A very interesting poll this week put out by Reuters kind of confirms what a lot of us have been saying now a few months — that a small percentage of people using e-cigarettes are using them to quit smoking.
According to this poll of 5,679 people, 75 percent of the people using vaping products are continuing to smoke tobacco. Apparently a number of these people rely on e-cigs to get a nicotine charge in public places where tobacco is discouraged.
According to the poll, roughly 10 percent of adults “vape,” and about 15 percent of adults under the age of 40. That’s up dramatically from 2013, when the estimated number of vapers was 2.3 percent of Americans.
Despite that 75 percent figure, about 40 percent of vapers believe e-cigs are an effective tool for quitting cigarettes. In fact, a recent study shows that e-cigs are not especially effective in helping people quit smoking. (That doesn’t mean they don’t help anyone quit smoking, it just means that e-cigs are not some sort of “miracle cure” or for tobacco use. They might help some people, but they don’t appear to be any more effective than Nicorette, nicotine patches or simply quitting cold turkey.)
“Toto, we need to get the hell out of Kansas. This state is bolloxed.”
Many states have raised cigarette taxes for the right reasons — because studies have shown that higher cigarette taxes result in a lower smoking rate.
Kansas is a total train wreck politically and financially. It’s been the source of a conservative experiment from Gov. Sam Brownback and a conservative state Legislature — that if taxes on corporations and the wealthy are drastically cut, then it will spur growth. Well, even though Reagan’s Trickle Down Economics was proven 25 years ago to have been a disaster, these guys in Kansas had to learn the hard way that this doesn’t help the state’s economy.
Instead, Kansas is desperately broke and is probably in the worst shape financially of any state in the country, taking a $800 million surplus two or three years ago and turning it into a $400 million deficit. Why? Gosh … NO REVENUES! So, they’re responding by cutting, cutting, cutting. Cutting school days, cutting services, etc.
Sam Brownback
But, you can only cut so much. Kansas Republicans finally bit the bullet and passed a couple of tax increases to address that $400 million deficit. But, instead of raising income taxes on the wealthy (who can most easily absorb a tax increase), they went after the poor with a pair of regressive taxes — a sales tax increase and an increase in the cigarette tax.
Look, I’m all for raising cigarette taxes to a reasonable amount, and Kansas’ cigarette tax was fairly low. The Legislature approved a bill raising the state cigarette tax from a pretty low 79 cents a pack to $1.29 a pack. (In my opinion, a good state tax for cigarettes is $1.50 to $2 a pack … more than that you start chasing people to Indian Reservations or the black market to buy their cigs).
So, I want to say “good job Kansas”, but I can’t. The state did the right thing … but for the wrong reason. A cigarette tax to cut smoking rates — great. A cigarette tax on the backs of the poor to try and balance a budget screwed up by your fiscal mismanagement — bad.
Look, I get one thing wrong with cigarette taxes is that they are a regressive tax. They are. The poor have a much higher smoking rate than the wealthy, so when you raise cigarette taxes, the bulk of that increase is paid by the people least able to afford it. However, my agenda is it also gives people the incentive to quit and discourages teens from buying cigarettes to begin with … and a number of studies bear this out.
Anyway, it just shows how screwed up the policies are in Kansas, attempting to balance the state budget on the backs of the poor, leaving the radical tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in place and then cutting services and programs mostly used by the poor. It’s a messed-up state.
I hope I’m not stepping on Pepe’s toes here, but here is a rare submission from me about smoking.
George Case was a ballplayer I had never heard of before. Over the past few months, I’ve been reading the comments from his son in a baseball group I belong to. Some very powerful, poignant comments.
Joe DiMaggio and George Case both died of tobacco-related illnesses. No cause of death is listed for Bucky Walters.
George Case was an outstanding baseball player, mostly for the Washington Senators, in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the reasons I had never heard of him before is that his career was very short — he only played nine full years and retired at the age of 31 due to back problems. But, he was very, very good. He led the league in stolen bases six times, stealing as many as 61 bases in a season during an era in which there weren’t a lot of stolen bases (In fact, in 1939, George Case led all of Major League Baseball in stolen bases with 51; the next highest total that season was 23 — wow, what a gap!). He stole 349 bases in that short career (averaging 41 steals a year over eight seasons), hit .282 for his career, made three All-Star teams, scored over 100 runs four times and hit over .300 three times.
According to Wikipedia, Case was “possibly the fastest player in baseball between the 1920s and the 1950s.” He got a handful of Hall of Fame votes, but his career was simply too short to get a lot of Hall of Fame attention. Case went on to own a sporting goods store and was a successful coach at Rutgers, then later coached for the Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins.
One of the reasons George’s name keeps coming up in the group is that people like to post vintage smoking baseball smoking ads. Pepe’s done a couple of posts about these ads, and about how many of those baseball players died from lung disease or cancer. People like to make fun of these old ads, but there’s a dark undercurrent to them — these guys either wittingly or unwittingly were promoting a deadly product and many of them died from tobacco-related illnesses themselves (Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Gil Hodges, Joe DiMaggieo, so many others.). Often times when tobacco and baseball comes up, George Case III enters the discussion, talking about his dad and advocating very strong against smoking. He has a powerful story to tell.
George Case, like many ballplayers of his time, starred in cigarette advertising. Case promoted Camel cigarettes. He died of lung disease at the age of 73. He actually starred in a Camels ad along with Joe DiMaggio, a heavy smoker who died of complications from lung cancer.
George’s son, George Case III, has told some powerful stories about his dad’s tobacco use and his death from lung disease. Here are a couple of them:
I smoked when I was in college and had a health scare and was told to give up the cigarettes which I did “cold turkey.” 50 years later I’m so glad I did because I am now older than my father was when he died because of smoking. He lived long enough to know all three of our children, who loved him and enjoyed being with him. None of our grandchildren would have the chance to know Pop-Pop. Our grandchildren only have heard stories and seen photos of their great grandfather. If it hadn’t been for the cigarettes, I’m certain they would have loved being around their great grandfather listening to his baseball stories. They hear the baseball stories from their grandfather but it’s not quite the same, unfortunately!
According to George Case III, his father only ever lost a race to Jesse Owens himself, who also died of lung disease:
From personal experience I can tell you this. My dad was the fastest player in the major leagues during his baseball career. And he was a heavy smoker. At the time, it probably had very little affect on his running, as he was a young man. The only person to ever defeat my father in a race was Jesse Owens (at the time, “the world’s fastest human”) – also a heavy smoker. HOWEVER, cigarette smoking did catch up to my father and Jesse Owens, later in life. The last few years of my dad’s life, he needed to have a portable oxygen tank and could barely walk across a room without getting winded. He used to say “if it hadn’t been for those damn cigarettes” My father died of emphysema and Jesse Owens died of lung cancer. If the dangers of cigarette smoking were known at the time, I’m certain the vast majority of athletes who smoked, never would have. Unfortunately, too late for so many – like closing the barn door after the horse had escaped!
(Surprisingly, even Pepe didn’t realise Jesse Owens had died of lung cancer, but sure enough George III is right. He did. He smoked over a pack a day and died at the age of 67.).
So, I appreciate George III’s advocacy and his passion and his honesty, and Pepe does, too. His dad sounds like he was an amazing man and an amazing ballplayer somewhat lost in the sands of history.
Here is an update on John Oliver’s excellent rant about the tactics of Big Tobacco in fighting regulations against their products worldwide.
This is complicated and I’m not 100 percent confident I will explain it right, but I will try:
Ukraine had been convinced (no doubt by Big Tobacco lobbying efforts) to file a World Trade Organization challenge against Australia over Australia’s plain packaging laws. Per Australian law, tobacco companies cannot put their logos on cigarette packs. Only graphic anti-smoking warnings are allowed and a small amount of text saying what the actual brand of the cigarettes are.
Tobacco companies filed suit and recently, the Australian Supreme Court ruled in favour of the government. So, Big Tobacco (or should I say Big World Tobacco) lost that round.
They grow wheat in Ukraine, not tobacco
However, Big World Tobacco also went the WTO route (John Oliver did a great piece on this), saying Australia’s strict rules affected trade with other countries and violated international trade agreements. For some mystifying reason, Ukraine got involved, even though Ukraine is not a major tobacco-growing nation and does not export any tobacco to Australia. (Like I said, I smell money — LOTS of money — exchanging hands here between tobacco interests and Ukrainian government officials.)
