Ok there’s one thing I haven’t seen posted anywhere in this thread and that’s a risk vrs reward breakdown of smoking. since this entire argument about informed consent comes down to whether or not people have enough information about the risk vrs reward aspects of smoking I think its relevant.
smoking risks
shortness of breath happens almost immediately after you start, you loose a significant amount of lung efficiency,
nasty teeth due to the stains from smoking,
serious long term health risks, including bronchitis, lung cancer, emphysema and more.
addiction to nicotine,
the cost of paying to feed your addiction. (a married couple I know quit smoking and saved about 600$ a year…that’s a couple house payments)
whatever else anyone wants to add.
benefits
none (unless your stoid, possibly the only human on the planet to gain something from smoking.)
sure there’s the IMAGINED benefit of stress relief one feels when lighting up, of course since the relief you are feeling is just your addiction being fed this cant be called a benefit.
It’s not like getting addicted to cigarettes is easy, no one lights up their first cigarette, takes a drag, slowly exhales, and says “THIS IS GREAT!” more like you light up, take a drag, think wow this tastes like SHIT! and then proceed to hack up a lung. If you remove the social aspects of smoking and told someone that they could Pay money to a big company for a product with Zero Benefits for themselves, that was personally addictive, and had serious long term health benefits do you really think they would jump at the idea?
So if my argument has any merit at all (and I leave that in your able hands to decide) I have to say that no, people don’t have informed consent, they are usually lacking in the big picture kind of view of smoking to the point where it becomes an argument about the health issues alone, and I think that’s just a piece of the picture.
ok not to offend you here but you’re saying that if I get a 12 year old girl pregnant she should be treated as an adult in this case? no child rape charges? no assault/statutory charges? I mean she’s a child engaged in “adult activities”. I don’t know if your argument is entirely wrong or if I just have a personal distaste for the implications of it.
and one more thing, is it possible for the mods to have a certain poster’s text all appear in either white or grey? justhink about it will ya?
If, to be fully informed, one must have actually felt the potential negative effects of something, we can never be fully informed about anything lethal or potentially lethal whatsoever. As a great deal of normal behavior involves risk taking to some degree (in fact, I think one would be hard pressed to think of an example that doesn’t, all the way down to a miniscule chance of food poisoning from the apple example by Gadarene), most choices would be uninformed. This criterion of “being informed” makes (almost) all choices uninformed, and does so without referencing time at all. Now all we have are “degrees of uninformedness.” That seems a bit excessive, don’t you think? After all, the requirement of personal experience is not present for all sorts of other things, like knowing history, science, math, and so on.
I have no idea why we need to bring up children at all. What seems to be required to make an informed choice about smoking seems like it should be available at quite a young age. There’s making an informed choice, and there’s understanding the societal nuances of that choice. I mean, how old does one have to be before they understand death? Because that’s what we’re talking about here. “Smoking = death, eventually.” If you didn’t know that you should avoid death by 11, I don’t know what to say.
Anyway, that’s tangential. Gadarene, the realized affects of smoking happen to an individual, if ever, far into the future. But even barring smoking, a person will die far into the future. At some point, I think you’re right: we [as humans] cannot count these events in our “calculations”. Because when we start talking about those things, anything could happen. I could die in a car accident, I could be murdered, house fires, floods, blah blah blah. You know what I mean? When the time considered gets long enough, the potential affects of a single decision get washed away in the potential happenings of all the intervening years.
It perturbatively cancels out, so to speak. I love physics analogies.
No offense taken. I think there is a distinction to be made between conduct that the state has made criminal and personal/civil conduct. It is possible to treat children one way in the criminal context and another way in the civil arena. For example, if a 12 year old steals a car, or takes their parent’s car out for a joy ride and crashes said car through my front door because they were negligent, the child will not have a defense to the negligence charge brought by me because they are a child. They might have a defense to the criminal charge (theft) brought by the state. Driving is an adult behavior, and when children drive they are held to the adult standard. So when I say that children should be treated as adults when it comes to smoking I do not mean to say that children should be treated as adults in all circumstance.
Stoid I meant to respond to you as well, I have never been a smoker, but I believe you when you say can be very difficult to quit. I just wanted to point out that the option is there, and undercuts the whole idea that a decision made when a person is 15 is irrevocable until they are 60.
Out of curiosity, if you don’t mind me asking, why does your mother continue to smoke? How old was she when she had her first smoking related health problems and what was her reaction? Did she ever consider quiting?
One point that I think has been lost here is that plenty of children, including me and others in this thread, did avoid cigarettes because of the education that we were given regarding the harmful health effects of smoking.
Assuming that, like me, children are taught a lesson unit at the age of 10 or 11 on the dangers of smoking, including being shown pictures of the possible negative effects or even actual diseased lungs, then they are informed, since for some of us, the information was enough to prevent us from smoking.
If others were shown the information that I was shown and decided to smoke anyway, I don’t see how they can be called uninformed. Perhaps they were less mature than I was, or less capable of processing the information, or in their particular mental risk analysis, smoking came up on the positive side, but they certainly had the same information that I did.
The question that most interests me is what do the people who started smoking at 10 or 11 think could have been done to prevent them from starting? What do they think schools, laws, and/or parents should be doing now to prevent other 10 or 11 year-olds from starting?