This is a tragic story. A young tourist in Peru was participating in an ayahuasca ceremony. As part of that ceremony, she drank nicotine tea to purge her body beforehand. She then died of nicotine poisoning.
This demonstrates a little-known fact about nicotine: Not only is it incredibly addictive, arguably the most addictive substance on the planet, it’s also incredibly poisonous, especially in larger doses than a person gets from a cigarette. I never even heard of nicotine tea before. Obviously, this story makes it’s clear that it’s something to be handled very carefully.
What’s brought how dangerous nicotine really is to light is e-cigarettes. E-cigarettes require these little vials of liquid nicotine. Thousands of people have been poisoned by nicotine the past few years because of these vials. Some people have been poisoned just by spilling a vial onto their skin.
In 2011, there were 271 cases of nicotine poisoning reported in the U.S. By 2014, that number had jumped to 3,957. More than half of these poisonings involved children under the age of 6. That’s a 14-fold increase in just three years. Thanks, e-cigs.
You mean they weren’t already? Seriously? Isn’t preventing disease a lot cheaper and more efficient than treating it?
Anyway, Medicare today announced that it will begin covering lung cancer screening tests. Catching lung cancer early — <i>very</i> early — has long been known as the best way to combat it.
Medicare will pay for annual lung cancer screenings for people aged 55-77 who are current smokers or quit within the past 15 years (Me, the flaming Socialist, says free lung cancer screenings for everyone over 55, since 15 percent of the people who get lung cancer never once smoked a cigarette.)
From the NBC article:
“It will save tens of thousands of lives,” says Laurie Fenton Ambrose, president and CEO of the Lung Cancer Alliance.
“We think it’s a transformative moment for our community.”
The screenings cost $250 to $300 per person and would likely save 20 percent of the people who get lung cancer. Before you think that’s a trivial amount, remember 158,000 people a year get lung cancer in the U.S. — that translates into 31,500 lives a year saved. That’s a city the size of Monterey, Calif., saved each year.
These screenings will cost Medicare $9 billion a year, or $3 a month per each Medicare beneficiary.
The article acknowledges that nonsmokers are left out of the Medicare coverage, but that efforts are ongoing to cover everyone with occupational or genetic risks.
This study surprised me a bit, only because I bet it’s been two or three years since I’ve last had to breath someone else’s cigarette smoke.
The Centers for Disease Research released a report this week that one in four nonsmokers continues to be exposed to secondhand cigarette smoke.
Good news, bad news: While that number is about half the percentage is 1999, 7 out of 10 African-American children are “regularly exposed” to smokers’ secondhand smoke. And two out of five children under the age of 11 continue to be exposed to adults’ cigarette smoke.
From the NBC News articles (NBC is great for stories on tobacco control, BTW):
“Although we’ve made significant progress in reducing smoking rates … some populations are subjected to the deadly impact of tobacco more than others,” said Chris Hansen, president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “… Secondhand smoke disproportionately affects African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, who are more likely to work in jobs that have the least amount of protection from smoking — such as service, hospitality and manufacturing industries.”
A bill has been introduced into the California State Assembly to raise the smoking age from 18 to 21. The State of Washington is considering similar legislation.
Some states have a smoking age of 19 (Utah, Alaska, New Jersey and Alabama), but no one has raised it to 21 yet (I need to correct this on an earlier post). Some cities and counties have raised the age to 21, including New York City and the Island of Hawaii.
I’m on record as not being a huge fan of the idea. It just comes down to two issues for me:
1) 18-year-olds can vote, die for their country and are arrested as adults if they break the law. About the only thing they cannot do is buy alcohol, and there’s a reason — public safety. It’s hard enough to convinced some 25- and 30-year-olds that they’ve had too much to drink as they get behind the wheel of a car. It’s that much harder to convinced 18- and 19-year-olds who don’t have the experience with alcohol yet that they shouldn’t be driving.
