A lot of people (myself included) like to cite the failed War on Drugs as an example of how the country learned nothing from its experience with Prohibition. “End Prohibition!” we scream to little avail.
Far from ending Prohibition, many American activists and politicians are bound and determined to start another one.
Tobacco Prohibition. It’s the newest thing, and the latest rage in many cities. Reason took a close look at it, and just like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, and the more recent War on Drugs, tobacco prohibition is creating an abundance of new opportunities.
Street corner “pushers” are selling cigarettes for a dollar a piece (a pack costs $11.75 in New York), and they are making a decent living at it, even though they risk arrest and jail. And the Brooklyn woman who has saved thousands of dollars by growing her own tobacco — how long before Bloomberg and his ball-less bureaucrats make that illegal too?
Anyone who doubts that Prohibition is the goal, consider the ominous claims now being made.
…exposure to tobacco fumes kills 600,000 nonsmokers a year worldwide, including 165,000 children, according to a December 2010 WHO study. That’s about 1 out of every 100 deaths worldwide, through smoke-related illnesses such as heart disease, lower respiratory infections, asthma and lung cancer.
And the fumes are harder to avoid than you think: They can seep through apartment ventilation systems and cling to baby car seats, where they’re easily ingested.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s office issued its own report on the dangers of smoking in December, reinforcing the dangers of “passive,” or secondhand, exposure.
This just goes on and on. Nearly everyone is said to be at risk.
Tobacco smoke contains 7,000 chemicals, including hundreds that are toxic and at least 70 known to cause cancer, according to the Surgeon General’s report.
Passive exposure also causes heart attacks, says cardiologist Matthew Sorrentino, M.D., FAAC, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.
“The toxins in cigarette smoke enter the body and damage the coronary arteries that bring blood to the heart,” he says. “Cholesterol builds up on the arteries, and they become blocked, which can lead to a heart attack.”
Etc. Pretty soon, smoking will be banned almost everywhere, lawsuits will abound, smokers’ children will be taken away from them.
That’s precisely where claims like these will lead:
Asthma and respiratory problems lead the list of smoke-related health dangers for kids, Sorrentino says. Between 200,000 and 1 million asthmatic children in the U.S. have aggravated symptoms due to secondhand smoke, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Preschool children are likely to have higher blood pressure if their parents smoke, according to a 2011 German study published in the journal Circulation. Earlier studies have linked secondhand smoke with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), low birth weight and learning disabilities. In households with secondhand smoke, kids age 12-17 are 1.67 times more prone to recurrent ear infections than those in a smoke-free environment, according to a 2010 Harvard study. Parents often smoke indoors more as children grow older, the study also found. There are 20 known or suspected mammary carcinogens in tobacco smoke. A lifetime of either smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke “about doubled the risk of premenopausal breast cancer,” according to 2010 research by an expert panel of Canadian researchers reviewing past studies.
They are demanding total bans on smoking in all apartments (the toxins are said to seep through walls), and the more the “scientists” study and indict the tendency of smoke to become airborne, a ban on smoking even in private homes is easy to envision. And once that happens, tobacco will be virtually illegal everywhere as a public health hazard, as well as a legally enjoinable nuisance. Final laws banning the substance would be a mere formality in the overwhelming interest of public health.
This used to be a wonderful country before the “Progressives” came along.
Prohibition worked so well in the past that we need more of it. When people keep doing unsustainable things that get more and more demanding and they can’t stop doing them despite the harm they cause, that’s called “addiction,” right?
They can’t stop, which means they won’t.
Comments
14 responses to “Is this country addicted to Prohibition?”
I understand where you’re coming from, but for my part, I’m pretty pleased that people can no longer smoke in restaurants and bars. From my perspective, people can go ahead and smoke if they are able to keep their smoke and its smell completely to themselves… but the very nature of smoking simply doesn’t allow that. If I go out to eat and end up coming home smelling like someone’s ashtray simply from being in the same restaurant, to me it’s no longer a libertarian issue. They should change “your right to swing your fist ends at the beginning of someone else’s nose” to “your right to blow smoke ends at the beginning someone else’s nose.”
However, on the flipside, people should be able to buy cigarettes wherever they want (such as in a lower-tax state), or grow their own with impunity, and smoke as much as they want on their own property.
I write “Second-hand smoke” on large objects. Like trucks. Buses. Large boulders on overhangs. That way, if they are involved in an accident, we can point and say, “Look! Second-hand smoke!”
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“The only proven health issue with electronic smoke is the possibility of stroke, as anti-smokers burst into red-faced rage at the sight of people enjoying themselves in public. It reveals something I’ve always suspected about the anti-smoking crowd: they are more concerned with people having fun, than they are about health
Making people put out an electronic cigarettes is the same kind of logic that has forced motion pictures to put smoking warnings at the front of their films. Apparently we’ve gotten so overprotective in society, that just the image of someone smoking is cautioned for its negative health consequences.
The DOT knows how ridiculous this sounds. They try to make a case for the ban by stressing that nobody yet knows the health consequences of electronic smoke. It’s not enough to protect us from real proven dangers; they need to protect us from the imagined ones as well. Heck by the same logic I don’t yet know the health consequences of the cell phone at the restaurant table next to me (and cell phones have been linked to cancer). Certainly I have the right to enjoy a meal without exposing myself to Second-Hand Cell.”
http://biggovernment.com/tslagle/2011/09/19/liberals-get-smoking-mad/
Actually, in study after study, cell phones have NOT been linked to cancer.
You guys are aware that this amounts to a war on schizophrenics:
Schizophrenia and Tobacco
Second hand smoke danger is junk science:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100318,00.html
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5811
Note that the study reported in the link below used 32 mice. And also note that there was no report of the confidence interval. If the confidence interval overlaps the control group interval the results are not very solid.
http://junkscience.com/2011/07/18/new-tobacco-warning-dont-smoke-around-mice/
“We use 1979- and 1997-cohort National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data, which allows us to compare the prevalence of obesity between cohorts surveyed roughly 25 years apart. Using the traditional Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, we find that cigarette smoking has the largest effect: the decline in cigarette smoking explains about 2% of the increase in the weight measures. The other significant factors explain less. ”
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17423
Simon – I’m thrilled to see you reading junkscience.com!
Maybe someday you’ll figure out why it’s wrong to use junk science — especially when it fits your agenda and when there’s ample good evidence to use.
(Hint: it makes you look dumb and ultimately hurts your cause.)
Donna,
I critiqued the evidence based on the evidence. The source is immaterial.
I would quote the Devil himself if he was correct on an issue.
I am no fan of “the source taints the evidence”. It does make me more careful if I don’t trust the source. So I cross check and do my own evaluations. Which you will note I did in this case.
So tell me Donna, does James Hanson working for Enron taint his global warming views or are they mistaken to begin with?
Does the fact that I have worked for the computer industry taint my views about the value of computers?
Tobacco is a hard case due to the externalities. We can mitigate the externalities of alcohol (like drunk driving) without prohibiting the substance itself, but that’s harder to do for tobacco. To make things worse, it’s hard to know who’s telling the truth about secondhand smoke, although doubtless the government has incentives to overstate them. But that does not mean there are no externalities either.
P.S. I do not know who is correct one way or the other about secondhand smoke, Simon, but on complicated subjects where data flies both ways sometimes it’s hard to tell if someone is “correct” or merely “presenting the facts that support my side of the argument.” (just speaking generally)
Simon – the source doesn’t taint the evidence, it taints you and your cause.
When you present evidence from a source that also promotes nonsense, you are also presenting the nonsense.