This is all irrelevant. I spoke of the climate between smokers and non-smokers only.
We’ll just have to leave this to opinion. If non-smokers were afraid, I had no clue… not even from some of my best friends who didn’t smoke. Let’s just leave it in the middle, some were afraid, some didn’t mind.
Here you will find all the studies ever done on ETS up to Jan 1998. There are quite a few. Be sure to read the explanatory preface for interpreting the data. http://www.forces.org/evidence/evid/story.htm
Here you will find articles on the World Health Organization’s study which found no significant risk for lunng cancer. There’s a link to the actual study on that page. http://www.forces.org/evidence/files/pas-smok.htm
No insult was intended to your family or anyone who experience that horror. I knew two people who went through that. But considering the corruption in both government and the health agencies to systematically attack one quarter of it’s population using Nazi like tactics, I do not want to see history repeat itself.
Thanks for the links Peter, they allow me to answer g8rguy’s request for a reanalysis of the data.
I guess the crux is if you believe mata-analysis is a valid reearch tool. Editting out their insulting hyperbole, FORCES lists many studies most of which showed an increased relative risk of cancer from ETS. They make much hay of one WHO study that did not reach statistical significance for lung cancer but the more recent (June, 2002) WHO meta-analysis that concludes otherwise they dismiss as the work of "the best possible promotion centre for pharmaceutically-produced smoking cessation ‘therapies’, as it is on the payroll (oops – sorry – “official partner”) of the Pharmaceutical Industry " ::rolleyes:: They are the final word when they say what you want to hear and pawns of your opposition when they don’t.
Peter, I have stated umpteen times in this thread that I. Do. Not. Support. A. General. Ban. On. Smoking. Anywhere. Either you are choosing to ignore it, or are seeing it but finding it more convenient to mischaracterize my position. Now, either provide some support for it, or retract it and apologize.
What I did state was that my objections to amendments like the one in Florida are based on an objection to the rights of property owners to make decisions concerning their property, not on any concern of some supposed “right to smoke.” There are, however, much more pressing and urgent violations of property rights for me to be concerned about.
Squish: Sealed, unsealed, open, closed, whatever — if I do not have the right to be free from tobacco smoke in my home, what rights do I have? It would be one thing if I was living next door to a heavy smoker, and propping open my doors and windows all the time so as to maximize the amount of smoke that gets in, then bitching about it. But I’m not. Can you, just for a moment, see that maybe it’s the responsibility of the smokers in this situation to give?
But it is what you said, or at least you tacitly acknowledged it. The majority of Americans who have health insurance have it through their employer. The employee does not pay the health insurance premiums; the employer does. He does it because he gets a tax exemption for it. Eliminate the tax exemption, and employer-provided health insurance would be gone the next day. And the employer is not going to turn around and just give you that money so you can buy insurance, because then both you and he have to pay taxes on it.
In short: Buying your health insurance for you=decrease in employer’s tax liability. Giving you the money to buy it yourself=increase in employer’s tax liability. The employee doesn’t figure into it.
As for the unemployed, their healthcare comes from Medicaid funding, write-offs by the hospitals, etc.
Americans do not, by and large, pay for their own health care, and unless you have convincing evidence to the contrary, the statement stands.
I’ve already addressed in previous posts the potential barriers to entry in some states for new bars; apparently you ignored them, or in any case chose not to disagree with them.
You’re also missing an important point: The people that you find in bars are self-selected – they’ve chosen to be there. There may very well be a population twice as large that isn’t there because they would prefer a nonsmoking bar. Until there are nonsmoking bars, we don’t know how many people would prefer one.
Luckily, we have a control group: California. Anyone have any data on bar and restaurant revenue post-1997?
Until you can provide a reasonable cite which states that market research has been conducted which shows little potential support for a nonsmoking bar, or which demonstrates that the banning of smoking in California bars caused a significant decrease in revenue, I’m going to have to dismiss the statement as nothing more than your opinion. This being Great Debates and all.
Here is a link to a page, from what is probably a very biased nonsmoking source. In any case, it suggests that bar and restaurant revenue actually rose in several states and municipalities where bans where passed. It is footnoted, but the footnotes are not linked, so I have no data on how reliably the original sources are quoted.
