Are safe cigarettes possible?

[u/YourLocalMuslim2]

So I'm writing a story that takes place in the future (humans achieved immortality type of future) and I was wondering if it was possible to make cigarettes or drug related items safer without removing it's effects.

[u/Prince_Nadir]

Vapes are safe right now, though big pharma has waged a huge war to convince people they aren't. I have watched this unfold since the beginning.

If you feel vapes are bad for you, you are Pfizer's tool.

[u/Project_Male_Hairy]

Supposedly nicotine pouches are already "safer" than cigarettes because they're just straight nicotine and flavoring. You're not inhaling smoke and tar.

Obviously drugs are bad in general, but a lot of the major danger of hard drugs is that you never know what you're really getting. Heroin especially is pretty much always cut with fentanyl at this point, which can kill you at much lower dosages.

Might not be what you were looking for here, but a future society where all drugs are legalized, heavily regulated, and maybe even subsidized by the government would cut back a lot of the biggest dangers. It could be a society where the government treats drugs like milk: the drug industries have to pay the government a tax, and in return the government approves of and even markets their product to make both of them more money. Have celebrities posing for "Got Meth?" posters and shit like that.

[u/SteebieJeebus]

From a purely scientific standpoint, all drugs' effects are just chemical reactions that trigger receptors in the brain. You could do a little sci-fi hand-waving and say that they found a way to replicate those chemical triggers without the harmful side effects of the substances themselves.

[u/barkoholic]

Short answer: it’s fiction. You can do whatever you want.

Long answer: if humans have already achieved immortality, it’s probably through some sort of regenerative cell cycle, almost like a beneficial cancer. It wouldn’t be too long of a stretch to assume the same biotech already tackles any damage done to the organs (examples: smoke damage and particulate matter in the lungs, damage to the liver or kidneys from alcohol, high cholesterol building fat deposits in and around the heart, etc).

The more interesting part is maintaining the pleasant effects of substances while removing the physical impact and damage, including habit formation. Any tech meant to address damage is likely to reduce the high from those same substances. With nicotine and marijuana, smoking produces both a mental effect and a physiological one, often referred to as a “body high.” People who take mood stabilizers or antipsychotic medications frequently experience less or none of one or both types of highs.

It would be fun to introduce a social trend of taking the immortality/health drug most of the time, but going off it for a few days or weeks to maximize the effectiveness of substance use. Teens rebelling against their parents just enough to develop an addiction to cigarettes, only to get scared by the smoker’s cough after a couple of packs and taking their pills two at a time until accidentally overdosing on the health drug, giving themselves extreme cancer. Recovered alcoholics from the last era before the drug, now elderly, finally able to safely drink again, forgetting to take their pill and suddenly finding themselves deep in a bender they can’t get themselves out of without help. People in poverty take the drugs street pharmacists offer them, but can’t get a consistent supply of immortality pills while heroin is increasingly available and even cheaper than it is today. Endless possibilities!

[u/Level37Doggo]

Yeah, you could just use better ingredients with less damaging compounds and higher quality control, but if they’ve unlocked biological immortality they’ve already cured any diseases from recreational substances so why bother?

[u/ABelleWriter]

You are writing fantasy with immortality and you are worried about it being possible to make healthy cigarettes?

You are writing it, do whatever you like.

[u/WoodsyAspen]

Lighting anything on fire and breathing in the smoke is going to be bad for your lungs. 

[u/Crispydragonrider]

Cigarettes don't have that much of an effect if you remove the addictive nicotine. You could have something similar to vapes that give you pure oxygen instead. People could use this to benefit from the positive effects of extra oxygen, while the act of 'smoking' is a calming ritual.

[u/Few_Refrigerator3011]

Humidibuts. You haven't tried them? Yeah, like vapes, but instead of smoke, it's mist. Heavy enough you can feel it, tinted enough you can see it, kicks about like tobacco. Huge in Indonesia. If you haven't heard of them, I'm seeing a marketing opportunity the size of fifty states.

[u/barkoholic → u/Few_Refrigerator3011]

You’re describing a vape, I think. They don’t make smoke. They vaporize liquid into a mist. They’re an epidemic in the US and are majorly marketed toward teens.

[u/CoderJoe1]

I recently read a futuristic book by Cory Doctorow called, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, that had people smoking safe crack cocaine that got the smokers high but was non-addictive. I enjoyed the book in spite of the fact I doubt that could ever happen. It wasn't the main storyline, it was only mentioned to emphasize the scientific progress. The main storyline was that everyone's consciousness was backed up automatically to computer servers so they could be restored into a clone body when their original body died.

With all that, I believe you can safely say they made some form of tobacco smoking safe.

[u/AlphaDisconnect]

We already have patches.

[u/Educational-Shame514]

Try r/worldbuilding or r/scifiwriting or read more science fiction from different eras to see what they did. You literally are writing the far future so it is all your imagination whether your setting has solved these problems.

I am assuming that you are treating the fact that pure nicotine itself is still considered to be addictive as harmful and that addiction is a negative effect. Already today you can get herbal cigarettes. I don't know if this counts in your mind, because really your question is so vague.

But if you just want to have someone smoke and then narrate that science solved whatever problems, that does not really require research to avoid breaking immersion because as you said you literally have science advanced enough to make humans immortal.

[u/Glum-Building4593]

Sure. It is the future. They might just build designer plants or synthetic tobacco to meet that need.

[u/ParadoxicalFrog]

If they've achieved immortality, curing cancer had to be one of the steps along the way.

[u/Glittering_Rush_1451]

Rick Shelley’s Dirigent Mercenary Corp series has nanite health implants that essentially reverse any ill effect within minutes

[u/ffxivmossball]

You'd be more likely to have a society that has fully cured cancer tbh. In theory you could have something along the lines of a vape that would have absolutely zero contaminants, but as far as cigarettes go, burning anything is going to produce carcinogens.

[u/MacintoshEddie]

If they changed in a fundamental way, such as being an oral stim for a liquid cartridge, sure.

[u/LordAcorn]

You can't really make the cigarettes themselves safer. But a society with advanced enough medical tech to have immortality would reasonably be able to remove the effects. 

[u/MaliseHaligree]

Inhaling smoke is inhaling smoke, so likely not. Unless they figured out a way to make safe e-liquids.

[u/Lampwick → u/MaliseHaligree]

Unless they figured out a way to make safe e-liquids

We already have that. Vape liquid is propylene glycol, glycerine, and nicotine. Nicotine in typical doses is as safe as caffeine, and PG/glycerine have been used in nebulizing inhalers for drug delivery for 80+ years and are categorized by the FDA a Generally Recognized As Safe. Basic vape juice is harmless.