Hate to see this happen...
 

In spite of the fact that I have smoked a pipe for about 50 years now, I am not a smoking apologist. I don't smoke in the house or any other confined spaces (including my car). I don't want my home or car to smell like smoke.

Nonetheless, I hate to see articles like this one in the New Scientist: "Have the tobacco police gone too far?", the jist of which is that, like the whole Global Warming issue, anti smoking advocates are becoming rabid about it to the extent of making a pariah of anyone refuting a finding.

I hate to see that happen. It's not what science is about.

Of course, most of the science surrounding second hand and third hand smoke is junk science at best and everybody knows that. If even half of it were true, we'd all be dead. Our parents would have died long before we were born.

I'm afraid the article misses the point entirely. The anti-tobacco movement is not about any health related issue. It is about an irrational hatred of smokers. Nothing more.

With 1 in 3 US citizens still smoking, can you imagine going through an entire day without coming into contact with one of them and breathing in all that deadly 3rd hand smoke? So, again, why aren't we all dead?

The research in this area lost all credibility decades ago.

That has always been my personal point of view, AEH. These issues start off on the right foot (smoking tobacco is not good for you, you really should try to stop if you smoke), but on the other hand, as a graduate student I rowed bow seat in a competitive 8-man crew for four years, still smoking my pipe and it didn't seem to limit my wind.

Then a generation sprang up who somehow got the notion that by controlling their health environment -- drinking the right teas, eating the right herbs, doing the right exercises, including the right elements in their diets, avoiding the right poisons, drinking the right bottled water, taking the right medicines, imbibing the right wines, etc. -- they would live forever.

These folks are convinced that so much as a whiff of smoke, even the smell of smoke on clothing will severely truncate their carefully defended life spans and render their own compulsive behavior null and void, and they search the literature for any hint that they are right. They agonize over the fact that fish like tuna and salmon store traces of mercury and at the same time provide essential oils and other good things to their diet. Julia Child put it well: there's a whole generation out there who are afraid of their food.

So what was merely sensible advice -- don't smoke, it's a very difficult habit to break and isn't good for you -- gets extended sensibly enough to don't hang around in really smoky places either -- but it's never good enough; given a crowd who believe that holistic medicine works, there's a shred of doubt about whether any smoke or smell of smoke might kill them and a fanatic group is born. It's the law in Nova Scotia that you cannot smoke in a car containing children, for example, and they were only a whisker away from banning smoking in homes with children before they came to their senses. Science takes the hindmost to a new religion where any exaggeration is fair game in pursuit of the noble cause. I don't see the global warming/climate change armageddon any differently.

It's about cost. If the smoking industry were to pay its own way, we shouldn't have a problem with them, but we should hate them because they refuse to pay to clean up the mess they make.

Trying to determine exactly how they make a mess is pointless because it doesn't matter whether or not Medicare, Medicaid, and other insurance costs are higher because of smokers hurting themselves or others. All that matters is that the cost is much higher than they pay in taxes, and that needs to change. A dollar per pack tax is just a baby step in the right direction, and the smoking industry's opposition to that is the reason that this is news.

Exactly so, NovaScotian.

Years ago I lived in a small, rural town surrounded by rice fields. The fields were a natural breeding ground for mosquitos. Every night during the summer the entire town would be "crop dusted" with DDT sprayed out from a low flying airplane to control the mosquitos. The surrounding fields were routinely crop dusted with different chemicals and with any breeze at all those clouds drifted into the little town as well.

I spent much of my life working around and with toxic rocket propellants and nuclear weapons.

Insect control is a necessity where I live. I have to spray the inside of my home several times a year to keep the bugs outside. Spraying insecticides on the yard and plants is another routine action.

And then comes some pseudo scientist saying I should really be afraid of being near someone who smoked a cigarette outside two hours ago because her clothes may contain traces of smoke? That like standing in the middle of an elephant stampede and worrying about the ant on your boot.

The amazing thing to me is that people are really buying this.

I wish the whole anti smoking element would just be honest about it. They don't like the smell of smoke, they don't like the people who smoke, and they want to rid their world of these offensive elements. At least that is an honest argument I can understand. A nano grams of a "potential" toxin is not something I have the time to worry about.

Here's a little honesty for you:

It is NOT a nano gram. It's millions of tons of pollutants put into the atmosphere every year for no reason other than profits to the tobacco industry at the expense of taxpayers and people who pay for health insurance.

... and yes, I don't like the smell of it either. I also have no sympathy for smokers. Their rights end where the smoke leaves their bodies.

A dollar a pack tax on cigarettes? Been a while since you bought a pack of cigarettes, right? The tax on cigarettes INCREASED a buck ten a pack this year alone ... a combination of state and federal increases. $5 a pack cigarettes is now common.... $47 to $48 a carton.

CWT, we are never going to agree on the cost to Medicare & Medicaid. Smoking saves money for both programs because people die earlier. Smokers pay more than their share, with their actual fair share being zero. Anti smokers cannot have this argument both ways by counting the medical costs but not taking into account fewer years of using the programs because of shorter life expectancy.

Agree there is a strong case against smoking. Second hand smoke is not so clear. Third hand smoke is pure propaganda.

Don't think it has anything to do with rights. And thank you for admitting you don't like the smell and you don't like smokers. That really is the crux of the matter. So, why do we have to resort to garbage science to make the point?

By your reasoning, CWT, the brewing of beer and carbonation of beverages ought to be illegal. Carbon dioxide is released from both, by the ton.

A. It has everything to do with rights and the smoking industry's trampling those of non-smokers.

B. We don't have to resort to garbage science, but the smoking industry does. They take one little mistake and blow it out of proportion so they can use it politically.

Not illegal, just taxed. Oh, and guess what? It is! Probably not enough to pay the costs to the taxpayer that are associated with it, but much closer than the tobacco industry.

The Federal tax is now $1.01, and even adding state taxes, you don't come close to covering expenses.

Pfft. Death from smoking is very expensive, and living with smoking isn't cheap either, with smoking breaks, sick days, prescriptions, hospitalizations, etc. You're using some highly selective accounting to come up with that rationalization!

I didn't post this thread to start a war on the merits/demerits of smoking. I wanted to point out that both sides of this "war on smoking" use "Junk" science to make their cases and thus devalue Science. The average person, untrained in medicine or science won't believe truly important results if scientific and medical arguments devolve into "The sky is falling" --- "No it's not".

If the thread turns into a polemic about smoking, I'll ask the moderator to can it.

NovaScotian, I regret to have to say that this passage feels like a straw man to me. Apologies in advance if you actually know real people like this.

