I wasn't taken in by propaganda. I spent several days researching the matter. There have been many studies of the flow of cigarette smoke through buildings, by people who are trying to stop others from smoking and by landlords and others who are trying to prove them wrong. There have been legislative hearings by people on both sides.
In particular, there are architects and building engineers who have studied it, because it's their job, and they could make a lot of money designing smoke-free buildings and smoke-proofing existing buildings if possible.
Smoke travels from one apartment to another. In my building, the building manager said that smoke complaints were one of the biggest complaints that he and other landlords were getting. People don't imagine that their neighbors are smoking. I've never heard of it turning out that the neighbor actually wasn't smoking. They can tell.
Some people wanted to have smoke-free floors, but the building manager told us that they had investigated it, and it couldn't be done, because of the way multi-story building ventilation systems work. They showed us how to trace the flow of air by watching how it blows a piece of toilet paper, from the bathroom vents, under the door, out into the hall and through the hallway intake vents. They spent thousands of dollars for a couple of tenants to tear off their walls, seal off all the openings, and re-install the walls. It didn't work. The smoke got through.
There were also court cases in which people sued their landlords and other tenants, and expert witnesses testified for each side about whether the smoke was traveling from one apartment to another. It seems to be undisputed, even by the smokers involved, that smoke travels through the apartments.
You're just ignoring the facts and denying it. But I'm not falling for propaganda. People tell me that it's a problem, and the smoke definitely drifts into their apartments.
In my building, there were people who were complaining that they had infants, and the smoke from their neighbors' apartment was drifting through and annoying them and their children. I researched it and it is indeed true. Smoke is distributed through our entire building (and most apartment buildings) through the ventilation system. It also passes through the walls, especially through the holes and conduits for electricity and plumbing, and through the doors into the hall. Apartments in the U.S. are not smoke-proof. You'd have to build them like hospital operating rooms.
I don't know whether the smoke three doors down could kill a baby, and it would be almost impossible to prove it. But people in the next apartment, and even in apartments on the same hallway, complain about the smoke. This wasn't just in my building. There were several lawsuits.
The legal complaints were that, apart from the health effects, the smoke was annoying. Under most local laws, that's enough. It falls under the nuisance laws, like playing loud music at 2am.
Actually, a quick Google search on "cigarettes cognitive ability" turned up a lot, along these lines:
Weiser M, Zarka S, Werbeloff N, Kravitz E, Lubin G. Cognitive test scores in male adolescent cigarette smokers compared to non-smokers: a population-based study. Addiction 2010; 105 (2): 358-63.
Conclusion Controlled analyses from this large population-based cohort of male adolescents indicate that IQ scores are lower in male adolescents who smoke compared to non-smokers and in brothers who smoke compared to their non-smoking brothers. The IQs of adolescents who began smoking between ages 18–21 are lower than those of non-smokers. Adolescents with poorer IQ scores might be targeted for programmes designed to prevent smoking.
I'm pretty sure there were studies that showed nicotine doesn't improve mental function, but I can't cite them so I'll leave it open.
However, you may simply be suffering from the cognitive decline of aging. Nicotine, through its effects on strokes and other degenerative diseases, helps that decline along.
If you have a bleeding wound in a military hospital, they're not going to let you smoke. Cigarette smoking makes it significantly more difficult for wounds to heal, more likely to get infected, and more likely to result in an amputation. You don't realize how much damage cigarettes do.
You can't smoke on commercial aircraft, and I don't think you can smoke on military aircraft. You can't smoke in public buildings.
I heard a talk by a doctor who treats people with smoking-related diseases, mostly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer. About 20% of his patients still smoke. He defended them. He said they can't stop, because they have a disease, nicotine addiction, and it doesn't do any good to humiliate them about it. We just have to let them smoke, and try to work out some kind of accommodation. There was a movement to stop people from smoking in their own apartments, and I thought that went too far (although there were some people who were living upstairs or next door from smokers, and the smoke was going through the walls and the ventilation system and making the non-smokers' lives intolerable).
