So, got a group who plans to try to burn down a building, using gasoline cans and gas rags. They have everything they need - except for a source of flame to ignite it. Someone mentioned 'damn me for not taking smoking'.

Then I thought about it -- how common would smoking be in Shadowrun? Currently, there is a huge push against it in real life, and with recent medication which can block the addictive nature of it (as in kill the addiction completely), how common would it be? I mean, where I live, you don't smoke in cars with children, you can't smoke in any public building, you can't smoke on busses, planes, in taxis, and you must be at least 10 meters from any public building if you're going to smoke (including bingo halls, nightclubs, etc). Stores must keep the cigarette packages hidden behind blinds, and can't show them to you -- advertising isn't allowed on TV or in magazines, and cigarette companies can't sponsor events in the country.

Then, I thought about being a shadowrunner. You're needing to be sneaky as all hell, avoiding being spotted, and scent would be a huge give-away. Drones which follow chemical trails, creatures which have enhanced tracking, and hell, even if you have invisibility, the stink of tobacco would reveal your presence like nobody's business. And then, of course, the expense... I'm certain the price for real tobacco would be through the roof.

So, really, yeah. I don't think smoking's really that much of a thing in 207X.

Thoughts?

Yeah, there is smoking. Someone mentions it in Arsenal. Remember, you can clone and grow your own, new lungs (won't even cause essence loss), so the push to ban kinda died out when people realized there were no more bad side-effects (other than a medical bill.) It may not be popular like some drugs that have larger effects on you (like novacoke) but it's easy and affordable.

I can see a couple of things happening. Since the price of cigarettes are determined mainly by the tax from the government, I see the price of cigarettes from the UCAS and CAS slowly increasing but cigarettes from the different NAN countries becoming dirt cheap (especially tobacco used for ceremonial use). This means that characters who spend lots of time in the NAN may pick up smoking while UCASers and CASers would more then likely not smoke as much (it would be that think ritch kids do to piss off their parents).

Perhaps, but if you don't have the addiction (and don't get the pleasant buzz from it, thanks to modern medicine being used to prevent it being an addiction at all)...

Which brings up another thing -- I'm surprised addiction actually is a problem in 207X, what with current medical successes in finding ways to cure addiction. By the time 207X rolls around, if the trend continues, it shouldn't even be an issue anymore.

People have to want treatment. Turns out taking those nifty meds isn't nearly as fun as getting high. Plus in SR you get all kinds of other benefits from drugs (like combat bonuses).

The reality is that its part of human nature to alter our mental states with chemicals. Thats not something thats going to change in 60 years. People will still smoke, and drink and do drugs.

Also, one of the major factors in the downward trend in smoking is the widespread use of public awareness/education campaigns and not-so friendly smoking laws. In places like the barrens, where you have large populations of uneducated people living in lawless areas with no healthcare infrastructure, smoking would probably be rampant. And the anti-smoking trend prevalent in western countries isn't so prevalent in large parts of the world like China, Africa and the Middle East. In China they have about 8,000 new smokers every day. A few years ago a 10 year old Chinese girl become the youngest person ever to be diagnosed with lung cancer secondary to cigarette smoke. And up until a few years ago their anti-smoking education campaign was pitifully underfunded (to the tune of one guy with a budget of ~15,000 USD a year responsible for stopping the smoking epidemic in Beijing, population 17 million).

Plus as TBRMInsanity eluded to its a major source of tax-revenue. Legitimate corporate types would probably look down on smoking, but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't promote smoking among the SINless. After all, the SINless exist for one purpose- to consume corporate goods. What could be better than a product as horribly addictive as cigarettes?

I wouldn't see it as being expensive unless you got natural tobacco - just synthesize nicotine, etc. and make it in a lab.

Also, the Shadowrun universe diverged from ours in the early-to-mid 1990's, before the intensive anti-smoking effort really got off the ground. With a SCOTUS that would come up with the Seretech decision in 1999/2000, it's doubtful they would have ruled in favor of the multi-billion dollar tobacco settlement a few years earlier. So the anti-smoking measures and push to develop anti-nicotine drugs most likely never occured in this timeline. And without a concerted effort to counter it, the impetus is to make smoking even more addictive, not less (as has been demonstrated with the tobacco industry in real life before the settlement). Throw in the corporations' greater overt influence on society, and you end up with a situation where those exaggerated TheTruth.com fake commercials are actual, effective marketing strategies.

