patrick.net

I've had a spot on the back of my right hand since the spring. My sister who's a nurse thinks it is an "actinic keratosis", which is common for fair-skinned people who live in sunny areas. There's about a 20% chance that it will turn into squamous cell cancer, but even that cancer is not terribly dangerous because it doesn't metastasize much.

I took a vacation to Spain this summer and visited an old college friend who now lives in Madrid. He told me that he smokes one cigarette a day, a Dunhill Blue, which you can't actually buy in Spain for some reason. He goes to France and stocks up. I decided to try out some cigarettes while on vacation in Spain, smoking about 20 total of three different brands over my two weeks there. I gave a lot of them away to homeless people on the streets.

After I got home, I noticed that the spot on my hand had shrunk quite a bit. Huh. Was it the smoking? I checked in a local smoke shop here, and found the Dunhill Blue for $19.25. Not cheap, but I wanted to try them out, and to see if the spot on my hand would shrink again. So I smoked one a day for 19 days, last one this morning. I have to say they are very high quality. There were 20 in the pack, but one morning a homeless woman saw me smoking outside my usual cafe here and asked for one, so I obliged. She put it in her pocket, lol. I'm sure she'll smoke it later because I see her around and she's often smoking. She seems schizophrenic, and I've heard that most schizophrenics smoke because it reduces their symptoms.

So at the end of the 19th cigarette, well, no change in that spot on my hand, at least none that I can clearly notice. Darn.

But I read a lot about cigarettes in the meantime, and learned some interesting things. One is that the oldest human ever, the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, smoked one Dunhill cigarette a day for about 100 years. Clearly it did not kill her, since she lived to be 122. She also drank a glass of port every day and ate about two pounds of chocolate per week.

And I remember from early in the plandemic that the Chinese reported that smokers were not getting sick at nearly the same rate as non-smokers:

https://antithrlies.com/2020/04/04/can-smoking-protect-you-against-covid-19/

What really floors me is the fact that people do not want this to be true. We are desperately trying to slow the spread and reduce the severity of a disease we cannot cure or vaccinate against. We are suffering enormous costs in order to do that. How great would it be if everyone could reduce their risk of getting a serious case of the disease by 80% by smoking a few packs?

I can imagine that smoke kills viruses in the air. Or maybe there's some other mechanism to explain it.

I also remember from a biology class in college that DNA repair mechanisms get amped up in smokers, presumably because the smoke is damaging their DNA. Maybe that's why the spot on my hand shrank after I smoked in Spain.

Then again, I didn't notice it was smaller until after I got home. Maybe it will shrink again now that I've stopped smoking again. I'll say so if it does.

Jeanne Calment: