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Topic: Are you a smoker?
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 04-21-2010 06:55 PM
It doesn't matter whether smoking cigarettes causes you to burst into flames. (But it would be cool to watch! Woudln't it? ![[Wink]](wink.gif) )
Smoking cigarettes is a voluntary activity.
It doesn't matter whether second hand smoke has the toxic effect that some people claim it does. If you don't like cigarette smoke you simply tell the other person that you don't like it and POLITELY ask him to move downwind of you.
The point I am talking about is that it is not right to make relativistic claims in order to get restrictive laws passed for or against any activity that isn't directly harmful to another person.
Joe, I'm sorry that your mother died of cancer. I know it's not a nice thing to happen. But, since my father died of alcoholism, we should also outlaw all alcohol. My grandfather died of hypertension so that means we should outlaw salt. My other grandfather died of diabetes. That means we need to outlaw sugar. And, because I have a second cousin once removed who drowned in a swimming pool, that means we need to outlaw swimming pools.
Or, maybe we could spend some time and energy on alcoholism treatment and research for heart disease and other diseases?
It doesn't follow that we should pass a law about something because a few people are affected in some way. EVERYBODY has been effected by something. If we followed the trend to its logical conclusion then just about everything would be illegal.
The point is that, beyond establishing a minimum age to drink or buy alcohol, the government has no business sticking its nose into other peoples' lives.
Too many people have become too dependent on government to solve their problems when they could simply say to the guy smoking that cigarette in the seat next to them at the bar, "Hey, buddy, do you mind moving down a couple of stools?"
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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today
Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99
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posted 04-21-2010 07:16 PM
quote: Randy Stankey
Joe, I'm sorry that your mother died of cancer.
She did? SHIT!!!!!!!
quote: Randy Stankey
But, since my father died of alcoholism, we should also outlaw all alcohol.
Where the hell did I say that we should outlaw smoking? Is everyone more stupid as a result of April 20 or something? Read my posts, people! Don't assume you read something that isn't there.
quote: Randy Stankey
The point is that, beyond establishing a minimum age to drink or buy alcohol, the government has no business sticking its nose into other peoples' lives.
So there should be no penalty for DUI, you're saying? In my opinion, anyone who gets a DUI is an idiot once. If they have more than one DUI, they are a born idiot incapable of learning from past idiocy.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 04-21-2010 07:36 PM
quote: Jonathan Smith
You have to be exposed to smoke from several hundred thousand cigarettes, or more to die from it second hand.
Regardless of your made up statistic the CDC says 38,000 Americans die from second hand smoke every year.
quote: Jonathan Smith
And, again, auto exhaust is worse for you, outdoors, than exposure to second hand is.
Try backing up this claim with some proof. Let's see where more than 38,000 Americans are dying of car exhaust yearly.
According to the CDC, 500 people per year die in the United States of unintentional carbon monoxide poisoning -the main, deadly ingredient in car exhaust. Outside of that you have smog and ozone coming from car exhaust. 4000 people in the US die of fatal asthma attacks on average per year.
quote: Jonathan Smith
Indoors, it depends on the area. I've been in bowling alleys where you could have 1,000 people lit up and you couldn't tell the following day.
The senses of smell and taste are diminished in smokers.
quote: Jonathan Smith
You shouldn't be allowed to smoke in booths, hospitals, little offices, but in a bowling alley, a bar that is 100% full of smokers nearly all of the time?
Again with the notion bars are filled 100% with smokers?
I think you're making up that story, especially considering Ohio doesn't have as high a percentage of smokers as Oklahoma. It's still legal to smoke in most bars within Oklahoma. As I said earlier, the majority of customers in bars in Oklahoma don't smoke. Non-smokers are in the majority now.
quote: Randy Stankey
Dictating whether people should be allowed to smoke in a privately owned business is like trying to dictate what movies should be allowed to be shown in a movie theater.
Has anyone ever died or contracted a life threatening disease by watching movies? Are taxpayers having to shell out billions of dollars subsidizing medical treatments that came as a consequence of watching movies? The only deadly activity I can think of involving movies is high risk sexual activities going on in porno theaters. Hasn't the Internet put most of them out of business already?
quote: Sean McKinnon
I find that people who have strong opinions one way or the other about addiction have been affected by it.
I agree with that to a certain extent. My mother's father's death from lung cancer (and seeing the guy 1 month before his death after one of his lungs had been removed) helped me decide at an early age that smoking was a very stupid thing to do. On the other hand, my Aunt Delores (my mother's older sister) languished in a coma for over 15 years before finally dying. She was put into her coma all thanks to a drunk driver.
So I have something personal against cigarettes and alcohol (drunk driving in particular). But even with personal feelings for lost relatives noted, I can still objectively look at the staggering difference in numbers, both in terms of deaths and monetary costs. Cigarettes are the worst, specific cause of preventable death in the world.
I'm all for any proposed smoking ordinance being put forth to a vote of the people. Chances are strong any measure would pass since the number of non-smokers is growing.
quote: Randy Stankey
It doesn't matter whether second hand smoke has the toxic effect that some people claim it does. If you don't like cigarette smoke you simply tell the other person that you don't like it and POLITELY ask him to move downwind of you.
