Many, if not most, municipalities have enacted ordinances prohibiting the consumption of alcohol on streets and sidewalks.
But I haven't seen any evidence that those laws harmed efforts by MADD and other alcohol control advocates to reduce drunk driving, binge drinking and alcoholism.
What exactly is the purpose of such laws?
There may be valid reasons to forbid alcohol drinking in streets or sidewalks, and limit this activity into safe places.
One could be that some people get drunk. And some people who get drunk also get harassing and sometimes violent. In the streets there may be mother with kids, not only regular pub customers.
Then, there are a few people who like to drink alcohol that also like to throw the empty bottles in the ground, sometimes breaking them. I think we all know how a shattered bottle on the sidewalk can be dangerous. In my town, there's an ordinance that ban the selling of alcoholics into glass recipients after a certain hour, precisely for this reason.
In contrast, there's no evidence that smokers may become nasty offenders or violent people as a result of smoking a cig. It's not crack, after all. And tobacco doesn't leave cutting shards on the ground as it's consumed. If we want to pick ETS as the 'cutting shards', then there's no evidence that ETS in the outdoors is of any harm at all.
So what the ban of alcohol consumption in the streets has to do with a smoking ban outdoors? It seems completely unrelated to me.
I think there is a good reason why the passage of laws banning alcohol consumption in public places has not led the public to think of alcohol control advocates as being fanatics.
The reason: because, as tR1cKy notes, alcohol consumption can cause intoxication, which is a direct public danger. Smoking does no such thing, so I do believe that if we start promoting banning smoking on sidewalks, we are going to be viewed as fanatics. And that will hurt all our other efforts.
"The ordinance ... lists the health dangers from secondhand smoke as well as pollution from discarded cigarette butts and cigar butts as reasons behind the need for a smoking ban."
Health danger from SHS on the beach?
Pollution from cigarette butts?
Those who drive through the Australian outback, hundreds of miles away from any civilization, are sometimes and in some areas surprised by the number of discarded bottles and cans on the borders of the dirt tracks. This kind of pollution is really disgusting and disturbing, because glass and aluminum don't degrade over time.
However I have never heard of any suggestion for banning drinks in cars.
In a fact sheet from San Diego County about Wildfire smoke and health: http://www.sdapcd.org/info/facts...ts/
wf_smoke.pdf
"Is smoke bad for me? ... If you are healthy, smoke usually does not present a major risk."
"These particles can build up in your respiratory system, causing a number of health problems including burning eyes, runny noses ... These particles can also aggravate heart and lung diseases such as congestive heart failures, COPD, emphysema and asthma."
I beg you to note the difference: aggravate, not cause
I seem to remember that a no sidewalk smoking ordinance was attempted a couple of years ago by a suburb in Maryland, but later overturned.
I suspect that the prohibitionist agenda has advanced sufficiently since then that this new wave of legislation will actually stick in some places, and we will start seeing people ticketed and possibly even arrested for smoking on the sidewalk.
I was once arrested for the horrible crime of walking down the street while drinking a beer. I think the actual charge was "Drinking alcohol in public view". I have always tried to be calm and respectful when it comes to dealing with police so while I did get thrown into the back of the car and threatened with a full arrest, in the end they didn't actually cuff me or take me down to the station, just held me in the car for awhile and wrote out a ticket, which I had to go down to city hall and pay. I suspect that my having had long hair and a shaggy beard at the time (I was 21 when this happened and looked like a classic hippie-kid) worked against me and got me picked up in the first place, where a more 'respectable' looking person would have been ignored or let off with a warning. But I also suspect that if I were black it could have been much worse in those days (and maybe even still today), and would have resulted in a full arrest and more serious trouble with the legal system.
Here's my predictions about no-smoking-on-the-sidewalk ordinances in the suburbs; 'respectable' looking people will get off with a warning and a finger-wagging, people who look 'different' will get fines and tickets, and homeless people and people with mental illnesses will be fully arrested.
If I walk down a street, I could at any time get hit by a car. Yet I have never heard anyone talking of banning cars in the streets. It would be a good idea perhaps, also because the exhaust fumes of cars must be at least as unhealthy as cigarette smoke. I think they are even much more harmful; after all, cigarettes are made of dried plants and paper, whereas cars use petrol (or gas, if you will). Does us all and the rest of this world a lot more harm.