While smoking is almost certainly deadly, in a majority of cases, the really detrimental health effects don't normally kick in until late in the habitual smoker's life. Which, coupled with the addictive nature of the product, virtually guarantees a regular customer for 30-40 years. And once the customer starts developing chronic health problems, you've got them over a barrel to pony up for the range of long-term life-saving therapies and medications that your company also happens to provide. And with no one available to call you on it, curing the addiction (or at least doing so cheaply) would be a sucker's game.

Probably only cause i smoke in real life most my characters do but never during business to easy of a spot plus but can carry DNA. Phoenix Golds usually.

You scare me.

Wow. Tonka, seriously, that right there may be the essence of how ALL 6th world megacorps should IMHO behave. Well done.
Im going to sell you an addictive substance for 30 or 40 years, sell you the drugs to help you kick the habit (hopefully unsuccessfully), and then sell you the service to clone your heart/lungs later on.

And dont forget that with the presence of shorter lived races like orks and trolls, they will probably die of old age before they even die of cancer. So to them it may not matter that they will contract horrible illness in 20-30 years time since they expect to be dead by then anway

Smoking is essential for SR-Noir style or Lowstyle.
No Guttersnipe without Cigarettes or Syntharettes

HougH!
Medicineman

Just a as a side Note, Runner's companion threw a monkey wrench into the works (something I, personally, am not using in my campaign) by making people with enough cash immortal.

Seriously.

There are procedures to (in this order) return your body to effectively 21 years old, and to rejuvenate damaged tissue. So you can chain smoke 2 cartons a day, pay for the treatments, and have no essence loss and have the body of a perfectly healthy 21 year old, whenever you feel like it. All for under 100k.

LAME!

(P.S. Yes, I know the treatment takes several months, but it is still super lame.)

Leonisation is in Augmentation, not Runner's Companion, and has been around since Shadowtech...

I quite like that it exists.

it could be that they get the shorter lifespan from a increased rate of cell division.

could explain their higher physical scores to.

if so, they may well develop cancer sooner...

its the classical division between the haves and the have-nots.

Pretty much exactly why I like it. It really highlights inequality within the setting, and I think that a big point about Shadowrun is that there's definite inequality that PCs can either attempt to resolve individually (by becoming high-fee runners) or collectively (through hooding or donating their money) or violently (team Neo-A) or not at all...

Seems to fit what I see. In real life I work in a homeless shelter and a good chunk of my youth was experienced from the lowest income levels. From the way things look, the number of smokers increases as the income level decreases. At a low income level I would make a guess of about 30% are smokers. People who live below the poverty level I would guess maybe 60% smoke. When you get to no income and homeless it's about 80% or more smoke. It works the same way with alcohol and drugs as well for the most part.

Also, taking into consideration the mention of anti-addition medication, one must not forget the great crash. Perhaps that breakthrough has been lost and not been picked up again by the corporation for the various reasons mentioned above.

It doesn't incur an Addiction quality and it's mild and agrees with the throat. All the cool kids in the Sixth World are doing it.

Cigarette has a lot of competition in SR. There are a LOT more interesting "light" drugs available, not to mention chips. Why smoke when you can pop in a chip that has pretty much the same effect as a cigarette - or hell, a completely different effect. Moody Blue, Sunshine Yellow, Soothing Calm... we're not talking BTLs here - just a light little simsense background to lighten your day at work, all day, every day.

Lab-rats have quite short lifespans yet all manner of substances are tested on them to gauge the potential reaction in humans.
Trogs will generally age and die from the same ailments as humans though in a shorter time frame, I'd imagine.

From this I've always assumed that cigarettes are illegal in the Seattle 'plex and the UCAS and consequently gave smoking a Legality code in times past.

BTW, is it the state or fed gov that regulate smoking in the US or Canada these days?

Smoking laws (along with drinking) are set by the states but are "nudged" by federal financing policies. States that want to drop their legal drinking age from 21 to 18 are usually threatened with loss of federal funding.

Smoking bans are provincial. Though the feds hate the tobacco companies too.

Who says you have to smoke to carry a lighter? I carried a Zippo for a few years (found one on the lip of a garbage can, cleaned it up & kept it), and I don't smoke. I had several freinds who did and would bug me for a light when we'd go out.

