Surgeon general: No safe level of secondhand smoke

I was sort of bummed that Batman Jones was so massively sensible in this thread, for a second I thought I was going to lineup with BigTexx and against batman jones for freaking once in my life. Close, though.

Deji - sorry, pal if you believe in public health at all, you have to restrict smoking - the science re: secondhand smoke is just too overwhelming, I am sure you know that. it does not just kill you, it kills people around you - waitresses, bartenders, patrons, whoever- and thats the rub. In this instance, the govt. is not protecting YOU from your vices (unlike pot laws, which are) - in this case, it is protecting ME and my kid and my friends from your vices.

people can do what they want in their own space, but smoke is not something that stays in its own space. I think laws are totally appropriate in this instance. Yes, i could move if we're in a bar together. But if i play in a band, and some freaking cloud of smoke rests in my fact for four hours (straight no breaks, no opening bands- ever!) and takes three days to get out of my delicious curly locks every time i play in a bar, it is problem. Or for the bartenders or whoever. It's selfish to ask people to get out of your way - we're not the ones introducing deadly fumes into enclosed public spaces. Sorry to inconvenience you, but your vices leave the rest of us with no choice.

But batman brings up sort of a good idea - a limited number of Smoking Bars. Maybe people can apply for special permits and people can smoke all they want. Is that reasonable? I have not thought it through... maybe.

 

That's all we want but it is not enough for these people.

 

Arkansas has a law going into effect next month that bans smoking in workplaces and restaurants.

 

again..it's happening everywhere. the debate lasts a little while...but it's happening.

 

But that's my point too: people don't "vote with their feet" because they're not basing their decisions on the right information (nor are bar owners) -- otherwise we would not have a situation where 99% of bars are smoking bars yet 10% of people smoke.

Sure, the BEST outcome would be a market that could find its own equilibrium point and leave everybody well off -- but that is not attainable due to the inherent nature of smoking and the externalities that go along with it, and the hard time that people have valuing them. In short, that outcome is a fantasy and while you can lament it - putting it on the 'laziness" of nonsmokers is simply not fair (or really relevant) any more than it is to blame it on the "selfishness" of smokers.

A BETTER outcome than the status quo (presuming that 90% of people don't smoke/want to smoke in bars - again these numbers are made up) is one where 99% of bars are non-smoking (due to a ban) and 1% are smoking.

Granted this is vastly oversimplified (not taking into account individual preferences, or the fact that walking outside to smoke a cigarrete for 5 minutes is a cost that most smokers will bear) , but I'm saying that in the absence of smoking bans - the outcomes that I have seen are not optimal because more people are being made worse off than others are being made better off.

 

Not at all, any bar that has outdoor seating or even standing for that matter, you can smoke in.

 

Be you can never ever ever do that indoors? Ever? Even with nothing but smokers in the entire place?

 

I just wanted to repeat this post again.

 

Why is that outcome fantasy? The same people who support the ban could take grassroots nongovernmental action. It happens in many instances. Encouraging such an outcome is certainly more desirable than surrendering to an inequitable action. Further it flawed to compare the laziness of the non-smoking ban supporting public to the selfishness of the smoker precisely because the optimal solution is not within the power of the smoker to bring into existence, while it is wholly within the power of the nonsmoking ban supporting public. To claim it is fantasy is to deny history. Movements can affect our community - it is in fact a movement that is bringing about the very change we are discussing. And it is in fact that very change that denies your position that people are somehow barred from externalized benefits.

However, I would certainly embrace some sort of legislative action short of a ban, whether it be tradable permits or something similar. I think we can agree that there are better solutions than a ban.

Another unfounded assertion. The fact is that the health problems casually (not causaly) associated with smoking would significantly shorten your lifespan greatly reducing your burden on the healthcare system. That's if it were true. What's next, BigTexx? Loss of productivity from smoke breaks? Don't worry, lol, there's an answer.

That's not the way it is in Austin.

That's at will employment. You aren't forced to work in a smoking environment. That is an individual's choice.

What is a 'real' benefit? That would seem to be a pathetic attempt to justify your own opinion. As individual's we can make our own determination on whether there is a benefit or not to the action. I'll point out that BigTexx has continued to ignored the challenges to the 'science' behind the SG's Report and has not given any further explanation of the Report's validity. You intuitive notion that because inhaling any smoke is bad for you is equal justification to ban outdoor grills, wood burning fireplaces, and automobiles - after all I cannot avoid the smog created by your insessant driving about as easily as I can avoid patronizing a bar.

