By the way, I just ran across a stat that says 54% of kids age 12 to 17 who smoke smoke menthols. If that’s true, then yeah, I can see a menthol ban as justified. Terrible optics, but justified.
(I assume that stat was posted upthread somewhere.)
And those previous restrictions were to control what people did in public, which affected the health of those they shared public spaces with.
The restrictions are not about what one does in public, but what one does in private.
How much is “greatly” to you? If it saves just one life, it is worth it?
The way that the CDC calculates such things doesn’t seem to be easily publically available, so, sorry, you’ll have to ask them. The only way I can see that they get the numbers that they do is to count pretty much any death that can be attributed to smoking as being caused by smoking.
But, I quit smoking nearly 9 years ago. How long do I need to wait to have a stroke or heart attack before it is no longer attributed to smoking?
I was a smoker at the time, and most of my peers were smokers, and I was at the time not too happy about the ban.
I never heard a single person say what you just did.
So, I show up at your office in 30 years with lung cancer. I haven’t smoked in 40 years. Do you write it up as a smoking related death?
It seems reasonable to do so, as it probably was my smoking that contributed to it, right?
So, this is no conspiracy or any of that crap that you seem to want to spin my words into, if I quit 40 years ago, and today I get counted as a smoking related death, how does that number give any useful information as to what smoking policy should be today?
Eh, I started with regular, as did pretty much everyone I knew. Nobody smoked menthol, I didn’t pick that up until much, much later. (It was actually because I “quit” and had a roommate that smoked menthol, so I would “borrow” a cig from him from time to time, and when I finally gave up, I’d become more or less used to them, so just went with it.)
Kids don’t smoke for the flavor. I was digging under my father’s seat in his car to find old forgotten Winston cigarettes. Banning menthol isn’t going to change the addictive nature of nicotine. It’d be like claiming that people buy guns because they like the loud noise they make when you fire them. Sure, some people may like that, but that’s not why they got a gun.
Even the FDA doesn’t claim that it thinks it will have much of an effect, giving numbers that seem big in the aggregate, but then work out to a few percent once put into perspective. And we already know that the FDA can’t count, so we don’t know if they are using the numbers based on their faulty 18 million or on the actual number, so I think those few percent are widely optimistic.
And like I said, this is going to be a massive loser for the Democrats. It’s been an uphill battle as it is, and I’ve been really hoping they would do something to help to secure a win this fall, but they have done exactly the opposite, deliberately shoving their head into the jaws of defeat.
As a current and lifetime smoker I can honestly say that if they banned tobacco tomorrow I would not complain. I know a lot of other smokers who feel the same way.
Veering? 
ooh, zing!
That is amazing, thanks.
It is amazing the lengths nicotine addicts will get into denial. Nasty habit, pushed by Big Tobacco, kills hundreds of thousands of smokers, and tens of thousands of non-smokers each year in the USA.
And that last is the big point. Smokers can’t say they have not been warned about the dangers of secondhand smoke. Yet, they kill tens of thousands of their loved ones each year- mostly older relatives but even kids.
There is no excuse for this. It is murder.
More or less murder than someone who cooks unhealthy food for their family?
Not nearly the lengths people will go to control the people they think they know what is best for.
At least when we rationalize our use of addictive substances, us addicts know what we are addicted to.
If someone has accepted the risks involved in smoking, who are you to tell them they are wrong? Lots of people do dangerous things that can get them killed. Is there something particular about endangering oneself through smoking that you cannot tolerate, or once you have banned smoking entirely and gone door to door to confiscate any tobacco products, will you go after the next dangerous activity on your list with as much gusto?
Which is why I can get behind public smoking bans, even if I didn’t much like them personally.
But, once again, such things do take time to work their way through. You are wanting to base public policy based on numbers that were baked in decades ago.
So, I sit in my car, or my house, by myself, and smoke a cigarette. Who am I murdering?
It’s not like a toddler may find my pack of cigs in the couch cushions and accidently kill someone with it.
Most of the evidence on secondhand smoke is weak and hardly persuasive that it was that big of a problem. Still was a good policy to stop smoking in restaurants, bars, workplaces etc in enclosed spaces where non-smokers had to be exposed to it against their will, but secondhand smoke is largely a boogeyman and like a lot of the statistics DrDeth has posted in this thread dramatically exaggerated.
The way it works around here (and in general for anyone making a dubious claim) is that the claimant is the one who must provide evidence.
Will this prediction will turn out to be as accurate as smokers’ dire prediction of economic doom for vast numbers of bars and restaurants faced with smoking bans (the preponderance of evidence instead has shown a neutral or even positive impact)?
