I know CVS is not 100% altruistic, with Caremark (sp?) being huge and there being talk from CVS about making prescribers pay more at pharmacies that sell cigarettes and whatnot (and how that may help make up for lost cigarette sales) [0] - but way to take a stance and really see it through. In terms of corporate good, this is great.
And what a horrible shame on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I'm so sick of the idea of the dollar above all else. Cigarettes kill people. That's it. Deciding it's ok to not only sell these death sticks, but actively fight against the championing of healthier living and longer lives is absolutely, totally, and completely shameful.
A great deal of the Chamber's funding comes from Tobacco companies. In fact there are conference rooms named for them. If you haven't seen Last Week Tonight's take on the international bad behavior of the Tobacco companies I really encourage you to check it out.
They've responded to a shrinking market in the US and other highly developed nations, by doubling down on their efforts to sell to everyone in the rest of the world. And woe to the country with a smaller GDP than Phillip Morris who decides to try to put restrictions on a pack of smokes.
With passage of the TPP, Tobacco companies may have almost every country on the Pacific Ocean caught inside a legal structure that would consider, respect, and perhaps even sustain the claims they have made against smaller GDP countries.
Congress passed fast-track authority for the TPP, and so its approval will be straight up-down vote; it can't be filibustered. The GOP overwhelmingly supports TPP and has majorities in both houses; the TPP also has Democratic support.
It's not just shame, this is literally evil. Cigarettes don't merely kill people, they addict them as well. And what's worse, is the US Chamber of Commerce has decades of extremely conclusive research on this matter. It's one thing to kill someone accidentally, but to take a gun and point it for power and profit...
I once happened to meet a researcher who spent some time with the data set and they had all sorts of horrific stories about how consciously evil the cigarette companies were. The one that sticks with me is the people planning marketing campaigns for mentally handicapped adults. I had no words. I still don't, really.
"Cigarettes kill people. That's it. Deciding it's ok to not only sell these death sticks, but actively fight against the championing of healthier living and longer lives is absolutely, totally, and completely shameful."
Cigarette makers shouldn't be allowed to lie about their product or mislead the public, but I believe they should still be allowed to sell it. Freedom means having the ability to do something that other people disapprove of or even to do things that are self-destructive, so long as they don't directly harm others. I hate cigarettes but I would not support a legal prohibition against them.
I say this as someone who suffered a SHS-induced asthma attack that nearly killed me when I was 6 years old. That incident got my father to quit smoking cold-turkey. Smoking can directly harm others and second-hand smoke can travel and affect those around the smoker.
Unless the point is that SHS is "indirect" harm. In which case I argue that releasing mustard gas is "indirect" harm.
1 out of 10 smoking-related deaths are non-smokers [0]. We can demonstrate it causes harm to other people and it fails to follow the criteria of "it shouldn't cause direct harm to others".
You're thinking third-hand smoke, which is the residue of the smoke that remains on furniture/walls and such in enclosed places.
The burning end of the cigarette? That smoke trail is SHS, as is the smoke that the smoker exhales. The exhaled smoke isn't as harmful as the burning cigarette.
People are exposed to larger amounts of SHS in enclosed places that traps the SHS inside. You don't have to smoke to create SHS, you merely have to light a cigarette.
How much and how concentrated SHS needs to be to be considered harmful is another story. Are designated smoking areas enough? How much distance does there need to be to let the smoke dissipate into smaller amounts and be less harmful?
I don't know the answers to the above questions - and I'm not going to trust any study funded by a tobacco company.
It's clear that secondhand smoke does harm others, but the extent to which it does is a matter of debate. There's non-tobacco funded research that indicates it's not a significant risk unless you live with an in-home smoker for 30 years[1] (lung cancer only, not sure about heart disease). There are studies that paint a far more extreme situation, I'm sure, but I think this puts occasional outdoor exposure into perspective.
As long as the public is well informed, I'm strongly in favor of allowing individuals to make their own choices. The cult of anti-smoking needs to come to an end. The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places, and nobody reasonable has any question about the overall health effects of cigarettes. It's time to let people make their own choices.
"The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places" only because of "the cult of anti-smoking". The antismoking laws that the Chamber of Commerce is lobbying against are those very same ones that ended smoking in public places in much of the developed world.
I guess you didn't RTFA, where it says the United States Chamber of Commerce is helping sue other countries for public health measures such as eliminating second hand smoke and ensuring people are well-informed of the risks they're taking?