2) The second reason is I’m all for laws and regulations that I think are going to combat tobacco. I’m all for smoking bans and raising cigarette taxes (within reason) and getting smoking out of PG movies because I think these approaches have worked and continue to work to cut down smoking. I question if raising the smoking age from 18-21 is effective in keeping young people from getting started with tobacco. Most kids start smoking at 14, 15 or 16, not after the age of 18. By then, most smokers have been smoking for a few years. If 15- and 15-year-olds can already easily get their hands on cigarettes, how hard will it be for 19- and 20-year-olds?
Anyway, while I might have some misgivings about it, there seems to be growing momentum for the idea. I’m not necessarily opposed to it, I just wonder how effective it would be to raise the smoking age, and I think I’d prefer resources going toward educating kids younger than 18 about why smoking is so bad than enforcing laws prohibiting legal adults from smoking.
Ladies — I’m a Libertarian … I’m smarter than you. Now make me a sandwich!
I can’t believe in this day and age, people are still stupid enough to try to argue this point, but then again, John Stossel is an avowed Libertarian and he does work for Fox News, so wonders never cease.
A decade ago, I butted heads on the old Topix forums with people who claimed secondhand smoke was harmless and the anti-tobacco Nazis were exaggerating the dangers from it. Dave Hitt and the Smoker’s Club used to be really hung up on the secondhand smoke is harmless argument (haven’t checked out either Website in several years, they probably still do).
Remember, decades ago, the tobacco industry argued, with some success that there was no proof that cigarettes caused lung cancer. My own parents argued that lung cancer was caused by air pollution; my mom continued to argue this even after her four-pack-a-day husband died of lung cancer at 49. They totally bought into the industry propaganda.
But, the narrative completely changed with the U.S. Surgeon General’s report on secondhand smoke that came out in 2006 detailed unequivocally, with considerable backing from the science community, that yes, secondhand smoke is bad for you and that yes, people have actually gotten sick and died from longterm exposure to it. This was followed up with a second U.S. Surgeon General’s report in 2014 with even further details, again with considerable backing from the science community, that secondhand smoke is bad for you and that people have died from breathing it constantly.
In addition, the World Health Association, the American Cancer Society, the International Center for Research on Cancer and National Academy of Sciences all also agree — secondhand smoke kills.
OK, that big run-up brings me to Libertarian stooge idiot John Stossel, who recently claimed, and I quote: “There is no good data showing secondhand smoke kills people.”
You mean there are still clowns trying to claim this? The Tampa Bay Times Pundit Watch, in doing a study on Fox News lies, found that 61 percent of the time, Fox News employees (not guests, employees) are making false statements or outright lying. Stossel’s whopper about secondhand smoke made the list as plain old “false.”
Good, thanks guys for catching it and calling out Stossel.
The Pundit Watch story does a pretty good job of explaining how the data is determined to calculate deaths from secondhand smoke. It’s just idiotic to claim there is no “good data,” but then again, science is hard for people whose worldview revolves around the fairy tales of Ayn Rand.
From the Pundit Watch story:
Scientists don’t keep a count of deaths by secondhand smoke as recorded in death certificates. (Death certificates don’t list “secondhand smoke” as a cause of death.) Instead, they rely on statistical methods used by epidemiologists, who are experts in disease patterns within populations. To figure out lung cancer deaths from secondhand smoke, for instance, the individual risk of lung cancer is analyzed next to the proportion of people exposed to secondhand smoke.
It’s a complicated statistical analysis, one with which Stossel obviously finds fault. But it’s not unusual. The same method is used to attribute the number of deaths from obesity through diabetes, for example, Samet said.
“This is the basic way to use to understand how the disease is exposed to this risk,” Samet said. “We understand that there are uncertainties that go with this, but this is a very basic tool. … The approach here is embedded in science and policy and understanding how much a disease is caused by something.”
Now, part of me doesn’t care what idiotic things global-warming denialist Stossel says (Offhand — Earth to John Stossel, the porn stache hasn’t been a “look” since 1978). One thing I learned about Libertarians, don’t waste your time arguing with them. The U.S. Surgeon General, the World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society, the Academy of Sciences can all agree on a point … “Nope, I’m a Libertarian, I’m smarter than thou. You’re all wrong.” Never met a Libertarian yet who wasn’t convinced he was right about everything and had all the answers.