I'd say smoking in SR is fairly common, with exceptions only in notable places that enforce a no-smoking policy.

So while UCAS state/provinces probably regulate smoking laws they'd likely be pretty consistent across the UCAS (i.e. illegal if one accepts the aforementioned reference).

Smoking's probably legal in the CAS though, what with all those tobacco plantations.

Since large segments of the troll and ork populations are SINless, the low average lifespan could also be a direct result of lifestyle (like rampant smoking). Even today people in lower socioeconomic strata have shorter lifespans.

There is a reference in I don't recall where about how smoking can torque off amerinds, who regard tobacco as a sacrament.

There might well be smoking in SR, but bear in mind that it doesn't have to be tobacco that people are smoking. It might just be one of a number of drug delivery systems. Patches, inhalers, intravenous, ingestion, snorting, insertion adjacent to mucus membranes such as cheeks or as a suppository .

I'm certain you mean "life expectancies". Lifespan is the longest any member of a species has been observed to have lived. Life expectancy is how long an individual or demographic is expected to live, on average.


The South and the North of the United States kind of switched roles in some ways before the split; the South got a lot of the Internet infrastructure before the crash, and the North had the "rust belt" of industrial facilities. As a result, the South became more classically liberal and the North became more conservative. Of course, after the Awakening large tracts of land (*braces for impact*) became agriculturally viable again; I imagine much tobacco farming is done on Amerind land now that they actually have enough/high enough quality land to pull it off.

Yes you are correct. Sorry for my imprecise language.

I'm a bit of a grammar Facist, I'm afraid

My Grammar was quite a fascist, but she mellowed as she got older.

Mine's a bible-thumper

Don't underestimate the effects of habituation- physical addiction can be a major pain in the ass when you try to initially come clean, but it's the mental habituation that keeps people coming back long after they have gone through withdrawal.

Furthermore, when looking at the legality ratings of SR drugs, one may quickly note that there's tons of legal mindbenders around, that most of the equivalents of drugs which are highly illegal now are merely restricted (in fact, the only completely illegal drugs in SR are K-10, deepweed, BTLs and all the memory-erasing stuff) and that one of the Big 10 started out as a coalition of major cocaine dealers...
SR4 fluff makes it quite clear that it is well within the interests of the corps to get people hooked (damn, they sell chewing gum that gets you addicted as soon as you try it out!) and if the corps want it, the feds can't do squat about it.
Even if i can't get a hit of novacoke in the UCAS, i can just walk over to the friendly neighborhood coffeshop down at the Azzie pyramid to snort a couple of lines.



Now that is a dystopian perspective.
Synthetic cannabis was crappy enough to begin with, i don't want to imagine what corporations would do to other helpless drugs for the sake of profit.
I hereby revise all my previous claims that SR would not be merely as bleak as people pretend it to be.
In fact, it's a lot worse.



+1
Couldn't imagine any of my more noir characters (not that i have any SR characters who aren't noir to some extend) without a smoking habit.
Unless they have gills, of course.
In those cases, i prefer to stick to rubbing any number of intoxicating pastes on those membranes.
Seems to be more fitting stylistically.



Why not just do both?
When people chain smoke and spliff like crazy simultaneously, why should slotting a chip distract us from our precious nicotine habits?
Polytoxicity is a constantly increasing trend nowadays, i don't think that the 2070s will be any better in that regard.
And good, old-fashioned cigarettes always make a perfect basis for slow self destruction.
I know very few drug users who don't smoke either, and those who don't usually have been smoking for years and kicked their smoking habit much later.

But don't forget the benefits of smoking:

You already mentioned the excuse to carry a fire-making apparatus.

Want to stake out a location for a couple hours? Bring your Black Death cigarettes with you. Think about it. If somebody sees you across the way just standing there looking around how likely are they to think you're acting suspicious? Now have them see you across the way smoking a cigarette. Are they as suspicious as before?

Cigarettes are legal, expensive (for what you get), and easy to transport. Perfect for small-time bribery. Need to know if a large truck has left the compound in the last couple hours? Ask the homeless guy across the way. He doesn't have a credit stick or a comnlink but he wants to know what's in it for him. If there's one thing I learned working downtown is that all beggars smoke, or know somebody that does that they can trade with.

if your referring to the need to have some object to fondle, then yes.

at least one person i know, that smokes, have said that the worst problem with trying to quit is not having that object between the fingers.