This PDF file from the California Board of Equalization, which details taxable salesby type of business statewide, suggests that as of the second quarter of 2001 (three years after the smoking ban took effect), sales at restaurants that sell beer and wine had risen 4.6 percent over the previous year; sales at restaurants that sell all types of liquor had risen 3.2 percent over the previous year. I can’t find data easily on previous years, so I don’t know if there was an immediate dropoff in 1998 followed by a return to previous levels, or if there has been a constant rise over those three years, but it’s nevertheless suggestive.
This site, again admittedly biased against smoking, claims that:
This is Great Debates, not In My Humble Opinion, Squish. Show me what you have.
While these numbers are helpful and suggestive, they’re not terribly convincing, in my opinion, because we lack a control to compare with.
That is, all the numbers show is that businesses that sold some form of liquor (NB: not, therefore, necessarily a bar, unless they mean to exclude for example grocery stores (which in CA are allowed to sell beer and wine, if memory serves) but didn’t mention that) showed an increase in taxable sales after the ban went into effect. They say nothing whatsoever about what would have happened had the ban NOT gone into effect; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see growth also with no ban, but we can’t have that data to compare against. It would be extremely helpful to have data from before the ban happened, which we would have to correct for general economic growth any other possible factors which may have slipped my mind.
In other words, claims to the contrary (“these data further discredit tobacco industry claims that smokefree bar laws are bad for the bar business. Quite the contrary, these laws appear to be good for business”) notwithstanding, there may well be no there there.
Jaysus H. Keerist on horseback, they’re already standing outside in all sorts of weather–how much further can they give? I sincerely and honestly doubt that that much smoke drifts into a properly weatherstripped apartment and submit that you are, indeed, oversensitive–or that the very sight of someone smoking drives you into a tizzy. What if it were a group of people standing outside wearing perfume? Are not many asthmatics sensitive to perfume? I’m allergic to olive pollen and in the last apartment complex I lived in there was an olive tree right outside my window. The last two years (of nine) that I lived there, the management stopped spraying it to prevent blossoming. I took some prescription allergy medication; I didn’t go frothing at the mouth about people who planted olive trees.
The employer subsidizes the premiums–and gets a volume discount from the health insurance companies–but in every job I had for the twenty years I worked, I paid substantial health care premiums.
Arizona doesn’t have Medicaid, it has AHCCCS (Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System) and its maximun income level to get on AHCCCS is laughably low–far below my disability payments. So, even though I pay taxes, I have no health care. I have no health care because I can’t pay for it, and I am far, far from being the only American in this situation. There are also the millions of working poor who work for companies that don’t subsidize insurance premiums and make too much money to qualify for Medicaid.
As for hospital write-offs, kindly contact my local hospital and ask them to write off the roughly $15,000 that I owe them and that they continue to bill me for. Ha!
[QUOTEI’ve already addressed in previous posts the potential barriers to entry in some states for new bars; apparently you ignored them, or in any case chose not to disagree with them.[/QUOTE]
No, you ignored the reasonable suggestion by another poster that the owner of a existing liquor license open a non-smoking bar.
If there were twice as many people who would prefer a non-smoking bar there would be twice the number of non-smoking bars as smoking ones. Or aren’t you aware that we live in a free-market economy?
Up in Canada the smoking bans are generally being brought in at a municipal level. Just last summer we got one here(Ottawa,Ontario). I was basically against it though I understand and appreciate part of the goal. Here’s basically my speech I had to make every two days(It kind of was a hot topic). For the record I smoke maybe 3 cigs a day down from ~a pack a day at one point. I fluctuate but the last few years have been tapering off.
I think that SHS is something of a health hazzard intuitively . I don’t personally need overwhelming evidence. People who don’t want to be exposed should be have options.
However, it is very much a property rights issue. The business owners don’t want to rock the boat and do a self ban, nor spend the wads of cash to make a properly ventilated smoking section. I would propose instead of a total ban allow for businesses to apply for smoking section liscences which opened you up to periodic city inpections. Inspections could check the air quality of both sections. It has been shown(the NewDen, a strip bar in town had air testing done and released results to media) that with a good air circulation system the air quality can be better than in most environmentally-controlled government buildings, with customers smoking full blast. In this way we reverse the status quo but allow people to invest in the smokers market.