I mean there’s a reason that Stossel is on Fox, where once-legitimate journalists go to watch their integrity and careers wither and die (Brit Hume, Geraldo Rivera — yeah, Geraldo was considered a legitimate journalist at one time). I mean the guy has claimed that the U.S. government has helped Native Americans more than anyone, and he’s been a sexist, misogynist male chauvinist pig on not one, not two, but three separate occasions. So, I can’t take his ignorant crap about secondhand smoke terribly seriously based on his track record.
What bothers me is people who watch Fox believe whatever swill Fox pundits put out there. There’s a reason why they’re watching Fox in the first place. They only want to hear things that fit their worldview, which is immigrants are taking over, blacks are all thugs, Obama is a communist Muslim tyrant and that women are begging to be raped. So, when Libertarian moron John Stossel makes up crap on Fox and Friends, Fox viewers buy it hook, line and sinker — like my parents bought the propaganda by the tobacco industry 40 years ago hook, line and sinker.
This was entirely predictable. A Florida jury, in one of the thousands of Engle progeny cases, recently awarded a punitive judgement against RJ Reynolds for $23 billion because a widow’s husband died from smoking cigarettes.
I hate RJ Reynolds as much as the next guy, but I knew that no way would this judgement stand up to appeal. It was much too excessive. Sure enough, on appeal, a judge lowered the judgement to less than 1 percent of the original figure.
From the story:
“That award is admittedly and clearly constitutionally excessive,” said Circuit Court Judge Terry Terrell said. He said awarding an equal amount in compensatory and punitive damages “is reasonable and just.”
It’s a fair judgement, the widow has also received compensatory damages of $16.9 million. Terrell gave her the same amount in punitive damages (Frankly, I would’ve liked to have seen more than $16.9 million, but $23 billion was clearly ridiculous. Generally, punitive damages cannot be more than 10 times compensatory damages, which is why this was kind of a stupid decision by the jury; it could have resulted in the entire case being thrown out.)
Reynolds, cuddly teddy bear that it is, requested to have the judgement dismissed completely, but the judge rejected the company’s request. Of couse, RJ Reynolds is appealing the circuit judge’s opinion.
This part of the story is interesting, something I’ve been looking for. RJ Reynolds has already paid out $114 million in Engle case settlements the past few years, with another $217 million pending various appeals. That’s just RJ Reynolds, not Philip Morris or Lorillard or British American Tobacco. In all, 85 Engle cases have been decided in favour of the plaintiff and 40 in favour of Big Tobacco. You wonder at what point, the industry just says, “screw it,” and reaches a settlement with the several thousand Engle plaintiffs. Apparently, it is still worth the industry’s while financially to keep fighting these cases, but they are adding up.
This is yet another in a long line (literally thousands) of Engle Case lawsuits in Florida. The Engle case was a Supreme Court decision that overturned a $145 billion class-action judgement against Big Tobacco, while at the same time allowing individual lawsuits against various tobacco companies to be filed. This opened up a floodgate of lawsuits and jury awards in the hundreds of millions (perhaps even billions by now, I don’t know if anyone is keeping track.)
According to Wikipedia, the tobacco industry has lost 77 of the 116 Engle cases that have gone to trial so far.
This case is in Jacksonville and the plaintiff is a 64-year-old woman’s whose legs were amputated due to vascular disease caused by 40-plus years of smoking. The jury found the plaintiff, Donna Brown, 45 percent to blame and Philip Morris 55 percent to blame for lying about and covering up the dangers of smoking and awarded Brown $9 million in punitive damages and $8.3 million in compensatory damages.
From the article:
“The jury recognized that every person has a right not to be hurt by the careless, intentional misconduct of another, and Donna was hurt very badly by Philip Morris’ reckless and intentional misconduct,” attorney Nathan Finch said Friday.
