Excellent, Dr. Siegel! Your focus on Philip Morris writing this bill and your laundry list of effective death reduction actions that Philip Morris has forbidden the FDA authority to take (a ban, nicotine removal, increase smoking age, limit types of sales outlets, or require a purchase prescriptions) was powerful. There's precious seconds to make your points and you couldn't have spent them better!
I don't think the average American appreciates the influence and economic muscle that the nicotine addiction industry would and could bring to bear upon this already thin, understaffed, overworked and underfunded agency. I don't think folks appreciate that it's an industry whose total annual sales are nearly equal to all prescription medicine sales combines.
Do we really want the FDA's 7,000 safety watchdogs developing a mindset that 100,000 or 200,000 annual product deaths is some glorious achievement? You're right, in what decade will that happen? If one of us were the Director of the FDA, how would we allocate precious workforce resources? With cigarettes thrown in the mix, we certainly couldn't do it based upon total annual human disease and death or we'd have to devote most of our staff to trying to reinvent an inherently deadly product.
If the tobacco industry with its billions hasn't figured out how to stop the killing then how in the heck is the FDA supposed to? The thinking of these guys is light years ahead of Congress! What an ingenious way to get government subsidized product research, that comes with an official license to kill.
Not only does FDA regulation confer an implication of safety, it actually shifts responsibility for cigarette deaths to the U.S. goverment.
If I were a tobacco industry executive or board member I think I'd sleep far better knowing that smoking deaths were the government's problem, not mine.
Doc, you seem to have a paradox of your own. Reducing or eliminating substances in cigarettes (dosage) any benefits will not be known for decades. This shoots holes in SHS implications. Even if the actual risks of SHS exposure were absolute and not theory. Even if dosage from SHS exposure was 10% of that of an actual smoker it will not be in decades to harm or kill but will take centuries. The fact is that dosage from exposure are in the thousands of 1%. Which brings us now into millenia. Methusalah would be tough one to show a significant risk to SHS exposure. By presenting one point of debate you disqualify another. There is the paradox.
nemo31;
Michael has always been careful to avoid how much of this risk and exposure is eliminated by the normal functions of the human body.
The rhetoric of "the deadly smoke" which creates urban legends can not be watered down simply to appease science or credibility.
It would be ridiculous to claim what they call smoke, as a whole, remains stable for indefinite periods of time indoors and outdoors This one has been used many times as more fiction to plant seeds in the mind, which is similarly fashioned to a lot of other foolish statements they make in epidemiology which measures stable amounts when no stability actually exist to achieve contrived ends.
What is collected and trapped is stable what we experience in the real world does not come close to what is described and they know it, but use the numbers just the same.
When we find tobacco related constituents in urine or toenail samples it fails most to understand these are constituents no longer in the body and how could they have an effect 20 or 30 years later.
Further spice is added to the mix when we see how little description is required beyond smoke. Millions of constituents and tobacco types merged into what ever brand you buy which varies by the country you buy it in. All it is claimed produce exactly the same compound known as deadly tobacco smoke.
When we look from a scientific standpoint; collectively what these fashionistas call "tobacco smoke" only exists in a fictional world we are being forced to live in, in place of reality as rhetoric becomes reality.
Is it really deadly? and which of the thousands of consumer products a smoker may choose are deadlier than others? no one knows and legally no one is any longer allowed to say, even if they did know.
All because the scientific community has neglected to look, and the fear comes to surface if they did look and found their own supplanted calculated fears were groundless what then; apologies?
Not from this arrogant crowd, simply more finger pointing and blaming others for their own incompetence because they failed process and did not find it necessary to look when rhetoric does the work for them.
What I want to know Kevin is how the fascisnistas can continually parade down their catwalk showing their latest nonsense---and never once trip over a dead body?
Curious, isn't it?
Sunz - What I want to know Kevin is how the fascisnistas can continually parade down their catwalk showing their latest nonsense---and never once trip over a dead body?
Curious, isn't it?
............
Sunz,
Perhaps tobacco smoke will be recognized as the first disease in history to cause a world-wide "virtual" epidemic, complete with "virtual" cemeteries and hospitals filled with "virtual" victims.
It may also be recognized as the first "virtual" disease to create a real multi-billion dollar industry employing tens of thousands.
Also, the first "virtual" disease that succeeded in legally turning hundreds of millions of real people into a special class that can be exploited, taxed and discriminated against with impunity.
What other conclusion can be made when our elected representatives speak of smokers as if they were just an asset to be exploited? Has any Congressman or Senator ever asked smokers to participate in any of these committee meetings?
Nope. Only Tobacco Companies and Big Tobacco Control. After all, does the dairy farmer consult with the milk cows?
Well SHS certainly gave Dr Siegel an apoplectic fit !OK so we were backing him into a corner concerning the legitimacy of his own work at the time,but suddenly spouting 220 dead bodies and 16Million asthmatics ALL triggered by tobacco smoke all directed at us callous bastards,well.