I detest smoking, second-hand smoke makes me feel seriously unwell, and I greatly dislike the smell of smoke on clothes. However, the latter doesn't make me sick, it won't kill me, and I do not propose enacting legislation about it. I just avoid people who stink of smoke, as is my right; just as we are entitled not to socialise with people who never wash. B.O. won't kill us either, but we don't have to like it.

My position is that we should make sure that the rules on second-hand smoke are actually enforced, which is not always the case, although things are certainly improving. Give me serious fines on anyone who lights up in an enclosed public space, and I'll give you a burial of the issue of third-hand smoke.

Oh, and I'm not a health food nut either. Chocolate is a food group. :)

Interestingly, when I receive comments while smoking my pipe outdoors they are most often of the form: Oh, that smells good, or That reminds me of my (male relative here), or What kind of tobacco is that?.

There is an element of straw man there, I confess -- :rolleyes: You are correct about the smell of smoke -- a legitimate dislike. My wife can smell my pipe on me, but as an ex-smoker of some years doesn't seem to mind.

I've never been permitted to smoke a pipe in lots of places that allowed cigarette smoking -- bars, restaurants, theaters, trains and airplanes for examples -- but then the pipe smoking habit is not like cigarette smoking from the perspective of its attachment to other activities like coffee drinking or after meals. When bars and coffee joints had smoking sections, I never sat in them -- found them overwhelming -- so like you, I don't frequent places where second hand smoke is prevalent; not because I think it will do much to me but because I don't like the smell of cigarettes either.

Having said that, however, I do think that bars and restaurants should be left to their own devices with a simple notice outside. Smoking permitted or not. People who are hooked on tobacco ought to have as much right to their destructive habit as the obese do.

State and federal total taxes on a pack of cigarettes is $2.19 here... plus a 7 percent sales tax. Average of states would be within 10 cents of that amount.

And again, from the New England Journal of Medicine, the long run cost to the taxpayers would go up if everybody quit smoking...

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/...ct/337/15/1052

You pick and choose what study you want to believe. This one makes sense to me.

We, the public, are being swamped with junk science that just does not pan out over time. One example, several years ago my doc put me on a medication called Zetia to control cholesterol and high HDLs. The med worked great and significantly reduced all the numbers. Then last year yet another study revealed that indeed the medication does reduce the numbers, but has no impact at all on outcomes. So what does that reveal about the numbers from the lab tests? Are they even related to outcomes? Beats me. This is what happens when you use statistical correlations to establish cause and effect. Sometimes you get junk science.

Third hand smoke, medications, chemicals, red meat, fats, eat more fish, auto & industrial exhausts and on and on. Most everything we read in the papers today is junk science based on some loose correlations and totally unrelated to cause and effect.

If cigarette smoke is despised by the general public, then just ban it entirely because that is the only thing that will eliminate 3rd hand smoke and the odor. No difference to me. But, let's quit trying to justify our wishes with junk science that stretches credibility to new horizons.

I think this point is the one that get me, AEH. The Feds, the States, and the Provinces of Canada collect huge taxes on tobacco, so they're not willing to ban it. Too often, Governments are into all the bad habits: gambling, smoking, drinking and their coffers profit handsomely. It has ever been thus with "sin" taxes.

In addition governments know that flat-out prohibitions simply don't work. Here in Canada there's a huge black market in cigarettes -- one that gets increasingly vigorous with ever price increase. Sure the tobacco-leggers are caught periodically, but the profits are so huge that someone else picks up where they left off; after all, manufacturing cigarettes is perfectly legal and so is growing tobacco; the illegal part of it is failing to pay taxes on them before you sell them. Banning smokes means doing so right back to growing the plant -- next you have grow-ops and a lot of legitimate farmers put out of business. The war on drugs has been an abject failure since I was a kid and prostitution flourishes everywhere and always has; bans on things a large number of people want simply don't work, not even in police states so they try to dissuade us instead with junk science.

Yeah, the tobacco-leggers are big here, too. Illegal in the state now to possess more than two cartons of cigarettes purchased outside the state.... even if more tax was paid in the state where they were purchased.

We just picked up a 57 cent tax on a pack. Governor wanted money to fund a statewide trauma system and it wasn't feasible to raise taxes with a recession hanging over governments heads. So, of course, hit the smokers.... nobody gonna support them. Same with DWIs... raise the DWI fines to fund whatever the legislature wants, ain't nobody gonna support drunk drivers either. And, of course, lowering the DWI limit will pull in more fines with the money going for everything from scholarships to expansion of state medical services (read that as new buildings and higher pay and such for the med school).

Implementing a state trauma systems sounds like a great idea, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what one is. They are not building any new trauma centers, hiring new trauma specialists, or such. No new ambulances or medivac helicopters. Think it's all radio/communications equipment or something.... better coordination you see. Strange doings.

People will smoke less and the revenues won't be there. Fewer DWI fines will actually get paid and that revenue won't be there either. But that doesn't matter you see, because the next time the legislature meets all these programs will be dumped into state general revenue funding and, alas, there will be a shortfall and new taxes needed to support state government. So, new taxes passed next session for underfunded programs established this session under a ruse.

Here's a related topic: Junk Numbers or "Why numbers no longer win arguments".

I like that, and I think it speaks to your original topic. People are just using information to be bombastic, and numbers go into this. They only look for information that supports their side of the argument. Thus they find the biggest number they can (on their side) and make it seem far more relevant than it actually is. Good find.

I like the original intent of this thread. It's very very important to not let personal feelings and political leanings distract an individual from finding the truth. The problem is that there is a lot of information out there on any given subject, and it's very easy to read your own interpretation into it. This needs to be avoided at all costs.

I think Douglas Adams put it well in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. I think it was the man who is running the universe who discusses it. The man who runs the universe basically has no preconceptions about anything (satirically so), but he does make an interesting point. Preconceptions only make it so that you can't go into a situation with your eyes open for the truth. ...he may have said it in Dirk Gently as well (or instead), I'm not sure.

The point still stands though. It's fairly ironic how this conversation has run after that first post. Wish I'd posted this reply back at the top when I had the chance...

I like the term "bombastic". Fits both cases of abuse nicely and sounds so much better than "dishonest".

I'm one of those wicked salesman types, I have some very colorful adjectives at times... :). Though, to be honest, I think bad science is a far worse sin. It masquerades as truth but still misleads people.

