43,340 deaths in USA 2003 (CDC)
42,443 deaths in USA 2001 (CDC)
41,804 deaths in USA 2000 (CDC)
3,000,866 automobile injuries in 2004 (CDC)
Automobiles are the highest ranking cause of accidental deaths in the USA.
If you plan on pulling out the Surgeon General’s report on the basis to ban smoking, you should also be for banning cars and trucks because they kill just about as many innocent people (as well as cause MAJOR enviromental damage which will kill an unknown amount of people in the future).
Except that banning automobiles would devestate the economy. Banning the automobile would transform the US from a first-world country into a third-world country nearly overnight. Banning smoking? Not so much.
Now the number of automobile related fatalities and accidents is cause for alarm, and if there is sensible regulation which can reduce these fatalities and injuries without decimating the economy, I say put them up for a vote. The pollution they cause is also subject to legislative regulation(state safety inspections/emissions controls, etc.) In the meantime let’s continue on with the discussion at hand.
I’d like to go out and have a beer in a bar, and I’d like to go out and listen to live music. However, I can’t do so as every place seems to be a smoking area. I’ve missed quite a few musical shows that I really wanted to see. I didn’t want to see them badly enough to risk a trip to the ER, though.
And yet I’m healthier than the two biggest anti-smokers I work with, both of whom have numerous expensive and medication dependent problems including insulin dependent diabetes. There’s only one person at work who missed less days in the last five years than I have, and most of the days I missed were to go on job interviews.
I don’t want your money.
And when you go to a bar that has a non-smoking section, it’s empty. There’s never anyone in it. If the non-smoking section could stand on its own, it would. But it can’t, and the anti-smokers are seeing us smokers have too much fun so they’ve gotta come piss on it.
A hell of a lot of them are perfectly willing to light up their own cigarettes while they stand behind the bar.
If there were enough people like you who wanted non-smoking bars and would patronize them, regularly not just ‘there was once a concert I wanted to see’, then there would be non-smoking bars.
Since such a demand doesn’t exist, anti-smokers will try to make the government create it. They’re trying it in Pennsylvania. Fine, I can buy a case and invite my smoking friends to my house. I already ask restaurants ahead of time if they have a smoking section. If the answer is no, I go somewhere else.
Oh, I see - so since smoking has been around for a lot longer than the knowledge of how harmful it is, we should just all accept that people smoke in bars. Since, you know, that’s what they’ve been doing for centuries and all. :rolleyes:
Women and blacks weren’t originally given the right to vote in this country either. Guess we should have just shut up and accepted those laws too.
While we’re at it, we can tell the government that they were wrong to work on improving working conditions in factories and mines - the people working there were obviously there by choice! How dare they want better conditions to work in!
Oh, and no more safety issues for the government to look into. No sirree. No need for any inspections of the food we eat, the cars we drive, the airplanes we ride in. Consumers have a choice! Let them make their own decision and live with it! No need for the government to spend any money!
:rolleyes:
Go ahead and poison yourself all you want in the comfort of your own home. Don’t make everyone else around you share in your addiction. Maybe if you weren’t blowing all that money on cancer sticks you’d actually have enough change left over to buy a clue.
I don’t recall anyone in this thread calling for a ban on smoking, just a ban in public places where others are exposed to secondhand smoke.
We regulate the use of automobiles, both in general (reducing tailpipe emissions, for example) and in limiting or preventing use of vehicles by those shown to harm others.
In many states you can’t legally drive a badly polluting car. You can’t speed or drive on the sidewalk. It makes sense to similarly regulate the activities of tobacco users so that as far as possible, the harm they cause is limited to themselves.
Did you actually read through any of that? They give no evidence whatsoever for their claims. They just say ‘well it has toxins, its gotta be bad for you’. Everywhere they say it increases your liklihood of getting cancer and heartdisease they don’t give you the real numbers. What’s your base chance of getting friggin lung cancer? Pretty small. The chances of getting lung cancer went from 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 80,000 (check link below). That means you’re going from 10 in 1 million to 12.5 in one million when exposed to 2ndhand smoke. The fact is, its not statistically significant. Everyone is getting whooshed by a couple people who are misrepresenting the data to make their claims seem credible.How about some of the actual numbers in these studies, not just the alarmist numbers. The EPA and WHO press releases on the subject contradict their own studies’ findings.
As was proved out in the Pit thread, extremists on both sides are to blame for taking this fight beyond the reasonable.
I see no reason why reasonable regulations to protect the air breathed by non-smokers should be objected to. But I see a lot of handwaving going on.
Example: Why a city-/county-/state-wide ban on smoking anywhere in restaurants and bars? Yes, I do get the point that it affects the health of the employees. But I’m certain that that can be dealt with by other means than an absolute ban. For example, if a bar owner sets aside a smoking area, it is his own responsibility as a businessman, or that of a bona fide volunteer employee who is not coerced into it, to maintain that area. And it must be properly isolated and vented to keep the smoke out of the non-smoking areas. This is not tricky – any HVAC person can create the appropriate differential in circulation.
Designated areas for smokers at worksites? Yes, and taking the weather into account. Unless it’s going to be a requirement that all employees take their breaks outside in Saskatoon in February, or during rainstorms.