Health campaigners were perplexed by Ukraine’s WTO suit because it is also a party to the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and was one of the countries that backed guidelines on how to implement the treaty, including enforcing plain packaging.
British American Tobacco has previously said it was helping meet Ukraine’s legal costs in the WTO case against Australia. Individual companies cannot pursue litigation via the WTO.
Well, there you go: BAT was paying Ukraine’s legal fees.
The issue isn’t over, but Ukraine was the biggest country involved in fighting the Australian plain packaging rules. Other nations challenging the plain packaging rules are Cuba, Honduras, Indonesia and the Dominican Republic (all tobacco-growing nations).
San Francisco recently banned chewing tobacco at all ballparks, including AT&T Park (to take effect in January 2016). Now, Los Angeles may be next.
A Los Angeles City Councilman has proposed a bill similar to San Francisco’s to ban chewing tobacco at all baseball venues in the city, including Dodger Stadium.
From the Los Angeles Times article:
“It’s about protecting the health of our players and the health of our kids,” councilman Jose Huizar said. “America has a great pastime, but chewing smokeless tobacco shouldn’t be part of that.”
There is also a bill in the California State Legislature to ban chewing tobacco in all California ballparks, including AT&T, Dodger Stadium, the Oakland Coliseum and Petco Park in San Diego.
Chew has already been banned by baseball in all Minor League ballparks, by both players and fans. It is also banned in all NCAA ballparks. The players’ union has opposed a ban on chewing tobacco in the past, but the issue is expected to be negotiated during the next collective bargaining agreement with Major League Baseball.
The reporter, Brendan Kennedy, makes kind of a funny comment that he tried to interview Gibbons about giving up chew, but that “twice he blew me off. He wanted to make sure he had actually kicked it before he went public.”
From Kennedy’s article:
The turning point for Gibbons came last June when Tony Gwynn died of salivary gland cancer. The Hall of Famer was just 54 and had chewed tobacco throughout his 20-year career. Gibbons didn’t know Gwynn personally, but his death hit home. It was the last push he needed to “wise up” and get over the hump.
“It was something I needed to do,” Gibbons said. “It wasn’t something I was proud of, but you get addicted to it, you know? Like all addictions you wish you could stop, but it’s not that easy.”
Gibbons said he first started doing chew in high school. Here’s the interesting part of Kennedy’s pretty extensive article. A lot of smokers talk about how certain repeatable behaviours go into their habit, such as sitting down at a bar. They get so used to smoking at a bar, that years after they’ve quit, years after places have gone smokefree, when they sit at a bar, their first impulse is to reach into their pocket and grab their pack of cigarettes. According to Gibbons, chewing tobacco and walking out onto a baseball field are the same way:
Soon it became as routine as batting practice.
“It was almost like without it you felt naked on the field,” he said.
Gibbons’ wife and three children — aged 22, 20 and 15 — have been on him for years to quit, and his mother would regularly scold him.
“She said, ‘You’re stupid. You get a little enjoyment out of this, but it’ll cost you.’ Because she cleaned people’s teeth and she could see the pre-cancerous lesions and the receding gum lines and the stained teeth.”
But there was always something about stepping onto the fresh grass in spring training every year, Gibbons said. That’s when the temptation was greatest and his willpower faltered. “It’s sad to say, but for a long time in this game it went hand-in-hand with everything else.”
Gibbons’ advice for quitting chew? He doesn’t have any, because he failed several times before he finally successed. Here is his advice:
“Don’t start,” he said. “Then you won’t have to worry about it.”
Gibbons says he doesn’t miss it and he hopes tobacco use continues to decline in baseball.
“You hope for this generation that’s out there now that they’re smarter than we were.”
Public health groups have called for banning chew in Major League Baseball (on the field and dugouts). It is already banned in the Minor Leagues and by the NCAA. However, the players’ union would have to agree to a ban on the field. A ban is expected to be part of the latest collective bargaining negotiations.
“The Merchants of Doubt” is a fascinating book by science historians Naomi Oreskes andErik M. Conway. I had an interest in the book because it explored how industry forces have used scientists to create doubt about their products and/or initiatives … and that all began with the tobacco industry back in the 1950s … hence my interest in the book.
