[stratos]

Yogi Yogi:

Khar Khar:

$1:

OK, first of all, everyone ends up with "crippling health problems". I'll go further and categorically state that everyone ends up with fatal health problems. I understand your mis-applied reasoning though--after all the people who put together reports on the cost of smoking, or other social sins, often forget this themsleves. It's an interesting contemporary sociological phenomenon--death itself is considered pathological, a failing of the medical system.

Your point about non-voluntary passive smoke inhalation by non-smokers is well-taken. It's not really an issue anymore with the new restrictions. Occupational exposure has been virtually eliminated and most of the exposure we non-smokers get is walking by occassionally as someone exhales, which falls more in the nuisance category than the health risk category. But there are still a number of people who will get sick because of past exposure. That number will taper off over time.

Not everyone ends up with the crippling kind which ends up with people losing lungs, people fighting cancer, people with long term respiratory distress, and so forth. No offense, but taking such a broad comment (which was kind of directed in a different direction) the way you did kind of felt odd -- like blaming life as being the leading cause of death because without life, there would be no death. Crippling implies that they are not killed, it implies that those who smoke increase the rate of people with long-term maladies which cripple them in the long term. This means people who go on oxygen when they are in their fifties, those who need to have a lung remove, and the many who join the hordes of Canadians with cancer every year. While everyone eventually dies, it does not mean that they were a burden for decades before dying, nor that they are going to get diseases when they are young and capable of working, nor that they are going to negatively impact others to increase the amount of people who have these problems befall them for a longer period or well before their time. However, smoking on the other hand manages all of those things.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the other factors you mentioned in your beginning paragraph, nor did I intend it to be -- it sounds to me more like you wanted to bring it up and decided to use my comment as a springboard to go on a bit of a tangent. Smoking incurs greater costs to society in lost productivity, greater costs over the long term to those crippled in some form as a result of a disease, and clogs up Canada's ability to handle health care issues. These are clear costs of longer term maladies brought about by smoking.

The third point to bring up is that you are taking this in a far too narrow view in an attempt to find mis-applied reasoning when it comes to the very narrow viewpoint of deaths due to smoking and the relative costs. Evidence on the dangers of cigarettes are well known. You respond by saying everyone dies. So, those lost years due to smoking are... what, non-existent otherwise? Opportunity cost, my good man! Consider the accomplishments of even just a minimum wage worker, and imagine all the people who die early to smoking. Or children which have had deformation issues due to this problem. Lost productivity. Lost capabilities. Years of working in society, blown out the hatch. Just because you want to take a look at the end of someone's like does not mean that those values equate perfectly -- we have to consider years of lost potential. Whatever consideration you give passive smoking, there is some degree of increased risk which you are imposing on someone else without their free will for your own benefit -- to me, this is not acceptable.

It is an issue, man. I'm sorry, but I don't want to get smoke blown in my face whenever I go outside, and then have people come here and defend it as "no worse than car exhaust," a "right," or their "vice which hurts/annoys no one but themselves." I know you are just waiting to leap in with a nanny law line here, but look at my post. The mass majority of it was complaining about the many problems I end up having to face daily because of smokers, not health issues. I don't have an opinion on this article at hand.

I always got a kick out of those who claim "he died early, or sooner than he/she would have if they had not...".

Now just how the hell do you know that "they died early"??? Believe me, I have verrrry closely checked out several live human specimens -albeit of the female persuasion-, and have yet to 'come across' (oops! perhaps the wrong phrase ) I have yet to 'find' an expiration date stamped on any of them!

Did you check under the right foots big toe pull off the toe nail and it will give a date generaly the same date that have pulled it off. That Date is YOUR death date because she's about to kill you for pulling off her toe nail.

[Zipperfish]

Khar Khar:

Not everyone ends up with the crippling kind which ends up with people losing lungs, people fighting cancer, people with long term respiratory distress, and so forth (nor do all smokers). No offense, but taking such a broad comment (which was kind of directed in a different direction) the way you did kind of felt odd -- like blaming life as being the leading cause of death because without life, there would be no death. Crippling implies that they are not killed, it implies that those who smoke increase the rate of people with long-term maladies which cripple them in the long term. This means people who go on oxygen when they are in their fifties, those who need to have a lung remove, and the many who join the hordes of Canadians with cancer every year. While everyone eventually dies, it does not mean that they were a burden for decades before dying, nor that they are going to get diseases when they are young and capable of working, nor that they are going to negatively impact others to increase the amount of people who have these problems befall them for a longer period or well before their time. However, smoking on the other hand manages all of those things.

