I don’t personally have a problem with them.
It is amazing how much better bars are now without the smoking. I remember coming home reeking of cigarette smoke in the old days.
I’m not a big fan of this menthol ban and I think there are probably better things they could be doing with their time.
Restaurants even moreso. I couldn’t imagine walking into a restaurant right now full of smoke and smokers, even just to pick up takeout. Hard pass.
And again, I am a smoker.
NJ had largely phased out smoking in Restaurants so long ago, I can barely remember it. I know they’re were still smoking areas for a while, but it never seemed bad. I think it was 2006 for bars.
The number is of course, an estimate, but a good one.
However, your statement "If a smoker dies from getting struck by lightning, that’s counted in the 500,000. is of course wrong. Just like the Covidiots who say that if a person tested positive for covid but got run over by a truck, they are counted as a covid death.
The number is not the number of smokers who die each year. Quite a few are ex-smokers who didn’t stop in time, or those who stopped after they were diagnosed with lung cancer. It is the number of people who die from smoking related causes. And it isn’t me coming up with that number, it is the CDC- so you seem to be saying you know better causes of death than the CDC does.
This is not true.
Are you saying there’s no double counting? Not one single covid death is also counted in the ‘smoking is responsible for’ number, and vice versa?
Of course there is some double counting.
Over 400000 American died from smoking related issues.
Over 600000 died of heart disease… some of which were caused by smoking.
But thinking that coroners count people being run over by trucks as covid deaths is just a crazy conspiracy idea.
How many more decades will it take for that 400,000 number to change? I was first told it in the early '90s.
Is there a reason that it never changes, decade after decade?
It used to be around 500000. But smoking rates didn’t get below 30% until around 1990 or so. And Population keeps increasing.
Are you doubting the CDCs numbers based upon your personal feelings and hunch?
My original doubt was formed based on an episode of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! devoted to debunking the 400,000 number. It caught my attention because a doctor had told me that same number in the early 90s, and I thought it was weird that it never changed. And that was like 15 years ago, and it still hasn’t changed.
ETA: Looks like it was from 2003, so closer to 20 years.
Reminder, keep this about data and posts and not posters.
Speaking of data, this chart might be illuminating, it seems a lot less vague then the CDC web page.
It looks like the rate per 100,000 had only started dropping a little in the US since it peaked in the 1990s. I’ll keep looking for a more recent chart.
Smoking is declining, so the numbers should start dropping.
From what I am seeing and reading, the drop in smoking has about a 20 year lag time for the drop in deaths as a large portion of deaths are slow to develop lung related issues led by lung cancer. So that might help explain the fairly level numbers.
Why would it not be? If they hadn’t smoked, they probably would have lived another couple few years.
Right, like someone who didn’t quit until they were 30.
Right, like heart disease. How do they know that the heart disease was caused by smoking? Because they were a smoker.
I don’t think that the CDC examines each of these ~450k deaths every year, do you?
I mean, there are people who don’t even trust the CDC to count the number of kids killed by guns every year, but implicitly trust the number that they say died from smoking. I’d say it’s a whole lot easier to diagnose how a bullet got into a brainpan than what the exact cause of a heart attack or stroke is.
And there are people who don’t think that suicide by gun should figure into the cost that guns have on our society, but they then turn around and count the number of people who find another way to kill themselves as being vitally important.
At some point, it becomes obvious it’s not about public health or safety, it’s about controlling other people.
That’s just lung cancer, though. I think heart disease is the biggest smoking-related cause of death, not least because that lung cancer chart shows numbers (44ish per 100,000) that would only account for less than half of the 480k deaths.
I think I’m doing that math right, corrections welcome: US Population = 329.5 million, 480k deaths caused by smoking = 145.7 smoking deaths per 100,000.
Right, but the problem is that those are the numbers that are used to justify actions taken now.
Lung related though includes other deaths. The risk of dying from both COVID and pneumonia in general is higher for smokers. There more, but I’m not a doctor.
Honestly, I hope the government has access to better studies and data than we do, because what I’m finding between Google and the CDC.gov site is less than useful. We need the baseball-reference people to take over gathering and reporting the statistics I think.
Am I doing this math right? Because if I then apply the same math to the entire world: 7.9 billion people, 8 million smoking deaths = 101.3 smoking deaths per 100,000.
Gee, that’s weird. I wonder why the US has half-again the smoking kill rate of the world as a whole? Developing countries have the highest rate of tobacco use; you’d think they’d have the bigger smoking kill numbers. (A staggering 74% of Chinese men smoke?! Holy fucking shit!)
Looks like in 2016, the United States was the 68th smokiest country:
Yet we have by far the highest reported smoking death numbers per capita. Huh. (Actually, that’s an assumption. I can’t find a nice simple table showing different countries and their smoking deaths per capita.)
EDIT: Actually I did find sort of that but am having trouble reading it, and am rapidly losing interest. Suffice to say our paltry 145 is nowhere near the 400 at the top of the chart for the countries in Oceania.
This is not obvious to me. In fact, I find this post to be veering into conspiracy theory territory.
Previous restrictions on smoking were not about controlling people, they were about public health, and they have been very effective. I see no reason to think that this is not in the same vein.
Whether the number of menthol cigarette smokers who’d quit once their favorite additive was removed from cigarettes is several million or several hundred thousand, greatly lowering the incidence of chronic disease and death for that population seems justifiable.
I’d like to see evidence backing up this assertion. It sounds a lot like the pandemic deniers/minimizers who claim without supporting data that a massive number of deaths have been falsely attributed to Covid-19 when something else was purportedly responsible, and persons just coincidentally tested positive for the virus.
This is a bizarre throwback to the days of the first public smoking bans, when lots of smokers were insistent that the real reason behind bans was not to prevent disease, save on health care costs and protect people from the hazards of secondhand smoke, but to punish smokers, in part because we were jealous that they were having so much fun. 
Usual Disclaimer: a good chunk of my income as a pathologist has come from diagnosing lung cancer and other diseases caused by smoking. Tobacco has been very very good to me. Pathologists now in practice would be reaping the “benefits” of smoking for decades to come, even if we could somehow magically make smoking disappear immediately.*
*I would advise pathologists in training with an interest in pulmonary pathology who might be discouraged by potential lost income from diagnosing smoking-related lung disease to cheer up. Financial benefits from diagnosing chronic lung ailments secondary to vaping will make up for some of that income.
What is the cutoff? How long after you quit until you’re no longer counted as a smoker? 15 years? (I did read that number once; sounded reasonable to me.)