Hiring Smokers Banned In South Florida City

Penurious Penguin writes "On October 2, City Commissioners of Delray Beach finalized a policy which prohibits agencies from hiring employees who use tobacco products. Delray Beach isn't alone though; other Florida cities such as Hollywood and Hallandale Beach, require prospective employees to sign affidavits declaring themselves tobacco-free for 12 months prior to the date of application. Throughout the states, both government and businesses are moving to ban tobacco-use beyond working hours. Many medical facilities, e.g. hospitals, have implemented or intend to implement similar policies. In some more-aggressive environments referred to as nicotine-free, employee urine-samples can be taken and tested for any presence of nicotine, not excluding that from gum or patches. Employees testing positive can be terminated. Times do change, and adaptation is often a necessary burden. But have they changed so much that we'd now postpone the Manhattan project for 12 months because Oppenheimer had toked his pipe? Would we confine our vision to the Milky Way or snub the 1373 Cincinnati because Hubble smoked his? Would we shun relativity, or shelve the works of Tolkien because he and C. S. Lewis had done the same? If so, then where will it stop?"

Comments

Make it illegal

[kthreadd]

Why not just make smoking illegal? The policy seams to be that it is bad and that should not do it, so maybe it should be enforced.

Re:Make it illegal

[T-Bone-T]

It has been proven that smoking is bad for you. It isn't subjective at all.

Re:Make it illegal

[bonehead]

As another lifelong smoker, I'll chime in and say that is 100% true. Advertising has zero effect on me.

Addiction is "cool" like that. There is no need to advertise in order to get an addict to satisfy his addiction. His body and mind are already telling him that he must do so, and at a deep, instinctual level. The only way to explain it to someone who has been fortunate enough to avoid any form of addiction is to say that the drive is AT LEAST as powerful as the drive to eat when your hungry is. Depending on the substance in question, the drive can be every bit as powerful as the drive to breath.

So, yeah, the only need for advertising is to get new people to voluntarily submit to that scenario.

Re:Make it illegal

[nbauman]

It's well-accepted that the tobacco industry, through the Tobacco Institute and other front groups, hired medical professionals to do studies to challenge every valid study that demonstrated the harm of cigarettes. They send a lot of their documents outside of the U.S., because they thought it couldn't be subpoenaed there. When the studies found that cigarettes were harmful, they didn't disclose them. When the studies cast doubt on the harm of cigarettes, they promoted them heavily. In science, this is now considered scientific misconduct.

The industry continued this process with second-hand smoke. There's pretty good evidence now that second-hand smoke causes lung disease, particularly in children who grow up in households with smokers. (I'll leave it to somebody else to cite the studies.)

You'll never have perfect evidence. You'll always have scientists who challenge the studies. They're paid to challenge the studies. There are a few scientists who honestly challenge the validity of the second-hand smoke studies without being on the payroll of the industry (now more often anti-regulatory groups), but their number is vanishingly small.

Re:Make it illegal

[GPierce]

No one want's to hear it, and it's about 20-30 years too late, but the effects of secondary smoke were "proved" through bogus statistics and flat out lying.

The EPA examined about 12 studies on the effects of second-hand smoke, most of them from Europe (as I remember). Of the dozen or so studies, almost all of them showed no measurable effect on health from secondary smoke. Two of them showed a very slight negative effect, and one of them showed that secondary smoke was good for you.

The EPA then turned to something called a "meta study" which was supposed to be a way of reviewing an experiment which did not give your the results you expected/wanted. The meta study was supposed to identify information that was not gathered or incorrectly measured or classified. The objective of a meta-study was to design a new study that would be more accurate. Then you were supposed to go back and do the research again, using what you had learned.

Instead, the EPA declared that the meta-study "proved" what they wanted - that secondary smoke was bad for your health. A number of scientists and mathematicians objected and were shouted down and ignored. Once this became established scientific doctrine, every researcher suddenly found very strong negative effects from secondary smoke, even though the honest studies prior to the EPA ruling showed no such effect.

A similar meta-study was recently performed at Stanford, regarding the health effects of an all organic diet - so it now appears that if you can't prove something, it's considered scientifically valid to used a meta-study to prove whatever you want.

Prior to the bogus EPA report, a lot of people disliked smoking simply because they found smoke offensive. This had no effect on public policy. Once people were told that secondary smoke was a personal issue, the anti-smoking nazi's suddenly had something to work with.