Life is the leading cause of death. That was kind of my point. The question is, what extra costs do smokers present. The scientific literature isn't that helpful. A 1999 California study estimated the annual cost per smoker (direct and indirect costs) to be $3331. At a pack a day and guessing about $5/pack taxes, smokers pay about half of that. (http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/13/3/264.abstract.)

Conversely, an interesting study from the New England Journal of Medicine that used a different epidemiological approach found a slight rise (5.5%) in helath care costs for a population with no smokers.

Alcohol has associated health care and lost productivity costs also, but a major difference is its cost to the police and courts--costs for drunk driving and violent crime (in the US it is estimated that alcohol is a contributing factor in 40% of violent crime). You don't get that with smoking.

Obesity cost is a newer field of reserach, but so far, it looks as if obesity is at least on par with smoking, at least in the US.

$1:

This has absolutely nothing to do with the other factors you mentioned in your beginning paragraph, nor did I intend it to be -- it sounds to me more like you wanted to bring it up and decided to use my comment as a springboard to go on a bit of a tangent. Smoking incurs greater costs to society in lost productivity, greater costs over the long term to those crippled in some form as a result of a disease, and clogs up Canada's ability to handle health care issues. These are clear costs of longer term maladies brought about by smoking.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the hospitals would not suddenly empty if smoking stopped tomorrow. As stated, I'm not convinced that smokers cost the system that much more, if anything. For one thing, in BC they seem convinced that teh absolute cost of smoking increases as the number of smokers drops signifricantly--a seeming contradiction that has never been fully explained in my opinion. Frankly, I think they see smokers as an easy cash cow. They're addicted so they will pay any price for thier fix. The only ceiling (as Ontario found out) is that if you jack the price too high, the black market will move in.

$1:

The third point to bring up is that you are taking this in a far too narrow view in an attempt to find mis-applied reasoning when it comes to the very narrow viewpoint of deaths due to smoking and the relative costs. Evidence on the dangers of cigarettes are well known. You respond by saying everyone dies. So, those lost years due to smoking are... what, non-existent otherwise? Opportunity cost, my good man! Consider the accomplishments of even just a minimum wage worker, and imagine all the people who die early to smoking. Or children which have had deformation issues due to this problem. Lost productivity. Lost capabilities. Years of working in society, blown out the hatch. Just because you want to take a look at the end of someone's like does not mean that those values equate perfectly -- we have to consider years of lost potential. Whatever consideration you give passive smoking, there is some degree of increased risk which you are imposing on someone else without their free will for your own benefit -- to me, this is not acceptable.

However, this is a long running debate neither of us have the data to substantiate -- but I prefer to look at it from the point of view of lost productivity as well rather than straight out accounting costs.

Opportuity costs are factored into most studies under the "lost future productivity." One thing I've noted a lot of studies don't account for is the fact that most people over 75 or so are a drain on the system. They are no longer productive (in the narrow economic sense), and they cost the system a lot more through health care, government benefits, etc.

This is actually what got me interested in this debate (actually, what got me interested is my ongoing battle against "advocacy science"). Smoking takes ten years off your life. The life expectancy in Canada is about 81. So, with about 20% of Candians smoking, that would be a life expectancy of 83 for non-smokers and 73 for non-smokers. So I'm not really seeing the lost productivity argument there.

Also, I think a privatiozed health care system would alleviate some of the health care costs.

$1:

It is an issue, man. I'm sorry, but I don't want to get smoke blown in my face whenever I go outside, and then have people come here and defend it as "no worse than car exhaust," a "right," or their "vice which hurts/annoys no one but themselves." I know you are just waiting to leap in with a nanny law line here, but look at my post. The mass majority of it was complaining about the many problems I end up having to face daily because of smokers, not health issues (although I still have it on the mind, no matter what stat for second-hand smoke risk factors people use). I don't have an opinion on this article at hand, and haven't touched on legality once.

My exposure is walking through a blue pall once or twice a week. I don't even notice it. And yes, the nanny state argument, for me, does come in. Chroinc (e.g. workplace) exposure to second-hand smoke is bad and should be banned completely. But I don't like the government moving to control the risks chosen by individuals because we have a socialized health care system. That's a slippery slope, and if we are going to go down that road, I'd rather just have a privatized health care system. That's just my opinion.