Merchants of Doubt has a pair of chapters regarding the tobacco industry … first about the lies and obfuscation attempted by the industry when information first came out about the dangers of smoking and lung cancer, then 20-30 years later, the industry used many of the same techniques to try and deflect about the dangers to non-smokers from secondhand smoke.
One of the fascinating things about this book is that from the 1950s and the great tobacco coverup all the way to global warming cover-up 40-50 years later, a small cadre of ideologically driven scientists were involved in all these issues. Why scientists would involve themselves in science as disparate as lung health and oncology to global warming? The initial assumption would be that these scientists were all paid off by various industries to deflect and create doubt about their products, but actually money is a less important factor than you would think. Ideology is the biggest factor.
Fred Seitz
The book revolves around three Cold War physicists who got involved with the tobacco industry, the oil industry, the chemical industry, etc., primarily because of their politics. These guys — three guys — did a tremendous amount of damage over the past 50 years by being very, very loud and determined and having a lot of industry backing.
The book begins with a Cold War physicist named Frederick Seitz, who worked on the atomic bomb in the 1940s. I was fascinated by the description of Seitz; a conservative pro-business, anti-regulatory right-winger. He let his ideology drive
Seitz reminded me of a well-known scientist who has been involved in tobacco control, but several years ago, turned against the rest of the scientists in the tobacco control field. I’ll get to him later. “The Merchants of Doubt” doesn’t really get into this guy, because as near as I can tell, he became active about 10 years ago and the “Merchants of Doubt” stops exploring the area of tobacco control about 20 years ago.
Fred Singer
Anyway, the book explores several scientific/ environmental controversies and the roles played by the same very small and very determined group of scientists to deflect and confuse the public. It begins with tobacco and lung cancer, then “Nuclear Winter”, Ronald Reagan’s ridiculous “Star Wars Initiative”, the attacks on Rachel Carson and “Silent Spring”, back to the tobacco industry and the wars of words over secondhand smoke (of which I was involved for several years) and finally into the huge battle over global warming, which of course is still ongoing.
I’ll quote several passages here from the book:
The tobacco road would lead through Star Wars, nuclear winter, acid rain and the ozone hole, all the way to global warming. Frederick Seitz and his colleagues would fight the facts and merchandise doubt all the way.
When it came to the original fight over smoking and lung cancer, one would assume that after the 1964 Surgeon General’s report came out unequivocally showing the link between smoking and lung cancer, but the tobacco industry fought back, with help from Seitz and others, creating its own “science” simply to confuse people … ie, to create doubt in the minds of the consumers. It was a technique refined and perfected decades later by the fossil fuel industry to create doubt about global warming (97 percent to 98 percent of scientists believe global warming is a fact and that it is man-made. However, much of the public has been led to believe there is no consensus about global warming and that there is still a lot of “debate” over the issue.).
Bill Nierenberg
From the Merchants of Doubt:
(In science) a conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers — the community of researchers — reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim. By the 1960s, the scientific community had done that with respect to tobacco. In contract, the tobacco industry was never able to support its claims with evidence, which is why they had to resort to obfuscation. Even after decades of tens of millions of dollars spent, the research they funded failed to supply evidence that smoking was really OK. But then, that was never really the point of it anyway.”
Hill and Knowlton documents showed that the tobacco industry knew the dangers of smoking as early as 1953 and conspired to suppress this knowledge. They conspired to fight the facts and to merchandise doubt.
Doubt mongering also works because we think science is about facts, cold hard definite facts. If someone tells us that things are uncertain, we think that means the science is muddled. This is a mistake. There are always uncertainties in any live science, because science is a process of discovery.
So what prompted these scientists like Seitz and a pair of Cold War physicists — Bill Singer and Bill Nierenberg — to turn their back on the scientific method? They were all highly educated and brilliant in their fields, but in the end, they became nothing more than shills. In fact, Seitz was literally a paid shill for Big Tobacco.
The Merchants of Doubt offers an explanation:
“Bad, bad sicence. You can practically see the fingers wagging. Scientists had been bad boys; it was time for them to behave themselves. The tobacco industry would be the daddy who made sure they did. It wasn’t just money at stake; it was individual liberty. Today, smoking, tomorrow … who knew? By protecting smoking, we protected freedom.”
Later, a small but loud group of scientists was relied upon to fight against the rising tide of evidence that secondhand smoke was dangerous to non-smokers. Singer, a physicist, who had zero training in oncology or pathology or biology, led the charge. Again, it came down to a blind devotion to right-wing, pro-marketplace ideology.
