Correlating Smoking Bans with Hospitalization

Great Debates
41

{groan}

gay sex – same as straight sex, is easily safe when not reckless, two people having gay sex doesn’t have anything to do with you (unless you’re part of it), so two people having gay sex aren’t going to make you get AIDS.
sex in general = see above
motorcycles = have a usefulness that out weighs the risk, safe we done correctly, is unlikely to kill someone other than the driver
cars = see motorcycles
jobs = are you fucking kidding me
Democrats, Republicans = see jobs
fast food = no more deadly than slow food, safe when consumed in just less than excess, someone else eating fast food is going to make you fat
prescribed drugs = prescribed for a reason, probably to prevent death, illness, or injury, safe when taken correctly
suntanning = stupid, careless, doesn’t hurt you if someone else does it

Banning smoking in a workplace, restaurant, or bar doesn’t stop you from smoking. You are free to inhale as much legal shit as you want. It just means that now the rest of us are free to breath smoke-free air. Your right to swing your fist ends with my right to avoid cardio/pulmonary complications.

A day when a businessman had control? When exactly was this magical era?

You want to smoke in a bar, I want to be able to piss under the table and take a shit on the seat next to you.

As far as I can tell, without a smoking ban businesses are NOT free to ban smoking. Bordering municipalities are the best example where if one side bans smoking and the other doesn’t, business drifts towards the side with smoking. Ban it on both sides and business goes back to normal. Owners who want to ban smoking on their own can’t, sort of like trying to own an 18c cotton plantation without slaves.

This study highlighted the dramatic health consequences of anti-smoking legislation. Other studies are disproving the ridiculous notion that banning smoking hurts business.

42

(Emphasis mine) This isn’t good news.

43

Heck, since I recreate the 1750s semi-professionally, going back to Teddy would barely be a start! But I would settle for say 1972 if I had to. Just to keep things more about “you youngsters”. :smiley:

You didn’t; I did. But the tone (or implication) is almost unavoidable from these great debates. And I too enjoy clear air; which is why I want to see smoking banned from actual public space such as sidewalks and parks - but that is yet another debate.

Actually, I’m free to inhale just about anything; legal or not. Cool thing about being an American. :slight_smile: Like with all the things I listed, I get to look at my life and lifestyle and pick and choose my risks. I can even protest for and against things and try to win others to “my side”. I can embrace every study that validates my concerns and pretty much ignore the rest. And that, indeed, is a very cool thing.

However, if my right to smoke truly ended at your cardio/pulmonary complications, the so-called bans would be on smoking on the sidewalk, outside buildings and other places you can’t avoid. Bars you can easily avoid; just don’t go inside! :smack:

After the snip; since we’re here to celebrate studies that highlight ridiculous notions, lets never forget that inn 2007, The New England Journal of Medicine (hardly a pro-tobacco publication) estimated an individual would need to spend 4,000 hours in a smoke filled room to inhale the amount of smoke in one cigarette.

18th Century and you may have me. However by the 19th century industrialization, improvements in farming techniques and equipment, as well as other economic factors had already begun to make slavery less than required for the production of cotton. If you look at the number of plantations using slaves in 1860 compared to say 1760, you will probably see that clearly. And you can pick any state you wish from Virginia to Georgia to where-ever. Yes, the Civil War was needed to end all slavery; slavery would not have ended without the War and Emancipation. But - you still haven’t said this is about banning all tobacco, have you?

Another take on your observation oif the economics would be that smokers are good customers in certain businesses; free spending and fun to be around. Anti-smokers on the other hand are cheap and little fun to be around. Since non-smokers (those who do not see themselves as smokers but who have no real ax to grind against smoking) outnumber us both and have the most dollars to spend, this debate may outlive us all.

44

Since you’re quoting “The New England Journal of Medicine” (cite?), here’s what they had to say about Ireland’s historic move in 2004 to become the first nation to implement a comprehensive smoking ban in indoor workplaces:

*"Historians may someday view Ireland’s bold move as a tipping point for global public health. Previous actions worldwide had stemmed from mounting scientific evidence, summarized most recently in the 2006 U.S. Surgeon General’s report, confirming that exposure to secondhand smoke leads to premature death and disease, including lung cancer and ischemic heart disease…When Ireland enacted its smoke-free policy, startled observers wondered whether other countries would follow suit. The answer came within months, when New Zealand successfully implemented a comprehensive ban. Global momentum has since accelerated, with a host of additional countries enacting policies within a few years…Though the United States lacks a federal policy, 17 states and dozens of municipalities are recognized as having smoke-free public places. …

Studies indicate that most smokers want to quit but are unable to do so. Smoke-free policies remove the social stimuli that promote relapse, motivating smokers to decrease consumption and quit…

The first few years of the 21st century have made possible what was once considered impossible. In the face of an escalating pandemic, a global haze may be starting to lift. We are witnessing a public health evolution in which the once-extraordinary is rapidly becoming the social norm. Making smoking history moves us closer to reaffirming the right to the highest standard of human health for all."*

In the face of these changes, the pro-indoor smoking forces are pretty much reduced to lame wisecracks about how nonsmokers have less fun. That much is true - as a group we are far less likely to enjoy the giddy experience of hauling around our own personal oxygen tank or speaking through an artificial larynx.