I think often the case is not so much with "bad science" - as science is really just a process, a process of theory, testing, retesting, discussing (publishing), retheorising, retesting ad nauseum. The problem is often with the reporting of the science... either misunderstanding of, misreprensentation of (deliberate or not), or just plain shallow reporting of - then of course there is our often layman understanding of the reporting of... etc etc. You get my drift.

I am as guilty as the next person of saying "I read somewhere once that [insert generalised fact here]". When really I am recalling my possibly flawed memory of a re-reporting of a reporting of a summary of a preliminary study that is really just the first step in a long process of scientific study. People often take scientific studies as the final step in the process, when they are more often than not, the first or early step in a possibly never ending process of research and understanding. Plus - how often do we read the actual primary source?

I can't remember the last time I ran into a pipe smoker. But if I recall correctly, a pipe doesn't smell as bad as cigarettes. My lungs react much more angrily to packet cigarettes than roll-ups. This is, I am told, because the packet-brand companies put loads of perfume in the paper. Don't know what would happen if you set fire to Chanel No. 5, but I don't want to be around when you try. :)

Oh no! That has been done in Spain. The rule is that every large establishment has to have two zones, while every small establishment can choose, and put an "Abandon breathing all ye who enter here" notice in the door. Result, every establishment considers itself small and puts the Dante notice up. So far in Madrid I have found one (1) restaurant in which I can eat, a sushi joint. In the south of the country, it gets worse.

Even as a passionate clean-indoor-air person, I would in fact be open to niche smoking restaurants, clearly labelled, provided that they were very much in the minority. Or else we'll slide all the way back to the period, not so long ago, when non-smokers were actually in the majority but had either to stay at home or go out and be smoked at; the time when smokers would take no prisoners.

Datapoint, the main movers behind the total ban in the bar/restaurant scene in Norway were the trade unions: apparently the poor respiratory health of waiters and barpeople -- in smoke all their working day -- was by no means junk science.

A most reasonable solution. Don't think it would have come to this if the public places had been reasonable about accommodating everybody.... for example a physically separated smoking section (separated by walls or such) with proper ventilation and separate heating and ventilation systems.

Unfortunately, a reasonable solution is not what we got. Only bars can allow smoking and only then if the bar prohibits entry of anyone under 21. A young GI returning from war not only cannot have a beer with his Army buddies, he can't even go into the bar with them to be the designated driver. The risk of second hand smoke is too great for the young soldier.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me, especially since they haven't been paying nearly enough for the damage they cause.
If that's true, then costs will drop faster than revenue, so it still works out well.
I don't know what logic you're using to come to that conclusion. Higher fines usually mean stricter enforcement.

I don't see where both sides are using "Junk" science. All I see is the Tobacco industry seizing on mistakes made by individuals who oppose them, and then presenting those mistakes as if they're representing the main thrust of the opposition. It's a classic use of a straw man, and it's disappointing that it has worked here.

Halifax is a small city (330K) and a college town (4 universities and a divinity school) so there's a vigorous bar scene. The governments of Nova Scotia and Halifax managed to bungle the whole smoking scene entirely (in their usual business-unfriendly manners). A few years ago, they decided that bars, coffee shops etc. could permit smoking in designated, completely separated (including ventilation) areas (which I found appalling, so never used).

The norm, I'm told by younger kin, was that everybody partied in the main bar and popped into the smoking area only for an occasional smoke. Then, long before those establishments had paid for those upgrades, the city decided to ban smoking indoors anywhere in the city and the Province followed suit, so the bars all took down their interior walls and built exterior sidewalk cafes. In winter, folks huddled in doorways).

Not satisfied, the anti-smoking lobby (Halifax is run almost entirely by its most rabid special interest groups -- the greens, anti-smoking, heritage trust, etc. -- no one else speaks up or attends public consultations), so no sooner had a season of café living passed that smoking on them was banned as well, so smokers stand in the streets outside. These moves have cost these establishments a ton of money AND they have lost custom. Even a cigar club was forced to shut down, church bingo joints lost players, Legions lost bar customers, the Yacht Club I belong to (run by the Navy) had to build a huge new second-floor deck, etc., so while folks in Johnny shirts clutched their kelly poles outside hospital doors for a quick puff, the Province, not wanting to lose any revenue themselves, permitted smoking in the Casino. Sounds typical, no?

No smoking anywhere on hospital property here, by law.... don't care if you're a quarter mile away at the far corner of a huge parking lot in your car with the windows rolled up at 2am in the morning and a 40 mile breeze outside. It is not about second hand smoke, obviously. It is about hating smokers and behavior modification. Ridicule people enough and they will change to the desired behavior. Obese gonna be next.... already started.... running up health costs... it's an epidemic.... take the coke machines out of the schools. And studies prove...... Yada, yada, yada.

Like your casinos, special interest got special treatment.... horse track, dog track, and gaming establishments (only have one... video gaming only because those are games of skill by law... unlike poker, which is a game of chance you understand) are all exempt from the law.

I sense there is a huge generational difference on these issues. For us old guys, the people we looked up to.... Eisenhower, McArthur, Truman, Roosevelt, Churchill, Kennedy.... were smokers. All of them. If one were anti-US, you could add Hitler and Stalin to the list of smokers. So was Clinton, except of course he didn't inhale. Obama was a smoker, too, until he decided to run for President.... rumor is he still backslides a little now and then. Nobody knew or cared who the Marlboro Man or Joe Camel were or what they were advertising.

I also sense a lot of intolerance from the younger generations. My and my parents' generation taught tolerance... we understood that government controlling someone else's behavior we didn't like put us in a position of having our behavior made illegal by a simple majority vote of some body of elected cronies. Better to live and let live lest we all be controlled. That kind of thinking would be outrageous in some of our more liberal states. Apparently, my state, too.

You say these things as if they were bad! :eek: The fact is that smoking has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction that kills, and would never be allowed if it weren't already entrenched in the culture.

You can whine about hating smokers all you like, but the fact is that smokers not only kill themselves, but they take others with them, and they cost us all a great deal in higher taxes and higher health insurance rates. Even if they were to pay the health costs, which would probably mean a tax of $30 to $40 per pack, they'd still be killing innocent people, and that's worth hating.

Ahh, CWT; It's always easy to say: "The fact is that smoking has no redeeming qualities" as if most smokers didn't know that. I know a number of smokers who have taken years to quit (including relapses) because quitting an addiction is not easy, even with expensive aids like nicotine patches or gum. My wife quit several times before she "made it".