From the book:
“One answer that has already emerged in our discussion of acid rain and ozone depletion: these scientists, and the think thanks that helped to promote their views, were implacably hostile to regulation. Regulation was the road to Socialism — the very thing the cold War was fought to defeat. This hostility to regulation was part of a larger political ideology, stated explicitly in a document developed by a British organization called FOREST — Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking tobacco. And that was ideology of the free market. It was free market fundamentalism.”
“Our society has always understood that freedoms are never absolute. This is what we mean by the rule of law. No one gets to do just whatever he feels like doing, whenever he feels like doing it. I don’t have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater; your right to throw a punch ends at my nose. All freedoms have their limits, and none more obviously than the freedom to kill other people, either directly with guns and knives, or indirectly with dangerous goods. Secondhand smoke was an indirect danger that killed people.”
“Why did this group of Cold Warriors turn against the very science to which they had previously dedicated their lives? Because they felt they were working to ‘secure the blessings of liberty’ If science was being used against those blessings — in ways that challenged the freedom of free enterprise — then they would fight it as they would fight any enemy. For indeed, science was starting to show that certain kinds of liberties are not sustainable — like the liberty to pollute. Science was showing the Isaiah Berlin was right: Liberty for wolves does indeed mean death to lambs.”
Which brings us to the curious case of Michael Siegel.
Merchants of Doubt, part two —
the curious case of Michael Siegel
I’ve never met Michael Siegel, never corresponded with him, never interacted with him in any way, shape or form. So, any psychoanalysis I give about him is strictly based on what I’ve seen from his writing online. While reading “The Merchants of Doubt,” I kept thinking about this tobacco control scientist, really a leader in the movement for several years, who turned against the movement about 10 years ago. The story of Frederick Seitz really reminded me of this guy. I knew about him only because on old discussion forums about secondhand smoke, when the dangers of secondhand smoke were still being hotly debated, this guy’s name kept coming up over and over from Libertarians and smokers fighting smokefree laws, quoting him and his “studies” debunking the dangers of secondhand smoke. It took a couple of minutes of Google searches and I found his name — Michael Siegel. Like the line from “Star Wars”, that was a name I had not heard in a long time. I don’t think I had given him five minutes’ thought in the past five years.
Michael Siegel
I had assumed years ago that Siegel was just some tobacco industry paid shill, but believe it or not, he really isn’t. He was a guy who actually was pretty active in tobacco control for a number of years and is still quoted to this day by some media outlets as a “tobacco control expert.” However, Siegel pretty much turned against the tobacco control movement about 10 years ago when he got kicked out of a listserve of tobacco control experts and scientists for — depending on what side you’re on — being too contrarian or too argumentative.
Siegel then decided to make it his personal crusade to be the thorn in the side of the tobacco control movement. Seven, eight years ago, he was attacking pretty much any and all studies being done on secondhand smoke. Again, the EPA, Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization and vast majority of scientists have reached the unequivocal conclusion about the dangers of secondhand smoke. All I can do is laugh at this guy Siegel (again, he seems to be a pretty smart scientist, he worked at Boston U.), railing that the Centers for Disease Control and Surgeon General’s Office (and the Food and Drug Administration when it comes to e-cigs) have no idea what they are talking about. “The CDC and Surgeon General and FDA are wrong, but I’m right, because I’m smarter than all of them.” Seriously, read the guy’s blog … that’s what he’s saying.
Seriously, if this was the avatar of a member of my fan club, I would seriously be questioning if I was on the right path
Again, I was able to find his blog and found to my delight that he seems to have abandoned his personal crusade against secondhand smoke studies and has now decided to change course and go after any and all studies regarding e-cigarettes. I swear if this guy isn’t receiving a paycheque from Blu E-cigs, then he’s a schmuck, because he oughta be; he’s absolutely doing the bidding of the E-cig industry. His crusade now appears to be to defend the e-cig industry against all these nefarious studies making them look bad. I have to be honest, I just busted up laughing when I saw this.