As long as smokers can smoke freely in their own homes and cars while their children are there and unable to escape it, the second-hand smoke nuisance has not been eliminated.
As long as X can X freely in their own X while their children are there and unable to escape it, the X has not been eliminated.
...
As long as parents can endlessly stock junk food freely in their own homes and cars while their children are there and unable to escape it, the influence of junk food has not been eliminated.
The problem, fundamentally, is that people can be inconsiderate of others. I would classify someone who smokes in their car with non-smokers in their presence, children and adults alike, as jerks. It's a dick move. But don't try to legislate against every dick move - teach people to be more thoughtful of others.
Having junk food in the house doesn't force it into childrens' bodies.
Food doesn't fly from the pantry into the child's mouth however children can only eat what their parents buy them. There are minor deviations from this rule e.g. the child has money to buy something nutritious or they can source food from another household. Otherwise having junk food in the house pretty much guarantees it'll find its way into the child's stomach.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
For the sake of the exercise I can compare apples to oranges. The exercise is to identify fundamental flaws in the OP's reasoning, not make simple analogies. The OP wants to ban passive smoking in the most private of spaces - feel free to explain how you do that in a way that won't be worse than exposing a child to passive smoking.
The inconsistency this game reveals, that different objectionable habits with similar health consequences receive different legal treatment, as they are not interchangeable in your X template, is cultural. If some other deadly thing can not take the place of X, I would argue that culture is invoked to support the otherwise useless, apparently unsupported assertion, "but, this is different."
The game isn't to find something exactly analogous to something else in order to expose the flaw in the structure of someones thinking. Example: take a gospel, replace every instance of the word God with Mickey Mouse. Is Mickey Mouse analogous to God? No, but the trick helps us analyze the original text in a more objective way.
My conclusion don't try to legislate against every dick move - teach people to be more thoughtful of others was an objective response to more laws governing what people can do in their own homes. Now let's explore it further because the concept of banning smoking in someone's home is fundamentally flawed:
How do you enforce such a law? Can someone just barge into your home, slap the cigarette out of your hand and give you a fine or take your children away? Could it be abused much the same way neighbors might falsely report you for neglecting a child because they have a beef with you? How much do you fine a person if the purpose of the law is to protect the children when fining the parents will leave the children with fewer resources? Do you give the parent a criminal record? Will that help the children more? What evidence is required before barging into someones home? Do you even barge into someones home or do you politely ask them at the font door "Have you been smoking in front of your children?"
"It's a dick move", no we have a word for that it's evil.
PS: Risking others lives for fun or profit seems to exist in a weird mental place. Drink and drive? Speed? Drive while really sleepy? Second hand smoke? Pollution? CO2? Fire a gun randomly in the air?
As outlined in a separate comment in this thread, your solution is unenforceable unless you want to erode some pretty fundamental freedoms. THAT'S evil. No, wait...it's not evil. "Evil" is a gross oversimplification of things. It's anti-intellectual and avoids any sort of meaningful discussion of why people do the things they do.
You feel compelled to help prevent potential respiratory issues and cancer in children exposed to second hand smoke by policing what people do in their own homes. But in the process of policing this issue you potentially do more harm than good - how do you solve the issue? Fines? Makes the family poor. Criminal record? Makes the family poor. Take away the children? Your intentions are good but I can only see the medicine being worse than the malady.
I just suggested that risking lives should be viewed as more than just 'a dick move'. Cutting in a school lunch line is 'a dick move' dumping lead into a towns drinking water is worse than that.
PS: We used to think beating children was ok so times change even if few people in up in prison.
I did put words in your mouth but the implication of your original comment, that smoking around children be banned in the home, was that there would need to be some sort of policing of this activity. To police an activity in an individuals home we need to impinge on some pretty important freedoms. So we have a choice - a severe nanny state where we address shitty behavior on a case-by-case basis or teach people to be more thoughtful so that we can prevent shitty behavior from the outset.
PS: We used to think beating children was ok so times change even if few people in up in prison.
Sending a parent to jail for beating their child is wise because beating a child imperils the child's life. On the other hand, sending someone's parents to jail for smoking around them will be more damaging than exposure to cigarette smoke. The medicine is worse than the disease. What's more, you assume all people are rational actors which we know is fantasy - just because some people have gone to prison in the past for some random transgression won't be enough to stop another person from doing the same.