I suspect that while some percentage of the ever-shrinking pool of smokers might be indignant enough to make a menthol ban their overriding issue, it won’t be enough to make a difference, seeing that 1) there are a lot more compelling issues facing voters, 2) most voters are smart enough not to confuse the FDA with the Democratic Party, and 3) there are a lot of people (including some smokers, ex-smokers and those who are interested in improving public health) who see discouraging smoking as a positive thing.
Also: it’s a pretty silly argument to say that further efforts to limit smoking are pointless because we haven’t yet conquered obesity, rampant gun violence etc. etc.
Maybe we should similarly stop talking about Jan. 6, 2021 and Capitol riot apologists because, oo, look what’s happening in Ukraine! And world hunger and climate change are much worthier of our attention. 
I don’t know how compelling this is. Is smoking much worthier of our attention than obesity? Google says triple the adults in America are obese than smoke. (90 million versus 30 million.) Is smoking actually worse for you than being obese? I don’t have any idea, but if pressed I’d guess they’re probably about even in terms of health risk.
Also, the capital riot was and represents an ongoing clear and present danger to American democracy. Obviously acute imminent threats take priority over the chronic or indirect issues you listed like climate change, hunger and the war in Ukraine. That’s just basic triage.
EDIT: Google lied to me, gave me worldwide numbers instead of US.
Ha! Obesity death numbers sound about as reliable as smoking deaths. If you Google, after some effort it’ll tell you 300,000 Americans die from obesity each year. Turns out that number is from a study done in 1999 examining data from 1991. So it’s not 300,000 Americans per year, as Google would have you believe, it was 300,000 Americans once, 30 years ago.
What’s the deal with these numbers? Why do they never change? Why do they keep being repeated as if they were measured recently? Couldn’t we at least update these as frequently as we update the census?
It seems the way it works around here is that posters stand proudly and smugly over a pile of thoroughly defeated straw.
The claim that I am making is that the CDC doesn’t seem to make the source of the numbers available. Maybe my google-fu is just weak, and I can’t find what is in fact, available, in which case, you could easily refute my claim by showing me where that data can be found.
Without context, that number is meaningless and useless in informing public policy.
The name itself tells you what it is, “Smoking related death”, not “Deaths caused by smoking.” Which, to me, a perfectly rational assumption is that it counts any time that smoking is listed as a factor in the death of a patient, even if it’s not a primary cause.
You brought up COVID. Now, a smoker is more likely to die from COVID than a non-smoker, right? So, if a smoker dies from COVID, that would be listed as a smoking related death, would it not? But that’s not what killed them, it was COVID. Now, the numbers are all over the place on how much smoking increases your chance of dying from COVID, but the highest one I have encountered is about 10%. So, you have 10 smokers die from COVID, each counted as a smoking related death, yet statistically, only one actually died due to smoking.
In my previous example, if someone who quits at 30 dies at 90 from heart failure, a reasonable argument could be made that they would have lived another year or two if they had never smoked, so why shouldn’t it be counted as a smoking related death?
If I die of lung cancer at 75, after not having smoked for 40 years, it probably was my 20 years of smoking that caused that, so why would it not be included?
I had a friend who died at 45 from heart failure. He had quit smoking about 9 years prior. Would you chalk that up as a smoking related death? Does the fact that he was well north of 400 pounds and had the flu in a year the flu killed an above average number of people change that?
On the other side, you have undercounts. If a smoker dies in a car accident, and during the autopsy, they see that they had stage 4 lung cancer and would have been dead within a year, it would be disingenuous to count that as a smoking related death, but it would also be irresponsible to not take that data into account.
I have provided a rational reason to think that public policy is better informed by having the complete data, not just a single number devoid of context, and you have responded by demanding evidence of absence, which around here, is seen as the most useless form of asking for a cite.
So, maybe I’m just missing it, and you seem to have implied you are in the medical field, so I’m sure you have better access, if you point me to the source of that number, that shows how much smoking contributed to a death, along with how former smokers are categorized, then we both win. You get to show that I was wrong that that information is not publically accessible, and I get the data that I have been looking for to put that number into context.
Predictions are about the future are always subject to failure, the future is inherently unknowable, I certainly could be wrong. I could predict that the LA Rams would beat my local high school in a game of football, and the prediction could turn out to be false, no matter how likely it seemed. However, I don’t see any path where this wins them any votes, and I do see this as a path that causes some people to no longer have enthusiastic support for the Democrats.
Side note, I personally used to eat out a few times a week. After the smoking ban came into effect, that dropped to exactly once a year(minus a year for COVID). I wasn’t that upset about it, but I did like to smoke a cigarette while waiting for my food and after I ate, so eating in restaurants simply became something I no longer did. Restaurants may not have gone out of business, but they did lose mine.