But this doctor and essentially everybody else in the health profession wants to stop smoking. They don't want to put people in jail, like we do for marijuana and heroin, but they do want to use effective ways to stop it. One way to stop it is to restrict its use in workplaces and public spaces. Another way to do it might be to discourage smoking in the military. They can't make current members stop smoking, but they might stop letting people enlist who have nicotine addiction, and they might phase it out of the workforce over the next 40 years. You don't have a right to smoke, and you don't have a right to be hired.
That's a problem with our unique American employer-paid health insurance system.
In countries with socialized medicine, or single-payer health plans, that doesn't come up. They treat nicotine and other addictions as medical problems, and offer them help in quitting.
Unlike the conservative predictions, the government and the health care system doesn't try to run the lives of individual people. They do use population-based methods, like raising taxes on cigarettes (which is a free-market financial incentive method).
So under socialized medicine, the government doesn't force individuals to adopt a healthy lifestyle, as American corporations do, and the government uses effective free-market incentive based approaches, rather than punitive methods, as we do here.
Suppose I'm looking for a day care worker to care for immune-compromised children on a cancer ward. I don't want to hire anybody with tuberculosis because they might transmit the tuberculosis to the children. The best test for tuberculosis is a blood test. Do I have a right to tell you that if you want this job, you have to give a blood sample to make sure you don't have tuberculosis?
The military is already forbidden to drink alcohol on duty, and while there's a potential of an enemy attack.
They can drink while they're off duty, but they're required to be in good health. If they're drinking so much off duty that they're suffering liver damage (which is the main problem of excessive drinking), I assume they would be sent to a substance-abuse program to try to treat it. If that didn't work, the non-punitive way to treat them would be with a medical discharge. You're not combat-ready if you're vomiting blood all the time.
When you join the military, you give up some freedoms. You agree to deliver a healthy body to them. You agree to have Big Brother give you orders to do things because they're good for your health. That's the deal.
If someone is addicted to nicotine, and his nicotine levels go down, he becomes anxious. If he then smokes a cigarette, restoring the nicotine levels is relaxing.
If he wasn't addicted to nicotine in the first place, relieving his addiction wouldn't be relaxing.
If someone is in a job where he has to have maximum physical health and endurance, because his life could depend on it, then he can't smoke cigarettes. Maybe he won't be able to use a drug to relax.
What does being legal have to do with it? If they have a right to fire you for an illegal substance, why don't they have a right to fire you for a legal substance?
This isn't a matter of banning smoking. TFA was about employers refusing to hire people who smoked. You have a right to smoke, you just don't have a right to have an employer hire you.
I appreciate the libertarian argument. However, I don't think individual rights automatically override community interests, especially when there is a danger of such magnitude. The smoking epidemic can't stop one individual at a time. It can only stop by population-based methods.
I haven't read that article in Archives of Internal Medicine, and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. The effect of red meat is so strong, that it's hard to believe it. This was an associational study, which is very good at suggesting directions for further research but not as good at actually measuring and proving harm.
This was part of the Nurses' Health Study, which found that hormone replacement prevents osteoporosis and women who took hormone replacement were healthier; later research found that hormone replacement was actually a major cause of breast cancer, which wasn't picked up in the original study, and that hormone replacement formulation is no longer used. It turned out that nurses with healthier habits, such as exercise and nutrition, were more likely to use hormone replacement.
If red meat actually raised the death rate that much, and the news gets out, then people will eat less red meat. It's much harder to stop smoking, and takes more aggressive efforts, because nicotine is addicting.
Countries with single-payer and socialist health care systems treat nicotine and other addictions as health problems, not criminal matters, and they deal with it by effective and non-coercive methods.
For example, they require cigarette packs to disclose their dangers with effective labels.
They also offer addicts, such as smokers, non-coercive ways to stop, such as counseling and drugs. They treat addiction as a population problem, and try to get the entire population to stop together.
Under socialized medicine, people actually have more freedom than they do in free-market employer-based medicine.
The only people they coerce are the tobacco companies, who are restricted in where they can sell tobacco, who they can sell it to (not children), and how they can market and advertise it.
But your employer should never be able to fire you for consuming anything or using any substance which it is legal to consume, period, the end.
Why not? We have work for hire laws in this country. An employer is free to offer a job to an employee for any reason he wants, or no reason whatever, and to fire an employee for any reason he wants, or no reason whatever (with certain exceptions such as union contracts and protected categories like race and handicapped). These laws would discourage smoking. I think that's a good thing.