Your on the wrong side Dr. Siegel. I know you have spent much of your life trying to stop people from partaking in a habit that might lead them to die of horrible diseases. That is not a bad goal.
However, well meaning people like you have opened the door for the nannies, the psychos like ASH, and politically driven doctors/scientists like Stanton Glantz.
For me, it is just a matter of choice. If you know the risks, have fun.
that will hurt all our other efforts.
Michael Siegel
What, exactly; are YOUR other efforts Dr. Mike and how do they differ from this, in YOUR view?
Iopener2000-
To take just one example, just consider the effort to simply educate people about hazards of smoking, which I think most would agree is entirely appropriate. I think that if we are banning smoking on sidewalks, suggesting that this is a major health hazard, then we are going to lose credibility and this may undermine even our messages about the health effects of smoking.
Another example is providing assistance to smokers who want to quit. If we support the idea of banning smoking on sidewalks, I think we will become viewed as punishing smokers and we will lose our credibility even in being able to provide assistance to those who do want to quit. They may reject us completely. To be honest, I think this whole effort may backfire and actually deter people from quitting because they just get fed up with the paternalism.
Obviously, the other thing I was getting at is that I think this is going to harm efforts to protect workers from secondhand smoke exposure. The difference that I see is that there is strong evidence (in my opinion, I know there is disagreement among many of my readers) that indoor smoking can lead to significant health effects among nonsmoking workers who are exposed for long periods of time. But I am not aware of any evidence that people walking down sidewalks are suffering substantial health problems from smoke exposure. To me, that's the difference.
There is also a article in the New York Times today that California Puts Passive Smoke on Toxic List. When people ignore the subtle little changes, eventually it leads to a bigger change before people know it -- making cigarette smoking an illegal substance. Then the public, especially the smoking public, is left scratching their heads and wondering what the heck happened.
"then we are going to lose credibility and this may undermine even our messages about the health effects of smoking."
Not only loosing credibility in terms of potential health effects but also in terms of what the objectives of health advocates really are.
The message conveyed by these mesures clearly is: We don't even care about the health effects, we just want to remove smokers from this world.
With reference to California Puts Passive Smoke on Toxic List
" That conclusion conflicts with a 2004 report by the U.S. surgeon general. Sanford Barsky, a researcher writing on behalf of the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, told the board in previous testimony that the state report "either ignores mentioning or does not give the appropriate weight" to studies refuting a link between secondhand smoke and breast cancer.
California scientists say their research is more current than the surgeon general's report."
Who says epidemiological statistics tell the truth?
If more current research is closer to the truth, why then are the studies by Enstrom/Kabat and http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/medline/pmid;
16399662 NOT considered closer to the truth? Well, all know the answer: it's the agenda at hand.
When the deadliest addictive drug (cigarettes) is appropriately compared to other addictive drugs that are illegal, emphysema advocates claim that comparison isn't fair because legal drugs aren't comparable to illegal drugs.
When cigarettes are appropriately compared to alcohol, lung cancer promoters claim that comparison isn't fair because alcohol and cigarettes impact the brain differently.
When indoor tobacco smoke pollution is appropriately compared to outdoor air pollution, cigarette fiends claim that comparisons isn't fair.
And when outdoor smoking restrictions are appropriately compared to laws prohibiting urinating, defacating, spitting and overt sexual activity
in public, tobacco smoke polluters claim that those comparisons aren't fair.
The only thing I find consistent about smoking advocates is that they don't want to compare cigarette addiction or tobacco smoke pollution with any other type of drug addiction, drug abuse, air pollution, public health or safety laws, public nuisances or indecencies.
And yet, cigarettes are far more hazardous than all of those comparisons combined.
Actually I think cigarettes vs. illegal drugs is a very good comparison.
Let's look at marijuana. Marijuana has been illegal for 70 years, and a wave of anti-drug hysteria on top of that in the 1980's meant that not only is possession, sale, and distribution a criminal offense, but also people can be randomly drug tested by their employers, evicted from their apartments, and lose custody of their children if caught smoking marijuana. There were never commercial ad campagins for 'brands' of marijuana, no 'Big Marijuana' corprorations with Madison Ave. ad agencies trying to push their product. And yet, despite all these restrictions, millions of Americans continue to choose to smoke marijuana, and marijuana is a multi billion dollar industry, unregulated and untaxed. And, despite hundreds of thousands of (mostly working class) people thrown in jail, the 'menace' of marijuana use has remained essentially the same for years.