One of the reasons I took up smoking. There was a period in the teen years where I was so ashamed of myself I wanted to be invisible. If you're having a cigarette, you're not loitering, you're smoking.

Funnily enough I only realised this years later, when I was reading a bit of unofficial Shadowrun fiction and it was mentioned as a surveillance technique. Serendipitous, I guess.

Widespread and prevalent. All the cool people do it, it makes YOU look cool, and it has all sorts of nifty accessories.

Seriously though, it's a dystopian future. Of course people smoke. (Bladerunner, Wolfwood from Trigun, and Spike from Cowboy Bebop. Heck, I think characters in Ghost in the Shell do even.) Plus there is that excellent point that it makes you more invisible. No one thinks much of the guy across the street who it outside for the 4th time this hour, smoking.



Edited: True story. I've heard the same thing from many of my friends. Heck, because I was a theater kid in high school, whenever I'm hanging out with my smoker friends (which is often; smokers are just more social) I catch myself pantomiming them. (Probably doesn't help that I do sign language, though.) And I've never smoked in my life. It's got to suck when you actually try and stop.

No, armored Leather is more common.
what? ^^

The debate here negates the fact that smoking is "good" not for the looks of it or its effects (and they are more than mild)
Its just pleasant.
Now the side effects is something that could easyly be overcome in the 6th world.
Besides, tobacco was being used before the europeans arrived in america, and even in europe smoking existed, but they where smoking some herbs/roots and even canabis.
So in Shadowrun, while i'm pretty sure smoking would be illegal in malls and hospitals, maybe some high tech corp bars/restaurants, but in most places, even public it would be allowed. (do you think someone in the early 90s could have immagined Smoking banned from all public places ?)

And with all the other pollutants in the air and water GM Tobacco cigarettes barely a blip on the radar screen.

Just say that in 2017 new non carcinogens strains of GM (genetically modified) tobacco plants were created by a joint research project at the University of Kentucky and the University of North Carolina funded from Philip Morris. Philip Morris advertised a 93% reduction of lung cancer risk putting a Two Pack a Day smoker at a lower risk of lung cancer than someone living in down town Newark.

With the threat of second hand smoke removed, the corporate lobbyist got the majority of the public smoking restrictions lifted in the next two years in most foreign and domestic markets. Ireland was the first European country to drop the bans.

Later research showed that Philip Morris's claims were greatly inflated, but the GM tobacco plants still carried less than a third the risk of non GM tobacco. By the time this came out smoking had make a major come back world wide.

Past 2030 Nicosticks are likely more common than cigarettes given the expense of growing tobacco. Most cigarettes are a mixture of nicostick and tobacco and only the most expensive cigarettes are 100% tobacco. CAS tobacco is still considered the best expect for Cuban cigars.

Of course there is a nice black market in 100% non GM tobacco cigarettes and cigars. Kentucky Best, Marlboro Reals, and Havana Escuela vieja (Old School) Cigars are the most popular.



They are working on it now...

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03...ette-maker.html

To heck with synthetic tobacco and low cancer causing plants, the world has had these electronic cigarettes for a few years now, though they are not approved by the FDA here in the US.

News site with Article about E-Cigs

In My own games I usually have at least one character that smokes something habitually, even if they do not take the addiction. As a note no one in my group actually smokes.

BlacKat

I was referring to a comment about addiction possibly being a general non-issue in the sixth world.

But yes, for nicotine smoking, self-conditioning to certain tactile stimuly (having the cigarette to fondle and cling to, sucking on it, inhaling and exhaling) are what constitutes the habituation, as the initial and even at that point very minor "kick" one gets out of smoking (amounting to nothing but slight dizzynes and probably a little nausea) wears off long before addiction comes into play.
It has often been stated that these haptic informations are linked to very primordial experiences of nurturing (leading to cigarettes being dubbed "adult pacifiers"), which might explain their strong appeal.
Positive initial feedback from the peer group may be another crucial factor.

Don't know wether any of this is true, but the effect is definitely there and, in my opinion and speaking from personal experience as a long-time chain smoker, a much bigger problem than the rather moderate symptoms of physical withdrawal.