And what is being legal have to do with it. Why should employers be enlisted into enforcing the pot laws?
Basically, smokers eventually end up getting cancer and dying. The health problems last maybe a few months. Tobacco doesn't have a debilitating effect that progressively gets worse throughout your life
Fact check: Lung cancer is not the worst effect of tobacco. 400,000 people a year die of smoking-related deaths, but only about 50,000 of them die of lung cancer.
The major causes of death from tobacco are heart disease, strokes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease does get progressively worse throughout your life. You start with a lung capacity that is enough for you to survive, with a substantial exercise reserve. That capacity gets progressively worse throughout your life. Most people will have enough of a reserve to handle their daily activities by age 70 or 80. For smokers, lung capacity gets progressively worse at a much steeper slope, so that by age 60 or 70, about 20% of smokers don't have enough lung capacity to get through their daily activities. Those are the people you see walking around (or riding wheelchairs) with little green oxygen bottles and plastic tubs going up to their nose. Once the lung capacity goes below survival level, even with oxygen, they die.
Strokes also have a debilitating effect that gets worse during your life. A stroke is a blockage of the blood supply to the brain, and whatever that part of the brain controls, you lose that ability. So it can damage any bodily function -- muscle control, vision, thinking, bowel and bladder control, etc. If/when it damages a vital function, you die. For people who get one stroke, as you go on, you get more and more strokes, each one destroying another function, until you die.
Heart disease also gets progressively worse during your life. Instead of being able to walk a mile, you can only walk a block, then half a block, etc. You can get angina, or chest pains, if you exercise too much. Heart disease does have a happy ending. It's a relatively painless way to die. One massive, quick, painful heart attack and it's all over. Some people even die in their sleep.
Smoking is unique because the harm of smoking is orders of magnitude worse than the harm of other pleasures, like red meat.
Smoking reduces your life expectancy by about 7-10 years, according to the best figures I've seen. I've never seen anything to suggest that red meat (alone) would reduce your life expectancy by a tenth that much.
I met a guy who worked for one of the science magazines whose job involved going underwater in mini-submarines, visiting volcanoes, etc. He couldn't get regular life insurance, so the magazine got him a special life insurance policy.
If you engage in particularly risky behavior, you would have difficulty getting health insurance. (This was true at one time; state regulations and Obamacare may have changed that.)
In a free market, an insurance company should have a right to offer you health and disability insurance at a higher premium if you engage in for example motorcycle riding, or receptive anal sex, or IV drug use, or football.
The problem is that health insurance is tied to the workplace. A single payer health plan would have avoided that problem.
Quite aside from the general unpleasantness caused by the stench, there are a lot of documented cases of people contracting lung cancer from tobacco exposure without ever having smoked a cigarette in their life.
One minor correction. Most of the cancers in non-smokers aren't caused by tobacco exposure. They're a different kind of cancer. They typically occur in Japanese women who for some reason have a higher susceptibility to this cancer.
Passive exposure does do other kinds of damage. Children raised in smoking households are more likely to get asthma, etc. It seems reasonable that there are a small number of lung cancers that are due to passive exposure, but the number is too small to measure (so far).
Read Atlas Shrugged. You don't have a right to a job. You don't have a right to make an employer hire you. We have employment at will in this country. An employer can hire or fire you for any reason he wants, or no reason at all.
If you want to work for an employer, you have to meet any requirements he makes for the job. If he decides he doesn't want to hire smokers, that's his right. Go find another job in the free market.
Slashdot Mirror
Alice's Restaurant
http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/alices.shtml
I wasn't taken in by propaganda. I spent several days researching the matter. There have been many studies of the flow of cigarette smoke through buildings, by people who are trying to stop others from smoking and by landlords and others who are trying to prove them wrong. There have been legislative hearings by people on both sides.
In particular, there are architects and building engineers who have studied it, because it's their job, and they could make a lot of money designing smoke-free buildings and smoke-proofing existing buildings if possible.
Smoke travels from one apartment to another. In my building, the building manager said that smoke complaints were one of the biggest complaints that he and other landlords were getting. People don't imagine that their neighbors are smoking. I've never heard of it turning out that the neighbor actually wasn't smoking. They can tell.