This is how ridiculous this guy is. One of his posts is about recent studies showing that the use of e-cigs among teens has exploded in the past two years. Meanwhile, the use of cigarettes among teens has collapsed. It’s just plain simple common sense that teens are switching from cigarettes to e-cigs because they’re easier to buy and because they’ve been given the idea by e-cig marketing that e-cigs are cool and more harmless than cigarettes. This is what Michael Siegel writes about this. This is an example of just how far gone this guy really is. He’s so busy nitpicking others purely for the sake of nitpicking, he appears to have long since stopped seeing the forest for the trees:
However, it is not true that the progress we have made in reducing youth smoking is being threatened by youth experimentation with e-cigarettes. The only way that our progress in reducing youth smoking could be threatened by e-cigarette experimentation is if e-cigarettes were a gateway to youth smoking or if e-cigarettes were as hazardous as smoking.
I just want to say to this guy: “Dude, what the fuck? What is wrong with you?” No one is saying e-cigs are as bad as cigarettes. What people are saying is that they are a different nicotine delivery system and that kids are simply transitioning from one nicotine delivery system (cigarettes) to another (e-cigs) and that this is not necessarily a step in the right direction … because it’s STILL NICOTINE … and it’s still incredibly physically addictive. So, yeah, e-cigs are a threat to the progress in reducing youth smoking for that reason alone, douchebag. This guy spends all his energy parsing language from government agencies and it appears to me he has massively lost sight of the big picture … nicotine addiction by its very nature is not a good thing.
I thought it was just me about this guy, but I found two other bloggers who have had more direct interactions with him who reach the same conclusion … that he is one weird guy and one damned difficult guy to figure out.
One is a blog written by a guy who goes by the name “Orac” who starts a blog entry about Michael Siegel by saying, “I don’t know what to think of Michael Siegel.” This blog entry is great and articulates better than I can everything wrong with this guy (I will articulate my own misgivings about Michael Siegel later, but seriously, Orac does it better.). Orac says that while it appears Siegel makes a lot of good arguments in some of his posts about secondhand smoke, what gives him a “bad feeling in the pit of his stomach” is that Siegel relies a lot on the term “junk science,” which is a term actually invented by the tobacco industry and that Siegel on his blog literally has nothing whatsoever positive to say about any study on tobacco, secondhand smoke or e-cigs that he personally wasn’t a part of. I haven’t plowed through eight years of Siegel’s blog, who has the energy, but everything I’ve personally seen is to the effect of, “this person study was bullshit, I’m smarter than this guy…”
Like Orac (not me) says:
Looking through Dr. Siegel’s blog, in fact, I had a hard time finding any articles in which he had anything good to say about any studies of the effects of indoor smoking bans. Recent posts have savaged a studies from Scotland, Indiana, and Ireland. I looked for a single example of Dr. Siegel praising an SHS study, and I was unable to find one. Surely they can’t all be bad, can they? And if they’re all bad, then I have to wonder: Why does Dr. Siegel still believe that SHS is harmful to health if in his opinion the science of recent studies is so bad? A little balance every now and then would be helpful; it’s little wonder that tobacco cranks love to cite him, given that the overall gestalt of his blog, I’m sorry to have to say, is more than a little crank-like, at least to me. True, I could be mistaking passion for crankery, but even so that’s the impression that, try as I might, I can’t entirely shake.
Finally, what makes me uncomfortable about Dr. Siegel and his stance is that he’s inconsistent. For example, appropriately, he likes to rail against “science by press release.” Damn straight. I find such abuse of science as disturbing as he does. Unfortunately, when it serves his purposes, Dr. Siegel doesn’t appear to be above doing something rather similar, as I noted in July. That’s when he championed a “study” by David W. Kuneman and Michael J. McFadden (a study to which he claimed to have contributed by going over the authors’ data analysis) on his blog before it was ever published. McFadden is a die-hard anti-SHS regulation advocate who runs a website called Pennsylvania Smokers’ Action Network, which features a particularly stupid bit of propaganda called Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains, while Kuneman runs a website called The Smokers’ Club. The study, entitled Do Smoking Bans cause a 27 to 40% drop in admissions for myocardial infarction in hospitals? A preliminary study was published not in a peer-reviewed journal, but on Kuneman’s website.