The thing I hate about this whole argument is it looks like I'm defending smoking (or drinking, or obesity, or global warming), and that's not what I'm trying to do. My primary thesis is that the government adn various lobby groups use advocacy science as a tool to intervene ever more and more into the private lives of its citizens.

[Yogi]

It would be most entertaining to see how some of those people who want the govt to ban my lawful right to smoke cigs are against the same govt proposing random breathylizers. They claim that is against their rights!

[andyt]

Yogi Yogi:

It would be most entertaining to see how some of those people who want the govt to ban my lawful right to smoke cigs are against the same govt proposing random breathylizers. They claim that is against their rights!

So who wants to ban cigarettes? The bans are about not smoking around people who don't want to participate, and if you can't understand that then the nicotine has rotted your brain.

[bootlegga]

Yogi Yogi:

It would be most entertaining to see how some of those people who want the govt to ban my lawful right to smoke cigs are against the same govt proposing random breathylizers. They claim that is against their rights!

The right to smoke cigs is in the Constitution? Well, colour me surprised!

[raydan]

Yogi Yogi:

It would be most entertaining to see how some of those people who want the govt to ban my lawful right to smoke cigs are against the same govt proposing random breathylizers. They claim that is against their rights!

I'd rather have smokers smoking near me than having drunk drivers driving near me.

[bootlegga]

andyt andyt:

So who wants to ban cigarettes? The bans are about not smoking around people who don't want to participate, and if you can't understand that then the nicotine has rotted your brain.

Apparently restricting cigarettes is now the equivalent of banning them (kind of like 1000 or so threads ASLplease started of late regarding guns and the registry).

[raydan]

bootlegga bootlegga:

Yogi Yogi:

It would be most entertaining to see how some of those people who want the govt to ban my lawful right to smoke cigs are against the same govt proposing random breathylizers. They claim that is against their rights!

The right to smoke cigs is in the Constitution? Well, colour me surprised!

Done....



...looks good on you.

[andyt]

raydan raydan:

Yogi Yogi:

It would be most entertaining to see how some of those people who want the govt to ban my lawful right to smoke cigs are against the same govt proposing random breathylizers. They claim that is against their rights!

I'd rather have smokers smoking near me than having drunk drivers driving near me.

Drinking and smoking seem to go together, so that drunk running you down is probably sucking on a fag. It is possible to have neither, methinks.

[raydan]

andyt andyt:

raydan raydan:

Yogi Yogi:

It would be most entertaining to see how some of those people who want the govt to ban my lawful right to smoke cigs are against the same govt proposing random breathylizers. They claim that is against their rights!

I'd rather have smokers smoking near me than having drunk drivers driving near me.

Drinking and smoking seem to go together, so that drunk running you down is probably sucking on a fag. It is possible to have neither, methinks.

I'd be surprised if you can find stats on this.

I'm an ex-smoker that never smoked in his car.

[Khar]

$1:

Life is the leading cause of death. That was kind of my point. The question is, what extra costs do smokers present. The scientific literature isn't that helpful. A 1999 California study estimated the annual cost per smoker (direct and indirect costs) to be $3331. At a pack a day and guessing about $5/pack taxes, smokers pay about half of that. (http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/13/3/264.abstract.)

Conversely, an interesting study from the New England Journal of Medicine that used a different epidemiological approach found a slight rise (5.5%) in helath care costs for a population with no smokers.

That’s my point – using it in this instance made little sense to me (I can see where you were going with it though). All people die, but all people have a reason for dying, whether it is a heart giving out or being shot. Not all people get “crippling health problems” before dying, which is what you insinuated, unless you are talking about this extremely short period of time which wouldn’t have effected the factors I wanted to discuss. I was talking about people being crippled in the long-term. I didn’t get how you were trying to equate that into the discussion when the point of important brushed by it for the most point from my initial point of view.

The problem with a lot of research in this field is that it’s conflicting (and we have a few scientists running around writing ten papers responding to the same things they talked about ten years ago) and hard to find much sweeping information on the topic. Most do various studies with small groups but these small groups are in such different positions otherwise it gets difficult to come up with any real answer other than “smoking causes premature death.” Also, thanks to the wonders of modern politics and lobby groups, the entire field gets to have the same fun AIDs, abortion, stem cell, TASER and global warming research has had (the joys of bias!).

