Correlating Smoking Bans with Hospitalization

Great Debates
61

I’ll agree with that one 100% but will pose a related reason that I, personally, don’t understand - that someone can enter something called The Pittsburgh Cigar Bar and expect it to be smoke free. That if I go to such a place I am somehow being rude.

If we can figure those two out (yours and mine) at the same time, controversy solved.

Why would I want to go to a bar to not have beer; subject myself to second-hand alcohol in the form of drunks and loud social behavior? Wouldn’t McDonalds or Dairy Queen be the better choice for me? The wiser one as well given the rate of alcoholism in my family. See how that works? So why would you want to make the Pittsburgh Cigar Bar non-smoking or even enter it? Make the wise choice and just stay outside.

Yes; which is why I want to ban smoking in places that are indeed public and second hand smoke should not be allowed. Sidewalks are probably the best example. Do you realize that distinction?

Note that I did not say ban home stereos; just car stereos. Enjoy your music all you wish - just don’t let it interfere with me. Keep it to yourself in the privacy of your own home or in clubs and other businesses formed for that purpose. In other words end second-hand sound and its invasion into my life.

(Who knows? Once we get Ronald McDonald and the Hamburgler that may be our next goal in making us all healthier.)

I could, in the past, enjoy my cigar and be no problem to you at all; inside the Pittsburgh Cigar Bar with like minded individuals. That is I could if people hadn’t interfered with that. Now I guess its the bus stop or sidewalk for me just like I’m told to. So why are you surprised?

Are you stalking me? Must you follow me to every club I belong to, every business I frequent? Regardless of your sex must you follow me into the restroom while I have a dump? You are free to a degree as well - but when that freedom is stretched to entering a bar centered around smokers and smoking and demanding they stop, I have to draw the line. Because you can ingest shit that strange but you can’t force me to join you.

(Someday we need a thread on equal rights. I want to have a baby. OK - I’m a guy and don’t have a womb or anything but by God I want my equal rights. Bloody Romans :slight_smile: )

You are dealing with the problem of second hand smoke? Really? Not the problem of smoking in general of course; just the threat of second hand smoke. And your solution to this problem is closing smoking bars and putting smokers outside where everyone has to breathe their pollution. You and I clearly have two different definitions of what constitutes dealing with.

People come to work with flu and worse every day. I have little doubt that I’ve been exposed to tuberculosis at least once in the past year on the trolley. I know beyond a doubt I was when I was teaching; its one of the reasons I had yearly tests for it. If it bothered me I would get some kind of “work from home” job. I wouldn’t mandate some sort of law somehow trying to control them. We did at one time but we’ve moved beyond that.

If it helps drive home the point, hand me your car keys and the car keys of everyone around you. Cars cause both health and economic problems, cost businesses money, and they offend me. I have no need for one and neither should you, you poor addicted person. It’s perfectly reasonable; you’ll get used to it fast enough.

Or does it seem reasonable to you that we meddle less in each others lives and find a central location/position? Neither of us may totally love it, but it could be the best thing for society in general.

62

So having laws mandating mine safety and entire government bodies regulating them have stopped mining deaths? Wow! When did that happen? :smiley:

I got some bad news for you ----- we got mines that don’t vent and we always will. Just ask the next coal miner you come across; I already did.

(I am not saying do away with all laws. I am saying make them as smart as we can and enforce them equally and with diligence. And lets be honest and admit that they can’t really change very much alone. That is a harder task we have to face more as individuals.)