Take a look at this little chart plotting dependance versus physical harm of various addictive substances and notice how high on the vertical scale nicotine is. Further note that these are population averaged positions; not all folks are equally dependent. My mother smoked very occasionally and entirely at will going weeks without, then smoking 3 or 4 and stopping again. My wife's mother (my wife is the eldest of 5, her mother just turned 92) smoked one cigarette per day with her tea after supper for about 50 years. An old mentor of mine smoked a pipe until he was 92 and macular degeneration of his retinas got him. He used to stride into class with his pipe clenched firmly in his jaws, put it down for the lecture and relight it during the end of class questions. He quit because he couldn't see a spark any more and didn't want to burn his house down.

My point is that folks who have never had a serious addiction always assume that common sense would see all smokers quit immediately. Many of them want to, but can't. Call them weak if you like; I'll just guess that you've never experienced addiction.

See. You've started down the slippery slope. All human behavior must now have "redeeming qualities." Would you care to list the social redeeming value of alcohol, please? How about a meal of more than 400 calories (overeating causes obesity which causes diabetes, strains the heart, kills, etc., etc.)? What about coke or candy machines? What about gambling? What about not exercising regularly?

Where do you stop the government dictatorship of individual behavior?

I think I've already stated before on another thread... I don't care if smoking is banned forever, everywhere. Smoking kills a lot of people. Non-smokers should not have to put up with smoke in their presence while in public establishments or at work.

Protecting non-smokers is one thing.... but we've gone way, way past that to government directed behavior modification under the banner of science, some of which is junk science. It is indeed a very slippery slope.

It may be easy to say, but it seems that it is more easily forgotten by smokers. If they didn't forget that fact, they wouldn't defend smoking as if it were a right. It is not a right and should not be one, anymore than firing a gun in public should be one. Both send out something that may or may not take a life, depending on the luck of the draw.

I don't have anything against smokers who are trying to quit, but find it difficult. What I find offensive is the idea that smokers have more rights than I do. If they want to smoke, that's fine with me as long as they pay for their own health care without increasing my costs, and they guarantee that their smoke won't affect me or any other nonsmoker. That means that until smokers and/or the smoking industry prove that third, fourth, fifth, etc., hand smoke does no damage, it shouldn't be allowed. It should not be necessary for the rest of society to prove that it is harmful, or even demonstrate that it might be harmful.

A ridiculous assertion. Smoking needs a redeeming quality specifically because when used as directed, it will kill you. It's the only 'legal' product that does that.

Really? What about alcohol?

Again, my issue is not about smoking... 2nd or 3rd hand other than the junk science aspect. It is government interference with human behavior that does not harm anyone other than the person engaging in that behavior. It is okay for government to protect non-smokers.... it is not okay for government to protect smokers from themselves.

Government should not be involved in modifying anybody's behavior where that behavior does not present a risk to the the public. (My opinion, obviously. No "rights" involved.)

Not wearing a seat belt, for example, presents no risk to the public. Neither would being in a boat without a life preserver AND a flotation device that can be thrown. Both against the law.

Riding a motorcycle, mountain climbing, sky diving.... all risky behavior. Should government protect these people from engaging in these activities? What, exactly, is the difference between banning these activities and making me wear a seat belt?

Not sure I agree with that aehurst. Yes, they may indeed die sooner, but they use the heck out of the system on their way out! All those cancer treatments, lung surgeries and doctor's appointments...

Quite so. That was tried for years in many countries. The bar/restaurant industry took no notice. In my city, as late as the Nineties, I could show you a restaurant on three floors, of which one was designated no-smoking; trouble was, they kept this closed until the rest of the establishment was full. In one establishment, the staff even used the NSZ as their smoking-room! In general, waiters would respond to an enquiry about non-smoking zones by removing an ash-tray from one table, or by denying that they were obliged to provide a NSZ, even though the legislation was passed almost before they were born. :mad:

I can't prove it, but I have a suspicion that all this was not the result of any rational market appraisal, as about 80% of the population were non-smokers, but rather because the proprietors of, and most of the workers at, bars and restaurants themselves smoked, all their friends smoked, and they thought of non-smokers in terms of unicorns and griffins. (That is why I find the trade-union argument I mentioned upthread a trifle hypocritical: employees were not, on the whole, innocent victims of smoke, but more aiders and abettors.) The industry prophesied ragnarok if a total ban was imposed, but to their great surprise, all us unicorns and griffins who had hitherto stayed at home started coming out to eat. :)

Aehurst, I tend to agree with your general philosophy: the distinction between protecting me from you and protecting you from yourself has been greatly eroded. Even though I am in general an evil European liberal pinko socialist etc. etc., I have always been queasy about this, for precisely the reason you cite -- where does it stop?

I'm only using this as an example because I happened to read it (sorry cwt, I doubt you're the only one). Isn't this just what we proposed we were going to avoid right at the beginning of the thread? $30 or $40 a pack to cover the costs? Not only do you not have any idea what the actual numbers are, but that's a very highly exagerated claim (I think).

Let's say someone smokes a pack a day, that would mean:
One Year: $30 x 365 days = $10,950
Multiplied by Average Time Spent Smoking ( Average Lifespan of a Smoker (Average Lifespan - 10 years)(67.8) - (Average Starting Age(13). Or, 55 years of smoking.
And then, just to temper the numbers, take 10% off those years, so 49 years.)
That bring us to $10,950 * 49 years = $536,550

I tried to lowball it as best I could, but $536,550 is still a pretty high number... Maybe I'm just not familiar with the average cost of healthcare for smokers, but...

And this isn't the only example being thrown around in this thread (seriously cwt, no harm intended, I just happened to decide I wanted an example when I read your post). Look, folks, I thought we were trying to keep this conversation tempered by sticking to obvious facts and staying away from grandiose claims and numbers. I think we have two very valid points of view in this thread, we should be nice and listen to each other. We might all learn something.

Let me say this about the current discussion. I'm not a fan of public smoking. I have a few reasons. First, cigarette smoke makes me cough and it makes my eyes water, so I don't like it. Second, there's enough evidence that second hand smoke is bad for me that I really don't want anything to do with it on any level, big or small. Lastly, there are plenty of places to smoke that don't involve standing next to me...so go find them ;).

But, there are some complications. I think pipe smoke smells sweet and it reminds me of this nice old man I knew when I was young. And, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I think a pipe will always make you look like a thinker.

To me it's not a clear cut issue. But, I usually solve the problem by either removing myself or politely asking people to leave or put out the cigarette if I can't leave myself. I don't see any reason to make a law against it, common decency should fix most of these problems, right?

