City Council Considers Smoking Ban Outside Hospitals

i'm all for the ban at hospital entrances, no one should be walking through a cloud of smoke to enter a hospital.

if, however, a hospital has a courtyard or some other open area (and really, i don't know the city hospitals well at all to know the answer to this), then i think a small part of it can be for smokers. dealing with security every time you need "some air" while your loved one is in the middle of a six, eight, fourteen hour surgery just adds to the emotional burden.

Always pleasant when you must enter a hospital and pass a gaggle of nurses puffing away on butts and a wall of smoke at the entrance. Classy. Also classy at elementary schools.

Hospitals and schools should include clauses in contracts that say employees can be fired for smoking. Even the smell of smoke on clothes, and the resulting dust, can be difficult or damaging for children and sick people.

I work in a building, where they required all smokers to stand at one location outside; of course, they didn't think about the fact that the location is next to the air-take vents!

Smokers are selfish - $100 packs for everyone.

Every time someone says "there ought to be a law" there probably oughtn't.

If this is a problem, hospitals should create their own bans. Why does the government need to get involved?

Smokers are inconsiderate litterbugs anyway. I can always tell where a gathering area for smokers outside office buildings are. Even if they have butt cans, urns and other receptacles, you'll see butts absolutely everywhere. I've seen people actually stand by an ashtray and drop their butts on the ground anyway. And if I had a penny for every time I saw a lit butt sailing from the window of a moving car...

Secondhand Smoke: the “no threshold” Scare

A major argument for smoking bans is the claim “there is no safe level”—no threshold—below which tobacco smoke is not dangerous. The ban advocates/activists invoke the well-known link of smoking and lung cancer and assert that, therefore, even secondhand smoke must also be carcinogenic. They claim the air from smoking can never be made clean enough to eliminate the health risk and thus smoking must be banned altogether. But the “no threshold” hypothesis about cancer has never been shown to be true for ANY chemical, much less secondhand smoke. The idea that if something is carcinogenic at high doses it must also be proportionately so at small doses simply does not fit the real world. At least ten elements (including iron and oxygen) are carcinogens at high doses but essential to human life in small doses. And some carcinogens, such as selenium and Vitamin A, are proven anti-carcinogens at low doses. These facts contradict the “no-threshold” idea. Thresholds are a law of nature; the mere title of one treatise says it all: “Environmental Carcinogenesis—The Threshold Principle: A Law of Nature." The authors, Claus and Bolander, state that the no-threshold concept about any dose being dangerous ignores “all the fundamental principles of cell biology.”

Dr. Elizabeth Miller, former president of the American Association for Research on Cancer, has stated: “Chemical carcinogenesis is a strongly dose-dependent phenomenon.” This is opposite to the claim by smoking ban advocates—including the surgeon general—that it is not dose dependent, that any dose is a health hazard.

The no-threshold concept, when applied to secondhand smoke, “incorporates unsound assumptions that are not valid,” says an article by Drs. Huber (pulmonary specialist), Brockie (cardiologist), and Mahajan (a hospital director of internal medicine and professor of medicine.)

Furthermore, thresholds are known to exist for mainstream tobacco smoke in total as well as for each of the individual carcinogens known to be in it. It is preposterous to claim, as the surgeon general has done, that secondhand smoke—which is more than 100,000 times more dilute than mainstream smoke—has no threshold, even though mainstream smoke does. This turns the dose-response principle of epidemiology on its head and means secondhand smoke can be more dangerous than actual smoking! Ridiculous!

The surgeon general should know that thresholds for all carcinogens in—or even assumed to be in—secondhand smoke have been identified. They have been calculated by the American Conference of Government Industrial Hygienists. Below these thresholds, the chemicals are considered safe. To reach the threshold for the carcinogen with the lowest threshold (hydroquinone) would require 1,250 cigarettes to be smoked in a sealed, unventilated room 20 by 22 feet within one hour. This would mean 30 people in that room each smoking slightly more than 2 PACKS of cigarettes per hour. And remember this is in a sealed room, where no one would enter or leave in that hour and where there would be no mechanical ventilation. Open a door or window or add mechanical ventilation, and the number of cigarettes needed to reach the threshold would be even higher. Of course, nobody—much less everyone in a room—will ever smoke 2 packs of cigarettes per hour. Thus it is essentially impossible for secondhand smoke to be a cancer risk despite the pathetic claims of the surgeon general and other smoking ban activist/advocates.

Notice that I began the last paragraph by speaking of all the carcinogens known “or even assumed” to be in secondhand smoke. This is because most of the carcinogens have never actually been found in secondhand smoke. If they exist there at all, they are in quantities too small to be measurable. They are simply assumed to be there because they are known to exist in the smoke from which secondhand smoke is derived. So calculations of their presence in secondhand smoke are based on their proportions in the parent smoke. But they may not exist at all in secondhand smoke because of physical, chemical and behavioral differences from the parent smoke. Secondhand smoke has extremely low concentrations of volatiles. Mainstream smoke is highly concentrated, and its higher gas phase concentrations favor larger respirable particles that condense and retain more volatile compounds. Evaporation is faster from secondhand smoke particles; within fractions of a second, they becomes 50 to 100 times smaller than their mainstream counterparts. Secondhand smoke quickly undergoes a variety of other changes: oxidation, polymerizations, photochemical transformations, and other changes. All these changes take place extremely quickly. So suddenly secondhand smoke is a very different collection of chemicals than the smoke from which it was derived, and carcinogens assumed to be there may, in fact, be absent. But even if present, they are in quantities far below the threshold levels. And secondhand smoke is “so highly diluted,” say Huber/Brockie/Mahajan, “that it is not even appropriate to call it smoke, in the conventional sense. Indeed, the term 'environmental tobacco smoke' is a misnomer.”

FOX NEWS ARTICLE
March 8, 1998

Passive smoking doesn't cause cancer - official By Victoria Macdonald Health Correspondent

THE world's leading health organization has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect.

The astounding results are set to throw wide open the debate on passive smoking health risks. The World Health Organization, which commissioned the 12-centre, seven-country European study has failed to make the findings public, and has instead produced only a summary of the results in an internal report.

Despite repeated approaches, nobody at the WHO headquarters in Geneva would comment on the findings last week. At its International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon , France , which coordinated the study, a spokesman would say only that the full report had been submitted to a science journal and no publication date had been set.

The findings are certain to be an embarrassment to the WHO, which has spent years and vast sums on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns. The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking - or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) - and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups.

Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer. The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers.

The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: "There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood."

A spokesman for Action on Smoking and Health said the findings "seem rather surprising given the evidence from other major reviews on the subject which have shown a clear association between passive smoking and a number of diseases." Roy Castle, the jazz musician and television presenter who died from lung cancer in 1994, claimed that he contracted the disease from years of inhaling smoke while performing in pubs and clubs.

I get cancer just listening to these whiny jerks pontificating about second-hand smoke. Smoke wherever you want, fuck 'em all.

they should ban smoking outside the womb/grave.

Smoking is stupid. but who gives a shit if it's outside the doorway.