nicotine.[/quote]This is probably due to the fact that you're not really supposed to inhale the smoke from a pipe or a cigar. The prevalance of mouth cancers would probably be higher, but lung cancers I would assume would be significantly lower

[Sonthert]

From what I understand, mouth cancers are higher than for non-smokers, but overall, pipe and cigar cancer rates are alot lower than the cancer rate for cigarette smokers. Hookah Whore:Then yes, they are bold faced liars. a cigarette contains 1mg nicotine, more or less. They are proposing that one hundred bowls have the same amount of nicotine as one cigarette, so that means one bowl has .01mg of nicotine in. Unfortunately, Nahkla and Al Waha, being ostensibly .5% nicotine (=.005g nicotine/g of tobacco) which means each gram of tobacco has 5 cigarettes worth of nicotine in (which sounds high, to me, anyways). So, if their statement WAS accurate, they would only be putting .0002 g of tobacco in the bowl, thats .2 mg, or approximately the weight of a grain of sand. Doesn't sound reasonable when you put it that way, right?