What does concern me is that it seems people are trying to use legal recourse to stop people from smoking. It didn't work for Alcohol, so I'm confused as to why people think this might work... The only real cure is to convince teenagers that smoking really isn't cool, so they never start. Most rational adults (at least in this era of mass knowledge) would never start smoking, but teenagers do all the time, despite the knowledge, because being socially accepted is just more important. Death seems really far off for teenagers, and there's alway the "It won't happen to me" mentality or the "I'll just quite later" thought...

I remember the book "The Tipping Point" having a novel suggestion for stopping smoking amongst teens as well...but I don't recall what it is. I should go look it up and post that as well.

I know a lot of folk think I am way out in right field on this... worrying about nothing. Just this month, our legislature made not wearing a seat belt a primary offense where it had previously been a secondary offense. Difference being you can be pulled over and ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt vs being ticketed for no belt after you've been stopped for another offense or been in an accident. The noose got a little tighter.

The same legislative body, however, voted down legislation that would require motorcycle riders to wear a helmet and carry medical & liability insurance. Go figure.

They put a curfew (11pm) on drivers under 18 and the number of teenagers that could be in a car driven by an under 18 driver.... driver plus 1. So much for double dating before 18.

All kinds of proposals still being kicked around surrounding text messaging and cell phones. One bill, likely to pass, would prohibit all cell phone use by a driver under 18, drivers 18-21 could use a hands free cell phone only, and over 21 can do whatever they like.

Needless to say, junk science is flying all over the capitol on all these issues.... each and every proposal guaranteed to save lives and they have studies to prove it. It has gotten so bad that 95 percent of our citizens cannot tell you what the law is regarding infant car seats.... it's just too complicated and is nothing like the federal guidelines which get aired daily on TV.

I haven't had a ticket or an accident in the last 45 years. I don't need government to tell me how to live my life. I don't need government to help me be a parent by telling me what I can and cannot allow my soon to be teenager to do.

Junk science... ala "studies indicate" .... just is not the answer. Neither is government intervention based on these often flawed studies. Individual freedoms are restricted daily in my very conservative state. Can't imagine what California and New York are doing... no doubt in Boston they are still trying to ban serving eggs over easy (yeah, they once banned that as unsafe and they had studies to prove it!)

:rolleyes:
A glass of wine or beer each day has been shown to be good for the heart.
First, it's unreasonable to assume that the average smoker will live long enough to smoke for 50 years. Your statistics are for the average person, which includes the roughly 75% who do not smoke. Thirty would seem more reasonable, but even that may too long, as smokers do harm to nonsmokers that they spend significant time with. Second, during the years that they do survive, they will take more sick days and more frequent and longer breaks during the work day, costing business money and therefore reducing the tax base, costing taxpayers money. Many of those sick days will include trips to doctors, which adds stress and more cost to our health care system. These costs eventually find their way to taxpayers as well, especially with so many uninsured. Next, you have to add the same type of costs for people affected by second/third hand smoke. These costs will be lower, but they're still significant. After these costs, you can begin to consider the health care costs when the smoker or some one they've harmed becomes truly sick, with something like heart disease, emphysema, lung cancer, leukemia, cancer of the larynx, etc. It's well documented that even a short stay in a hospital can run forty to fifty thousand dollars, but these diseases tend to be treated for longer periods and cost much more. Patients can spend thousands per year just on medicine, and that doesn't included doctors visits, hospital stays, or operations.

With all this in mind, I think an estimate of $200,000 in cost over thirty years is probably overly conservative, but we'll use that as a starting point. Naturally, since the smoker isn't paying that cost up front, it needs to be financed. If we use 5% as an interest rate to keep up with inflation (it's been lower, but very likely to be much higher in the future) we can use a loan calculator to see what the monthly cost would be. This shows us a cost of $1073.64 or $35.79 per day. Even if we use 50 years, the cost is still high at $908.28 or $30.28 per day. This while using a very conservative estimate of $200,000 for total costs and a very low interest rate of 5%, when actual medical costs have been rising at a rate of something like 20%!

Truthfully, I have no idea what the cost is to taxpayers, if any. As long as we are getting bombarded with very questionable, unprovable studies indicating this or that nobody will know. Kinda what NovaScotian was saying in the OP.

The link I posted from the New England Journal of Medicine is a respectable study and unbiased. This study includes smokers.... not just second or third hand smoke. How can this very respectable group come to a totally opposite conclusion than others? Obviously, somebody is doing bad science. But who?

The studies on 2nd hand smoke are all over the place. How can we possibly put a dollar amount on that? IMHO.... 3rd hand smoke studies are pure garbage.

Indeed, and I protect my heart regularly using that advice. I would also add that tobacco has been shown to reduce stress... a major contributor to heart attacks.

We both know that tobacco AND alcohol can cause death, right?

Thing about being alive is, the longer you keep doing it, the greater your chances of dying. So we'd better stop, right?

About 10 years ago, a cyber friend of mine used the emboldened part of this quote as a footer:

I've posted it here in earlier discussions, but it fits part of this thread particularly well.

OK, you've all convinced me, I'm gonna go drink a bottle of Scotch, smoke a nice cigar, eat a whole bag of potato chips and a burger. I will be so low stress I should live forever!

Did you even read my original post? Did you not check the sites?

Look, my whole point was that we are getting carried away by conjecture and made up statistics. This cannot be a useful debate if it simply takes the form of fear mongering. NovaScotian was quite clear about this in his initial post.

My contention is, and continues to be, that there is value in our having separate opinions. But we have to either back ourselves with facts, or with logical arguments that we are willing to accept may be incorrect when faced with either a) a better logical argument or b) contradicting facts.

As I stated before, and will state again, I have nothing against you or your argument cwtnospam, you aren't the only one doing this. I'm trying to make an appeal for a reasonable discussion that will foster learning in both parties rather than a divisive argument that will leave both sides far more polarized than when they entered the discussion. That was the point of my original post, I wish we could just do that...

Nicely put, Z!

If you really want to live to be very old, simply move to Hawaii and quit taking generic drugs. Study proves it:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004405.html

Either that or select parents and grandparents that lived a long time.

Yes, you completely forgot that the costs need to be financed, and that easily wipes out all of your $536,550 and begs for much, much more.

If you want to argue that medical inflation is lower than 20%, I'm fine with that, even though the rapidly increasing cost of health care is blamed for contributing to the economic melt down. My point was and is that using 5% was being very generous to opposing positions! That's barely higher than the rate of inflation for all consumer items and it is an undeniable fact that medical cost rise much faster.