Some people wanted to have smoke-free floors, but the building manager told us that they had investigated it, and it couldn't be done, because of the way multi-story building ventilation systems work. They showed us how to trace the flow of air by watching how it blows a piece of toilet paper, from the bathroom vents, under the door, out into the hall and through the hallway intake vents. They spent thousands of dollars for a couple of tenants to tear off their walls, seal off all the openings, and re-install the walls. It didn't work. The smoke got through.
There were also court cases in which people sued their landlords and other tenants, and expert witnesses testified for each side about whether the smoke was traveling from one apartment to another. It seems to be undisputed, even by the smokers involved, that smoke travels through the apartments.
You're just ignoring the facts and denying it. But I'm not falling for propaganda. People tell me that it's a problem, and the smoke definitely drifts into their apartments.
In my building, there were people who were complaining that they had infants, and the smoke from their neighbors' apartment was drifting through and annoying them and their children. I researched it and it is indeed true. Smoke is distributed through our entire building (and most apartment buildings) through the ventilation system. It also passes through the walls, especially through the holes and conduits for electricity and plumbing, and through the doors into the hall. Apartments in the U.S. are not smoke-proof. You'd have to build them like hospital operating rooms.
I don't know whether the smoke three doors down could kill a baby, and it would be almost impossible to prove it. But people in the next apartment, and even in apartments on the same hallway, complain about the smoke. This wasn't just in my building. There were several lawsuits.
The legal complaints were that, apart from the health effects, the smoke was annoying. Under most local laws, that's enough. It falls under the nuisance laws, like playing loud music at 2am.
Actually, a quick Google search on "cigarettes cognitive ability" turned up a lot, along these lines:
Weiser M, Zarka S, Werbeloff N, Kravitz E, Lubin G. Cognitive test scores in male adolescent cigarette smokers compared to non-smokers: a population-based study. Addiction 2010; 105 (2): 358-63.
Conclusion
Controlled analyses from this large population-based cohort of male adolescents indicate that IQ scores are lower in male adolescents who smoke compared to non-smokers and in brothers who smoke compared to their non-smoking brothers. The IQs of adolescents who began smoking between ages 18–21 are lower than those of non-smokers. Adolescents with poorer IQ scores might be targeted for programmes designed to prevent smoking.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35952518/Cognitive-test-scores-in-male-adolescent-cigarette-smokers-compared-to-non-smokers-a-population-based-study
I'm pretty sure there were studies that showed nicotine doesn't improve mental function, but I can't cite them so I'll leave it open.
However, you may simply be suffering from the cognitive decline of aging. Nicotine, through its effects on strokes and other degenerative diseases, helps that decline along.
If you have a bleeding wound in a military hospital, they're not going to let you smoke. Cigarette smoking makes it significantly more difficult for wounds to heal, more likely to get infected, and more likely to result in an amputation. You don't realize how much damage cigarettes do.
You can't smoke on commercial aircraft, and I don't think you can smoke on military aircraft. You can't smoke in public buildings.
I heard a talk by a doctor who treats people with smoking-related diseases, mostly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer. About 20% of his patients still smoke. He defended them. He said they can't stop, because they have a disease, nicotine addiction, and it doesn't do any good to humiliate them about it. We just have to let them smoke, and try to work out some kind of accommodation. There was a movement to stop people from smoking in their own apartments, and I thought that went too far (although there were some people who were living upstairs or next door from smokers, and the smoke was going through the walls and the ventilation system and making the non-smokers' lives intolerable).
But this doctor and essentially everybody else in the health profession wants to stop smoking. They don't want to put people in jail, like we do for marijuana and heroin, but they do want to use effective ways to stop it. One way to stop it is to restrict its use in workplaces and public spaces. Another way to do it might be to discourage smoking in the military. They can't make current members stop smoking, but they might stop letting people enlist who have nicotine addiction, and they might phase it out of the workforce over the next 40 years. You don't have a right to smoke, and you don't have a right to be hired.
That's a problem with our unique American employer-paid health insurance system.
In countries with socialized medicine, or single-payer health plans, that doesn't come up. They treat nicotine and other addictions as medical problems, and offer them help in quitting.