Even though this unfortunately isn't the case, jail should only be used to separate violent people from the general population - there are far better methods for dealing with non-violent offenders, chiefly community service or a fine.
I think you vastly underestimate other tools a state had to influence behavior. Education for example is a ridiculously powerful tool that's underused in the US. Don't assume you need to fix things in a week states can have 100+ year time horizons.
Also, if you have 10 equally valid issues at a national level. Then 100% fixing one of them almost impossible and probably extremely expensive where making a 20% dent in all 10 of them is more valuable and probably far less costly.
There's also some evidence that smokers die earlier and are less of a burden on the health services than non smokers. I mean it's a terrible reason to support smoking, but I kind of support your viewpoint. I don't think there are any smokers out there anymore who don't know it's bad for you. Though I would never ask to go backwards in terms of where we arrived at now - packs with warnings and no indoor smoking is a great thing.
> I don't think there are any smokers out there anymore who don't know it's bad for you
I suspect this is not necessarily the case in countries with less public health education, especially developing or poor countries which is where Tobacco has shifted its efforts to grow or maintain revenue.
nah... as a smoker, i can tell you it's damned clear that it's bad for you when you wake up in the morning. there's no internal dialogue telling you "maybe this isn't bad for me".
there's an external dialogue though, for sure... "it's more/less bad than you think"
>The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places
Reduced, but not eliminated. People still smoke in far too many public spaces in the US. Try standing at the curb outside baggage claim at SFO or SJC. Or, outside many large office buildings.
The only place smoking should be legal is in the privacy of your own single-family detached home. Even then, only if you don't have any minors living there.
No, because they aren't stopping. To use your analogy, you must stop taking your antibiotics once the course is done and the infection clear.
Having won all the battles they should have won, the cult is reaching to win battles they shouldn't. Keeping people well informed about the choices they make is good. Keeping public places reasonably free of smoke is good.
But once you inform smokers about the consequences of their choices and prevent them from affecting those who don't want to make those choices ... it's time to step back and allow people to make their own decisions.
If somebody wants to make an unhealthy choice for themselves, I don't have a problem with it. Maybe they'll need to pay a different health insurance premium to make up for it, and that's okay, but otherwise it is not the prerogative of my self or any government to intrude on personal choices which have effects limited to the individual.
The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places
Only in the West. Here in SE Asia you're hard pressed to find a cafe or restaurant that isn't completely engulfed in cigarette smoke during business hours. Public smoking bans seem a long way off here.
As long as the public is well informed, I'm strongly in favor of allowing individuals to make their own choices.
It's not much of a choice when you're psychologically manipulated through marketing to start smoking and then physically dependent and mentally addicted thereafter.
The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places
This is nonsense. I can't walk into my office without going through a giant cloud of smoke. Smokers are literally smoking right next to the signs that say, "No smoking within 30 feet of door" that are less than a foot from the door.
>It's not much of a choice when you're psychologically manipulated through marketing to start smoking and then physically dependent and mentally addicted thereafter.
I have no respect for this abdication of personal responsibility.
>This is nonsense. I can't walk into my office without going through a giant cloud of smoke. Smokers are literally smoking right next to the signs that say, "No smoking within 30 feet of door" that are less than a foot from the door.
I likewise have no sympathy. There's a difference between an actual public health concern (my intention using 'nuisance') and the nonexistent right to not be offended. Sharing public space means being inconvenienced sometimes. There's a big difference between working in a smoky bar for 10 hour shifts, and smelling cigarettes for 30 seconds as you walk in a building.
> nobody reasonable has any question about the overall health effects of cigarettes.
This is probably not true. Sure, smokers know that cigarettes are harmful and that their live is probably going to be shortened by smoking, but they do not know the rates or severity of the various health problems.
For example Most men do not know that smoking is a leading cause of male impotence. People don't understand why their surgeon wants them to stop smoking (reduced risks during surgery; better healing after).
That's not it. Cigarettes also bring a large amount of pleasure to people. If you think that doesn't matter, replace it with candy bars, or any food that isn't part of the healthiest possible diet.
The occasional cigarette might bring pleasure to people. But typical cigarette smoking has the opposite effect.
A tobacco addiction works by screwing with your brain's ability to perceive pleasure. The result is that most cigarette smokers do not get pleasure added to their lives by tobacco. It's just that they need to keep smoking just to keep getting themselves back up to feeling normal.
