I just saw a nifty little study about how bad THIRD-HAND smoke is bad for you. It went on and on about how it was in your hair and clothes and was so dangerous to babies, etc. But, the best part of the whole thing for me was where the conclusion was reached that it was still better for mothers who smoked to breast feed their babies rather than bottle feed them formula. So nicotine-laced breast milk is better than pure clean formula?? What a stupid pile of horse-hockey. I used to smoke, but I have to say anyone who is a reformed smoker that gets all pious and treats people who smoke like shit can kiss my ass. As for people who have never smoked, bravo to you! But get over yourself. People can’t cherry-pick freedoms, we either are, or we aren’t. If you hate being around cigarettes, move.

Smoking is a dirty, nasty, and unhealthy habit, not to mention expensive. I smoked for 14 years before successfully kicking it 3.5 years ago cold turkey.

The city of Pueblo Colorado is owned lock stock and barrel by the federal government. If the feds werent in Pueblo, there would be no town to survey.
I would like to see this study out of a city that has no federal overlords. Try Grand Junction Colorado. That would be a much more ethical place to do a study of this kind. Pueblo has a conflict of interest, and the feds can manipulate anything they like in that town.

We are, after all, still a free country aren’t we?

Well, no actually, we are not. Do you need the master list of reasons we are no longer a free country? I bet you already have one of your own. I give alot more weight to what is than what we are told is. The freedom you refer to has been replaced by authoritarian nanny statism with a big dose of bullshit to fool the masses. We are being conditioned to be less and less aware of our freedoms and less likely to defend them. This is a non-partisan reality.
Being the realist that I am, I would re-phrase the statement like this:
We still do, after all, want to slow the rate of slide to authoritarian control dont we?

I love you too, AR-15.

xoxoxo

In addition, farting doesn’t cause emphysema.

Trust me R108, you don’t want to be on a slow elevator with me after chili night, it may not cause emphysema, but it will cause shortness of breath for you.

Now what about the tax side of the comment?

absolutely, we are. so, are you on the team to endorse the forced the starvation fat people? Asked and answered; it’s a false comparison. these people really mess with our health care system I don’t support socialized healthcare, either. and their overeating causes starvation world wide. False; just another Marxist “fixed pie” idea. if you think about it, fat people are really baby killers. Nope. That would be the abortionists.

Dennis Miller Break-

Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but America’s attitude about smoking has become more hostile than a militia member at a tax audit. These days even the Philip Morris employee cafeteria has a no smoking section. If you walked into a restaurant and loudly demanded that they serve you a charbroiled live puppy, you’d probably cause less of an outcry than you would simply by sitting down and lighting up a smoke.
When I say “smoke,” I’m talking mostly about cigarettes, although I guess with the increasing popularity of cigars, we have to include them in this discussion. For years, cigars concerned only half the population, but their usage is growing more prevalent with the fairer sex. For women, smoking cigars is like going to Chippendale’s: You’re basically saying, “Look, guys, we can be just as big a bunch of assholes as you can.”
Now, it’s been proven that tobacco company executives’ sworn congressional testimony concerning the addictive properties of nicotine had all the sincerity of a defense attorney’s tie rack. But who can possibly be shocked by this?
Tobacco companies will stop at nothing to win the smoking wars. Now their scientists are saying some of the smoking research data is no longer valid because the contemporary mores dictate that rats have to step outside their mazes to have the smoke.
Hey, don’t blame the cigarette makers. Tobacco companies are being sued way too much. I admit they’re evil poison-mongers who give other poison-mongers a bad name. Yes, they lie about the addictive nature of their products and get rich doing it. But come on, tell the truth, we knew they were lying all along. If you’re saying you didn’t know cigarettes were bad for you, you’re lying through that hole in your trachea. Of course it causes cancer. Of course it causes emphysema. It’s fucking smoke. Would you build a campfire and every hour stand real close and take deep breaths? How could you not know smoking is bad for you? Is having teeth the color of caramel corn normal ? Is coughing up your lungs one smoldering loogie at a time normal? God gave you two lungs, so don’t be an asshole. Think. Use one lung for smoking and the other one for breathing.
Here are some signs that it might be time to quit smoking:
1. Before you light up, you wrap a nicotine patch around your cigarette.
2. Your newborn twin sons are named Benson and Hedges.
3. You name each cigarette and have a personal conversation with it while you smoke.
4. You’re at Arlington Cemetery, paying your respects to JFK, and you lean over and light one up off the eternal flame.
And 5. You shit pure tar.
Listen, the bottom line on cigarette smoking is it’s really just the way you interpret things. I mean, they say smoking gives you cancer. Sure, you can be negative and look at that as a bad thing, or you can see that smoking gives you cancer. It gives it to you. It’s a present. Here, here’s cancer. . . . Why, thank you very much, Mr. Cigarette.
You know, when I find myself in a room where everyone’s smoking, and it gets too intense, you know what I do? I don’t start waving my hand around and fake coughing; I don’t start rattling off heart disease and lung cancer stats like some autistic surgeon general; I don’t lecture anybody about their lifestyle choices. . . . I leave the room, okay? My acceptance of smokers is one of the compromises, one of the little negotiations that once must make if one is to live in modern urban society.
I don’t know why people complain about secondhand smoke. At nearly two dollars a pack, don’t you realize how much money they’re saving you?
Plus, if you smoke, you get to read the matchbook covers and learn about the exciting career opportunities awaiting you in cartooning.
And hey to all of you militant antismokers whom I see screaming at strangers for lighting up: If you were that concerned about your lungs, what in the fuck are you doing living in L.A.?
Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