63

I want to go through this list again to again show where you are wrong in your analysis:

gay sex – currently not allowed in the work place, public places, or restaurants. You choosing to have gay sex won’t give me AIDS.

sex in general – see above

motorcycles – also not allowed in the work place, public places, or restaurants. You choosing to ride a motorcycle doesn’t hurt me. Many places have recognized the need to have “no engine idling” areas. If you’d like to treat them the same, then surely you won’t mind me pumping my exhaust into your bedroom. Or filling your kid’s classroom with it. Exhaust is pretty much the same thing as cigarette smoke, and I don’t want to breath in either.

cars – see motorcycles. Also note that we curtail the “freedom to drive.” We have speed limits, we restrict speed even further in school zones. We license drivers. We don’t allow drinking and driving, why do you suppose that is? The answer is that you become a hazard TO OTHER PEOPLE. See how driving is a risk to you, but drunk driving is a risk to other people. You are allowed to drive, you are not allowed to drive drunk. You can smoke at home alone, but not around me.

jobs – we have long established the need for work place health and safety guidelines. The railings on stairs aren’t just decorative. They are expensive and required by law to be there, installed properly, for the safety of employees. Dido for fire exits. When a job becomes needlessly dangerous, rules are put in place. Compare coal mine safety in the US vs China. Would you rather it be left up to the individual employer? The cost of all those safety features could go into your salary.

Democrats,
Republicans, I’m going to pretend these were typos.
fast food – you eating fast food doesn’t hurt me. You can choose what ever the hell you want to eat, but notice that you are the only one eating it. Bits of trans-fats aren’t filling the air. If your cigarette didn’t emit toxic fumes I’d have no problem with it. Or said another way, it’s not the smoking it’s the smoke.

prescribed drugs – you taking prescribed drugs doesn’t hurt me. You can choose what ever pill you want to pop, but notice the way you are the only one taking them. Also note that prescription drugs are controlled and regulated, for your safety. We have trained medical professionals deciding what you should take, and what it can be mixed with.

suntanning – again, YOU tanning doesn’t give ME skin cancer. But notice that we realized CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, without the ozone layer we were all getting more skin cancer, so we banned CFCs. See how that worked? Individual responsibility, vs group responsibility.

It’s really very simple, ask yourself if you doing one of those activities will harm me. If the answer is yes, it’s evil and needs to be curtailed. If no, go right the fuck ahead. You do what you want to do to your body, and leave mine the hell alone.

Choose better friends, ones that are able to make responsible choices.

64

In a field where there was a dude all made of straw?

65

kopek you are drawing a lot of false equivalencies that are not helping your argument.

If like-minded individuals wanted to have a club where they smoke and enjoy other people’s smoke, so be it.

If I want to be able to buy a cigar, why should I also be forced to smoke someone else’s cigar. I went to a car dealership the other day, and I don’t remember them having any cars idling inside. Why was that?

If I go to a place called the Pittsburgh Boxing Club, should I also expect to get hit?

It’s simple, one is you voluntarily doing something to yourself, the other is you doing something to me. We have ways around such issues, establish members only, and require people to give written consent. Non-smokers aren’t a protected group.

You are again mistaking personal consumption with inflicting harm on someone else.

Notice that McDonald’s doesn’t have topless dancers, why is that?

When I CHOOSE go to a place call a Topless Bar I expect to see boobies, and will not be offended by that site. We have established areas (with age limits) where men/women can dance naked in front of consenting adults.

Why is it considered illegal for a teacher to show students his penis? I see my penis all the time and it doesn’t hurt me. Why would parents be offended by a teacher showing students his penis? Why don’t we allow teachers to smoke in classrooms? Why don’t we run exhaust fumes into school? All the same reasons.

You have no idea how badly I want that. Right now we’re talking about indoor smoking, not sure if you noticed or not. Notice that it’s considered a bad idea to run your car inside with the garage door down, why is that? But then we are able to run cars outside. See how gases can be trapped and concentrated in enclosed spaces. That’s what we’re talking about in this thread, I’m sorry you didn’t realize that.

You don’t need to ban car stereos, again you are making false equivalencies. A stereo at an acceptable limit doesn’t bother other people. If your smoke stayed only around your head I’d have no problem with you smoking.

Do people come to work knowing they are carrying active tuberculosis? Do people knowingly site down next to you, with a positive TB test on their forearm, and hack up blood?

If you knew someone next to you had active tuberculosis? If you could see the positive TB test on their forearm, and saw them hack up blood, would you stick around? Noting that if you leave you don’t get paid, and will probably get fired. Or would you rather we establish rules about the transmission of infectious diseases?