Another problem in Ontario is that we don’t really have a good legal distinction between bar and restaurants. If you sell alcohol you are required to sell food. Maybe a separate legal business type could make this a friendlier transition.
I just think social engineering should be a little more subtle. Shoving the new world order down peoples’ throat just gets all the bile going as we can see here.
As an aside, while I feel for the servers in restaurants it isn’t really support for a smoking ban. When we accepted how dangerous it was to breath coal fumes all day we didn’t ban coal mines, we required certain safety equipment. Servers could just be required to wear masks. Or is that too silly?
You make some interesting points, CarnalK. The problem is, this is an all or nothing thing. I don’t believe a compromise solution was even offered…but I may be wrong on that.
Actually, the California BoE tables do list “Eating establishments which sell beer & wine/liquor” separately from package stores and other retail establishments, FWIW.
True, true – I even thought of that after I posted. The first link does mention Madison, WI, which instituted a ban, and suggests that it experienced growth vs. the rest of the state of Wisconsin, which did not have such a ban. Again, I don’t support the bans anyway, but I also don’t think that they will hurt the businesses at all. My suspicion is that the number of smokers who simply can’t refrain for an hour or two would be far outweighed by the number of nonsmokers who formerly were not going to bars or restaurants at all.
Squish:
They can go into their apartments.
I mean, pardon my sarcasm, but boo fuckin’ hoo. Smoking is optional – if they’ve chosen to start, and someone in their home doesn’t want them to do it there, that is hardly my problem or concern. See, that whole “choice” thing works both ways. Nobody has dragged them outside and stuck a cigarette in their mouth; they chose to be a drug addict and chose to get their fix at a time when it is inconvenient or impossible for them to do so inside. I have no moral problem with that – take all the drugs you want. But once it comes into my home, it becomes my concern.
A tizzy. Right. Don’t recall throwing a tizzy last time I saw my dad . . . or my mother . . . or my sister . . . or my grandfather . . . :rolleyes: Can we maybe stick to the facts, and not your baseless and insulting speculation about how I might or might not behave?
What if it were a family of human-sized skunks? What if it were Superman? We aren’t playing “What If?”; we’re discussing things that actually happen. And perfume doesn’t behave like, well, smoke. I mean, you can toss out red herrings all you like, but a burning object has physical properties that perfume does not. If you can’t even admit that, well . . .
OK, there’s one anecdote – unfortunately, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” We’ve got my anecdote, and we’ve got your anecdote. Now, you asserted that “Americans pay for their own health care.” It’s your assertion; either prove it, or I will assume it false. If you can’t handle the idea of providing data to prove your assertions, there are other fora that may be better suited for you.
I said: “I’ve already addressed in previous posts the potential barriers to entry in some states for new bars; apparently you ignored them, or in any case chose not to disagree with them,” to which you replied:
Actually, I did not ignore it; I acknowledged that it was a good point. In fact, here is the exchange that took place:
g8rguy: Why, though, couldn’t I instead just buy an existing bar? In other words, though there are apparently barriers to deciding I want to start a smokefree bar, are their barriers to converting an existing bar to be a smokefree one?
pldennison: Good question. Probably not.
So, not only did I not ignore it, and not only did I concede the point, the person who made the suggestion acknowledged that there are, in fact, apparent barriers to entry! If you’re going to tell lies, I suggest that you do it with someone with a much shorter memory than mine.
Non sequitur, I’m afraid. The conclusion does not follow from the premises; the number of potential consumers of a product has no bearing on whether someone is willing to offer it. This should be blatantly obvious to you, since you yourself argue about an inch above this statement that there are millions of uninsured Americans. I’m sure that they greatly desire low-cost health insurance and medical care, and yet, nobody is providing it. Odd. Or does the existence of the “free market” only matter when you want to make a point?
Now, would you like to start providing any actual evidence for any of your assertions, or not?
Exactly the point ivylass there should have been some kind of middle ground. The people who push for total ban say “Oh, those whiny smokers will get over it” but there is no need to create such animosity in the first place.
Yes, many in this field have voiced an objection against using mata-analysis and I’m inclined to agree with them. They feel a result should serve only as an indicator and not be used to set policy. Besides, it is too easy to influence the result. It is my belief, this may be the case with the two WHO studies. It is my understanding that in their first study, they were so convinced they would find something they had no need to resort to bias. It does seem strange they tried to keep the result under wraps. So now their latest study shows a connection. What do you think, was bias introduced?