It's not chemical nicotine that people abhor. It's nicotine specifically in conjunction with a bunch of awful toxins that we collectively call "tobacco."
Similarly, people are much more against caffeine in the form of sugary energy drinks than caffeine in the form of tea, because energy drinks are bad for you while tea is moderately good for you on the whole.
Which raises the question of why so many of these people are vehemently opposed to e-cigarettes, which are essentially just a mechanism for delivering nicotine with some inert vapor.
> Which raises the question of why so many of these people are vehemently opposed to e-cigarettes
I'm a smoker myself (quit a few times, for periods up to a year, I will quit again, but damn that addiction is going to chase me for life).
I'm not "vehemently" opposed to e-cigs, but I don't like them either. When they first appeared, I saw a few friends switch to e-cigs, and considered perhaps getting one for myself. But after a week or two, every single one of them "cheated" and occasionally smoked a real cigarette, citing that it just wasn't really the same. By now, nearly all of them have switched back to smoking real cigarettes.
Then I realized, e-cigs just keep the cravings and addiction going. I knew I wanted to quit, and quit for real. For me personally, from experience, only the first week or so of quitting is the hardest, after that the craving subsides (for some people this takes longer). Then comes the period where you're really happy you're no longer a smoker, feel cleaner, smell more things (not always good, but very worth it, and sign of progress). Then comes the long stretch where you just need to never, ever smoke a cigarette again, for the rest of your life. Because even just smoking one, after half a year, weakens that resolve, and I should consider myself "on notice" for at least a couple of weeks, because the threshold for smoking another one becomes so much lower, and before you know I'm back at step 0. It's (for me) not particularly hard on the day-by-day basis, it's the part that you can't ever give in to it again, for the rest of your life, that makes it hard to keep up.
That's why I don't like e-cigs. For someone who is really addicted, it just keeps the door open to fall back to regular cigarettes any time, because you don't do anything about the habit and nicotine addiction, you just make it less unhealthy as long as you stick to e-cigs only.
The only positive thing I have gained from smoking, is learning what addiction really means, therefore understanding other people's addictions better, and decidedly staying away from other addictive substances.
One of the more interesting bits of trivia about nicotine and caffeine is it is the mode of delivery that makes nicotine so addictive. If you smoked caffeine it would be as addictive as nicotine. Given we now have vaping it should be possible to smoke caffeine - I haven’t looked, but I would not be surprised if someone out there is selling smokable caffeine.
Sure - the harm is is going to be greater when you add in all the other nasty compounds in tobacco smoke.
It in not only smoke that is harmful as people who chew tobacco suffer an increase in mouth cancer. While vaping should have a lower risk than smoking, it is not risk free. Since it is so new we won’t know for sometime how dangerous it is.
The problem with cigarettes is not just that they kill you a little bit sooner, but that they cause many years of life of reduced quality. There's a bunch of stuff like COPD or stroke that don't always kill smokers but do make their lives much less pleasant.
I'm not sure if you were making a distinction between vaping and smoking, but I checked and there is indeed vapeable caffeine (plus taurine and flavoring.) I feel weird dropping a link, but search "Energy Shisha" if you're interested.
Just a small counterpoint, I'm a huge cigarette hater and I love the fact that e-cigarettes are catching on. They still smell crappy and suck to be around, but they're nowhere near as unpleasant and vomit-inducing as cigarettes are. Addicts are going to be addicts; for my sake, I'd much rather have them vaping than smoking.
I have no issue with the nicotine. I have issues with the acetone, ammonia, arsenic, butane, cadmium, formaldehyde, lead, etc.
When caffeine contains the above and my act of consumption means others also inhale those chemicals (SHS) then I'll care about caffeine as much as I do tobacco smoke.
It's quite clear to me that I'm addicted to caffeine. If it had carcinogenic effects even beginning to approach those of cigarettes, I would quit immediately. I'm pretty sure a lot of people have a similar relationship with caffeine.
This statement makes no sense. Besides the fact that literally everything works by manipulating your brain, no one has ever measured a quantum of pleasure, so it can't be “added” to your brain like a unit of flour.
Actually, his explanation is basically how addiction ends up working on the brain. Smoking becomes the new normal, so not smoking makes you go to an extremely bad mood.