The planet does have its share of offensive jerks. On both sides of this dispute. But it’s my personal opinion that the typical individual is someone respectful of others: the non-smoker who has no problem with smokers having somewhere to go to smoke so long as he/she doesn’t have to go there, or breathe the air from there; the smoker who will gladly abstain from smoking outside the designated area if there’s a reasonable, decent designated area.
About the bars-closing meme: Common sense will tell you that NYC and LA will probably support a Latvian-cuisine vegetarian restaurant staffed by bears in hotpants. But such an institution will probably fail in Mattoon IL, Spartanburg SC, or Carson City NV. Likewise “proof” that bars do not close due to smoking bans in major metropolitan areas proves absolutely nothing about smaller, possibly depressed-income communities. People have cited anecdotes and local news items about places that this has happened.
The guy who insists that tobacco smoking should be banned everywhere deserves to be awarded a genuine Carrie Nation imitation silver miniature hatchet. And the guy who insists that his “right to smoke” gives him the power to send someone allergic to smoke to the hospital probably deserves to be sued and pay the allergic person’s hospital bill. With lost-income and punitive damages.
There is a happy medium, folks. Can’t we try to find it?
Let me also say that I am not a smoker. I don’t like being around people who smoke. It stinks and makes my clothes stink. But it is not within my rights to take their rights away.
Leaving aside ‘analgoy’, which is possibly my favorite typo to date…
My very favorite blouse was singed and a scar was left on my otherwise-delightful cleavage by someone who dropped a cigarette on me from the railing one floor up. He did apologize, but I still have a little burn scar on my breast. And on my blouse, too! It’s very upsetting!
But I’m against banning smoking in bars or outside them. I’d want to curtail it in enclosed spaces for music venues, but frankly I’d rather see this as an initiative on the part of club owners rather than legislated. Stupid nanny government.
That said, when I went to an LA nightclub and realized I could breathe without my throat burning, I really did like it. I just feel that smoking’s to be expected in a place like that. Smoking and drinking. If I wanted a smoke-free, alcohol-free evening I’d go to a library.
The evidence for the surgeon general’s report is in the form of a database of ~900 studies. The report is a meta-analysis of all these independent studies. If we were to search for “lung cancer” in the database, we get 99 hits. One of those is article 727, originally published as “Involuntary smoking and lung cancer” in Scand J Work Environ Health 2002; 28 Suppl 2:30-40. This is the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health which is a peer-reviewed scientific medical publication. The abstract for the article, or the excerpt they have from it on the SG’s site, is as follows.
This study was summarized and the data points pulled out of it to become part of the huge data pool the SG’s report came from. The data points used from this publication are interesting. Especially for those who are interested in the impact of Environmental Tobacco Smoke(ETS) on those in the workplace.
The Surgeon General’s report is huge, and difficult to wade through and understand. It wasn’t published for general consumption, but more as a tool for policy makers(who will have expert advisors) and health professionals. Water-cooler level(or message-board level) discussions about it’s validity, the validity of the methods used, or the accuracy of the conclusions are probably pointless because none of us have the expert level knowledge necessary to evaluate it, nor the time to read the ~900 sources and perform decent analysis.
For myself, I am content in taking the SG’s report with a very miniscule amount of salt. I’ll follow it’s recommendations and use it’s data to inform my voting choices. The possibility exists that it is wrong, but I know which basket I’m putting my eggs in.
The problem with this is that coercion is relative: since bar and restaurant service employees are often at the lower-skilled end of the spectrum, it’s difficult to ascertain whether the employee is exposing themselves to a very long-term and intangible risk (the same sort of denial we smokers are in at first) out of economic necessity. I do agree that a totally hermetically sealed area would be a good compromise, but they already tried this in Italy, and it proved financially prohibitive.
Again, even within the study you cite, the numbers betray the conclusion they draw. Like I said, a 25% and 17% increase is statistically insignificant.
Probably floating about on the internet somewhere. Whose aren’t? But you’ll just have to go with the testimony of the biggest, most adorable cross-dressing gay man I ever met, who pronounced them ‘exquisite’.
(why yes, I am trying to defuse the cranky in this thread. Nothing is more calming than pleasant breasts)
That would make an excellent sig.
Nothing is more calming than pleasant breasts, indeed!
Idiots! Smoke, rights, health, government interference, anal goys… all of you shut up and let’s look at pleasant Little Plastic Ninja breasts.
I had been hoping that one positive outcome of the Pit thread was that you had ditched the “they want to BAN all smoking!” strawman. Instead I see this from you.
Please cease conflating regulation with Prohibition.
We dealt with this in the Pit thread as well. On the basis of research referenced in the Surgeon General’s report, separate smoking areas do not work. Nonsmokers are still exposed to secondhand smoke.
Anecdotes are not generally viewed as solid evidence, not on this board and certainly not when reports based on valid statistical analysis contradict the anecdotally-based claims.
There is a happy medium. Smoke all you want - just don’t do it in enclosed public spaces where employees, customers and the remainder of the general public are exposed to the health hazard you are creating.
And on my blouse, too! It’s very upsetting!