I expect the same with tobacco prohibition. Tobacco will not 'go away'. But it may go from being a multi-billion dollar taxed-and-regulated industry, to a multi-billion dollar illegal and unregulated industry. I expect the folks who will end up in prison (and I believe there will be tobacco related incarcerations by the end of the decade) will be neither the executives of the old "Big Tobacco" or the gang-lords who will control "New Tobacco", but a bunch of working class smokers.
Excuse me Bill, but what are exactly those "emphysema advocates" and "lung cancer promoters" you're talking about?!?
It's rather an unusual profession to promote disease. Are there also influenza PR's and AIDS sponsors?
The publication is full of contradictions. "California scientists say their research is more current than the surgeon general's report"
If newer reports obsolete previous ones how can they justify including previous reports in their meta-studies?
"The air board must next consider regulatory steps to reduce exposure to the smoke, a process that could take years."
Funny, they must consider steps to reduce exposure? So before having set standards, before having measured actual exposures against existing standards (already set by OSHA for most pollutants), they know they must reduce it. We all know how these standards will be set: they must fit the agendy. And they will find ways to explain why the standards for ETS must be more stringent than for exhaust gases and industrial pollution. The resemblance to the EPA "study" of 1993 is obvious.
"''People live in apartments all across California who are exposed to secondhand smoke on a daily basis,'' Knepprath said. ''It drifts from a common area or another apartment.''"
A new notation: smoke drifts. And of course, it drifts as a solid mass, without any dilution, alteration on its way from one appartment to another.
This makes me want to cry ... How stupid can you get until you don't call it science anymore?
The California Air Resources Board has unanimously adopted a regulatory amendment identifying tobacco smoke pollution as a toxic air contaminant.
http://www.arb.ca.gov/regact/ets...006/
ets2006.htm
That means that indoor locations where smoking occurs can now be identified as toxic waste dumps.
Michael, You have some interesting ideas on this site. You said you wanted someone from the tobacco control movement to explain bans on busy (or not) sidewalks is not what the movement is all about.
I would like to know, in your opinion what IS the tobacco control movement all about? Specifically, if you were asked to be the movement's leader and spokesperson, what do you think that it SHOULD be about?
Godshall writes that "when outdoor smoking restrictions are appropriately compared to laws prohibiting urinating, defacating, spitting and overt sexual activity in public, tobacco smoke polluters claim that those comparisons aren't fair."
"appropriately"? Not "fair"? How about just plain insane? This guy is such an over-the-top fanatic that he can't even recognize valid comparisons.
Bill wrote:
" When the deadliest addictive drug (cigarettes) is appropriately compared to other addictive drugs blah blah blah..."
i think, Bill, that if you want us to buy the concept that banning alcohol consumption outdoors is something comparable to banning smoking outdoors, you need to bring us convincing reasons to think so, rather than whining like a child whose snack has been stolen by bullies.
Anon-
With respect to secondhand smoke, my position is that I think tobacco control advocates should be supporting and working for a smoke-free environment for all workers. I do not believe we should be pursuing smoking bans outdoors, except if it's a confined workplace or an enclosed area such as a place where people cannot move freely about (e.g. a stadium where you are in a fixed seat and cannot move).
tR1cKy wrote:
"Excuse me Bill, but what are exactly those "emphysema advocates" and "lung cancer promoters" you're talking about?!?"
For starters, tR1cKy, benpal, marcus aurelius, iopener2000, Hoodwinded, Lynda, Walt, Brett, Wiel, ed pscho, l. duguay, McFadden, O'Brien, Koza, Turci, Thomas, Højbjerg and others affilated with
http://www.forces.org/index.htm
Bill-
I wouldn't necessarily fault you for calling the tobacco companies lung cancer promoters, since they manufacture products that cause the disease, but I don't think calling individual smokers or other private citizens who are speaking out against what they see as inapppropriate public policy lung cancer promoters is reasonable. The tobacco companies may well be called the enemy, but I don't think smokers are. In fact, I think they are the very constituents (i.e., the public) that we are supposed to serve as public health practitioners. They are, in fact, the "public" in "public health." And obviously, Lynda does not belong on this list, even if it were appropriate to say that anyone who questions anti-smoking groups policies is a lung cancer promoter.