This is where the whole "cold turkey" thing comes from and why quitting is so difficult for so many people
I smoke about once every month or two. Sometimes a cigarette, sometimes a cigar and sometimes in the winter a pipe. If it is as addictive as they claim, it has yet to show. I have no feeling of "needing" to smoke. I do it because it is a very enjoyable experience.
I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug, just as some people are addicted to gambling or facebook or video games. Some people just get addicted to anything that once gave them a positive emotion.
Are you challenging the notion that cigarettes are addictive? I can't imagine this was your point. If you would like, I will provide evidence citing that cigarettes are, in fact, very addictive.
Edit: well you edited your comment twice since my reply, so I'll be right back with some information for you.
I vaped unflavored nicotine for about 2 years. Intermittent at first, heavy daily use during the second year, equivalent to a pack of cigarettes per day or more. I quit because enjoyment decreased to the point where it was no longer worth the hassle.
I experienced zero addiction for the first three months, and even after the full two years addiction was mild. I reduced my dose gradually over two weeks. There were no physical withdrawal symptoms, and only minor craving which went away after a few months abstinence. I'm no expert on heroin addiction, but I find it hard to believe it's equal to nicotine. Perhaps whole tobacco would be different.
No, the difference is, at least from what I've seen (am not sure if the research supports this, but it would be interesting if it did not), some people (like myself) seem to be more susceptible to smoking addiction than others. I know quite a few people who have no trouble smoking intermittently, with months in between, and then quitting with hardly any effort. Maybe they just have more resolve or willpower, but I've seen them smoke more than enough to "catch" the addiction like I did, then stop, never really getting stuck into a daily habit. Yes I'm jealous :) On the other hand, I don't want to smoke just "occasionally" either, I just want to quit.
> I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug
It springs from the interaction between the two; different drugs have different addictive qualities, different people have different susceptibilities to those addictive qualities. Individual extreme outliers -- in both the more easily addicted and less easily addicted directions -- for any particular drug are to be expected, and don't disprove the general feature.
> I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug
The only people who claim that are ones who haven't been addicted to cigarettes :-)
If you're only smoking once a month, the nicotine isn't building up enough to make withdrawal a problem. I'm not even sure there's enough nicotine in one cigarette that you would notice any withdrawal symptoms. And in a month, the nicotine from the previous cigarette is long gone.
Besides that, the hardest part of quitting is getting rid of the habits around it, and if you're only smoking once a month, you're not forming any habits. Try smoking a cigarette with your coffee first thing every morning for 6 months, and see if you still believe it's not addictive :-/
That said, I'm sure the strength of the effect can vary from person to person.
Smoke a pack of cigarettes over the course of a few weeks, and then pay close attention to your body the first week you stop. You WILL crave cigarettes during that week. That is the feeling of physiological dependence. The pack of cigarettes has affected your body in ways you can't control. It isn't a "personality" thing (like other addictions which are purely psychological). Although, obviously, people will react differently to this subsequent craving, and will have different levels of strength in resisting it, if they desire to do so.
I do agree with you that the occasional cigarette can be very pleasurable.
Well, you can control it by not smoking for a week or so. Admittedly I don't know of any proper studies, but I have always heard rules of thumb around 1 to 2 weeks. For myself it was about a week, and not really that bad of a week compared to what I expected.
Cigarettes don't merely bring pleasure, they also bring physical addiction. High fructose corn syrup is also another problem.
I generally think everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want to themselves, as long as they're not being influenced by others in a way they can't control or are not fully aware of, which is what advertising and marketing generally is.
When you add in underlying physiological effects like chemical addiction to nicotine and sugar (and an ignorance of), this is clearly a case where individuals freedom and security is being infringed upon.
When the day comes that we can structure our society such that might does not make right, I'll agree with you, we should relax our laws and encourage more a more libertarian outlook. Until then, centers of power and capital need to be constrained by our legal system to protect the vulnerable.
Personally, my main opposition is to the industrial-scale production and sale of recreational drugs, because addiction and capitalism are a terrible combination.
As an example, the park nearest my house has a guy who comes by occasionally on some busy weekends to sell pot truffles. I'm sure he makes a modest living, but I have no worry about people getting dangerously hooked. If we were to let Coca Cola put the cocaine back in, though? Or to let 7-11 sell hash and crack, with prominent placards outside and a billion-dollar ad budget? No thanks.