Unlike the conservative predictions, the government and the health care system doesn't try to run the lives of individual people. They do use population-based methods, like raising taxes on cigarettes (which is a free-market financial incentive method).
So under socialized medicine, the government doesn't force individuals to adopt a healthy lifestyle, as American corporations do, and the government uses effective free-market incentive based approaches, rather than punitive methods, as we do here.
Suppose I'm looking for a day care worker to care for immune-compromised children on a cancer ward. I don't want to hire anybody with tuberculosis because they might transmit the tuberculosis to the children. The best test for tuberculosis is a blood test. Do I have a right to tell you that if you want this job, you have to give a blood sample to make sure you don't have tuberculosis?
Caffeine doesn't have any harmful effects, AFIK.
The military is already forbidden to drink alcohol on duty, and while there's a potential of an enemy attack.
They can drink while they're off duty, but they're required to be in good health. If they're drinking so much off duty that they're suffering liver damage (which is the main problem of excessive drinking), I assume they would be sent to a substance-abuse program to try to treat it. If that didn't work, the non-punitive way to treat them would be with a medical discharge. You're not combat-ready if you're vomiting blood all the time.
When you join the military, you give up some freedoms. You agree to deliver a healthy body to them. You agree to have Big Brother give you orders to do things because they're good for your health. That's the deal.
If someone is addicted to nicotine, and his nicotine levels go down, he becomes anxious. If he then smokes a cigarette, restoring the nicotine levels is relaxing.
If he wasn't addicted to nicotine in the first place, relieving his addiction wouldn't be relaxing.
If someone is in a job where he has to have maximum physical health and endurance, because his life could depend on it, then he can't smoke cigarettes. Maybe he won't be able to use a drug to relax.
What does being legal have to do with it? If they have a right to fire you for an illegal substance, why don't they have a right to fire you for a legal substance?
It's a conspiracy by big tobacco and unscrupulous scientists that is documented by papers that were subpoenaed and released in court cases.
http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco
LOL you've got lung cancer http://www.chantixsite.net/images/joe_camel.jpg
Yeah, but how fast would you have run 2 miles if you hadn't smoked?
The anti-tobacco groups didn't have to do any lying. The truth was bad enough.
I haven't noticed any anti-tobacco groups lying, although I'm not responsible for every anti-tobacco group in the world.
This isn't a matter of banning smoking. TFA was about employers refusing to hire people who smoked. You have a right to smoke, you just don't have a right to have an employer hire you.
I appreciate the libertarian argument. However, I don't think individual rights automatically override community interests, especially when there is a danger of such magnitude. The smoking epidemic can't stop one individual at a time. It can only stop by population-based methods.
I haven't read that article in Archives of Internal Medicine, and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. The effect of red meat is so strong, that it's hard to believe it. This was an associational study, which is very good at suggesting directions for further research but not as good at actually measuring and proving harm.
This was part of the Nurses' Health Study, which found that hormone replacement prevents osteoporosis and women who took hormone replacement were healthier; later research found that hormone replacement was actually a major cause of breast cancer, which wasn't picked up in the original study, and that hormone replacement formulation is no longer used. It turned out that nurses with healthier habits, such as exercise and nutrition, were more likely to use hormone replacement.
If red meat actually raised the death rate that much, and the news gets out, then people will eat less red meat. It's much harder to stop smoking, and takes more aggressive efforts, because nicotine is addicting.
Countries with single-payer and socialist health care systems treat nicotine and other addictions as health problems, not criminal matters, and they deal with it by effective and non-coercive methods.
For example, they require cigarette packs to disclose their dangers with effective labels.
They also offer addicts, such as smokers, non-coercive ways to stop, such as counseling and drugs. They treat addiction as a population problem, and try to get the entire population to stop together.
Under socialized medicine, people actually have more freedom than they do in free-market employer-based medicine.
The only people they coerce are the tobacco companies, who are restricted in where they can sell tobacco, who they can sell it to (not children), and how they can market and advertise it.
Under socialism, corporations are not people too.
But your employer should never be able to fire you for consuming anything or using any substance which it is legal to consume, period, the end.