$1:

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the hospitals would not suddenly empty if smoking stopped tomorrow. As stated, I'm not convinced that smokers cost the system that much more, if anything. For one thing, in BC they seem convinced that teh absolute cost of smoking increases as the number of smokers drops signifricantly--a seeming contradiction that has never been fully explained in my opinion. Frankly, I think they see smokers as an easy cash cow. They're addicted so they will pay any price for thier fix. The only ceiling (as Ontario found out) is that if you jack the price too high, the black market will move in.

I think that’s pretty clear, but the reduction of the strain on the system, the amount using it, and potentially the costs thereof (I know that’s debatable), would be worthwhile, as it would be if another leading factor in deaths could be reduced, from obesity through. The less people we have in the hospitals for reasons exacerbated by smoking, the happier I will be – that some of the problems of hospitals is basically being caused almost directly from vices like smoking, or alcohol, bugs me, and if there is a method to reduce the amount of people who need to use the system, I’d be happier.

Not all research out there is on the toxicity of cigs, but also what could reduce the toxicity in the short term. What could be restricted or altered to make them less of a burden on society, even if we can’t reduce the amount of smoking related problems, such as increased risk factors? I can get the government wanting to tax the crap out of cigarettes, it is a prime example of an inelastic good, but any direction things can be taken to reduce the amount of problems from smoking exhibited in modern smokers and those who have had increased issues due to the nature of second hand smoke would be worthwhile, in my opinion.

$1:

Opportuity costs are factored into most studies under the "lost future productivity." One thing I've noted a lot of studies don't account for is the fact that most people over 75 or so are a drain on the system. They are no longer productive (in the narrow economic sense), and they cost the system a lot more through health care, government benefits, etc.

This is actually what got me interested in this debate (actually, what got me interested is my ongoing battle against "advocacy science"). Smoking takes ten years off your life. The life expectancy in Canada is about 81. So, with about 20% of Candians smoking, that would be a life expectancy of 83 for non-smokers and 73 for non-smokers. So I'm not really seeing the lost productivity argument there.

My problem with the current setup of a lot of papers is that they either don’t include it when I read them, or they do not include them to the correct degree. For example, there was a paper I read perhaps three or four weeks ago which was talking about the economic impacts on farming communities from health issues, with a focus on respiratory problems. It included smoking, amongst many others less than healthy farming practices which the government got involved with and forced change.

However, the study took opportunity cost and assumed that these people had had all the children they would have, would have retired at 65 and would make prompt use of the health care system. The latter two points got me the most, since farmers retire when they can’t shift the clutch on a tractor anymore and there’s evidence (pretty sure there’s more than anecdotal evidence for rural hospital use rates) that farmers have issues when it comes to making use of the medical care system. Hence, the paper both underestimated one factor and overestimated another. This is just an example, and I find there are a lot of these.

When we look at impacts, the drive seems to be to narrow opportunity cost in an effort to focus on the far more quantitative accounting costs. It appears our experience differs here, but I find when they are talking about young people dying, they do not consider career advancement or future children into lost opportunity cost, or fail to adequately look at output of some of these workers of all ages who either smoked themselves or who may have had their conditions exacerbated by passive smoking. When we look at carcinogenic effects during pregnancy, we have to consider the chances of a child being born which may need long-term developmental assistance, or a child incapable of reaching full potential. I have consistently felt that this has been an underutilized factor in current models, but this is by far more of a personal point of view – I know of others who feel that it reduces the amount of people on care when they are older, but I have problems with the idea that wasting diseases only exist for the elderly in this case and that these factoring in before a potential retirement age is reached does cause further damage than otherwise.

But this is pretty much me repeating myself, which no doubt has you face palming a bit. As you’ve shown and I’ve mentioned, this is a conflicting topic when it comes to anything like evidence, so neither of us really has a ton we can toss out to verify our position. If we could, I’m sure this argument would either not have happened or been of a very different tone.

When it comes to lost productivity, in your second paragraph, I am going to have to disagree with the way you interpreted the statistics. It's better to envision a giant bubble of persons which encapsulates the average, the midpoint being the average and the bubble being the curve. When we move the average down, we move the entire bell curve down. To me, this implies that while both average ages are above the retirement age, there is a larger amount of the smoking curve which crosses into the pre-65 age slot than there is from the non-smoker curve. This is not just my opinion. This researcher (MD) found the death rate for men under 64 was 2.1 times that of non-smokers for smokers. The average age might be higher but that does not mean most of them are managing 65. The spread tends to be wider for smokers, with some having normal non-smoker age rates while others die in their 40s. This is not a result difficult to find, I believe, as I’ve seen it other times as well when quoted in journals discussion the economic effect.