You've claimed that $30 to $40 is highly exaggerated. I've shown that it is not. If you want to prove me or my methods wrong, come up with an estimate of the total (smoker and third party) health costs of smoking, use some interest rate greater than 5% and show what it would cost to finance those expenses over any reasonable life time.

I should point out that even a small increase in the interest rate has a large impact on costs, with 6% taking the monthly cost of my example to $1199.10 from $1073.64, or an increase of $4.18 per day. If we assume that smoking only costs $100,000 in health care (an unreasonably low estimate) and a rate of increase in medical costs of 10% (also much lower than reality) then the financing monthly costs rise to $1755.14, which take the daily costs to $58.50. Honestly, I think a reasonable estimate would probably be in the quarter million dollar range, with medical inflation around 15%, but I'm trying to estimate the numbers on the low side.

Fixed it for you! :D

I'm not sure about mountain climbing, but, in the US, the government does regulate motorcycle riding (typically at the state level) and skydiving (at the federal level).

For example, as a US citizen I cannot make a skydive without being equipped with two parachutes. One of those parachutes, my reserve, must be TSO'd. My harness and container must also be TSO'd. My reserve must have been packed within the past 180 days by an FAA certified senior or master rigger. I cannot jump through clouds, and must maintain certain clearances from clouds. That's just a few of the FAA regulations. Most of them have been written in the blood of skydivers who came before me.

Banning these activities would be the equivalent of banning you from driving, not requiring you to wear a seatbelt while you're in a car. Requiring you to wear a seatbelt is like requiring me to take along a reserve parachute.

It has also been shown to cause heart disease. Are you suggesting that tobacco offers more health benefits than detriments to smokers' hearts? Clearly, evidence does not support such an assertion.

Regulation is always necessary when people try to assert their rights over those of others. If smokers didn't force non smokers to breathe their smoke there wouldn't be a need for regulation. As an example, smokers create their own problems when they stand by the door of a building with lit cigarettes, forcing nonsmokers to have to run a gauntlet. It's silly to think that doing something like that isn't going to cause people to want more laws against smoking.
I was assuming he was being deliberately obtuse.

Frankly, I don't care if second hand smoke is dangerous or not. It smells disgusting. When smokers cause my clothes to smell like smoke because they're too inconsiderate to take their nasty habit elsewhere, it's no better or less disgusting than if they were picking their nose and wiping it on my shirt. Heck, it's no better than if they tried to make me eat their snot.

They brought the legislation on themselves by being so inconsiderate to begin with. They demonstrated that, as a group, tobacco smokers could not indulge responsibly in public without being forced to do so via government regulation. Let 'em wheeze and whine all they want, outside, away from people smart enough not to partake in an activity known to kill one in three participants.

As this thread turns into an anti-smoking rant completely off the original junk science topic, I guess it's time for ArcticStones to close the thread. We've beaten it to death and it's getting repetitious.

I don't care if people smoke or not. But when smokers complain about government overstepping their bounds by passing legislation to stop public smoking, I hope the smokers don't believe that I'm dumb enough to believe their lies and rhetoric. One of the purposes of government is to control public nuisances. A very large portion of smokers are exactly that.

Article I, section 8 of the US Constitution authorizes Congress (but does not reserve the power exclusively for Congress) to define and punish offenses against The Law of Nations. That particular treatise, which was a primary reference for drafting the Constitution, proclaims that people do not have an inherent right to infringe on the rights of others (paraphrasing). If those complaining the loudest would take the time to actually learn what the Constitution's framers empowered government to do, they would realize that their argument is baseless rhetoric, and that even the Founding Fathers would tell them that they don't have a legal leg to stand on.

Off-topic is basically acceptable in the Coat Room. Let's just make very sure that there are no personal attacks in this thread, or it will be closed.

Trevor

I've unsubscribed. Ciao.

But it is not off topic! The topic is the use of junk science, which is exactly what the smoking industry (and smokers) have been using for at least the last 50 years. First, they claimed smoking was good for you, then they claimed it wasn't harmful or addictive, now they're claiming that second/third hand smoke doesn't harm anyone, yet they've never had proof of any of these claims.

Instead of proving their claims, they've been very good at framing the argument so that it is up to nonsmokers to prove damage. That's an insidious tactic that should never be allowed. It should instead be up to the smoking industry to prove that their product does no harm to nonsmokers. If they can't prove that, then it shouldn't be allowed in any public area or even around family members. Actually, that's being too generous: it shouldn't be allowed at all because smoker health problems affect everyone.

Would you be so kind as to point out the article that claims third hand smoke is expected to kill 100% of those who encounter it? Or are you sensationalizing, setting up a strawman so you can make a claim of junk science?

Generally, that is the fault of the media and corporate interests. If a study finds that Symptom A appeared in 70% of a sample of 43 people who partook in Activity B, and concludes that there is a positive correlation between Activity B and symptom A, it's likely that some media outlet will report that scientists have declared that Activity B causes Symptom A.

The only thing I see that I consider junk science is when "scientists" skip publishing studies in respected, peer reviewed academic journals in favor of going straight to the editorial page of a newspaper. This is a very common tactic of those parties with a vested interest in attempting to fool the public into believing that anthropogenic global warming is not widely accepted among climatologists. (Not surprisingly, some of those professional deniers formerly did paid research for the Tobacco Institute in attempt to show that there was not a consensus among doctors w/r/t tobacco use being hazardous to users' health.)

Just recently I read a FOXNews article which rightly claimed that claims of 90% of guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico came from the US. The were quite correct in claiming that the data do not support that figure. Unfortunately, they did some mathematical gymnastics, completely ignoring basic fundamentals of arithmetic and statistical methods, and themselves claimed 17% to be the actual figure, which also is not supported by the data in any way. Looking at the primary data and the original source of the 90% claim reveals that the claim was accurate, but qualified, and that qualification was not repeated by those repeating the claim. That's junk science; the media attempts to explain or disprove something about which they don't have a good understanding themselves.

See, if you'd just check your facts:

That comes from this site. I apologize, it's some quick and dirty research.

Still, that's far more less the half million that was proposed before.

I'm just asking for a reasonable argument, I'm under the impression I can't have one. I think I'm done...

Bit of an opinion piece here that is relevant

Media distortion damages both science and journalism

Well, JC, if you feel that strongly about it, why hold back.... just jump out there and say what you really think!

I don't think anybody has posted anything here suggesting government cannot or should not protect non-smokers from smokers or that smoking does not cause death, or even that second hand smoke is not also dangerous. Nobody, and certainly not me, has asserted the principle that smokers have a "right" to smoke anywhere they choose.