I didn’t say it would be an overriding issue, I said it would decrease their enthusiasm for supporting the Democrats, and once that enthusiasm drops enough, they won’t stand in line for hours to vote for them. Where that line is is arbitrary and unique to every individual, but as a trend, Democrats should be trying to increase voter enthusiasm, not simply hope that this latest disappointment won’t put them over the edge.
Which would be relevant if any of those issues were actually being solved.
Eh, most voters would fully recognize that the head of the FDA was appointed by a Democratic President.
Sure, and they were already going to vote for the Democrats, you are only winning votes if this will make them vote twice.
(I do like how in one breath, you claim it won’t lose votes because people upset with this ban won’t confuse the FDA with the Democratic party, but in the next, you claim that it will win votes because the people who want this ban will.(Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a “talking out of both sides of your mouth” emoji.))
It would be, if it were an argument that was actually made by me, rather than one created entirely out of straw by yourself.
BTW, since you brought it up, how are those issues coming?
indeed. Maybe you can keep making up arguments to deftly counter that no one ever made.
Tell you what, take a poll of people who smoke menthol, and ask if they want them to be banned. If, as I suspect, you get a strong majority saying that they shouldn’t be, then what you are doing is telling them that you know better than them how to live their lives. People don’t much appreciate that, and these are people that we are expecting to go out of their way to support the Democrats.
It’s not a matter that the Democrats can’t do two things at once, it’s that they simply aren’t doing anything at all. If racial disparities in housing and employment, policing and criminal justice were addressed, if guns were kept off the streets so the kids can play safely, then this ban would be asking for a small sacrifice in return. Instead, it’s just take, take, take, nothing ever given, and please come out and vote for me in the fall.
Now, this won’t cost the Democrats my vote. I recognize the current Republican party as unmitigated evil. So, I’ll unenthusiastically make my way to the polls whenever they are open to vote for the incompetent idiots in the Democratic party over the fascists in the Republican party, but I don’t expect everyone to. Someone who looks at the party, and the only thing they see that has been done “for” them is to take away their favorite brand of cigarette is going to be hard pressed in seeing why they should make the effort.
You want to decrease smoking, just ban cigarettes. People may not like it, but it will at least achieve the goal you claim to have. This menthol ban will be as effective as the assault weapon ban, and probably about as popular.
And, how many of these were smokers? Was the death caused by smoking, or by obesity? Which cause of death do they get attributed to when we use that big number to scare people into accepting changes in public policy?
I suspect that an obese smoker would get double counted, and go into both categories. If they had COVID, they’d go into three.
No, the cause of death would be given as Covid-19. One would expect that in a person with chronic bronchitis and/or emphysema and diminished lung function due to long-term smoking, that smoking would be listed as a contributing factor.
This is no more believable a scenario than what you floated earlier regarding heart disease deaths being blamed on remote smoking history. Again, you need to come up with evidence to support these conjectures.
To refresh your memory, you said a ban would be a “massive loser” for Democrats.
Diehard smokers and their allies, an increasingly vanishing breed, have a massive tendency to overestimate their influence.
For someone who thinks he’s being unfairly characterized as a member of the conspiracy crowd, it’s odd that you’re making the same arguments as Covid-19 deniers/minimizers, who frequently tell us (regarding masks, social distancing, vaccination requirements etc.) “It’s not about protecting public health, they’re just trying to control us!”
So why hasn’t the “smoking is responsible for X deaths” changed at all from covid? Surely covid had to have killed some smokers, yes?
52% of Americans can’t name a single Supreme Court justice and you expect them to be familiar with the workings of the FDA bureaucracy?
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health, 2014 [accessed 2018 Feb 22].
- World Health Organization. WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2017external icon. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2017 [accessed 2019 Jan 31].
- World Health Organization. WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2011external icon. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2011 [accessed 2018 Feb 22].
- Jha P, Ramasundarahettige C, Landsman V, et al. 21st Century Hazards of Smoking and Benefits of Cessation in the United Statesexternal icon. New England Journal of Medicine 2013;368:341–50 [accessed 2018 Feb 22].
- Xu X, Shrestha SS, Trivers KF, Neff L, Armour BS, King BA. U.S. Healthcare Spending Attributable to Cigarette Smoking in 2014. Preventive Medicine . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2021.106529external icon.
- U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Cigarette Report for 2019 pdf icon[PDF – 1.1 MB]external icon. Washington: Federal Trade Commission, 2021 [accessed 2021 Apr 27].
- U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Federal Trade Smokeless Tobacco Report for 2019 pdf icon[PDF – 1 MB]external icon. Washington: Federal Trade Commission, 2021 [accessed 2021 Apr 27].
- Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Broken Promises to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 20 Years Laterexternal icon. Washington: Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, 2018 [accessed 2019 Jan 7].
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Best Practices for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs–2014. Atlanta: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health, 2014 [accessed 2018 Feb 22].
- Creamer MR, Wang TW, Babb S, et al. Tobacco Product Use and Cessation Indicators Among Adults – United States, 2018. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 2019;68(45);1013–1019 [accessed 2019 Nov 18].
- Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health Detailed Tablesexternal icon. [accessed 2019 Jan 31].
- Babb S, Malarcher A, Schauer G, et al. Quitting Smoking Among Adults – United States, 2000-2015. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 2017;65(52);1457–1464. [accessed 2019 Nov 11].
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tips Impact and Results [last updated 2020 Mar 23; accessed 2020 Apr 15].
And then see at the bottom? Fact Sheets?
Takes you to a bunch of studies, etc
Smokers have a nicotine addiction. That addiction often causes them to be in denial and ignore real facts
You seem to think that just saying “I doubt the CDC” means something. It doesn’t. The CDC figures are based on science not faith. You can doubt the existence of ghosts, unicorns or that Jesus was the Son of God all you want, fine.
But unless you are a scientist in that field, with published papers of your own- you don’t get to doubt science.
They don’t count individual cases, as you seem to think, that they pore over coroners death certs. That same sort of totally wrong reasoning was and is done by covid deniers. That’s not how epidemiology works. And, no, I can’t explain it to you, my science skills* are not up to it, and you’d need four years of college in the field.
No, you have not. This is just denial. And all the numbers, facts and figures are there. Mind you, quite a few of the studies would not be understandable by a layman.
This question has no meaningful answer. Go get a degree in epidemiology, first, then you will understand.
- I can explain Littoral ecology, if you like.
This is not quite true, while sometimes cause of death is listed as a specific virus, that is actually relatively rare. For example I think the most influenza cause of deaths to ever be reported was below 1500 in a single year–yet we know many years influenza has “caused” the death of upwards of 80,000 people. A lot of times when you die of a respiratory virus the cause of death is going to be more the mechanical proximate cause of your demise, which could be something like “heart went into arrest.” A well-filled out death certificate will list an “Immediate Cause”, an “Antecedent Cause” and an “Underlying Cause.” i.e. Immediate Cause: Septicemia, Antecedent Cause: Gangrene of limb, Underlying Cause: diabetes mellitus.
A common death certificate for someone who died from covid might show an Immediate Cause of “acute respiratory distress syndrome” (i…e. because their lungs stopped working.) An antecedent cause might be “Pneumonia” and then perhaps an Underlying Cause might be: SARS-CoV-2 infection. Covid is definitely getting cited on death certificates with much higher fidelity than influenza, but it’s still pretty hit or miss. One reason influenza is often not put on a death certificate, is in the pre-covid times people dying of a random respiratory virus, they may be dying of one that doesn’t even come back in testing, there’s tons of influenza variants and other respiratory variants that have been killing thousands of people a year for many years. In a pre-covid environment, the hospital and ICU ward is trying to save this person’s life with all the typical pre-covid interventions for an acute respiratory infection, the importance of knowing which virus was not historically that important since most respiratory viruses have limited “direct interventions” that vary based on which virus it is. Due to the pandemic, the testing regime around it, the use of covid-specific interventions like antibodies etc, it is a bit of a different world now–but it is still commonly true that a death certificate lists the most immediate cause of death as the primary cause of death, and then will “work backwards from there” to explain antecedents that lead to it–but how rigorously that is done has always been a bit of a weak point in our medical information/reporting system.
The CDC would disagree with you. For instance:
“Approximately 375,000 deaths during 2020 were attributed to COVID-19 on death certificates reported to CDC.”
Other diagnostic codes commonly appeared on death certificates to document events leading to death.
“…the location of ICD-10 diagnoses in relation to the COVID-19 diagnosis was used to categorize the co-occurring diagnoses as being in the chain of events that directly caused the death (chain-of-event conditions) or a significant condition contributing to death (significant contributing conditions). Any co-occurring ICD-10 code that appeared on the same line or above U07.1 (i.e. Covid-19) in Part I was considered to be a chain-of-event condition…For example, a death certificate with an ICD-10 code for respiratory failure listed below U07.1 would be coded as a chain-of-event condition because respiratory failure caused by COVID-19 led directly to the death.”
The entirety of your post was already responded to in my post in which you were quoting.
You were claiming that “a specific virus” being listed as the cause of death on death certificates was “relatively rare”. My post supplied 375,000 reasons in 2020 alone why you were wrong.