Write to your legislators and tell them to get rid of the bans!

Michael J. McFadden
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”

I would favor legalizing marijuana, but we all know these addicted (it’s an addiction, it’s not your fault) smokers will smoke outside.

They need to get their hit so they can function in a social society or bar. It quells their brains, it’s a release from the ‘bad scary world.’

Respect your neighbors and do your addictions in private…and if your neighbor is offending you in some way…try talking to them. $20 says when someone offends you, you’ll just go light up…nice repeating cycle of addiction =)

Michael J. McFadden
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”

The larger issue is that as we speak laws are being created which set dangerous precedents that usurp constitutional freedoms in the name of public health.

I really wonder what the anti-smoking contingency will think of this whole campaign when laws are passed which infringe their own rights.

It is happening now. For example, in the California family courts, you can be accused of being unfit and negligent if you do not refer your children to psychological or psychiatric counseling or refuse to submit to a psychological evaluation. This is in the name of “public health” and “protecting children.”

The next target is evidently obesity in the name of “public health.” This campaign is well underway and I am quite sure that we will see just as much hatred and fear spawned from that program.

Both of these have profit motives with a veneer of altruistic and philanthropic interest, just like the anti-smoking campaign. Overlooked is that the medical industry, pharmaceutical industry and the psychological industry are all mega industries, which savor the profits that come from captive markets mandated by law.

One of the major purposes of the constitution was to prevent the majority from passing laws to impose their wishes on minorities. If you study the history of law, it appears that the a major purpose of our judicial system is to prevent private citizens from taking matters into their own hands, lynching, scapegoating and vilifying at will.

Dangerous precedents have been set.

God help us all.

If you do decide you want Brains just hit Amazon. They get them to your door in less than a week from what people have told me!

- MJM

I apologize for my sarcasm. I can’t seem to help myself when it comes to this issue.

I should clarify my point – that the lot of us are actually not sick from the environs in which we grew up, but that if all the media hype had any reasonable basis, we should be.

As one of five children who grew up in a heavily smoking household, I can attest to the fact that the five of us rarely missed school due to illness. The five of us are still rarely ill and reasonably healthy in our adulthood.

Thanks for your recommendations. When I can get my hands on a copy, I’ll be sure to read your book. I promise!

Angela, as you well know, that’s not the case… and because you are old enough to realize that, you have some perspective to see how the antismoking movement has lied to people and created virtually baseless fear. Younger people unfortunately don’t have that perspective, and even older people for the most part have succumbed to the constant pounding of the media to the point where they think most smoking restrictions are reasonable from a health threat standpoint (as opposed to the standpoint of simple preference).

To fully understand the psychology behind the changes and the methods that have been used to achieve those changes I’d have to recommend Brains itself: something like the Stiletto, though honest and accurate in what it covers, doesn’t even scratch the surface of that information.

- MJM

Tobacco smoke concentrations, even in older fashioned bars with relatively poor ventilation, never even come CLOSE to approaching OSHA standards of concern. When I spoke to OSHA people in the 1980s and warned them they’d be under pressure to ban smoking they laughed at me because the idea was so ridiculous.

When ASH mounted a lawsuit to try to force them into banning smoking they turned around to ASH and told them that if the lawsuit wasn’t dropped that they WOULD set an explicit “smoking standard” and it would most definitely be one that recognized an acceptably safe level of workplace smoking.

ASH dropped the lawsuit and ran.

Smoking bans are bad laws based upon lies. To see a good, although one-side and brief, examination of those lies download the “Stiletto” at:

http://encyclopedia.smokersclub.com/257.html

If you find *ANYTHING* of substance in there that you have substantive criticism of, please share it here for all to see and I will respond.

Michael J. McFadden
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”
http://pasan.TheTruthIsALie.com

I agree, as do most smokers I know, that it is inconsiderate to light up in a group situation – such as fairgrounds, concerts…that sort of thing. At the same time, it is easy enough in those situations to move to a more comfortable breathing space.

All of my arguments come down to three basic concerns:

1) Smokers are treated with an undeserved lack of respect.

2) Smokers will have a basic right stripped away from them and/or be criminalized for it.

3) If society tolerates the manipulation of a group of people, then what will society be like by the time our children and grandchildren are adults?

I agree: smoking should be legal outdoors. I think it’s inconsiderate to do it in a group situation without asking, even outdoors, but I think a sensible law about that would be both impossible and absurd. That said, a bad argument is a bad argument even when the point it aims to prove is true.

Your question about the accuracy of death tolls (for primary smoking) is fair, but the answer is that they’re really pretty accurate. Is there any reason to suppose that smokers are more likely to work with flour dust or asbestos than non-smokers? Probably not. You would assume these things would average out between the two groups. They won’t always, of course. For example, the group of non-smokers probably includes more health freaks. You can control for this, though, if you identify it beforehand.

Then there are statistical tests you can do, and the result is something like ’smoking increases cancer risk by 20%, but due to the finite statistical power of our study, that number may reasonably be anywhere from 15% to 25%’. (Those are example numbers I just made up.) You can combine samples from studies, if you choose them well, to refine that number until the margin of error is negligible. Without looking into it myself, I would think that the carcinogenic effects of primary smoking are sufficiently well studied by now that the numbers are as precise as is realistic.

@MJM

I just don’t see why people who work in bars should have laxer safety laws protecting them than people who work in offices or factories. (It may be that there is a good reason for this but I can’t imagine what that would be.) I’m not going to comment on OSHA rules, though, as I don’t know enough about them to do so usefully.

My question was not whether or not there are more smokers than non-smokers dying of lung cancer. My question is, how can anyone possibly know the number of deaths that can be directly attributed to smoking? You can throw numbers out that are alarming, but how accurate are they really? How many lung cancer deaths in smokers are attributed to smoking when it might have been caused by asbestos or flour dust in large, industrial ovens?

People my age have been subjected to second-hand smoke everywhere as we grew up. Shouldn’t the lot of us be toting oxygen tanks and inhalers by now?

Smokers do not have more rights than others by being allowed to smoke outdoors. Allowing smoking – OUTDOORS – does NOT make an explicit exception in existing health and safety regulations. You have a right to drive your car, build a campfire, operate a lawn mower, choke your neighbors out with your fireplace, etc.

If anti-smokers are really serious about all of this, why go about it half-assed? When everyone on the planet is smoke-free, there will still be all of the aforementioned “airborne particulate matter”. Or would that be too inconvenient?

What is all this hatred about anyway? You can go out to eat, go to a bar, go to a movie, do your shopping, fly or cruise anywhere – whatever you want – without having to deal with cigarette smoke. Do you really, truly believe that you’re going to become gravely ill and die early because some smoker, somewhere in the world, lit up outdoors?

Perhaps we should all quit doing everything on the off-chance that some group of quacks decides that everything we do is harming everyone else – even though they can’t substantiate it.

So are you saying that bars with smoking should have to meet the same sort of OSHA particle air quality standards as offices and factories?

- MJM

Your comment about the “deadly boring” and “expensive” studies is misleading

I don’t think it is. Scientific literature is simply not available to anyone without an institutional login. It’s prohibitively expensive.

Both smokers and non-smokers can develop lung cancer. If a non-smoker develops lung cancer, then obviously there are causes other than smoking or even passive smoking. Convince me that 100% of lung cancer deaths in smokers are caused by smoking. Better yet, convince me that at least a percentage of those deaths could have been prevented if the victim had stopped smoking – or never started in the first place.

Hang on. Are you really claiming smoking isn’t even dangerous for the smoker? That’s just mental. Sorry, but it is.

On the other hand, it’s entirely false that 100% of lung cancer deaths in smokers are caused by smoke and I’d never try to convince you of that or claim it in the first place. But a percentage of them are. You just have to look at the incidence of cancer in smokers and non-smokers. It’s significantly higher in the first group. Sure, there’ll be some confounding factors to that, but is it too much of a stretch to imagine all that tar they inhale might contribute to unhealthy lungs?

That said, no death can be prevented. But not smoking postpones it.

The next time you hear smoking death-toll numbers, try not to let the media brainwashing affect your ability to think independently, and question, “How could they possibly know that?” Think about it.

As a scientist, my first instinct with the news is to ask exactly that. And with something like a death toll from smoking I know how they get the numbers because I’ve studied epidemiology. You get the incidence of a disease in non-smokers and you subtract it from the incidence of the disease in smokers. Then you run stats to see if that’s significant. It’s easy. Really.

Doing something for passive smoking is harder because the definitive test would be unethical and the ones we can do are affected by many confounding factors, and that’s why there’s so much more uncertainty. But personally I would say the best argument for the smoking ban is not direct epidemiology (which will never give us an answer we can be totally confident in) but simply that it brings the rules on cigarette smoke into line with those for all other kinds of airborne workplace particulate matter. (That said, if you want to criticise those other rules, go ahead. I’ve certainly never researched the justification for those — it didn’t seem necessary to read scientific papers to justify the idea that workplaces should have as little smoke in as possible. That seemed obvious.)

Since allowing smoking makes an explicit exception in existing health and safety regulations to accommodate your habit, the question is not whether “smokers should have fewer rights than any other groups”; it’s whether smokers should have more rights than any other groups. And I don’t see why they should.

I have read many articles and reports on the issue of passive smoking and haven’t found one solid reason that smokers should have fewer rights than any other groups. My opinions are not based on the views of any individual politicians, but rather on the industry that anti-smoking has become, and how governments worldwide have handled the issue.

My observations, while admittedly sarcastic, are only meant to point out the hysteria and hypocrisy of anti-smokers, and the possibility of similar and legitimate arguments that could be made. This is not to say that smokers are more aware, vigilant or respectful than anti-smokers. Smokers just happen to be the trendy prey of the moment.

Anti-smokers seem to think that smokers are – as you put it – demonstrably corrupt. I simply believe that taking away the rights of one group based on fear-mongering media spin and mass hysteria more than facts is just wrong. The persecution of smokers (which is what the majority of the fuss amounts to, as far as I’m concerned) has gotten ridiculous and way out of hand.

While I’m at it, you can ponder this:

Both smokers and non-smokers can develop lung cancer. If a non-smoker develops lung cancer, then obviously there are causes other than smoking or even passive smoking. Convince me that 100% of lung cancer deaths in smokers are caused by smoking. Better yet, convince me that at least a percentage of those deaths could have been prevented if the victim had stopped smoking – or never started in the first place.

The next time you hear smoking death-toll numbers, try not to let the media brainwashing affect your ability to think independently, and question, “How could they possibly know that?” Think about it.

I recall a house fire several years ago, in which the house next to mine burned nearly to the ground. I’m quite certain that the occupants were not smokers because the firemen didn’t evacuate the neighborhood for fear of a pack of cigarettes bursting into flames and releasing toxins into the air.

When will it all stop? Anti-something-or-others will be looking to infringe on your personal rights long after the last cigarette butt is crushed out and the dust settles from the dominoes falling.

I think on the whole the more serious “non-professional” Free-Choice proponents (which make up virtually all of us, although you could claim that since I “sell” a book that I’m a professional) have read more studies than the serious “non-professional” Antismokers (of which I don’t think there are too many: there’s just too much easy money to be had on that end of things for anyone who’s on that path in any serious manner.) Your comment about the “deadly boring” and “expensive” studies is misleading and it’s misleading in exactly the way Antismokers want: they don’t WANT people to read and think about the studies because doing so would spoil the nice propaganda of the press-releases and presentations that misrepresent them.

Heh… and I like the way you’re asking Free-Choice folks to find an “honest politician.” Do you make much money on bets like that?

Michael J. McFadden
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”