My other half-serious plan is for licensing. Imagine that to be able to legally buy and take LSD, you have to take a 12-week class with practical exams where you drop acid with your instructor. I can think of no better way to remove the appealing mystique of drugs than to make kids turn up after school every Wednesday for a semester and have some teacher drone at them about mechanisms of action and key safety considerations.
Might as well form a company that does both. Then you can make money from causing the problem and from solving it. It'd be the broken window fallacy on an industrial scale.
The cigarette problem does seem to make a compelling case for recreational drugs being a more complicated problem than most people anticipate.
Most people put themselves firmly in a pro- or anti- legalization camp, but in reality there are major problems (and solved problems) with both approaches.
Fully legalize and you'll encounter this horrible scenario where big companies emerge to profit off addictions. They'll lobby governments domestically and abroad. They'll engage in all kinds of shady practices to protect their businesses, just as cigarette companies have. (the oft-proposed solution to the flawed status quo)
Don't legalize and you'll miss many opportunities to help addicts, allow the black market to continue, etc. All the things you're already familiar with. (the status quo)
Precisely. I'm a non-smoker, non-drinker, non-narcotic. I am quite fond of chocolate.
I find it disingenuous to vilify cigarettes and smoking when alcohol is considered not just okay but popular and socially acceptable. In social routines, as a non-drinker, I am an outlier.
Neither alcohol or cigarette smoking appeal to me. I personally find being around a smoker to be slightly more annoying than being around drunkards. But neither is pleasant.
Still, although I personally wouldn't be directly affected by alcohol prohibition, I am glad that I didn't live during the United States' experimentation with prohibition and I don't want alcohol prohibition today. Similarly, I don't particularly like the current prohibition of narcotics due to secondary effects. I also don't like where things are with tobacco—wherein smokers are essentially painted as evil or weak, and certainly not partaking in a habit they actually enjoy.
I personally have no problem with people smoking but for two things: smokers often smell bad and many of them seem to feel that the world is their ashtray.
Sure, but the health effects are smoking are well documented and significantly worse than eating candy bars, or even most other poor diet habits that people have. In addition, cigarettes negatively impact the health of non-smokers that have the misfortune of having sustained contact with a smoker (for example, children) due to not only second-hand smoke but also the toxins that cling to clothing and other surfaces.
It would be different if smoking only affected the smoker, but as it affects the wider population (such as higher overall health care premiums), it deserves stricter controls.
1) From your link, "The study doesn’t cover the many other ill effects of breathing somebody else’s cigarette smoke, of course, which include asthma and possibly cardio-pulmonary disease." So not debunked exactly.
2) Penn & Teller are entertainers (and illusionists). They present controversial opinions for the sake of a TV show. It is not journalism and shouldn't be accepted at face value.
"but the health effects are smoking are well documented and significantly worse than eating candy bars, or even most other poor diet habits that people have"
Heart disease is a bigger killer than cancer in many countries.
I've noticed that whenever discussions about smoking come up, people tend to reference other things that are also bad for health (vehicle emissions is a common one, as is junk food) as though it shouldn't be addressed unless other things are being addressed in the same way at the same time.
Obesity through junk food is a problem as well. It's being addressed separately.
The difference is that a candy bar only kills the person who is consuming it (and kills them much slower than a cigarette), while the cigarette kills the people around the smoker too.
What people find disgusting differs from person to person though, that's why it's the other way around, if you don't ever want to see anything you find disgusting, you have to stay at home or plan your routes extremely carefully, possibly wear blinders.
From your link, "The study doesn’t cover the many other ill effects of breathing somebody else’s cigarette smoke, of course, which include asthma and possibly cardio-pulmonary disease."
My anecdotal evidence says otherwise. I get a headache whenever I'm near a smoker, even if I didn't know they were smoking until after I got the headache (I have a bad sense of smell and sometimes I don't smell it).
That's not it. Cigarettes also bring a large amount of pleasure to people. ...
Of course things are more nuanced, when it comes down to the matter of lifestyle and individual choice.
But it's kind of beside the main point. Which is: when it comes to their tireless efforts to tear down nearly any reasonable safeguards (whether in the form of health warnings on packaging, or access to minors) -- and especially the extent to which they resort to FUD and blatant anti-intellectualism to achieve these ends -- the tobacco lobby simply has no case.
That's a terrible comparison. Most people eating a candy bar are doing do because they like candy and want to eat it. Most people consuming cigarettes are doing do because they are addicted and wish they weren't.