I regret that I do not share these good times.

45

The curious thing to me is that your cite uses the original 1999 cite they ran in its footnotes. You have to respect any publication that plays all sides as they do. I also like their article from around the same time as your cite:
“The United States is approaching a “tobacco tipping point” — a state of greatly reduced smoking prevalence. There are already low rates of smoking in some segments of the population, including physicians (about 2%), people with a postgraduate education (8%), and residents of the states of Utah (11%) and California (14%).25 When Kaiser Permanente of northern California implemented a multisystem approach to help smokers quit, the smoking rate dropped from 12.2% to 9.2% in just 3 years.25 Two basic strategies would enable the United States to meet its Healthy People 2010 tobacco-use objective of 12% population prevalence: keep young people from starting to smoke and help smokers quit. Of the two strategies, smoking cessation has by far the larger short-term impact. Of the current 44.5 million smokers, 70% claim they would like to quit.20 Assuming that one half of those 31 million potential nonsmokers will die because of smoking, that translates into 15.5 million potentially preventable premature deaths.20,26 Merely increasing the baseline quit rate from the current 2.5% of smokers to 10% — a rate seen in placebo groups in most published trials of the new cessation drugs — would prevent 1,170,000 premature deaths. No other medical or public health intervention approaches this degree of impact. And we already have the tools to accomplish it.14,27”

Funny how bans don’t seem to be in the equation there. :wink:

As for after the snip; just wait - you may just have the pleasure before you die. I hope not, but that is a very real possibility.

Speaking from personal experience, the people I have known with O2 as their constant companion were, for the most part, tobacco free in lifestyle and work. Some of the ones with the artificial devices for speaking were rabid anti-smokers, people who wanted smoking banned everywhere. Now if they had picked smoking or being tobacco free over the dip and wad tobacco they used ----- maybe things would be different. I’ve known smokers in their 90s leading happy lives and folks much like yourself dieing from slow and horrible cancers, heart disease, and lung diseases. Fate can be a fickle bitch sometimes.

46

What exactly do you mean by this? Their references include the 2006 Surgeon General’s Report on the hazards of secondhand smoke. What supports your claim that they “play all sides”??

Why is it “funny” that they ran a specific article (or appear to have - you are deficient on links) that praised a particular effective approach to reducing smoking-related mortality? Is this another exposition of the tired paranoid meme about how indoor smoking bans are implemented solely to “control” people?

Thanks for the thought (I seem to have touched a nerve in referring to the good times smokers enjoy as they age), but I’m taking what steps I can to minimize risks - including supporting clean air initiatives that include indoor smoking bans.

Not unusual - people who’ve sworn off bad habits are often the most vociferous about the need to do so. A pity that for many long-term tobacco abusers, quitting came too late.

This is even more pathetic than your previous arguments. They would have been better off smoking? Delusional thinking.
And in any debate about the indisputable hazards of smoking, there’s going to be some inane anecdote about how “My grandpa smoked three packs a day, drank like a fish, ate lots of fatty foods and never exercised, and he lived to be 90”.

Never mind that people who ignore those risk factors are far more likely to die prematurely or suffer miserable chronic diseases, it’s the exceptions that get held up as examples. :rolleyes:

47

So that doesn’t bother you at all does it?

“just don’t go inside”

You believe it is your right to do something that means I don’t get to go inside.

I’m proposing a system where we BOTH get to go inside.

One makes me less free, the other makes us both free.

Why is it you think you have the right to cause other people harm? When your solution is, “just don’t breath.”

We all seemed to grasp the concept that I have a right to play music, up until the point where it keeps you awake at night.

What would you say if your neighbour was burning tires? Or pouring toxic chemicals in his backyard (next to your well), piling up garbage and attracting rats.

You are demanding the right to harm other people. Ideally we shouldn’t need to make anti-smoking laws, smokers should have the decency to burn toxic chemicals away from other people. Just like I have the decency to shit in a bathroom instead of on the floor next to you.

And what you’ll notice is that smokers have zero decency (no, not all smokers, I’m sure there are very nice smokers that are very courteous). When forced to go outside their response was to huddle around the main entrance to a building, creating a cloud everyone has to walk through, and so much smoke that the people on the floors above them have to keep their windows closed.

If you have the right to smoke inside, I have the right to fire a gun into a crowd.