Now, compare someone that knowingly is transmitting active TB, with someone knowingly burning toxic chemicals. Why is one allowed and the other not?

This point has been debunked repeatedly, now I will do it again: We have recognized the health and economic problems associated with cars. Which is why there are required safety features. Why we license drivers. Why we have established rules of the road. Why we don’t allow drunk driving. Why we have speed limits. If you want to compare smoking to cars, you aren’t going to like the result.

66

To muddy the waters further, if a bar/restaurant/nightclub has noise levels above the safe exposure limits for employees, the employees are not only allowed to report it and not work in those conditions, but in Alberta, they are REQUIRED to do so.

Those of you saying that government legislation controlling what a business owner does in his own businiess isn’t right are forgetting that when it was left to the business owner’s discretion, extremely few of them did the right thing. They HAD to get legislated into doing what they should do.

67

I would like a cite for your assertion that the majority of business owners have to be forced into being responsible citizens.

68

My cite is my personal experience with wanting to go to nightclubs or bars without smoking, but there weren’t any until smoking bans were legislated.

69

You’re not exactly helping yourself by quoting these studies.

Near as I can tell, you’re arguing through these links that 1) medicine/public health workers are unreasonably targeting secondhand smoke and ignoring other important factors detrimental to health, and 2) that secondhand smoke’s impact on nonsmokers is negligible.

It should be obvious to you that there are many facets of the effort to improve health, some of which are discussed in the first NEJM article you linked to. And you should be well aware of moves to reduce obesity, promote immunization and the like. Attempts to reduce smoking (through limiting tobacco advertising, public service announcements, higher taxes etc.) have also been made. “Don’t pay attention to us (smokers), go look at someone else” is a foolish ploy when “someone else” is already getting considerable attention.

And an increased risk of coronary disease of 25-31% among those exposed to secondhand smoke may seem “small” to some observers (including you), but, suprisingly enough, nonsmokers are not willing to accept that higher risk (or any of the other elevated risks for conditions like asthma and cancer) just so smokers can puff away in enclosed public spaces.

Tobacco products carry health warnings, as you know.

Yes, I have - literally (remember, I’m a pathologist). Your suggestion that either smokers or nonsmokers are “better off” than snuff/smokeless tobacco users when it comes to oral cancer risks is farcically wrong. Smokers have about three times the risk of developing oral cancer compared to nonsmokers. Here are some examples of how smokers became “better off” (warning, graphic images).

You know better than that. We make a choice as to whether we smoke, overeat, drink to excess etc. A lot of nonsmokers don’t want smokers to make negative choices for us by exposing us to passive smoke in enclosed public spaces.

Secondhand smoke exposure is one risk factor we can control. And we are. And it looks like indoor smoking bans are working. How about that? :slight_smile:

I applaud the OP for presenting further evidence to support the institution of indoor smoking bans. It is to be expected that some smokers and their “civil rights” allies will engage in further denial about health risks, gripes about “control”, and insistence that businesses should be able to do whatever they want (employees and customers be damned). It’s tiresome, but they the worst they’ll be able to do is slightly slow down the drive to make smoking in enclosed public spaces illegal everywhere. Attempts to turn back the clock to “the good old days” are doomed, and they know it.

70

I don’t understand, do you mean to suggest that if left alone business owners would act responsibly, and do the right thing for their employees?

In all my experience, prior to smoking bans being put in place, there were ZERO smoke-free restaurants. Which means that none of them were responsible enough to make the right choice for their employees. Even after other cities started imposing the ban, restaurants continue to put their employees at risk.

It isn’t meant as a slight against business owners, but they cannot be expected to act responsibly. They have to do what ever makes them money within the rules of law.

Nike continues to use sweat-shop labour, and people continue to buy their shoes. Responsibility isn’t profitable. Which means the only way to get lead paint out of toys is to legislate a ban–and there by level the playing field. Remove the option of responsible vs not for everyone, and the game continues.