As I have previously posted.... banning smoking everywhere all the time simply because the majority think it is obnoxious is perfectly fine with me. Just don't be surprised when that govt behavior comes back to bite one of your own individual freedoms in the name of protecting you from yourself (as opposed to protecting you from somebody else).

People who enjoy jumping out of perfectly good airplanes probably need a little supervision.:) But, as far as I am concerned, govt should not be passing laws to restrict your right to do so. Safety guidelines are fine. Regulating business entities that offer sky diving to the public is fine. Making an individual behavior that affects nobody else a "criminal act" is a very different thing.

You took the response out of context.

When used as directed, smoking is deadly, and that makes it different from all other legal behaviors. Twisting the argument into a smokers rights issue is supporting the principle that smokers have a right to smoke anywhere they choose. It is also disingenuous. When a smoker smokes, they harm everyone — no matter where they do it — because some of the health costs will inevitably be borne by the taxpayer. When they do it around others, they increase those costs.

ALL risky behavior meets the requirements you outlined. We should enact laws that criminalize all risky behavior because if the individual is injured the "health costs will inevitably be borne by the taxpayer."

Is that your argument? Do you not see the potential for that argument infringing on personal freedom? (Forget tobacco, that discussion is going nowhere.)

Neither skydiving nor driving is a behavior that affects nobody else.

None do. Other risky behaviors only affect the person doing them. Whenever they don't, we restrict those behaviors. You can't fire your gun within city limits, drive drunk, etc. Smoking should be no different: because it almost always negatively affects every taxpayer as well as put innocent lives at risk, it should be severely restricted.

@J Christopher
Gentlemen, may I most humbly suggest we are near impasse. In a sense, everything everybody does has the potential for impacting others in a negative way... from using an electric can opener or turning down the thermostat too far, to the more risky behaviors some engage in. I can see the linkage, of course, but I do not want government intervening to stop my behaviors unless it results in harm, or reasonable risk of harm, to another. Control is an insidious disease that spreads and infests everything it touches.

Perhaps my sensitivity to these issues is a result of having lived on military bases as a child and a couple times as an adult. That's an environment where the rules are arbitrary and fully enforceable.... from a dress code while shopping, to lawn inspections, to fixing your thermostat at a particular "economical" range. You really, really do not want to allow infringements on personal freedoms to reach the point that anybody can regulate your daily activities. Been there, done that, it sucks.

Then, again, maybe I'm just not liberal enough.

This is that insidious tactic again, stretching the bounds of reason to justify the unjustifiable. It does not matter that everything can have a negative impact. What matters is that smoking NEVER has a positive impact and ALWAYS has a negative one.

Methinks we're going in circles. You win. I give up.

Not circles! Just never past the starting point. Smokers win as long as they can define the argument to be about proving that a certain level of smoke is harmful, but that's a flawed argument. Smoke has been proven deadly. If you're going to claim that a certain amount is not harmful, then it's up to you to prove that claim. You can't ask the rest of the world to prove that it's false.

A humble law proposal...
 

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I’m afraid that I have not been following this thread, although I now see that it has overheated. Apologies!

A small point if I may: I have heard it said that studies show that clean tobacco (i.e. with none or fewer chemical additives), such as that used by many pipe smokers, is not nearly as damaging to one’s health as Malrboros etc. My grandfather was a pipe smoker -- but it’s been years since I saw someone lighting up.

In other words, a frightening number of the additives are, in fact, either carcinogenic or have extremely detrimental health effects.

First a digression: A few years after we emigrated to California, my father was diagnosed with MS. He was a heavy smoker. True to his Norwegian habits he rolled his own, buying tobacco from specialty shops. So it often became my task to purchase cigarette paper for him. It was only later that I realized that the odd looks at me as a 13–14 year old, and reputation had a simple cause: Californians by and large do not purchase cigarette paper to light up legitimate herbs!

Law proposal
If it was up to me, I would draft a law that compelled the listing of all additives, just as with foods. After all, the substances are even more surely being absorbed by the bodies of smokers than if the tobacco was passing through the person’s digestive tract.

But those ingredients are trade secrets. Tough!!
That long list of additives won’t fit on the cigarette pack. That’s the producer’s problem!

I suspect far fewer people would die.

-- ArcticStones


PS. What do you think, NovaScotian?

I have stayed away from this thread, because as has been mentioned previously it cannot end well. With that said, as Arctic Stones mentioned, the additives in commercial smokes are worse than the tobacco itself. I personally smoke a pipe, as well as hand rolled (well, with a machine, tubes and filters) cigarettes. In the several years since I switched, I have gotten rid of all the nasty additives in store bought smokes. No, it is still not healthy, per se, but it does minimize the risk somewhat. A few months back, I bummed a store bought from my brother in law and to be quite honest, I had to put the thing out after two or three puffs. The taste of chemicals was overpowering.

As I said in # 22, my lungs can tell the difference between second-hand smoke from hand-rolled and packet. Not that I've ever done a blind test, or wanted to, but I think I would pass. Prince seems to be the worst. I was informed that it was the perfumes, but if Stones and you say it's additives in the tobacco, I am happy to believe you.

The chemicals may make commercial cigarettes worse, but that doesn't mean that any other cigarette is safe, and that's what needs to be proved in order to justify continuing to allow their use.

Poison is in the dose. Here, I would say it is up to you to prove what level is poisonous. People die of water poisoning, but people drink lesser amounts every day with never any proven health issues. Some even drink the legendary 8 glasses a day, which is nonsense.

There is even vitamin poisoning from taking too many vitamins. It is not up to individuals to 'prove' that small levels of vitamins are useful or not poisonous. It is up to medical experts to define ranges within which certain expectations may be met. Then you choose your path. Some will only take 'organic' or 'natural' vitamins, assured they know more than scientists do about chemistry. Some consciously overdose their favorite vitamins.

Even there, science disagrees, Linus Pauling was a Nobel Prize winner and believed, spent his money, time, and reputation trying to prove, that overdosing on vitamin C was good for you. Before you put him down, we need people like him who challenge the common wisdom. A great man, he never tried to institute dictatorial laws to force others to be his pawns.

Wonderfully egregious strawman. Fraud? What fraud? You mean Madoff? One man, an obvious con man at that. I feel sorry for the people who believed in him. They where willing suckers who believed that only they knew an irrational truth while millions of experienced people denied it. There is no fraud in food. Fat content is on the label. Low fat usually means high sodium or high sugar. Read the label, take your pick. Don't eat what you don't like. We eat too much for natural reasons too complicated to easily modify.