48

Its not that high, more along the lines of 8% of tobbacco sales. If it was a quarter of the total sales, I would have expected merchants to be whining about a level playing field.

Declan

49

Nope , Miller banned guns in the city of Toronto

Declan

50

I’m not sure if your being humorus, with the rogue scientists comment but after ten years , you should be able to spot trending data nationwide by now, in the major citys, even excluding Calgary.

Declan

51

I thought of these remarks when I saw a news item in the paper today.

It seems that a Placerville, California man wrote and delivered his own obituary to the Mountain Democrat newspaper, then hanged himself from a bridge.

*“An explanation might be in order,” Allan Leo Peters II wrote in a suicide note that was posted, in part, on the newspaper’s Web site Wednesday.

“Yes, I have hanged myself (At least I hope I did). … I have had emphysema for the past few years, and lately it has been really hard to struggle to even catch a breath. I really cannot convey to you how very hard it was even to try to take a very deep breath. … My life has been drastically altered in the past few years, and I believe in euthanasia.”… An envelope containing Peters’ obituary and his suicide note appeared at the Mountain Democrat on Tuesday night but went unopened until about 8 a.m. Wednesday, “about a half-hour too late,” said Ken Paglia, the newspaper’s reporter covering the story.

“The envelope included a picture, apparently of Peters, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth,” the Mountain Democrat reported. “He is wearing a baseball cap with ‘True Value’ written on it.”*

I guess his life was different, at that. :cool:

Those of us who don’t smoke prefer to pick our own life-changing experiences, rather than having smokers do it for us with secondhand smoke. I expect the CMA Journal article showing a decline in hospitalizations after the public smoking ban was instituted in Toronto, to provide further ammunition for groups seeking to extend such bans to other jurisdictions.

52

I’ll quote the earliest cite exactly (check the footnotes of some of your cites when you get a chance)
“Conclusions Passive smoking is associated with a small increase in the risk of coronary heart disease. Given the high prevalence of cigarette smoking, the public health consequences of passive smoking with regard to coronary heart disease may be important.”
We can debate just how prevalent smoking is (I doubt its all that prevalent) and just what the word “may” means but what we have here is a small increase. Hmmmm - makes me wonder. Are there other behaviors out there more prevalent that promote more harm?

Here - let me Google that for you:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/12/1221
and on the earlier study:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/340/12/920

And if it isn’t about control, why aren’t we putting “1-800-stop-smoking” numbers on every tobacco product rather than trying to run bars and taverns?

ROFL! Sorry to say that thanks to the prescription from my doctor, my nerves are pretty much bulletproof. I do, however, love being able to revisit “Mr Obvious” when I can. You keep supporting those bans and I’ll keep supporting things that have already proven effective; some day we may just meet at a rally somewhere.

You haven’t looked at oral cancers, the rise in chewing tobacco use, and its effects on the young I take it? You say smoking in bars is evil and I say all tobacco is evil. Minor difference but an interesting one. But your being a reformed smoker and not a reformed dipper may have something to do with that.

Well, since we all ignore risk factors and put ourselves at risk of chronic diseases and premature death I will ask again: what makes smoking in bars special? Why is it the one example you hold up?

Now if you were able to tell me that ending all indoor smoking, including homes, would end all chronic disease and suffering, that ending smoking would somehow end ignorance of all the risk factors we face every day, then you got me on your side.

Actually you picked a bad person for that argument - my neighbor basically took a modern version of Agent Orange to kill all his grass and shrubs (he really hates lawn care) and turned his yard and small areas of mine into a mud puddle and dust storm waiting for the right weather to happen. Not only have I not complained, I wouldn’t trade him for you or many of the other people I have met through these various message boards. He’s never told me how to live - why should I tell him? Doubt me? I’ll send you pictures via e-mail and if you give me a street address I can have him swear to a statement that the above is indeed accurate.

Now about that music ------ there are a couple “boom cars” that run up and down California Ave keeping me awake at night. Again, I’m not kidding about this. Are you saying the solution is to ban car audio systems? It would solve the problem; about as well as banning smoking in bars solves the problem of tobacco and its impact on the health of us all.

Here - let me get the petition and pen ready for you. :smiley:

53

Sure, you could spot trends, but that is all it would be, trends. If you think about the backlash against this one study, that had controls had a modest about of scientific rigor, imagine the backlash against a reported “trend.” You yourself dismissed this study as, “Sounds like what the climate control people did.” I would expect your dismissal to be ten fold of a reported trend.

To try and isolate the effects of smoking in the workplace and restaurants is extremely difficult. The study compared Toronto to two cites without smoking bans, and to various diseases that aren’t supposed to be tied to second hand smoke.