Go forth ye puritans and smite the smokers. After all, who but satan blows smoke through his nose?


Harper's Magazine, Nov, 1993 by Richard Klein

From Cigarettes Are Sublime, by Richard Klein, to be published next month by Duke University Press. Klein is a professor of French at Cornell University.

The noxious effects of tobacco have been observed since the moment of its introduction into Europe at the end of the sixteenth century. Since the early nineteenth century, it has been recognized that the alkaloid of nicotine, administered to rats in pure form in minute doses, instantly produces death. No one who smokes fails eventually to get the signals that the body, with increasing urgency, sends as it ages; in fact, every smoker probably intuits the poison from the instant of experiencing the first violent effects of lighting up, and probably confirms this understanding every day with the first puffs of the first cigarette. But understanding the noxious effects of cigarettes is not usually sufficient reason to cause anyone to stop smoking or resist starting; rather, knowing it is bad seems an absolute precondition of acquiring and confirming the cigarette habit. Indeed, it could be argued that few people would smoke if cigarettes were actually good for you, assuming such a thing were possible; the corollary affirms that if cigarettes were good for you, they would not be sublime. The noxious character of cigarettes--their great addictiveness and their poisonous effects--constitutes the absolute precondition of their troubling, somber beauty.

Cigarettes are not positively beautiful, but they are sublime by virtue of their charming power to propose what Kant would call "a negative pleasure": an inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the "bad" taste the smoker quickly learns to love. Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility. Warning smokers or neophytes of the dangers of smoking only entices them more powerfully to the edge of the abyss, where, like travelers in a Swiss landscape, they can be thrilled by the subtle grandeur of the perspectives on mortality opened by the little terrors in every puff. Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good--not good, not beautiful, but sublime.

It is no easy task to praise cigarettes at this time in America. We are in the midst of one of those periodic moments of repression when the culture, descended from the Puritans, imposes its hysterical visions and enforces its guilty constraints on society, legislating moral judgments under the guise of public health, all the while enlarging the power of surveillance and the reach of censorship to achieve a general restriction of freedom.

We may speak of censorship with respect to smoking because smoking cigarettes is not only a physical act but a discursive one--a wordless yet eloquent form of expression. It is a fully coded, rhetorically complex, articulated discourse with a vast repertoire of well-understood conventions that are implicated in the whole literary, philosophical, and cultural history of smoking. In the present climate, the discursive performance of smoking has become a form of obscenity (just as obscenity has become an issue of public health). Of course, censors always claim that they work on behalf of the moral and physical well-being of the body politic, which they wish to protect from the harm that is supposed to follow from the proscribed symbolic behavior. Since smoking is wordless, it is a form of expression especially vulnerable to suppression by censors who hesitate before banning speech. Like the Gypsy dances that were banned at French carnivals, smoking cigarettes has become an act that arouses irrational fears and excessively repressive impulses.

The world can only be grateful for the precision and insistence with which doctors remind it of the dangers of smoking poison; that is their job. But the passionate excess of zeal with which cigarettes are everywhere stigmatized may signal that some more pervasive, subterranean, and dangerous passions are loose that directly threaten our freedom. The freedom to smoke ought to be understood as a significant token of the class of all freedoms; when it is threatened one should look instantly for what other controls are being tightened, for what other checks on freedom are being administered.

Anti-smoking forces in this country have not yet succeeded in banning cigarettes, only in changing the value of the signs that surround them. I wish to recall the other, secret side of cigarettes, the side that has been all but repressed in the current climate of public disapproval. For a moment I want to reverse the reversal of judgment and, instead of decrying cigarettes, to celebrate them--not in order to recommend them or to minimize the harm they do to the body but to recall that, despite their many disadvantages, which have always been known and widely proclaimed, they present benefits, universally acknowledged by society. Those benefits are connected with the nature of the release and consolation that cigarettes provide, with the mechanism they offer for regulating anxiety and for mediating social interaction; they serve as well to spur concentration and, consequently, to permit the efficient production of many different kinds of work.

