Cigars and Life Insurance

[volum]

So I signed up for some insurance the other day and they swabbed my mouth....They asked if I used nicotine and I said I smoked cigars. My insurance agent said not to worry about cigars so I didn't. Sure enough my lab results come back and I screen negative for nicotine...Nice! I remember reading a thread a while back about this and that came to mind when I got my results back. I guess you need alot of nicotine in your system to screen positive.

[Nabinger16]

Score one for cigar smokers around the world. They may take away every public place we can smoke that they can find, but they can't touch our life insurance. [SIZE=1](for now anyway)[/SIZE]

[wharfrathoss]

just wait till they turn on the camera they put in your mouth the last time you had a cavity filled! (j/k, i think)

[woops]

wow, didn't know that! how many cigars do you typically have in the course of a week? and how long was the time frame between your last smoke and the swab?

This is interesting.

[volum]

I normally smoke 2-3 per week, so not super frequently, and the last one before the swab was two nights before.

[blacklagoon]

Thats very interesting. I know with cigars most people don't breath in the smoke so i takes a little longer for the nicotine to get into the system which means less nicotine.(if I'm wrong tell me) So i could see who that would work.

[webjunkie]

I'm pretty sure that you still absorb a significant amount of nicotine through the membranes in your mouth and throat. On the other hand, most cigar smokers aren't getting a fix every thirty minutes to every few hours. So while we still put as much in to our system (if not more, there's more tobacco in a cigar after all), we don't put it in as regularly or as often. I think that makes sense. I've been hitting the bottle a bit tonight

[BigFrankMD]

wow is that what its come to now? christ I feel like i live in communist russia not only do you have to pay an arm and a leg for crap like that but they swab your mouth too? unreal. bad enough I cant smoke in 90% of the places I go not to mention people look at me like im an ass when im out. oh and here in baltimore they have pretty much outlawed all public and private smoking.

sorry for the rant. =S

[winnie]

Another plus for cigars, IMO, is they are pretty much natural as far as I know, tobacco leaves, and that's about it.

Who knows what kind of additives they are putting in those cigarettes!

[rehbas21]

I wouldnt really want to know.

[bmwe28m5]

Originally Posted by winnie

Another plus for cigars, IMO, is they are pretty much natural as far as I know, tobacco leaves, and that's about it.

Who knows what kind of additives they are putting in those cigarettes!

Cigarettes contain a ton of chemical compounds which are not naturally occuring in the body. Nicotine is one of them and tobacco leaves, whether in cigarettes or in cigars, contain the alkaloid. But testing for cigarette use is not too difficult as the list of additives provide for a multitude of tests to be utilized. Testing for use of cigarettes is akin to throwing a dart at a wall and the entire wall is a bullseye. Plus a biopsy is another potential method, but that is fairly rigorous at the moment, but with the oncoming nanotech onslaught, this method should be fairly easy in about 10-15 years even if not nanotech, but instead microtech. Another issue is inhaling the smoke, which is a predominante technique with cigarette smokers and the lungs will be full of compounds and radioactive element isotopes. Lots of potential methods to test. No idea why you'd smoke a cigarette, it just sounds like an awful experience.

Cigars are not healthy, but I like em, so Im going to smoke them. My insurance company has never determined that I am a tobacco user after 10 years and approx 2 cigars a week over that period.

[Lynchmeister]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that the aging process of the tobacco for use in cigars goes a long way in decomposing much of the nicotine.

[bmwe28m5]

Im not aware of the relative levels between the multitude of types of tobacco, but an aged cigar will contain nicotine and my guess is that the enzymes in the dead leaf will probably have metabolized some nicotine, but to what end compound Im not sure. Bacteria (dont worry, its normal and natural, just like humans contain beneficial bacteria, so do plants) will also provide a metabolism pathway. Regardless, the aged cigar leaf will contain levels of nicotine, and the tobacco leaf will provide for nicotine stability even after it has been severed from the plant. Lots of interesting research with this (its probably just a hunt through a library).

[hdroadking]

i know i have been tested, at least by blood test, on two different occasions for insurance purposes. the last time, i had not smoked for 3 days and it came back negative. to put that into perspective, i have smoked cigars, probalby a minimum of one a day, for over 25 years.