Same goes for other intoxicants, even though withdrawal may be much more painful in these cases.
But just consider that there's a very high percentage of people who get hooked again after months or even years of abstinence from alcohol, heroin and the like.
They're completely clean at that point, there's no physical substance craving whatsoever, and still they keep coming back to their old habits.

As well, there's addiction issues with substances who aren't even physically addictive in the first place.
The body doesn't develop any cravings for most recreational drugs -in fact alcohol, nicotin, barbiturates or heroin are the exception rather than the norm in that regard- and still, people habitually consume substances such as marijuana or amphetamine.

Moreover, even in the case of physically addictive substances (i tend to avoid the terms "hard" and "soft" drug, as they are both poorly defined and unclear about the real risks from consuming a given substance, which depends on a large variety of different risks), users often develop habitual consumption patterns before they get hooked physically.
This may not be true in the case of nicotine, which causes physical dependency very quickly, but it's certainly the case for most alcoholics, who get used to drinking daily sometimes years before "the shakes" start to kick in.



Of course, to bring this back to ingame issues, there's PAB in SR, so there is a valid and reliable cure for mental habituation to a substance in the 2070s.
But i certainly wouldn't undergo brainwashing just to quit smoking, especially if i could as well get a new set of cloned lungs instead of letting some shrink screw with my head.
Of course, the possibility of PAB treatment indicates that the upper class (once more, seeing a pattern here?) may have very few cases of burnout level addiction, if any.
Which reinforces statements in Arsenal how common substance abuse is even among the elite, as long as it doesn't affect the bottom line.
And smoking cigarettes certainly doesn't, quite to the contrary.

So i completely agree with everyone here who believes that smoking will be more widespread and accepted in SR than in the contemporary USA.

The UCAS certainly, the CAS I'm not so sure about. Having a quick look at a map of the different current day states and how much state tax they levy on cigarettes aside from Texas and Oklahoma the states that become the CAS seem to have the lowest taxes whilst the states that make up the UCAS mostly have the highest taxes, especially the north-eastern states. And then you've got the tax levels that the Canadian provinces impose on cigarettes which are pretty steep IIRC. Since the CAS generally seems much more libertarian to me than the UCAS I'd also guess that the Federal taxes are much lower south of the border so I could see a lot of potential for cigarette smuggling between individual states and between states in the UCAS and CAS.

Cigarette smuggling is a big business today, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Note also that though Law Enforcement agencies will make half-hearted efforts to stop cigarette smuggling, their focus is going to be on guns and BTLs rather than Camels.

Cybperpunk 2020 had those amusing flavored/scented cigarettes, not unlike the sweet mini-cigars you can buy at smoke shops and gas stations in real life.

Great flavors like:
Strawberry
Vanilla
Chocolate
Pepperoni Pizza
Hashish

Those things always reminded me of the Slurpy-Soy! shakes from Food Fight. (Now in Classic Purple flavor!)

-paws

If people in SR's 2070s don't smoke, how am I supposed to slip the guard going on break his Laés laced cigarette? Or have a good excuse for smoking that scent masking cigarette near the chem-sniffer checkpoint?

Amusingly enough, my night elf has a quickened spell on him -- sustained destruction of tobacco in an area effect. He can't stand the stuff, and he's a neat-freak, so this is his 'silent objection'.

now THAT is a nice and cute way to annoy people as a mage O.o
i am SO stealing that one *snickers*
Wish that worked in real life too . . even if that meant a slow and gruesome death for me ^^

Well, a strong part of Cyberpunk (Which Shadowrun is, no doubt) is Film Noir, where everyone smoked. So, yeah, the Coffin Nails are still selling strongly. The Tobacco is probably vat grown and has who knows what kind of addicting chemicals added to it (Save for the Indian Smokes, which are just Tobacco, a good reason to run to the Native Lands!), but how is that different from today?

Anyhow, replacement lungs are cheap now, aren't they?

And needing to pay for Cancer-Curing Treatments is as good a reason for a SINner to go Shadowrunning as any other. Not to mention needing to have it done at a Shadow Clinic, as any legit operation will get the Revenue Service wondering how you got the money for it. And that gives Mr. Johnson and the Street Cutter leverage on the poor guy, pulling him deeper into the Shadows...

Damn, now I want to play a SINner that's dying of Cancer.