You don’t have the freedom to walk into my smoke and then demand that I stop smoking.

I won’t if you smoke in your own space. But when you come into the common areas of the public, maybe your right to smoke does not trump my right to be free of it. Smoke at home.

Again, you are free to vote for the legislators who promise to end all smoking restrictions.

absolutely, we are. so, are you on the team to endorse the forced the starvation fat people? these people really mess with our health care system and their overeating causes starvation world wide. if you think about it, fat people are really baby killers.

I won’t if you smoke in your own space. But when you come into the common areas of the public, maybe your right to smoke does not trump my right to be free of it.

The public square is available to all citizens and as Rob pointed out, if the smoker is not in a crowd, but standing aside smoking alone and someone walks into his smoke or Cologne-Perfume, which people also bitch about, then you are denying them access to the public area by chasing them down, as it were, so you can bitch (I don’t smoke).

I read today that now they want to ban third hand smoke, that is, the particles left by the smoke on your hair, clothes, breath or whatever. In other words, if you had a cigarette, put it out before going into a public area, but still had residual particles of the smoke on you, you are endangering lives. That also applies to inside the home!

Quite frankly, if a restaurant or bar chooses to allow people to smoke and posts that information, then no one should go in there unless they willingly accept second hand smoke risks, whether they are a prospective employee or customer.

This habit has been around forever and therefore reasonable accommodations should be made for work or play, wherein those smokers can enjoy their habit and others not liking second hand smoke can just stay away.

The marketplace should change smoking habits, by things like extra insurance premiums for smokers and a large patient cost for any smoke related injuries/illness. Or, if there are restaurants or bars that want to prohibit smoking and some that do, the market place will dictate who survives in business and who does not!

^ also, other than being trapped in an elevator with a gaseous individual, you have the option to move upwind in either case.

I have only said that smoking is not a “freedom issue” and that people are not welcome to force their toxic waste on me

Actually tobacco played a major role in our current freedom, over 232 years ago, you know it you just choose to ignore it, just as you choose to ignore that you have the ability to remove yourself from the proximity of any one that chooses to absorb “toxic waste”. You seem to be presenting the fact that you lack the ambition to move and thus require the government to mandate that others bow to your needs. What are your thoughts about socialism?

This habit has been around forever…

In our culture, only since Sir Walter Raleigh.

Of course, those things aren’t ok with Robert the nanny stater, so they’re bad, while smoking bans, and higher cigarette taxes are just fine.

Now, you’re just lying. I have only said that smoking is not a “freedom issue” and that people are not welcome to force their toxic waste on me. You’re just making things up, now.

If you paid attention, you would know that the American people object strenuously to higher taxes, and I’m one of them. Taxes are no justification for smoking, and I have never made that argument, so you owe me several apologies, if you have any integrity.

No, actually I’ve created a very real situation. You seem not capable of recognizing it.

Wrong again! As I said before, I don’t do that. Assigning that to me is wrong. You owe me an apology.
I repeat, over and over and over and over again, I don’t care if people destroy themselves and their families with smoking; they don’t get to do that to me and my family. They are not entitled to force that on me. It’s a freedom issue, get it?
You can make up all the phony situations you want, but they don’t apply to me.