Thank you, Orac. Thank you for convincing me it’s not just ME (and Michael McFadden is a total freaking Libertarian crank). If Siegel were interested in legitimate science, wouldn’t he be dissecting these secondhand smoke and e-cigarette studies and as part of a peer-review process rather than on his blog, rather than associating with idiot losers like Michael McFadden? I’d love to hear from Siegel about that. More on Siegel’s blog in a minute. In the end, Orac says Siegel basically “comes off like a crank.”
I found another pretty hilarious post about Siegel from another blogger named Carl Phillips, who is a researcher in the field of alternatives to tobacco who has actually has dealt with Siegel. He rips into Siegel for attempting to start up a $4.5 million crowdfunding campaign to study e-cigs as a means of smoking cessation. Here are my two favourite passages from Phillips’ rant:
I wrote to Siegel about (speaking just for myself) is that what he was doing also appeared to violate the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of rules of public research ethics. It is extremely dicey to ask a threatened community for research funds. E-cigarette users are terribly worried about the political climate, and thus are likely to respond to any request for funds that comes with a promise of doing something about the regulatory threats to their ability to choose to vape. Thus anyone asking for such funds needs to be very careful to make sure they are not promising too much. … By contrast, Siegel presented only a hand-waving description of what he planned to do. When confronted with concerns with potentially problematic details of the (unspecified) protocol he or his staff always (to my knowledge) responded with some equivalent of “oh, we will take care of that — don’t worry.” This is the behavior of a shady corporate consultant, immediately responding to every question with reassurance in spite of apparently never having thought about it before, not of a careful researcher. I am certainly not calling either Siegel or his staff shady, but when your behavior looks like that of someone who is shady, it should be a red flag.
Siegel is notorious for being part of the cabal that blames evil corporate influences for never-specified nefarious impacts on research and policy. Funny how that does not seem to bother him when he wants to fund his own research with corporate donations.
So, I have one blogger saying he comes off like a crank and another saying he and his staff are behaving in a shady manner. Orac also posted a comment that Siegel seems to enjoy too much playing the role of gadfly. That really resonated with me and then there was this passage in “Merchants of Doubt” referring to scientists such as Seitz and Singer:
“They promoted claims that had already been refuted in the scientific literature, and the media became complicit as they reported these claims as if they were part of an ongoing scientific debate. Often the media did so without informing readers, viewers and listeners that the ‘experts’ being quoted had links to the tobacco industry, were affiliated with ideologically motivated think tanks that received money from the tobacco industry (or in later years the fossil fuel industry), or were simply habitual contrarians, who perhaps enjoyed the attention they got promoting outlier views.
I think that final sentence hits the nail on the head about Michael Siegel and here’s why I think that. Siegel definitely has a very ardent following. I saw it 7 or 8 years ago on old Topix message forums, Libertarians quoting his blog posts left, right and centre. Here’s what really bothers me about Michael Siegel. On his blog, one of his followers, someone who has posted repeatedly on his blog, in fact, has an avatar of Barack Obama with an Adolph Hitler mustache and hairstyle. I know if I considered myself a serious scientists and one of my ardent followers had an avatar mashing Adolph Hitler, arguably the most evil man in history, and Barack Obama, I certainly would be asking myself, “what the hell am I doing here?” I would be asking myself why people like that were a member of my fan club. It appears to me (I’m playing armchair psychiatrist here), that this is someone who enjoys being a “rebel” an “outlaw”, whatever and enjoys having a fan club of like-minded people … Internet cranks and Libertarians. Someone touched upon in “The Merchants of Doubt.”
I got a lot of out “Merchants of Doubt.” One of the things I didn’t expect to get out of it was that maybe I finally understand this secondhand smoke contrarian I remember hearing so much about 8 to 10 years ago.
California is the latest state that is seriously considering raising the smoking age from 18 to 21. The California Senate passed a bill raising the smoking age (pretty easily with a vote of 26-8); now the bill goes to the State Assembly.
The Hawaii Legislature passed a similar bill earlier this year and New York City raised the smoking age to 21. Some other states like Alabama, Utah, Alaska and New Jersey have a smoking age of 19.
This is an issue where I’ve dragged my feet a bit personally getting behind. A whole bunch of tobacco control groups are fully behind raising the smoking age to 21, such as Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the American Cancer Society.
However, where I am reluctant to completely jump onboard is the knowledge that very, very few kids start smoking between 18 and 21. Most kids start smoking when they are 15, 14, 13 or even younger. So, it’s already against the law to sell cigarettes to kids under 18 and yet kids are managing to get their hands quite easily on cigarettes. I question if raising the smoking age to 21 is likewise going to have a constructive and tangible effect.