But what can you expect. Our laws are made by a generation of people whose parents did not believe that LSD causes chromosome damage.

Re:Make it illegal

[YttriumOxide]

There's been a general adoption of the belief that cigarettes are incredibly addictive, as part of the campaign against smoking, and I think that has had a very detrimental effect. When somebody is told everyday that quitting smoking is nearly impossible, it becomes harder. After all, stopping smoking is, in great portion, a psychological struggle, and preconceptions will color that strongly.

If people had been raised with the idea that any idiot can quite smoking if they want, it would be much easier to stop. In fairness, though, that might lead to more people taking up the habit in the first place. Regardless, the psychological arena is the one area where perception can become truth.

In fairness, I agree with the AC. Two weeks is not long enough to say that I've really "quit" yet - only stopped for the moment.

I am still suffering from extreme cravings from time to time and lesser cravings more frequently in between.

The campaign against smoking tells many lies; but the addictiveness of cigarettes is not one of them - or at least, not in all aspects. Nicotine is incredibly addictive, however not in the way most people think of addiction. It's not that smoking once or twice will get you addicted - it won't (usually). But smoking becomes "easier" once you get used to it, and after long term use, you eventually will find yourself addicted.

As a young teenager, I smoked a cigarette per DAY sometimes. There's no way I was addicted, and I could have easily stopped any time I wanted. However, when I started smoking twenty a day, I'd find myself becoming fidgety if I didn't have a cigarette every hour or two. That's when I was starting to become addicted.

There are a lot of lies told about quitting as well. The most common one I hear is "after 3 days, all of the nicotine is out of your system, and it's purely psychological after that - there is no more physical addiction."
The problem with this statement is that it's half true. Generally speaking the nicotine is out of your system in about 3 days. However this does NOT mean the physical symptoms are gone. Sorry for quoting from Wikipedia, but it's easier than typing it all up myself:

Modern research shows that nicotine acts on the brain to produce a number of effects. Specifically, research examining its addictive nature has been found to show that nicotine activates the mesolimbic pathway ("reward system") – the circuitry within the brain that regulates feelings of pleasure and euphoria.

Dopamine is one of the key neurotransmitters actively involved in the brain. Research shows that by increasing the levels of dopamine within the reward circuits in the brain, nicotine acts as a chemical with intense addictive qualities. In many studies it has been shown to be more addictive than cocaine and heroin. Like other physically addictive drugs, nicotine withdrawal causes down-regulation of the production of dopamine and other stimulatory neurotransmitters as the brain attempts to compensate for artificial stimulation. As dopamine regulates the sensitivity of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors decreases. To compensate for this compensatory mechanism, the brain in turn upregulates the number of receptors, convoluting its regulatory effects with compensatory mechanisms meant to counteract other compensatory mechanisms. An example is the increase in norepinephrine, one of the successors to dopamine, which inhibit reuptake of the glutamate receptors, in charge of memory and cognition. The net effect is an increase in reward pathway sensitivity, the opposite of other addictive drugs such as cocaine and heroin, which reduce reward pathway sensitivity. This neuronal brain alteration can persist for months after administration ceases.

A very relevant sentence is that last one - "This neuronal brain alteration can persist for months after administration ceases.". That is the "physical addiction" that remains and does so for quite some tim

Re:Have you seen the tobacco packaging in Australi

[orasio]

You are right. They let them keep their logos, the only prohibition on brands is that they can't have "modifiers" like a Light version and stuff, they need to sell each version with a new brand name. Of course, they can't advertise on tv, on the streets, and inside the shops all signs also have the ugly images.

They were talking on tv last week about a decrease of more than half of teenage smokers. When al this started I thought it was nonsense, but it's funny how it works. Smokers tend to hide their boxes, because they are unpleasant, and they don't keep them in sight of kids. They even tend to smoke more privately. It should come naturally, without the offensive images, but they seem to work.

Re:Where will it end?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, it took 7 whole minutes for a fallacious slippery-slope comment to appear. It used to take a lot less; you must be slipping.

Such arguments are only fallacious from the standpoint of strict logic. Anyone with a knowledge of the history of actual human beings, and how many groups of them actually do implement their goals in such incremental fashions, will realize that it is not fallacious at all.

Using only logic to describe or predict the behavior of human beings is nonsensical, as human beings are not logical.