Hi Bex, you're up early on Saturday, eh. As someone with mercury toxicity (20+ years of 17 amalgams, just got out 15, the last two in couple weeks), I started smoking in my early twenties at the end of my graduate school (Brown University, theoretical physics). Having entered the profession with very high demand on brain, I noticed at some point (in retrospect, it was after getting a series of amalgam fillings) that my focus and mental stamina was falling. Smoking was the medicine picked instinctively that alleviated the problem and saved the day.

Before deciding to smoke, though, I spent a summer in the large medical library of my parents (both medical doctors), read all there was about it, looked at the family history and concluded smoking would be fine for me. Frankly, without it and with all those amalgams, I probably wouldn't have been able to continue in this intellectually very demanding field.

As with anything else in life, especially the good stuff, moderation is what separates poison from medicine. And, as with foods and beverages, one should stick with the least adulturated products and with the time-tested, traditional ways of using them. I smoke organically grown, additive free tobacco (American Spirit), roll my own cigarettes, no filters (just tobacco leaf and very thin chlorine free paper), about a pack a day. I also take 500mg vit C on every hour during day (vit. C has 1/2 hour half life so one needs to keep it coming). I also take other common supplements & vitamins, as well as lots of raw nuts (walnuts, almonds..) as the main food through the day, home roasted & freshly ground coffe & tea with honey, fruits (hate most veggies), a glass of Italian wine with dinner (the only conventional daily meal I eat). Having experimented over the years with just about anything that came my way, the old magical plant, tobacco, remains the single most helpful health supplement among them all.

I imagine, once I clear up the mercury, I might need less of it. For now, it is the best mercury antidote I know of (probably due to stimulation of internal glutathione production). Having researched the subject of anti-smoking "science" (which is largely a cover for the money making extortion racket), I felt I had to respond to the potentially quite harmful conventional wisdom expressed earlier in this thread. For a mercury toxic person with double ApoE4 allele, quitting smoking (or not taking it up for non-smoker), is a recipe for almost certain early onset Alzheimer's. The remaining five ApoE combinations (E4+3, E4+2, E3+3, E3+2, E2+2) are progressively less susceptible to the mercury neuro-toxicity, although none is entirely immune.