Nevertheless, I wish to praise cigarettes not chiefly for their utility but rather for what the nineteenth-century French poet Theodore de Banville called their "futility." Cigarette smoking, like a Kantian work of art, does not serve any purpose, has no aim outside itself. It is this very uselessness that ensures the aesthetic appeal of cigarettes--the sublimely, darkly beautiful pleasure that cigarettes bring to the lives of smokers.

In 1856 a journal devoted to smoking, called Paris fumeur, had as its motto "Qui fume prie": "Smoking is praying." The moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience, a space and a time of heightened attention that give rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, and cinder connecting hand, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself. Yes, cigarettes are bad for you. But if they were not also good for you, so many good people would not have spent some part of their lives smoking them constantly, often compulsively. One thinks of the many great men and women who have died prematurely from having smoked too much: it does them an injustice to suppose that their greatness did not depend in some degree on the wisdom and pleasure and spiritual benefit they took in a habit they could not abandon.

And yet writing in praise of cigarettes was the strategy I devised for stopping smoking, which I have--definitively; this is therefore both an ode and an elegy to cigarettes. Perhaps one stops smoking only when one starts to love cigarettes, becoming so enamored of their charms and so grateful for their benefits that one at last begins to grasp how much is lost by giving them up. Healthism in America has sought to make longevity the principal measure of a good life. To be a survivor is to acquire moral distinction. But another view, a dandy's perhaps, would say that living, as distinct from surviving, acquires its value from risks and sacrifices that tend to shorten life and hasten dying. The act of giving up cigarettes should perhaps be approached not only as an affirmation of life but, because living is not merely existing, as an occasion for mourning. Stopping smoking, one must lament the loss to one's life of something immensely, intensely beautiful, must grieve for the passing of a star.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Harper's Magazine Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

 

Becasue the externalities cause the market to function inefficiently, since people don't have to internalize the cost of their actions, and others don't accurately value those costs -- like I said, without the right information, this won't happen. Unless you can create a perfect information situation, it's fantasy.

This is proven by the fact that: it doesn't happen -- As far as I have seen, in no background rule situations - 99% of bars are smoking bars.
That's indicative of a market that's not working.

why? If the market isn't functioning right why are they forced to go this route rather than from the top down? Seems arbitrary.

Inequitable? Like I said, if there's a situation where 99% of bars are smoking bars yet only 10% of the public wants to smoke in them, that's inequitable - and far more inequitable than the inverse scenario.

As for laziness and selfishness, they're both presumed in and irrelevant to any behavioral economic approach and you're interpreting/using them to make moral judgments. I'm not very concerned with that in this context

 

Real means tangible, verifiable, etc.. For instance, a benefit of an outdoor grill would be the ability to cook up a tasty steak. A benefit of a wood burning fireplace would be the ability to heat up your home in the winter. A benefit of the automobile is getting somewhere quickly. Cigarettes seem to have no benefit other than the false pleasure obtained by the simple satisfaction of an addiction (and apparently the replenishment of the body's dopamine ).

 

Sometimes I get "brain freeze" from frozen margaritas. Cigarette smoke heats my throat and my headaches goes away.

 

Not true. The fact that there is a movement to ban smoking in bars proves that the public does assess the externalities you address. That doesn't mean that a ban is the optimal solution. Further, it does happen. This is a partial list of restaurants that have moved to be nonsmoking, not because of leglislation but because of market pressure:

Applebee's -Thomas and King, owners of 76 Applebee's franchises, made all their restaurants in five states smokefree
Arby's - Company-owned restaurants only
Au Bon Pain
A&W - Company-owned restaurants only
Baskin & Robbins
Bertucci's Brick Oven Pizza
Boston Market
Burger King - Company-owned restaurants only
California Pizza Kitchen
Carl's Jr.
Chick-Fil-A
Chuck-E-Cheese
Church's Chicken
CiCi's Pizza
Dairy Queen - Company-owned restaurants only
Dunkin' Donuts - June 1, 1991
Hardee's - Boddie Noell Enterprises, Inc., franchiser of 320 Hardee's restaurants, made all their facilities in four states smokefree
In 'n Out Burger
Jack in the Box - Company-owned restaurants only
Kenny Roger's Roasters - Company-owned restaurants only
Kentucky Fried Chicken - 1,200 company-owned restaurants, franchises encouraged to adopt smokefree policies
Long John Silver's - Company-owned restaurants only