Call it a ban by a thousand regulations.

Stop whining; you have the freedom to elect politicians who promise to encourage smoking; just try to find one. The false “all or none at all” dichotomy just won’t work. About 75% of the public doesn’t smoke, and doesn’t want it forced on them by the smoking addicts. Live with it.

“Cigarette smoking is nasty. Cigarette smokers are nastier. I know. I was one.”

Well good for you RR. I don’t smoke and never have but I’ve seen your kind many times. Since your an ex-smoker anyone else who smokes is little more than a piece of shit to your kind now. You are one pompous asshole RR. Not just because of this one post either you jerk.

This is apparently a study from 2006, yet it is published today with great fanfare like it happened yesterday and hasn’t been thoroughly debunked. For the study analysis by Dr. Michael Siegel see:

http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2006/09/pueblo-study-concludes-that-smoking.html

This just shows the effectivness of a well run propaganda campaign.

The entire basis for the danger posed by second hand smoke is The EPA Report on Second Hand Smoke. That study was done by cherry picking other studies to achieve the desired result. Even then, some of the statistical benchmarks that determine whether something is significant had to be changed to get the desired outcome.

This is not a secret. It has never been a secret. It was even established by a court that the data had been fudged.

But it is a matter of, in the opinion of some, the ends justifying the means. Even if the study is bogus, it gives the desired result and so, the fudging of the data is ignoted for the “greater good.”

The news media, politicians and “activists” decided to pretend that the study was valid, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Everything since then has built on this EPA study that was manufactured to support a conclusion.

If you’re saying you didn’t know cigarettes were bad
for you, you’re lying through that hole in your trachea. Of course it causes cancer. Of course it causes emphysema. It’s fucking smoke. Would you build a campfire and every hour stand real close and take deep breaths? How could you not know smoking is bad for you? Is having teeth the color of caramel corn normal ? Is coughing up your lungs one smoldering loogie at a time normal?

Yep.

If you hate being around cigarettes, move.

Territorial imperative. IMO, it’s exactly this type of arrogance that has caused the backlash against smoking.

Cigarette smokers are nastier.

As illustrated by all their poo-flinging on this thread when someone doesn’t like their forcing their crap on the rest of us.

The disease of smoking is emphysema. You don’t have the “freedom” to force others to breathe your smoke.

Smokers, being addicts, aren’t free; they’re slaves. That’s their choice, but their enslavement leads them to violate the freedom of others, and now they want to whine about it.
I’m not violating anyone’s freedom, btw; straw man.
Unless, of course, you think I shouldn’t be free to object to being dosed with the toxic waste of smoking addicts.

Go to a smoking establishment and you know what you’re getting. Stand near a smoker, and the “toxic waste” you get is much less dangerous than bus exhaust fumes, or other air borne lovelies. Fail.

In addition, farting doesn’t cause emphysema.

False; no one has the freedom to violate the freedom of others; that’s not freedom, it’s license.

Then, R108, let’s see your license to violate the freedoms of those who choose to pay the tax to smoke!

You don’t have the freedom to walk into my smoke and then demand that I stop smoking.

So, your definition of “freedom” only goes in one direction, Rob? Of course I have the freedom to do that, but you’re setting up a straw man here. Cigarette smoke also travels, so it isn’t just a local problem.
I take someone lighting up in my presence as a form of physical assault, and feel justified in replying in kind.

I guess I just value freedom more than using the coercive force of government to ban my pet peeves.

Same old straw man; it’s not the govt that is doing this, it is the non-smokers who don’t want toxic wasted forced on them.
Again, you are free to vote for the legislators who promise to end all smoking restrictions.

You don’t have the “freedom” to force others to breathe your smoke.

You don’t have the freedom to walk into my smoke and then demand that I stop smoking.

I won’t if you smoke in your own space. But when you come into the common areas of the public, maybe your right to smoke does not trump my right to be free of it. Smoke at home.

My privately-owned property – be it a bar or a restaurant or what have you – is not the public’s. And you have no right to tell me, as a property owner, to ban smoking.

I won’t come on to your property and tell you what to do if you extend to me the same courtesy.

And I say this as someone who hates smoking and can’t stand being around it.

I guess I just value freedom more than using the coercive force of government to ban my pet peeves.