71

Is this the fault of the business owners, though? If the public did not support these businesses, the businesses would not be profitable. I think in some instances it becomes too difficult for a consumer to know where the products they are buying come from, which is why some regulations are needed. However, if you go to a bar and someone smokes there it is pretty easy to never go again. As you said, business owners are motivated by what makes them money…what makes them money is the public coming in and spending money. If the public doesn’t want something, they can change the business without expanding the government’s reach. I think with the increased knowledge, and public awareness, of the harmful effects of second hand smoke, we would have seen many businesses going non-smoking in the near future without having to have have the government get involved. To me, that is a preferable solution.

72

There you’d have an excellent indicator of how long it takes for people’s taste buds to recover once they stop smoking.

73

You’re confusing two separate issues. I was referring to businesses being responsible towards their employees. Deciding on their own that having a waitress spend 8 hours in a smoke filled bar is going to have negative consequences on her health. Just like having an auto-mechanic run the engine with the garage door close.

Clearly businesses are not going to make that decision on their own. Instead they hide behind the belief that “employees are free to get a job some where else.” Avoiding safety standards is always going to be more profitable. The only way (in my opinion) to make safety seem cheaper is to make them mandatory with fines for failing to comply.

The only other way would be for a supreme court decision to show that an employer is responsible for the lung cancer their waitress developed. Suddenly having employees any where near smoke is a major liability.

So then it’s just a matter of whether or not you agree with employee rights and work place safety standards. Should the government be stepping in and telling businesses how they should treat their employees? At some point, cigarette smoke needs to get properly classified with car exhaust and paint fumes.

The fact that people are dumb enough to continue to buy and smoke cigarettes is an entirely different issue. Granted, people are free to smoke as much as they like, it’s their bodies, their decision. Just like all the other activities that are harmful and dangerous. The problem is that the people who smoke are the same people that think it’s okay for other people to second-hand smoke. So no amount of information is going to convince them to make the responsible decision to NOT smoke indoors and around other people. If they were responsible to begin with they wouldn’t even be smoking.

I really liken this to drunk driving. Basically, drunks are the last person you want making a decision on whether or not they are capable of driving. And over the past 10 years we’ve started to realize that drunk driving is a danger to the rest of us as much as it is to the driver.

It was said earlier “just don’t go inside.” Well, I want to drive drunk, so how about you just stay off the road (and side walk).

As far as I’m concerned, a smoker is the last person in the world with the responsibility enough to decide if we should or should not allow smoking in public places.

That might be a tad more harsh than I mean for it to be. I might have crossed into the no true Scotsman fallacy, but it seems more like we’re asking the fox if we should have a fence around the chicken coup.

74

I note that the OP used the word “correlation”, and presumably nothing beyond correlation is being suggested in the article. I’d think that it would be too hard to factor out the effect of healthier lifestyles generally, rising cigarette prices and taxation, and so forth. Bar and restaurant smoking bans probably have a disproportionate effect on those who didn’t smoke that much to begin with. They might have enjoyed “flirting with danger” when out having drinks, but when they started making you go outside to smoke, in Toronto no less, it wasn’t worth continuing. It’s hard to say what proportion of these people would have ended up in the hospital for smoking related illnesses, if the ban hadn’t been enacted.

75

There’s also some proof that business owners don’t make decisions on what is actually best for their business, but rather based on their own perception of what is best for their business. It didn’t make sense to me for the longest time, but I’ve come to the conclusion that business owners thought that by leaving smoking in place, they were including everyone to be a potential customer, when in fact they were excluding the non-smoking majority. Once a few places went smoke-free and we had a choice, we took our business there and left the smoking places behind, and I can’t believe we were the only non-smokers to do so.

76

Waitaminnit - half?

Half of all smokers die of smoking? I thought it was more like one in ten. Yes, that’s a lot, but is isn’t half.

Regards,
Shodan

77

The statistics are not hard and fast, but 50% is not a hard to find stat (33 to 50%). Also, smoking can take 15 years off your life. If you could expect to live to 80, change that to 65 if you smoke. Jim did a rough calculation on that based on 20 cigarettes per day, from age 20 to 65 - it would be 24 minutes off your life for every cigarette you smoke.