As I said before, comparing cities between two different provinces wouldn’t be statistically significant, there are just too many other factors at play. To report a “trend” would be irresponsible and simply add fuel to the pro-smoking lobby.

If I told you over a 10 year period PEI had a 43% decrease in erectile dysfunction as compared to Quebec, would that mean anything?

54

This I had to single out because you made a point I’ve been trying to get to in past threads.

Yes - some smokers have zero decency. But in a manner of speaking its caused by us (us who are not big fans of Big Tobacco and what tobacco does in this country) being idiots. Huge world class frikkin idiots. We’re the ones who forced them outside and made them everyone’s problem! What did we think they were going to do? Stop smoking? Yeah - like that’s ever worked before with any other substance or activity people enjoy.

We’re the ones who banned (in some states) all indoor smoking, even in bars. And we said “you go outside”. Look at the Ohio ban for example. Then we (me above many as you would know from earlier threads) get all pissy about them smoking on sidewalks and bus stops and the like. But by God we’re going to keep those bars smoke-free, aren’t we?

Fighting ignorance is tough sometimes.

Lets try this instead: lets ban all smoking in actual public places like sidewalks and parks and let the tavern owners decide for themselves. We may just find ourselves ahead of the curve for once.

55

I suppose the real reason for the controversy is that, for reasons I don’t understand, simply asking someone not to start a fire where I am eating my dinner is rude.

Go figure that one.

Tris

56

Full disclosure - I am a smoker. I also enjoy going to places where no smoking is allowed, because I smoke less and reek less.

But, IMO, none of the above matters. You can bring up the old canard about the “right to swing your fist…etc.” and replace it with “cardio-pulmonary health” but that is not the issue that should be debated.

I think that, yes, you have the right to make the decisions for your own lungs. And, in the same way, a business owner has the right to make the decision about smoking in his business. A business owner doesn’t care about anyone’s lungs, they care about their pocketbook. This is the controlling factor, which makes anyone’s lungs immaterial.

I fail to see why a town/state/country has the right to ban, by threat of force, smoking in a private business. In practice, you would have bars that ban smoking, bars that allow smoking, bars that require smoking, etc. And each of us could pick and choose when we spend our money. If you can’t handle the smoke, then you have to miss out on the Super Fantastic French Onion Soup at Smokey’s. Or, if you can’t handle not smoking, then you miss out on the Super Fantastic French Onion Soup at Healthy’s.

Ultimately, this is just a distraction from the real and very important issue of when the right of the government to meddle in a private business ends.

57

kopek, you are confusing a lot of various other arguments with what is going on here.

We are talking about banning smoking in indoor public places. The reason is that while you personally may be willing to evaluate the risks of smoking, when you do smoke you include me. That’s not cool.

Alcohol has harmful and negative consequences, but if I go to bar and have a beer, you are able to go to a bar and NOT have a beer. See the way that works?

We are not talking about banning smoking, or tobacco. What we are banning is the second hand smoke that it gives off. Do you realize the distinction?

I mentioned loud music, and you responded with, “should be ban car stereos?” That’s the kind of nonsense we are trying to work away from. It is possible for a person to enjoy music in a way that does not interfere with others. Just as it is possible for you to smoke without interfering with others. Do you see the way we’re talking about something you do that interferes with others? In this case, second hand smoke causes/aggravates health conditions. If I played music so loud you couldn’t sleep, you’re health would be affected.

Is the appropriate response for you to just not sleep? For you to move? To ban music?

No, none of those are appropriate. We have city by-laws in plan that ban excessively loud music, played late at night.

I’ll say it again, you can smoke all you want, just not around me. If I have an equal right to be some where (workplace, restaurant, bus stop), that means you don’t get to smoke there. You are free to be there, but you are not free to smoke there. Do you see the distinction? You are free to ingest all the weird ass shit you want, so long as in the process I’m not forced to ingest it with you.

And to say, “well, there are other things that are harmful,” is irrelevant and a fallacy. We have identified THIS harmful act (second hand smoke, not smoking in general), and are dealing with it. The issue of car accidents is separate and being dealt with in its own forum.

If it helps to drive the point home, how would you feel if someone in your work place had active tuberculosis? Think about that the next time someone is coughing near you. Surely it’s their right to spread disease as they see fit. Or does it seem reasonable that they be asked to stay home while they recover?

58

Bolding mine…

No, you do not have “an equal right” to enter into any business. In the US, business cannot discriminate based on race and sex*, but other than that, they can discriminate all they want.

  • I realize this is subject to nuance, and there may be other limits. None of them include smoking, SFAIK, so that forms no part of my debate
59

In California at least, the ban was to protect employees, not customers. There’s a bar on sunset - I think it’s called Tiki or something - that has no employees, only the owner and his kids or something. Smoking allowed…

60

So, should there be coal mines that vent methane and coal mines that don’t bother?