The Illuminati don't exist. But one of my students had an interesting variation on that. It was modeled on the Sith. I thought it very creative. There were three old men who ruled the world, each with one, and only one apprentice. He could never explain to me how the old guys could be sure the apprentice didn't just bump them off at the first opportune moment.

NovaScotian, I have to agree with you about how the anti-smoking campaign has grown into a monster.

I personally hate smoking. My parents smoked like everyone of their generation. It stank. Smoking stinks. I really hate cigarette butts in beach sand.

But I don't hate my parents. I don't hate smokers, although I don't have any friends who smoke, which is my choice. I avoided restaurants where smokers where, but went into smoke-filled bars when it suited me. I almost hate smokers who throw butts in the sand or inflammable grasses.

Unfortunately, second-hand smoke has become some kind of irrational fear. It is distasteful, but I don't believe it is deadly in any normal circumstance. So many people believe that Evil Is At Hand and are always ready to believe the most irrational things. Things that can't pass any rational examination. One of my students came into class once and told me that 10% of our community goes hungry. Where are they I asked her? She was bewildered. The poor in our community have color TVs, cars, cell phones, and their children are overweight. If they ever go hungry it is so they can save up to buy a newer iPod and they just don't gain weight for a month. But she gave them her money anyway. There really are people starving in this world, but they are not overweight.

We need some regualtions as it is so crowded these days. Regulations should be tempered with a good dose of skepticism, though.

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Good points in your first post, Eliwyn.
May I however point out one hilarious fact: Only in the USA can I purchase bottled drinking water labelled “Contains 0 % fat”. :rolleyes:

Thanks.

That's true. We here are all extraordinary people. :D

That's ridiculous. The people making the claim are responsible for proving it. In offering cigarettes for sale, there is an implicit claim that they are not harmful to the user and others. It is the epitome of junk science to ask the rest of society to prove your claim is false.
LOL! Eaten any Chinese milk products lately? There's extensive fraud in food, and it runs through every part of that industry. Everything from deceptive labeling and advertising through outright criminal acts like poisoning milk. Open your eyes.

I made a claim? Not sure what you mean there. I never said they were safe. It is obvious that your claim that cigarettes are proven to kill you is not true. Far too many smokers die of other causes, including old age, for there to be a one to one correlation. While not healthy, can you prove they are more dangerous than so many other things that are allowed? Murdercycles are pretty dangerous, seems deaths are not uncommon among the riders around here.

There is no fraud in the American food system, that's just hokum. Now, it is true, all Chinese food or manufactured products should be banned, but just try to get that done. Only raw materials that are to be processed, such as ore or timber, should be allowed in from China. No tobacco products either. :D

:rolleyes:
This is so absurd I don't know where to begin, so I'll just leave it.

Please make up your mind. If there is no fraud in the American food system, then there is no need to remove Chinese food from it.

That depends on your standard of proof. Can we say that we know with absolute certainty that cigarettes kill? Of course not. Of course, we can't say that gravity is a force inherent to massive objects with absolute certainty, either. Nonetheless, we are able to draw statistical conclusions with very high levels of confidence.

It is true that 100 percent of all smokers die, and most die from smoking related disease. Here are the numbers from the Centers for Disease Control that specify their age at death. Prepare to be surprised.

http://www.geocities.com/madmaxmcgar...NUALDEATHS.htm

45,000,000 US smokers.... 430,000 smoking related deaths each year. I make that to be less than one tenth of one percent a year.

The risk of smoking is better defined as a shortened life span.... shortened by 10-12 years.

"Obesity and inactivity" mortality numbers are not much different than smokers.... only slightly lower.

I cannot find any numbers on deaths caused by 3rd hand smoke. I am beginning to think they do not exist.

Once again for clarity: it does not matter if they exist. What matters is that the smoking industry has not proven that they do not exist. It is junk science and downright reckless to demand that something ingested be proven harmful before taking action against it. Anytime anyone offers anything for sale, there is and must be an implicit warranty that the item is safe when used as directed.

Smoking has already been proven to be unsafe when used as directed and so it is incredibly irresponsible to suggest that it might be safe to third parties without proof of that claim.

I didn't suggest that, I said I couldn't find any numbers. And, it is not third parties, it is residue on clothing.

For the record, the major causes of preventable death, in order, are 1) smoking, 2) obesity and inactivity, and 3) alcohol.... and there's not a huge difference in the numbers.

Your position, CWT, is that if the Dalai Lama smokes a cigarette in Nepal then somebody in San Francisco is going to die. And that is fact unless I can prove it untrue. Correct?

The thread is not about whether or not smoking causes disease (I think we all agree it does), it is about whether or not the wild claims are based on fact or have they been over hyped to make it sound a lot worse than it really is.

My position is that it requires the use of junk science to claim that anyone is taking that position. No one needs to die for the smoking industry to be in the wrong here. I'm simply saying that until they prove that some one smoking in Nepal will absolutely not kill some one in San Francisco, it is prudent and necessary to assume for legal purposes that it will kill some one. Whether or not it actually will kill anyone is irrelevant to my argument.
Once again for the hard of hearing, I'm not arguing about whether or not smoking causes disease. I'm arguing that the wild claims are coming from the smoking side. The wildest claim of all being that the anti-smoking side needs to prove harm before action against smoking should be taken. Harm has been proven for a long time now. It is up to the smoking side to prove itself to be safe in any given situation (second, third, fourth hand smoke, etc).

My hearing is just fine, and thank you for asking. Obviously you don't like smokers or tobacco companies. That's okay, I don't like anybody very much either.

My problem is not hearing or reading, it is figuring out how to prove a negative that has me stumped. That and your whole argument about exposure doesn't matter.... the mere existence of a nano gram anywhere in the universe results in certain and unavoidable death.

You certainly do have a problem understanding: My argument has nothing to do with unavoidable death. It has to do with the tobacco industry's use of junk science as a marketing tool. For decades, Big Tobacco has controlled the public argument so that nonsmokers have had to prove the negative: that cancer, emphysema, heart disease and other problems didn't occur because of some other pollutant. That was and is the wrong question to be asking, and it is — if possible — even more wrong now that smoking has been proven to cause these diseases.

Agreed..... brain impairment from continuing to ram my head into a brick wall.

Might I suggest that you refrain from inaccurately restating an opposing viewpoint to the point where it is not recognizable? That would eliminate the need to repeatedly revisit the viewpoint.

Unacceptable tone!
 

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This thread has long since overheated. I really do expect a more civil discussion, even when there is vehement disagreement. Thread closed.

For the future, please bear in mind that condescending posts like the following are unacceptable: