Editorial: Smoking survey yields good news

Posted by regulators (anonymous) on September 12, 2008 at 11:47 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Great! Now when will our premiums go down?

Posted by Todd (anonymous) on September 13, 2008 at 1:43 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Regulators, the solution is to stop penalizing the taxpayers. In California, they have raised the taxes on tobacco products to offset taxpayer burden (probably the only intelligent thing California has done in the last decade). In a few states, some cigarettes are up to $7.00 a pack, which helps offset taxpayer burden and economically discourages many from starting or continuing. You think people are screaming now over fuel prices? Watch tobacco sales drop to an all time low when the first state starts charging $5.00 a pack just for health tax...that will push the price up to at least $10.00 a pack.

It's a broken system; taxpayers pay thousands of dollars for pre-natal care and childbirth, to some families with 5+ children and can't afford them; then we turn around and give them $7,000+ in tax refunds each year for their reward.

This editorial is good news, but falls short of providing the most important information. How about a survey of the 164,000 ex-smokers to determine how they quit, and pass along the most common method to the current smokers that can't quit? Remember, it's an addiction, and not merely a choice for everyone. Thousands want to quit and can't leave the nicotine.

Posted by harleyrider1978 (anonymous) on September 13, 2008 at 6:35 a.m. (Suggest removal)

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/...

And concludes:

The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. 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:

Posted by Disgusted (anonymous) on September 13, 2008 at 1:52 p.m. (Suggest removal)

I quit smoking in 1980. I learned how to read when I was in first grade and was totally aware of the warning on the cigarette packages that I carried around in my pocket. It was a personal decision I made without government intervention. I can not endorse how many states are taxing cigarettes and designating the money received to pay for programs that we will never be able to get rid of. If cigarette sales keep declining the tax payers will have to make up the difference. The only ones that will benefit will be a bunch of politicians who bought some votes with the tax money.

Posted by gene (anonymous) on September 21, 2009 at 11:09 a.m. (Suggest removal)

As discerning readers surely have surmised, “harleyrider” is no ordinary commenter. He’s a spammer.

An online version of the “tax protestors” across the country, he has been sent out to create so much noise that some dimmer bulbs might think his spam has some distant relation to the truth.

Harleyrider's specialty is hijacking message boards. Innocent boards like the Tribune's are manipulated to function as his own freebie PR Newswire. His loose-rivet boilerplate is slapped onto every board in the country (Google him or his phrases). He seems part of this 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.

He posts tobacco-funded studies, or Big Tobacco's discredited misrepresentations of normal studies.

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 legislature, where he might have to account for himself or his misrepresentations of studies.

Does Post-for-Pay exist? Read how corporations are taking their PR wars to the Internet without disclosure:

http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdo...

“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 was funded by the tobacco industry)

Once the Flat Earthers, Holocaust Deniers and Green Card Lawyers start following hareleyrider’s scurrilous PR methods, message boards like the Tribune's will soon become as useless as newsgroups are today.