I still contend there is nothing created in the virtual world of health scare. that cannot be cured with a good old fashioned hemp rope.
Or and electric chair.
Or a gun.
Kevin: a good old fashioned hemp rope.
Sunz: Or and electric chair.
Jalestra: Or a gun.
Nah, I want them to suffer in prison where they belong. And force them to pay back every red cent they've stolen from us.
.
Trash is trash tnsmoker, we don't keep empty boxes around that outlive their usefulness regardless of the fact we pay more for packaging of a product than the actual product itself, why do the same with empty people?
Hi, guys.
I'm darned if I recall where on this site it was exactly that I encountered a complaint about the high cost of smoker's health care, illustrated with the example of a smoker with no health insurance, who ultimately collapsed and spent two days having only 'comfort care' in a hospital until he died two days later, for which the charge - for, I repeat, two days stay with, I'm guessing, minimal (comparatively speaking) care - was said to be $100,000.
Another commenter here stated that her insurance company was charged $250 for a tube of toothpaste provided her during a hospital stay.
When there's that much emphasis on profit, there's little room left for health care - especially as regards the pharmaceutical arena.
To the investors and industry people to be encountered shortly in an upcoming comment section, cancer drugs are all about money, investors, payouts - in such as this case of unproven drugs with uncertain effects, this pay-back to be drained from the desperate dying in agony potentially for several months longer, possibly selling their houses on the off chance of doing so.
This is the type of situation regulatory agencies were created to prevent.
But when democratic government serves self-interests like various industries, rather than the people it exists of, for and by...
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/cont...ull/
NEJMp078041
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/cont...ull/
NEJMp078048
(Note the research funding. If even one had been, rather than Big Pharma-, tobacco-related, he'd have been driven off in flames because the same criteria doesn't apply when commercial industry sets the rules.)
http://www.cptech.org/pharm/pryor.html
Don't miss the links at the end of the following article
(And this makes it pretty obvious that a fair degree of the high rate of childhood obesity used as an excuse to remove basic human rights and to harrass and restrict the population is linked to the high rate of child drugging for Big Pharma profit - not personal choice 'evils'.)
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/20...nuing-
fall.html
So Big Pharma pretty much runs public health agencies in various countries, and money trumps the value of life, rights and truth - no big surprise there.
Now complete control of tobacco's to be effectively handed over to a ruthless, secretive group of corporations which routinely sacrifice the health and lives of others to expediency - in the interest of exterminating smokers.
http://thepumphandle.wordpress.c...lution/
#more198
http://thepumphandle.wordpress.c...ience/#more-
153
http://thepumphandle.wordpress.c...s-fda/#more-
150
links to the following
http://energycommerce.house.gov/...s-
testimony.pdf
http://energycommerce.house.gov/...s-
testimony.pdf
http://www.tcf.org/Publications/.../
healthbeat.pdf
"in a money-driven health care system, those who view health care as a profit center strive to dictate social policy."
(We've noticed - and in Canada, having had our once-great Medicare system starved for privatization over the past few decades for 'Free Trade', for-profit is really only just moving in for the projected $5 billion (?) extra annually those with money will pay over taxes which assuredly will not drop with the switch.
But globalization means a few giant corporations literally owning everything, and the same squeeze will be enacted world-wide, as with the smoking bans.)
Don't miss this part in the list:
http://www.thehealthcareblog.com...l-
str.html#more
You'll see some very familiar characteristics in the comment section.
This is what we're dealing with.
And it's becoming more common in tandem with perpetual increases in neurotoxic exposures and proven accumulations in our bodies and environment.
A few selections follow from:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magaz.../
open_boss.html
'Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It's a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren't just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We're worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they're lifting profits and stock prices, we're willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.'
'On the broad continuum between the ethical everyman and the predatory killer, there's plenty of room for people who are ruthless but not violent. This is where you're likely to find such people as Ebbers, Fastow, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. We put several big-name CEOs through the checklist, and they scored as "moderately psychopathic"; our quiz on page 48 lets you try a similar exercise with your favorite boss. And this summer, together with New York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience. "I always said that if I wasn't studying psychopaths in prison, I'd do it at the stock exchange," Hare told Fast Company. "There are certainly more people in the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension than in the general population. You'll find them in any organization where, by the nature of one's position, you have power and control over other people and the opportunity to get something." '
'But how can we recognize psychopathic types? Hare has revised his Psychopathy Checklist (known as the PCL-R, or simply "the Hare") to make it easier to identify so-called subcriminal or corporate psychopaths. He has broken down the 20 personality characteristics into two subsets, or "factors." Corporate psychopaths score high on Factor 1, the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others" category. It includes eight traits: glibness and superficial charm; grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; conning and manipulativeness; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (i.e., a coldness covered up by dramatic emotional displays that are actually playacting); callousness and lack of empathy; and the failure to accept responsibility for one's own actions. Sound like anyone you know?'
They do tend to self-identify.
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