I'm exactly as much of a "lung cancer promoter" as Bill is a "fascism promoter."
Your continual tactic of resorting to name calling and semantic games only makes it more obvious that we're striking a nerve, and that you've got nothing to stand on.
Heh heh heh.
So Bill, i am part of a group of conspirators, identified with those nicks, whose goal is to promote lung cancer and emphysema among people. And this group is "forces".
Well, i'm not part of "forces" (and i'll leave to the others to speak for themselves), although i do read it often, as many other things. If you want to know, i find it interesting and somewhat funny in its serious bashing on radical anti-smoking organizations (those i define "fascists" btw).
Anyway, i don't feel like spreading lung cancer and / or emphisema. Certainly i don't do it with my 5-6 cigs per day, all smoked outdoors, nor when i question the validity of some anti's claims, nor when i mock you after you make an absurd claim like this one.
Actually, I am not formally a part of FORCES either, although I support much (however, not all) of what they say and support.
Bill seems to have difficulty dealing with individuals who can't be neatly shuffled into pigeonholed groups that he can then blast as a whole.
His tactic would make as much sense as my dismissing everything Dr. Siegel has to say because he's on a list-serve that is probably quite generally supportive of the Helena botch.
Michael J. McFadden
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"
http://pasan.TheTruthIsALie.com
I gather news and read media releases; then I put them into one page. I guess that makes me an lung cancer supporter, even when my newsletter generally is over 3/4 written by reporters 1/4 by the public (letters to the editors).
I guess seeing all the news on an issue in one place hurts your cause. Don't ask me how.
About that proposed sidewalk ban in Maryland that somebody mentioned. It was in the small village ironically named Friendship Heights and the ban was proposed by its mayor and knocked out merely on a technicality by a county board. But here's the real kicker: One of the mayor's given reasons for the proposal was to protect the children from the mere sight of people smoking. That's how concerned he was "for the children." But about a year later, this same concerned mayor was busted for sexually assaulting a little boy in (couldn't make this up) the bathroom of a church. If you doubt me, google it. Story also strikes me as emblematic. Puritan control-freaks are often trying to control the world as a roundabout way of controlling their own pretty dark desires.
I find I unfortunately disagree with Dr Siegel that these extremes of unscientific fanaticism will undermiine the Movement. This bandwagon has already become a juggernaut--too many people (not to mention politicians) have already climbed aboard, and no amount of weird irrationality can stop it or even dampen the propaganda-driven hysteria. Just as no amount of irrationality or irrational accusations could stop the Salem hunt.
Well, Bill, making those drugs illegal armed the anti-smoking crusade.
Pointing to an earlier wrong perpetrated by fans of government coercion who objectively despise individual freedom (which no American wants to admit, hence all the incompetent rhetoric and research rationalization funded by theft) in no way justifies the later depredations.
Another empty argument. Dismissed.
The communities health???
I would not give the self appointed "health experts" that rave about tobacco and alcohol a second of time until "real health threats to our nations health are addresses".
Since CE.Koop and the CDC declared AIDS and active Tubercluosis as a result of AIDS a "politically correct" disease working people health care workers,prision guards, policemen's health calattoral to keeping the medical records of patients carrying airborne pathogens as "private data" The above mentioned will become victims of deadly virus's spread through out our country.
How many billion's of public funds have been spent on the tobacco danger to the public's health canard?
I am greatly honoured that Mr Godshall calls me a lung cancer promoter. I also find it amusing that Mr Godshall claims that tobacco is much worse than alcohol. I am not the slightest bit surprised that medical costs are escalating.
As far as Forces is concerned, I am certainly not affiliated with Forces, I am a paying member!
Finally, I do not think it fair to call Lynda affiliated with Forces. Her role on these pages is entirely different. I fully sympathize with her, because her sisters life was ultimately lost to the zealotry of the anti smoker movement.
Mr. Godshall--
I promote individual freedom, not the fell diseases you accuse me of promoting. Yes, I accept the fact of these diseases, and oppose the authoritarian contempt of liberty by which the promoters of intolerance (that would be you)claim they will eliminate them.