**
Not so, you must have read the average column. As the section on ‘interpreting the data’ says, epidemiologists average the interval even though they know it’s not permissible. You must read the min/max interval column where both values must be higher than 1 for there to be risk, since the true value could be anywhere in between. When interpreted properly, you see the overwhelming majority of these studies are moot, they show no risk.
Yes, many in this field have voiced an objection against using mata-analysis and I’m inclined to agree with them. They feel a result should serve only as an indicator and not be used to set policy. Besides, it is too easy to influence the result. It is my belief, this may be the case with the two WHO studies. It is my understanding that in their first study, they were so convinced they would find something they had no need to resort to bias. It does seem strange they tried to keep the result under wraps. So now their latest study shows a connection. What do you think, was bias introduced?
**
Not so, you must have read the average column. As the section on ‘interpreting the data’ says, epidemiologists average the interval even though they know it’s not permissible. You must read the min/max interval column where both values must be higher than 1 for there to be risk, since the true value could be anywhere in between. When interpreted properly, you see the overwhelming majority of these studies are moot, they show no risk.
Sorry about that, it’s just that you are so vehemently offended by SHS, it slipped my mind that it was you who said it. I will make it a point to remember. I apologize.
Actually Peter, it is not moot, but is the point of meta-analysis as a tool. Each study had a one in ten chance of being a false result according to a 90% confidence interval, ten studies all showing the same added up is that 10% chance of a false result times itself ten times, or a one in 10,000,000 chance of being false result. In a simpler way of thinking meta-analysis pools data from studies individually not large enough to show statistically conclusive findings and creates a pool large enough to find smaller but real effects. A discussion about its validity as a technique is reasonable but specious to pull out only for tobacco … you’d have to throw out lots of modern medical findings if you disputed it as a technique. It is well established throughout the literature.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by pldennison * [They can go into their apartments.
I’ve already pointed out that they may be guests of people who don’t allow smoking in their homes and thus are smoking outside.
OK, you’ve referred to your anecdote about people smoking outside your apartment (outside, in the open air, where smoke can and does disperse), here’s mine: In my last job, two people came to work wearing so much perfume one day that it completely permeated a room that held over 100 people, causing people with breathing problems and people without to begin coughing and choking–even myself, and I’m not usually sensitive to strong odors. Even the management on duty agreed that the stench was unbearable, and ordered them to go home and bathe.
See the point? Both perfume and smoke disperse in the open air; neither of them disperse in a normally-ventilated closed environment, and both can be objectionable or physically uncomfortable to some people.
I stand corrected, then. However, if you’ve conceded the point, why aren’t there, outside of California, such things as non-smoking bars?
And that does it. I should have known from other threads that you would eventually come to this. You just negated any reason I have to answer you further.
" Now, you asserted that “Americans pay for their own health care.” It’s your assertion; either prove it, or I will assume it false. If you can’t handle the idea of providing data to prove your assertions, there are other fora that may be better suited for you. "
Not to be a buttinsky but if you are saying that the US is a country of (mainly)socialized medicine I think the onus of evidence is on you, as that goes against any debates on medicine I’ve ever heard. If his employer is paying for it it is part of your salary/benefits. I’m not saying you are wrong but I think squish’s view(if that’s who’s it was, don’t shoot anyone) is the generally accepted one.
Mmmm, I’ll have to present this to Forces to see what they have to say about it. I really don’t know enough about it to offer further comment. Though I vagely remember reading something about the drawbacks of pooling small studies.
Makes one wonder what any medical finding is actually telling us. Like so many findings, first they tell us something is bad for us, then ten years later they tell us it’s ok. Go figure.
I’m not asserting that the U.S. system is socialized; I’m questioning Squish’s assertion – for which she provided, once again, absolutely no evidence – that Americans pay their health care primarily out of their own pockets.
And, once again, while employer-provided healthcare is indeed a benefit, i.e., it is part of your compensation package, it is only there because it reduces the employer’s tax liability. It isn’t as if you can waive the insurance and have your employer give you the equivalent in salary; it would increase his tax liability to do so.