Why not? We have work for hire laws in this country. An employer is free to offer a job to an employee for any reason he wants, or no reason whatever, and to fire an employee for any reason he wants, or no reason whatever (with certain exceptions such as union contracts and protected categories like race and handicapped). These laws would discourage smoking. I think that's a good thing.
And what is being legal have to do with it. Why should employers be enlisted into enforcing the pot laws?
Basically, smokers eventually end up getting cancer and dying. The health problems last maybe a few months. Tobacco doesn't have a debilitating effect that progressively gets worse throughout your life
Fact check: Lung cancer is not the worst effect of tobacco. 400,000 people a year die of smoking-related deaths, but only about 50,000 of them die of lung cancer.
The major causes of death from tobacco are heart disease, strokes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease does get progressively worse throughout your life. You start with a lung capacity that is enough for you to survive, with a substantial exercise reserve. That capacity gets progressively worse throughout your life. Most people will have enough of a reserve to handle their daily activities by age 70 or 80. For smokers, lung capacity gets progressively worse at a much steeper slope, so that by age 60 or 70, about 20% of smokers don't have enough lung capacity to get through their daily activities. Those are the people you see walking around (or riding wheelchairs) with little green oxygen bottles and plastic tubs going up to their nose. Once the lung capacity goes below survival level, even with oxygen, they die.
Strokes also have a debilitating effect that gets worse during your life. A stroke is a blockage of the blood supply to the brain, and whatever that part of the brain controls, you lose that ability. So it can damage any bodily function -- muscle control, vision, thinking, bowel and bladder control, etc. If/when it damages a vital function, you die. For people who get one stroke, as you go on, you get more and more strokes, each one destroying another function, until you die.
Heart disease also gets progressively worse during your life. Instead of being able to walk a mile, you can only walk a block, then half a block, etc. You can get angina, or chest pains, if you exercise too much. Heart disease does have a happy ending. It's a relatively painless way to die. One massive, quick, painful heart attack and it's all over. Some people even die in their sleep.
Read Atlas Shrugged. You don't have the freedom to get hired for a job. An employer has the freedom to decide whether to offer you a job.
An employer has the freedom to offer jobs only to people who don't smoke.
The present article is not about prohibition, but about employers refusing to hire employees who smoke, enforced by blood or urine tests.
The worst that could happen is that employees would be trying to fake blood or urine tests, but I don't think they'd be successful.
Smoking is unique because the harm of smoking is orders of magnitude worse than the harm of other pleasures, like red meat.
Smoking reduces your life expectancy by about 7-10 years, according to the best figures I've seen. I've never seen anything to suggest that red meat (alone) would reduce your life expectancy by a tenth that much.
It's easier to just vote new judges onto the bench, and have them reinterpret the law the new way you want.
I met a guy who worked for one of the science magazines whose job involved going underwater in mini-submarines, visiting volcanoes, etc. He couldn't get regular life insurance, so the magazine got him a special life insurance policy.
If you engage in particularly risky behavior, you would have difficulty getting health insurance. (This was true at one time; state regulations and Obamacare may have changed that.)
In a free market, an insurance company should have a right to offer you health and disability insurance at a higher premium if you engage in for example motorcycle riding, or receptive anal sex, or IV drug use, or football.
The problem is that health insurance is tied to the workplace. A single payer health plan would have avoided that problem.
Quite aside from the general unpleasantness caused by the stench, there are a lot of documented cases of people contracting lung cancer from tobacco exposure without ever having smoked a cigarette in their life.
One minor correction. Most of the cancers in non-smokers aren't caused by tobacco exposure. They're a different kind of cancer. They typically occur in Japanese women who for some reason have a higher susceptibility to this cancer.
Passive exposure does do other kinds of damage. Children raised in smoking households are more likely to get asthma, etc. It seems reasonable that there are a small number of lung cancers that are due to passive exposure, but the number is too small to measure (so far).
Read Atlas Shrugged. You don't have a right to a job. You don't have a right to make an employer hire you. We have employment at will in this country. An employer can hire or fire you for any reason he wants, or no reason at all.
If you want to work for an employer, you have to meet any requirements he makes for the job. If he decides he doesn't want to hire smokers, that's his right. Go find another job in the free market.