Or because they enjoy nicotine/tobacco. Not everyone is drowning in self-hatred because they like a little head-buzz. Witness the outrageous growth of tobacco-based vaping products in the last few years.
Look at dosage. You can smoke an integer number of cigs a day. I am not aware of anyone smoking 1/3rd of a cig at a time or at least its very unpopular.
I can and do limit my sugar intake but for a treat once in awhile I'll buy one of those extremely expensive yet extremely tasty imported dark chocolate bars and eat one little square as treat per day for a long while. I bet if I ate the whole bar in one sitting I could reignite my sugar cravings, but its just a gram or so of carbs so I'm good.
The counterexamples are I suppose e-cig vape people could just sniff the bottle, or people who drink one unit of soda no matter if its a 6 oz mini can or 64 oz giant cup.
Given the tobacco companies have historically been guilty of pretty much every evil known to mankind I would not be surprised to discover the "unit size cigarette" is at least partially constrained geometrically to maximize addiction, and a smaller or larger dose would result in lower addiction rates.
There might be a maximal addiction dosage of dark chocolate, but non-unit consumption of candy bars is so normal that it might not work as an addiction strategy.
There's an interesting question that arises from this though: are more people now addicted to sugar because everyone is now aware of the terrible results of long term smoking (but aren't as aware of the problems with sugar)? Should we have warning labels on packs of sugar too?
I've heard people talk about how 40 years ago, or less than that, if you asked someone to put out their cigarette in the office, everyone would think you were some kind of jerk.
Now no one smokes, but we have an obesity/diabetes epidemic, and people bring in homemade cookies or brownies every day.
I can just imagine the uproar if anyone proposed a sugar free office though.
I think some people's cologne/perfume stinks, but I don't see anyone trying to ban that. Some people have asthma complications due to second hand fragrance.
Should we mandate showers too? I've known some people who didn't practice proper hygiene and had a rather repulsive smell. Maybe we should forcibly scrub them down.
That's probably not true (nb: I'm a "social smoker" in the sense of, if I'm out drinking, I'll follow friends out for a smoke break; that makes me a "pack a year" smoker) --- the demographics on smoking have changed to the point where it's become useful to study "light" smoking and not just daily addicted smoking. In studies, young smokers smoke much less than older people. Addicted smokers smoke all the time. From this, I conclude that there are, like me, people who smoke non-addictively.
My experience is very similar. I probably consume about 1 pack a year or so with friends in social environments. The other things is I do a fair amount of traveling and don't want to be rude or reject someone's hospitality if someone offers me a cigarette while I'm abroad.
I was hopelessly addicted to cigs from ages 18 to 21. I'm talking two packs a day, lighting up before getting out of bed, smoking while eating, etc.
I quit nearly cold turkey (one month ramp down) and didn't touch one for about a decade. A few years ago I went through a "social smoking" phase for a few months where I'd bum a couple while out drinking, or during the day here and there. Maybe totaled like ten cigs a week or so.
There is a huuuuge difference. Social smoking is real.
I can see how businesses and its representatives (the chamber) may make the case that companies ought to have freedom of speech. Just like citizens united, businesses have lately been able to lobby for certain rights that were originally created for people.
But I disagree. Free speech and the right to vote protections were given to individuals as basic human rights, and corporations are not people. More money should not equal more voting or lobbying power. I realize that is impossible to avoid entirely. Still, the more we let stuff like this happen, the more we dilute the value of our individual democratic rights.
I've read that the drug store chains don't think they have a future selling products that people can buy online, and are switching to healthcare services (flu shots, mini-clinics, etc.), and that they see advocating for health issues as marketing, while selling something like cigarettes is incompatible with their new image and mission.
In the UK drugstores are pretty much extinct, and are most commonly found as a desk in a supermarket. The UK is a bit different though in that supermarkets have sold non-prescription drugs and similar items you'd only find in a drugstore elsewhere for a long time.
Cigs bring lots of people in the door, like fuel at a gas station. Probably not a profitable decision. Will lose plenty of regular customers. Could be exec has personal reasons for it, like a family member death.
And what a horrible shame on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I'm so sick of the idea of the dollar above all else. Cigarettes kill people. That's it. Deciding it's ok to not only sell these death sticks, but actively fight against the championing of healthier living and longer lives is absolutely, totally, and completely shameful.
[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-270B-850