$1:

My exposure is walking through a blue pall once or twice a week. I don't even notice it. And yes, the nanny state argument, for me, does come in. Chroinc (e.g. workplace) exposure to second-hand smoke is bad and should be banned completely. But I don't like the government moving to control the risks chosen by individuals because we have a socialized health care system. That's a slippery slope, and if we are going to go down that road, I'd rather just have a privatized health care system. That's just my opinion.

The thing I hate about this whole argument is it looks like I'm defending smoking (or drinking, or obesity, or global warming), and that's not what I'm trying to do. My primary thesis is that the government adn various lobby groups use advocacy science as a tool to intervene ever more and more into the private lives of its citizens.

In this case, the reason I don’t feel it’s a nanny state thing is concerns that it’s not actually allowing all people involved to accept the risks, and for the most part, it infringes on other people’s access to air. When we drive, we accept certain risks (health or otherwise) inherent with doing so, but I don’t feel an inherent risk of going to the bank or walking the park should be “breathing in someone else’s smoke.” To be frank, it’s not just that I don’t like the idea of wandering through smoke for pure health problems, but also because I hate being smoked out of my own apartment or getting blasted with (much more noticeable to me, anyways) smoke frequently during the day. I feel giving people the ability to take their vice and impinge on my access to nice air is a poor way for things to be – why should ten or twenty of us have to walk behind a smoker, taking in her fumes? Why is that fair? Likewise, why would people have to be walking through intersections to get to doorways where smokers congregate, so we have to walk through those clouds to get into buildings? Why should my apartment smell like crap and irritate my eyes, mouth and throat, when it’s not my vice and not their apartment? Is it acceptable to have this more or less forced on me?

My problem with advocacy science in this case (and I also have a problem with advocacy science) is that it’s the same cases being brought up are the same papers from 10 years ago, and these papers are being used for the cornerstone of the “Smoking isn’t that bad” movement to discredit a very broad, sweeping area of science, done by a quite a few people I know to use fairly rigorous methodology in a variety of institutions and universities around the world with funding from a large variety of sources. There’s been more than a few independently performed studies done now which have shown that there is a deleterious effect to smoking (to various extents), and the connections between the ingredients within cigs and their problems have been around for some time now – even though many of those studies were conducted well outside of regarding cigarettes. While I have no doubt advocacy science plays a part, I do feel there is a general trend of papers which does lead to a specific result.

I’d not worry too much about you sounding like you were defending smoking, it was quite clear you were not. It seems to me this is largely a discussion on the minor details rather than a central point of contention in the whole debate – in general, we seem to be in agreement. Likewise, I don’t want to make it seem like I was picking apart at the phrases you used here.

All in all, I’ll just end off by restating what I think we’ve both said in this just as a general note to all readers that neither of us can really prove a point of view with the current status of the research in the area, I think, for what was discussed at the beginning partially. Both of us readily identified papers or opinions which expressed a divergence in findings in each of our posts, and mentioned various problems (lack of information, failure to have sufficient use of variables, advocacy science) present with the research in the field. I don’t think there’s much we can do other than state we disagree on some tangential points.

[ASLplease]

khar, i like you and all, but if you want me to read your posts you've got to shorten them up a bit. think of this as a conversation, if you wanted to talk for 20minutes straight whenever it was your turn, I just wouldnt have that much fun with you.

[Zipperfish]

ASLplease ASLplease:

khar, i like you and all, but if you want me to read your posts you've got to shorten them up a bit. think of this as a conversation, if you wanted to talk for 20minutes straight whenever it was your turn, I just wouldnt have that much fun with you.

And he wonders why everyone around the coffee machine flees when he shows up to pour his coffee in the morning

[herbie]

Two week struggle to quit and another BIG FAIL.
Actually got so hairy I smashed the office phone to bits when the battery died during an important conversation and an employee tossed a pack of Exports on my desk and told me to go out and smoke them!

[raydan]

herbie herbie:

Two week struggle to quit and another BIG FAIL.
Actually got so hairy I smashed the office phone to bits when the battery died during an important conversation and an employee tossed a pack of Exports on my desk and told me to go out and smoke them!

Day 17 for me.