In a perfect world the smoker will politely comply. But we live in an imperfect world. I've seen militant smokers in action plenty of times to know asking a smoker to move downwind is a potentially risky thing. It could get you involved in a fist fight or worse. So most non smokers just put up with it to avoid a confrontation.
quote: Randy Stankey
The point is that, beyond establishing a minimum age to drink or buy alcohol, the government has no business sticking its nose into other peoples' lives.
It becomes the government's business when it has to use countless billons of dollars of taxpayers money to help pay for lung cancer treatments given to lots of uninsured, underinsured or post retirement age smokers.
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Chad Souder
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 962
From: Waterloo, IA, USA
Registered: Feb 2000
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posted 04-21-2010 08:24 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
Regardless of your made up statistic the CDC says 38,000 Americans die from second hand smoke every year.
This is a purely estimated statistic. I'm not saying you made it up, I'm saying the Center For Disease Control did. Doctors really have no idea what causes cancer, since it is such a random disease. George Burns actually smoked cigars - it wasn't just part of his act - and he was over 100, wasn't he? Cancer isn't enough of a sure-thing for it to be positively linked to any specific cause. That is probably largely due to the fact that almost all cancer research goes toward how to cure it, not how to prevent it. That's probably because a lot of research is funded by pharmaceutical companies, which is a whole different discussion. Keeping people well doesn't make money, but I digress. Think about it - how many things over the last 30 years supposedly caused cancer only to be later determined to be perfectly safe? My own personal opinion is cancer is highly stress-related, but who really knows? So they'll say so-and-so died of heart disease and he or she lived in house with a smoker, so we'll count that as caused by second-hand smoke, then do some math to estimate how many times that must happen in the US and come up with 38,000. Never mind the person was also obese and only brushed their teeth once a week. It's a faulty statistic. If there is real evidence linking second-hand smoke to death, I've never seen it.
quote: Bobby Henderson
4000 people in the US die of fatal asthma attacks on average per year.
They know no more about what causes asthma than they do cancer. I had asthma until I outgrew it around age 17. I grew up between rural West Virginia and rural Iowa, where I was NEVER around smoking, smog, excessive exhaust, or any other usual suspect. It's purely speculation this makes for an invalid reference.
Randy - I completely agree with you on the government's role, but don't want this to dive further into the realm of politics.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 04-21-2010 10:38 PM
Joe, I read: "My mother and my grandmother got lung cancer. ...skim...skim...skim... It killed them both."
My mistake. ![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
Still, I'm sorry that your mother got cancer.
By the way, I do use telegraphic language and figures of speech.
So, when I say something like, "Besides making establishing a minimum drinking age.....", I assume that the reader understands the other things like making it illegal to drive while drunk or to give alcohol to minors and other common sense things that go along with it.
If we couldn't use figures of speech and telegraphic language and expect others to understand a broader meaning from them, we would all have to speak like Mr. Spock all the time. Of course, you are right. We need other laws in a similar vein regarding things like alcohol. It should be illegal to drive while intoxicated, regardless of the substance.
If you ask a person to stop smoking or to move a couple of seats down and he threatens you he is likely committing a crime and that's another matter all together. If the situation happens in a bar it might fall within the bartender's job description to deal with the situation. Although many rules of behavior are relaxed, basic civility is still a requirement. I have heard my father tell many a customer, "Hey buddy! Cool it or get the fuck out!"
If the situation were occurring outdoors different rules apply. Would it be just as easy for you to move upwind? Or, even better to go somewhere else? I can't think of many outdoor situations were it would be an inconvenience for me to move a few feet in order to avoid smelling smoke.
If I was at a stadium watching a baseball game (or some similar situation) and there wasn't a smoking/no smoking section we would be back to the same scenario that occurred in the bar. If the guy tried to escalate the situation afterward when you were on the street, that would be a crime.
There is a civil way to handle these types of situations in the great majority of cases. I really don't think it is necessary for people to ask for laws to deal with situations they don't have the courage to handle themselves. It's not right to use relativistic excuses to justify it either.
We should not allow government to intervene in more and more intricate areas of our daily life because that can start us down the proverbial slippery slope. Before we know it, we'll be so restricted by minuscule laws that we won't be able to do anything anymore.
I truly think this is a real risk.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 04-22-2010 12:58 AM
The government should not be paying for other people's medical problems. Neither should the government have taken millions of dollars worth of bribes... oops, I mean "campaign contributions"... to look the other way when marketing and manufacturing companies manipulated the truth in order to sell more cigarettes. But, again, we would have to wade through a quagmire of relativism to answer questions like this and we would likely get nowhere.
(e.g. "Why is one thing allowed when another thing is just as harmful?")
It is within government's responsibility to say whether it will pay for some things or not pay for others. Without jumping into the above-mentioned quagmire, I will say that the government's sense of what to pay for or not pay for is severely screwed up. Examples will, no doubt abound.
