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On their way to outlawing smoking in public parks, beaches, and in your dreams, officials at the Health Department are moving forward with a plan to require graphic cigarette warning signs anywhere you buy smokes in NYC. The new signs will include information on how to quit, and, like the one seen here, will show the ugly side-effects of smoking. Some 12,000 retailers in all five boroughs are expected to display the signs by December, but the city will give them a two month grace period before issuing fines.
But at least one defiant local smoker says the public education campaign is futile, telling NY1, "Everyone knows the risks. It's a habit, you can't break it. I enjoy it, actually. I don't plan on quitting no matter where they put the signs." Meanwhile, the FDA is stepping in to make its presence felt among children, announcing a nationwide ban on candy-flavored cigarettes today. Kids, it's only a matter of time before the government takes away your licorice whips, too.
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Man, I remember when they made cigarette-shaped candy. Didn't make me want to be a smoker.
Smoking is bad for your health? Gee whiz, I had no idea.
Just more bureaucrats trying to justify their existence.
I wonder if they're considering the same graphic images in abortion clinics. No judgements, just sayin'.
Why? To convince gynecologists to quit smoking?
But smoking makes me look so cool! With my tight jeans, 80s shades, and smug, smile-free face... a cig is the ultimate style attribute.
To be fair, I wish they'd include details regarding how many packs those lungs smoke and for how long.
agreed. pre-existing medical conditions also apply.
SECOND HAND SMOKE IS A JOKE...........98% WATER VAPOR....STEAM...........
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
British Medical Journal & WHO conclude secondhand smoke "health hazard" claims are greatly exaggerated
The BMJ published report can be found here:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057
And concludes:
The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.
What makes this study more significant than any other is that it took place over a 39 year period, and studied the results of non-smokers who lived with smokers..... meaning these non-smokers were exposed to secondhand smoke up to 24 hours per day; 365 days per year for 39 years. And there was still no relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality.
This report was of course silenced in the media; however in light of the damage to business, jobs, and the economy from smoking bans the BMJ report should be revisited by lawmakers as a reference tool and justification to repeal the now unnecessary and very damaging smoking ban laws.
Also significant is the World Health Organization (WHO) study which concluded "..secondhand smoking doesn't cause cancer..." found online here.
Excerpt:
Passive smoking doesn't cause cancer-official
By Victoria Macdonald, Health Correspondent
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."
And if lawmakers need additional real world data to further highlight the need to eliminate these onerous and arbitrary laws, air quality testing by Johns Hopkins University, the American Cancer Society, a Minnesota Environmental Health Department, and various researchers whose testing and report was also peer reviewed and published in the esteemed British Medical Journal......prove that secondhand smoke is 2.6 - 25,000 times SAFER than occupational (OSHA) workplace regulations.
OSHA has established PELs (Permissible Exposure Levels) for all the measurable chemicals, including the 40 alleged carcinogens, in secondhand smoke. PELs are levels of exposure for an 8-hour workday from which, according to OSHA, no harm will result.
Of course the idea of "thousands of chemicals" can itself sound spooky. Perhaps it would help to note that coffee contains over 1000 chemicals, 19 of which are known to be rat carcinogens.
-"Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities" Gold Et Al., Science, 258: 261-65 (1992)
There. Feel better?
As for secondhand smoke in the air, OSHA has stated outright that:
"Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)...It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded."
-Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec'y, OSHA, To Leroy J Pletten, PHD, July 8, 1997
Indeed it would.
Independent health researchers have done the chemistry and the math to prove how very very rare that would be.
As you're about to see in a moment.
In 1999, comments were solicited by the government from an independent Public and Health Policy Research group, Littlewood & Fennel of Austin, Tx, on the subject of secondhand smoke.
Using EPA figures on the emissions per cigarette of everything measurable in secondhand smoke, they compared them to OSHA's PELs.
The following excerpt and chart are directly from their report and their Washington testimony:
CALCULATING THE NON-EXISTENT RISKS OF ETS
"We have taken the substances for which measurements have actually been obtained--very few, of course, because it's difficult to even find these chemicals in diffuse and diluted ETS.
"We posit a sealed, unventilated enclosure that is 20 feet square with a 9 foot ceiling clearance.
"Taking the figures for ETS yields per cigarette directly from the EPA, we calculated the number of cigarettes that would be required to reach the lowest published "danger" threshold for each of these substances. The results are actually quite amusing. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a situation where these threshold limits could be realized.
"Our chart (Table 1) illustrates each of these substances, but let me report some notable examples.
"For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes would be required to reach the lowest published "danger" threshold.
"For Acetone, 118,000 cigarettes would be required.
"Toluene would require 50,000 packs of simultaneously smoldering cigarettes.
"At the lower end of the scale-- in the case of Acetaldehyde or Hydrazine, more than 14,000 smokers would need to light up simultaneously in our little room to reach the threshold at which they might begin to pose a danger.
"For Hydroquinone, "only" 1250 cigarettes are required. Perhaps we could post a notice limiting this 20-foot square room to 300 rather tightly-packed people smoking no more than 62 packs per hour?
"Of course the moment we introduce real world factors to the room -- a door, an open window or two, or a healthy level of mechanical air exchange (remember, the room we've been talking about is sealed) achieving these levels becomes even more implausible.
"It becomes increasingly clear to us that ETS is a political, rather than scientific, scapegoat."
NEW YORK CITY CLASH
When you do risk assessments you do not look at each chemical individually. You add up the effects of each chemical. And a chemical concentration below the PEL is not a guarantee of safety.
This doesn't mean the conclusion of what you pasted is incorrect, but the methodology certainly is.
thats what osha does.........individual pels........dose makes the poison or did something change in epidemiology.
I'd much rather my tax dollars be spent on posters than on treating lung cancer patients on medicare.
Gothamist: The ban is on candy-FLAVORED cigs, not the candy version of cigarettes.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jKdYE3UEXb9ZfiXoS43vCQyzBUgAD9ASI7JO0
Corrected, thank you.
those tax dollars arent just yours........those same smokers paid 10 times the tax you ever paid as a non-smoker.......how about taking all the smokers taxes they pay per pack and create a health insurance policy strictly for them the smokers.........makes to much sence and destroys your argument doesnt it.
Smokers don't have enough money to pay for all the medical bills they run up in their lifetimes because of their stupid habits. That's why the rest of the country pays for their end-of-life care and pointless lung cancer surgeries.
insurance is just that insurance that smokers tax dollars should go into........only 20% of smokers ever get cancer.........and a much lower risk than the non-smoking public..........where cancer has risen while smoking rates went down........they still cant prove smoking causes cancer.......meta-analysis that you nazis use isnt science but a witch doctors brew in a prayer of hopelessness........
You're a complete fucking tool. I know a thoracic surgeon who spends 75 percent of his practice operating on lung cancer patients. 85 percent of them are current or former smokers. And most of them die anyway. The Cleveland Clinic itself, ranked by US News and World Report as the 4th best hospital in the country, will not hire anyone who smokes.
And only 20 percent of smokers get cancer? That's funny, because roughly 50 percent of the entire population gets cancer at some point in their lives. Are you saying that smoking actually prevents cancer, you stupid fucking idiot?
they should focus less on the people already addicted and focus more on finding new and more effective ways to stop people from starting in the first place. those who start smoking already know the dangers, so i really dont think this is going to make that much of a difference.
As readers and the Gothamist surely have surmised, “harleyrider” is no ordinary commenter. He’s a notorious spammer.
Harleyrider's specialty is hijacking message boards. Boards like the Gothamist's are manipulated to function as his own free PR Newswire. His loose-nut boilerplate is slammed onto every board in the country (Google him). He seems part of this weird cabal of maybe 10 shameless spammers who try by sheer force of numbers to make their lies seem true, deluging boards with torrents of misleading sewage--like his tobacco-funded study, or Big Tobacco's long-discredited misrepresentation of a normal study.
Noise intended to drown out truth is a typical, documented tobacco industry tactic.
It must be a full work-day to hit every message board in the country as he does.
And it’s all anonymous; he doesn’t have to stand up to spew this swill out in the open in front of a legislative body, where he might have to account for himself or his misrepresentations.
Does Post-for-Pay exist? Read how US corporations are taking their PR wars to the Internet--without disclosure:
www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/54195297.html
“Allegiances are not always explained. The most impassioned defense … on the blogs comes from Trevor Butterworth, editor of Statistical Assessment Service, also known as STATS. He regularly combs the Internet for stories … and offers comments without revealing his ties to industry.”
(STATS: funded by the tobacco industry)
Once the Flat Earthers, Holocaust Deniers, etc. start following hareleyrider’s scurrilous PR methods, message boards like the Gothamist's will soon become as useless as newsgroups are today.
Not to totally side with "harleyrider", but there are a lot of well-documented, independent studies out there that have found little or no danger from secondhand smoke. And in some studies that claim to have have found dangers, the subjects (i.e. lab rats) were exposed to levels of smoke that in some cases would be the equivalent of firsthand smoking.
I am all for taxing the hell out of smoking, limiting their advertising, warning labels, and all that. But I'd rather we just admit that non-smokers just find it gross, annoying and rude to have to be forced to breathe it or wear the stink home, instead of citing secondhand smoking risks that may not actually exist.
>>"there are a lot of well-documented, independent studies out there that have found little or no danger from secondhand smoke. And in some studies that claim to have have found dangers, the subjects (i.e. lab rats) were exposed to levels of smoke that in some cases would be the equivalent of firsthand smoking."
Nonsense. Total nonsense. Well, not total--yes, there are some studies that show little harm. But that in no way leads to your rash conclusion. The 2006 Surgeon General's report examined all relevant studies and found the literature as a whole shows major health risks.
Don't know your sources for your supposed information, but your BS detector has failed you here.
poor poor geneb,run out of propaganda over at tobacco.org to put out on the newswire today...
Dont worry my libtard friend,your political bussies are about out.........have you looked at the polls lately...your nazis friends are fast being tossed to the road and anti-tobacco with them.........I would start looking for a new job..........you green wacks are a dying political breed.