Mazzio's Corporations - Owner of Mazzio's Italian Eatery restaurants in ten states
McDonald's Corporation - Company-owned restaurants only, franchises encouraged to adopt smokefree policies
Papa John's
Pizza Hut - 1,675 company-owned restaurants, franchises encouraged to adopt smokefree policies
Popeye's
Schlotzsky's
Showbiz Pizza - Company-owned restaurants only
Starbucks - All locations worldwide
Taco Bell
Taco Cabana
TCBY - Company-owned restaurants only
Tim Horton's
Wendy's International Inc.

Er, a ban instead of an optimal or even semi-optimal solution seems the most arbitrary.

Actually only about 60% of nonsmokers support a ban. Further you are drawing a false choice - it is not either a ban or no ban.

 

60% of the 90% of non smokers equals 54%. You still lose.

 

Still lose what? Calm down. That nonsmokers are in a majority is not in dispute.

 

Are you kidding? Each of the things you list are not only subjective but unnecessary and harmful to others. Having a 'tasty' steak is no different than having a 'relaxing' cigarette. Claiming wood burning fireplaces are needed for heat is absurd, as is the need for you to get somewhere quickly. Leave earlier. Carpool. Take public transport. You don't NEED to do all the driving you do.

 

No worries, I'm calm.

 

I respectfully submit that these are not bars, taverns or pubs, rather they are fast-food establishments, most or all of which do not serve alcoholic beverages - and hence not valid substitutes. If I want to go drink beer and watch a game, but don't want to breathe in smoke - going to a Dairy Queen is not a viable substitute.

In fact this list illustrates my point,conspicuously absent from this list are the mass-market, chain bar & grill establishments that DO serve alcohol (which I guess would be Bennigans, TGIFriday's, etc.)

But it comes up with a better solution?

The 90% figure I was talking about was people who didn't want to smoke in bars, not people who support a ban. Anyway I took that number from an earlier post of yours and acknowledged several times that it's made up. Still, as M-baiter points out, the numbers are against you anyway no matter what as far.

Of course there are other choices besides ban or no-ban - but if the choice is one or the other, then the ban situation seems to be significantly closer to optimal than the no-ban situation - but it is of course vastly simplified out of necessity. For example, the ban situation doesn't shut smokers out completely, it just means they have to smoke outside, which is not a big deal and can have its own benefits on a social level that most people don't account for.

 

Applebee's is the fastest growing of these types (Bennigan's, Fridays) establishments, hands down. Sorry, but you're claiming the market is not adjusting but it clearly is and this is case in point.

With more than $4 billion in sales at company-owned and franchised units over the last 12 months, the Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar concept is the largest chain in the fast-growing casual-dining segment of the restaurant industry.

http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/oct2005/pi20051018_4107_pi008.htm

That's over 1700 restaurant/bars in 49 states. As for the others they at a minimum show an awareness of the public preferences and a market reaction. I think you can reasonably say that these are precursors to further market action (since the list of corporate non-restaurant/bar nonsmoking environments is huge and almost all encompassing these days).

No. The better solution would be for those who recognize it is not the optimal solution to advocate the optimal solution, or even a less than optimal regulation instead of a ban. But as I indicated earlier, that requires more effort than 'the ban is inevitable get used to it,' 'screw you selfish smokers,' 'smoke smells icky - let's ban it.' Hence my position that it's laziness that drives a ban. Not unawareness. If people were unaware then there wouldn't be bans, lol.

 

Hayes, if all you've got is that VERY roughly 10%, give or take, of all applebees are non-smoking (you said they're smokeless in five states -- applebee's website claims restaus in 49 states) - I think that proves my point about smokeless bars not evolving naturally is further supported -- not to mention the fact that even if all the applebees were not smoking, rather than just a small percentage, it would still amount to a tiny % of bars nationwide.

More likely, I'm willing to bet that large urban areas in the 5 smoke-less applebees states already have bans or that bans were passed in the states themselves, and that applebees is trying to be ahead of the curve, rather than reflecting any market change.

And finally, there's a bit of a problem here with substitutes. An applebees in a strip mall in the burbs is not a viable substitute for a lot of people.