Lawyers are not normally part of the government but they can use the government as a tool to harass others. This should not be allowed, either. However, this is another question for another day because there's no good answer to how we can limit frivolous or abusive lawsuits without limiting other lawsuits which may be extreme cases but are not frivolous. To be more aggressive in cutting off bad lawsuits makes it more likely that we will cut off good lawsuits too. That's a thin gray line that's difficult to draw.
Still, there is no reason why somebody shouldn't be allowed to smoke a cigar and drink a glass of cognac on a special occasion or smoke a cigarette during a night out with friends. That doesn't mean that people should become long-term habitual smokers but if it wasn't for the abuses by manufacturers that we talked about above, this wouldn't be so much a problem, either. Would it?
It is perfectly within rights for a business owner to allow smoking or not to allow it. It is perfectly within rights for a person to decide whether he should smoke or not. As long as somebody isn't breaking the law, there's no reason why they shouldn't be allowed. (Taking into consideration countless Spock-like enumerations of laws and/or minuscule regulations that might or might not exist or even be reasonable.)
It is also a person's responsibility to be courteous when and where he smokes, to comply with a polite request to not smoke, to refrain from smoking in places where not allowed and to dispose of his refuse and cigarette butts when done smoking.
It is a fucked up sense of right and wrong that has gotten us into the position this country is in and, unless people put their foot down and stop the silliness it's only gong to get worse. Yes, it will take time and, in the process things will seem fucked up in different ways. Because no two people are guaranteed to share the same sense of right and wrong, it will be virtually impossible to come to an agreement on how to best unfuck things. Debates on whether things like cigarettes or alcohol should be allowed are just one symptom of how fucked up our system has become.
Unless people start putting their collective foot down and say, "Enough!" it's not going to improve.
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Chad Souder
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 962
From: Waterloo, IA, USA
Registered: Feb 2000
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posted 04-22-2010 09:59 AM
quote: Chris Slycord
It's an absolute fact that the relative risk of developing lung cancer is significantly higher amongst smokers.
quote: Chris Slycord
Plus, cigar smokers are less likely than cigarette smokers to get lung cancer (but still significantly higher than non-smokers).
Please take time to read posts. It saves time by keeping people from having to repeat themselves. I was responding to Bobby's comments and we were both talking about SECOND HAND smoke. At the very least, George Burns and every other cigar smoker in the world inhale a substantial amount of SECOND HAND smoke, their own, which is what we were talking about. Sure, it's just one guy. His name just popped into my head. But if you're saying genetics can prevent cancer, then genetics can also accelerate it along with a multitude of other variables. There are oodles of people who get cancer, including lung cancer, that never smoked and weren't around second-hand smoke.
quote: Chris Slycord
The fact that they do research to find things that give one an increased risk of getting cancer shows definitively that they are researching how to prevent it.
Again, please read before you respond. That word "almost" in there indicates that I am fully aware research is done as to what causes cancer. Just not much compared to how much is done on how to cure it.
quote: Bobby Henderson
I'm more willing to take the word of doctors, scientists and the Centers of Disease Control regarding cigarettes and lung cancer deaths than non-experts who are doing little more than spit-balling a guess.
Look, if you want to check some statistics, do your own searching and look at percentage of smokers by country, then at death by cancer by country. When you find the two lists don't match very well, get back to me. I'll give you some help for starters. Google "cancer by country" or "smokers by country" and don't click on any links that have spit-balling in them.
And Randy, George Burns did interviews in which he talked about his cigar smoking. Cigar Aficionado had one awhile back.
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Jonathan Smith
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 201
From: Youngstown, OH
Registered: Jan 2010
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posted 04-22-2010 12:41 PM
quote: Joe Redifer
If you are late for a funeral or a wedding, it is your own tardy ass' fault in the first place for not managing your time correctly. Learn how to be on time. It is not an excuse for speeding and endangering others' lives. That's just stupid. Regardless, it certainly is bad if you get into a wreck and kill people while driving that fast. That's why you call for a police escort or the like.
The two examples I gave were imaginary, but being late for a funeral wasn't.
It was John Pytlak's funeral, and I didn't see you there Joe. I wouldn't have known you at that time by looks, but I'm sure I would have heard your opinions on everything from all the way across the reception.
I told his wife and daughter I was sorry for being late; John helped me get a batch of movie film made one time, so I felt it necessary to drive to Rochester to pay my respects.
His daughter told me how John had once talked his way out of a speeding ticket driving 90MPH to see a Fighting Irish game.
Anyway, you are right, when you are late, it is your fault, no one else's. If you leave on time, and you have construction all the way down the interstate that no one you called told you about, or some asshole brake-checkign you for a forty-mile stretch of interstate, it is still your fault. He was probably reading my mind too, and passing judgment since he has never been late, or been at fault, for anything.
You should definitely call the police and tell them you are driving 110MPH.
They approve of that, and it wouldn't take any time at all for them to meet with you, especially from a payphone.
Or maybe I just should have missed the entire thing, or called the church and told them to wait for me
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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