The Washington Post did a pretty good story on this, suggesting that there is data supporting the argument that raising the legal smoking age does have an effect on teen smoking rates. I’m guessing a reason why — it’s not very hard to 15- and 16-year-old kids to find 18-year-old friends at school or older brothers or sisters to buy their cigarettes for them. Not too many 21-year-olds hang out with 15- or 14-year-old kids, so with a higher legal smoking age, it might be harder for kids to find someone to buy their cigarettes for them. That’s a total guess on my part, but it makes sense to me.
There is also the Libertarian argument, that kids over the age of 18 are old enough to vote and die for our country, but they’re not old enough to buy cigarettes? I actually get that argument and have a hard time refuting it. At the same time, the argument for not allowing 18-21-year-old kids to drink makes sense to me, however, that kids do not have the judgement or experience yet at 18, 19, etc., to know when they should and should not get behind the wheel of a car if they have been drinking.
Nevada isn’t a state where I would have expected this, but the state Legislature of the Silver State just passed a $1 a pack increase in its cigarette tax.
The bill, which as near as I can tell has yet to be signed by the governor, would increase Nevada’s cigarette tax from 80 cents a pack to a more reasonable $1.80 (According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the tax was Governor Brian Sandoval’s idea to begin with, so he is expected to sign it into law.) . 80 cents a pack is pretty low. The average state cigarette tax in the U.S. is around $1.50 a pack and state cigarette taxes range from a ridiculous 17 cents a pack in Missouri to a kinda ridiculous $4.35 a pack in New York.
$1.80 a pack is a good spot for a cigarette tax. Studies have shown that cigarette taxes do provide an incentive for smokers to quit and helps to discourage kids from smoking; in fact, a recent study released a few weeks ago bolsters this argument. According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids: “Studies show that every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes reduces youth smoking by about 6.5 percent and overall cigarette consumption by about 4 percent.”
However, I think if you make the tax too high, like New York’s, I think you start encouraging a lot of people to buy black market cigarettes or to go to the trouble of driving out to an Indian reservation to buy their cigs. New York not coincidentally has a huge issue with black market cigarettes and cigarette smuggling, especially when nearby Virginia has a cigarette tax of only 30 cents a pack. Honestly, I could see smokers making a trip from New York to Virginia two or three times a year to stock up on cigarettes. You buy 10 cartons in Virginia, you save $700 over about three months (if you’re smoking roughly one pack a day) … and it’s only a 220-mile drive.
Anyway, I digress … I like doing math. The real solution to those problems is for states to have more uniform cigarette taxes, which I don’t see happening. Mostly of the really low cigaratte taxes are in the Deep South, which again not coincidentally have some the highest smoking rates in the country. Surprisingly, one of the lowest states in the country is California at 87 cents a pack. California has tried to raise its cigarette tax through voter initiatives, but those initiatives have failed. The California Assembly just needs to suck it up and pass a bill and quit screwing around with passing the buck to voter initiatives.
A coalition of bars made a number of arguments on the technicalities of the law, mostly claiming that the law was “too vague” (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that argument before, I’m not sure how a smoking ban could possibly be “vague.” The whole concept of a smoking ban is pretty straightforward), but the judge ruled that their arguments had no merit.
Smoking bans almost always survive legal challenges — I’d say 95 percent to 99 percent of the time. No state smoking ban has ever been overturned, though multiple lawsuits were filed several years ago when a flurry of states passed smoking bans. Only in a handful of small towns and cities (Jackson, Wyo., comes to mind) have lawsuits been successful in overturning smoking bans. So, this struck me as being kind of a frivolous lawsuit.
I would suggest to these bar owners to give the ban a damn chance, it only went into effect April 22, about six weeks ago, before freaking out about it. Smoking bans in most other localities have had little or no effect on the economy. I would argue people are still going to vacation in New Orleans, especially since there’s varying level of smoking bans in about 31 states and most major cities in the country, so they’re used to it. Geez. I predict a year or two from now, most people will be used to it, the economy of New Orleans will be humming along just fine and some people will still be grumbling about it and claiming its cost them business (but they will have no proof of this).