The marginal gains your policies may accrue on these issues are not worth the loss of liberty and treasure attendant on promoting them.
Sometimes, accepting the woes of the world is the mature thing to do. I hope you will remember that.
I also am not affiliated with forces, nor any tobacco company, nor do I support either the tobacco cartel(which unjustly sold out it's customers for federal shielding for their actions), nor any tobacco control group, it is not their place to tell others how to live, educate, yes, coerce, or order, simply put, no. I am a strong proponent of an individuals liberty and right to choose their own lifestyles. I also am very interested in history, and history has tried this trick before, more than once, in more than one country. A prime example is/was prohibition. You would think with less than 100 years since that fiasco, some of these non smokers would have lived long enough to remember the outright gang warfare that accompanied the unbelievable profit margin the government set up for the illegal sale of a cheap, easily attainable/producable vice, yet here we go again. Have taxable sales dropped since the huge increases on taxing the tobacco industry? Yes. Does that mean that use of these products have dropped significantly? No one knows, as the illegal trade has geared up considerably. Our elected officials told us that selling, buying, using illegal drugs was helping terrorists fund there plots. How much easier, with less risk is there in selling a legal product obtained illegally, and which the punishments for pale in comparison. The Anti-smokers want a war, and they are willing to help fund one in order to try to dictate what an average citizen can or can't do legally, without any true proof of harm, or in other words mr Bill, name three deaths you can PROVE were CAUSED by SHS, show me the death certificate, We can all spout irrational numbers as much as we want, give me proof of any actual harm caused by SHS, undeniably caused, not contributed to, not associated with, not linked to, caused.
Of course, this like any other rationale question put to mr Godshall, will be handled in one of the 2, or 5, or 10 ways that he always responds.
I do find it humerous how, just because I spoke my mind, I am now identified as "affiliated" with an organization, that, at best, I read occasionally. And notice how, because I ask for proof or question statements, I am now a "promoter of diseases". In my 39 years as an active health care worker, I could pretty reliably bring up more than three patients I have treated who have not considered me a menace to the healthcare industry, or their health or lives, as a matter of fact, I know that I have saved many more lives, directly, than Mr Godshall ever will as a "public health advocate", which I am still curious about, how does one get the position of "public health advocate"? By dictating to others how their lives should be led?
I do sincerely believe that Mr. Godshall has never seen a repressive law he hasn't liked, or a government lie he hasn't defended.
It's strange, I have never met you sir, but everytime time I read one of your posts a picture of Wally Cox appears in my mind.
I find it amusing when folks who refer to me as a Nazi, Stalinist, terrorist, tyrant, fascist, jihadist, and McCarthyist get upset when I correctly point out that they are lung cancer and emphysema promoters because they advocate public policies that result in higher rates of lung cancer and emphysema.
What a bunch of hypocrites.
We don't advocate public policies that result in forced unemployment, nor do we advocate policies that would deprive you of your rigth to choose your own lifestyle.
it is news to me that i am affiliated with FORCES. i happen to be an educated and informed individual that reads and can make up his own mind about what he does with his life and respects the choices that other people make for themselves. government interference into our lives is way out of control, from both the left and the right. the public health cabal has absolutely gone off the deep end. as a scientist i can say that these so-called 'advocates' are nothing more than welfare recipients in lab coats.
brandz
"I find it amusing when folks who refer to me as a Nazi, Stalinist, terrorist, tyrant, fascist, jihadist, and McCarthyist get upset when I correctly point out that they are lung cancer and emphysema promoters because they advocate public policies that result in higher rates of lung cancer and emphysema."
Hitler came to power promoting nationwide good health too, Wally, er, Bill, and look where that got him.
I've been up and down these threads and no one has called you anything but a (health) nazi and/or a muddahfuging health taliban. But since you insist on embellishing the insult list then go ahead, Bill, knock yourself out- and thank you for letting us know what we polite people never mentioned.
Personally, I will call you a silly bits.
Any by the bye, bits, what do you puff, or nibble on, when you are trying to relax, and not otherwise on-line, to save us international sinners from ourselves?...hope you don't mind, just thought I'd ask.
..."He bag production he got emphysema
He got one lung cancer he one stupid smoker
He got feet down below his knee
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease
Come together right now over me"
Oh Wally, I lub U, U so bad...
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