Brown was a Marlboro smoker, but she also occasionally smoked Winstons, made by RJ Reynolds, which apparently reached a settlement with her.
The woman tried to quit several times, using Chantix, nicotine patches, nicotine gum, even a hypnotist, but nothing worked. She was not able to quit until she finally had a stroke in 2014 (Sounds like my mom, who kept smoking through cancer, heart attacks, chronic bronchities, etc., and only quit when she had a severe COPD episode.).
According to a survey of 9,000 people from Clear Way Minnesota and Minnesota Department of Health, the statewide smoking rate has dropped to 14.4 percent, the lowest ever recorded and down from 16.1 percent in 2010. That number is also down a whopping 35 percent from the 1999 smoking rate of 22.1 percent.
When asked what factor played an important role in helping people quit, the No. 1 reason was the increased cost of cigarettes. Minnesota’s state cigarette tax was raised $1.60 in 2013 and is one of the highest in the country at $2.83 a pack (only New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Washington are higher). 63 percent of the survey respondents said the new price of cigarettes helped encourage them to quit smoking.
The survey also found that teens and young adults (18-24), the age group with the highest smoking rate normally, no longer as the highest smoking rate in Minnesota (likely because of e-cigs).
Interesting info in the survey about e-cigarettes. The survey found that 66 percent of people reporting using e-cigs were also smoking cigarettes (telling me they were using e-cigs to get around smoking bans in workplaces, bars, etc.). 22.5 percent were former smokers while 11 percent were people (ie, kids) who had never smoked a cigarette. So, at least according to this one survey, fewer than one-fourth of the people using e-cigs used them as a smoking cessation tool, while over 10 percent were likely kids who had never smoked a cigarette in their lives. To me, that does not bolster the case for e-cigs well.
This story is a bit frustrating and contradictory.
It states, and was widely reprinted in a number of pro-marijuana Websites, that a study from the Annals of the American Thoracic Society says that long-term marijuana smoking has no adverse effect on lung health. (However, this is where these stories drive me crazy — what the study actually said is that long-term marijuana smoking has no adverse effect on lung function. Important distinction.)
What these means is that even after 20 years, it appears for most pot smokers, the lungs still operate at the same capacity, etc., as before the smoker started using pot. That’s drastically different from cigarettes, which seriously impair lung function after a few years (Basically, smokers finding themselves easily out of breath.)
This article, which was written by someone from NORML, contradicts itself slightly by stating that long-term pot smokers “self-report” increased symptoms of bronchitis … and this is the contradiction. Bronchitis, especially chronic bronchitis, leads to more serious COPD … so taking this statement at face value, chronic pot smoking does in fact have a negative effect on lung health.
This article on the same study from ThinkProgress is a little more balanced, I think. It acknowledges that pot smokers seem to have increased bronchitis symptoms, but it blames the rolling paper for that.
There’s studies out there finding zero link between pot smoking and COPD and pot smoking and lung cancer. I don’t have a problem believing the studies on lung cancer, but I personally believe, despite the fact I can’t cite studies to back this up, that long-term chronic pot smoking is simply not good for your lungs. It might take a lot of pot for a long time to seriously damage your lungs — a lot — but it’s still smoke and constant smoke in your lungs are not going to do them any favours. Again, this is just another in a long series of exasperating articles on pot smoking and lung health.
All that being said, I absolutely believe pot should be legal. There’s no logical reason why it is illegal while tobacco and alcohol and legal. And whatever damage pot does to people physically pales by comparison to the damage that pot laws do to people’s lives.
This is an issue where I tend to split off from a lot of anti-tobacco advocates.
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced a bill last week to raise the smoking age in Washington from 18 to 21. It’s an effort I can’t totally get behind for several reasons.
First of all, when do most kids start smoking? Virtually no kids actually start smoking when they turn 18. Most kids start smoking at 14 or 15 or even younger. So, I have to question if such a law would get much accomplished in stopping kids from smoking. Most kids have already been smoking for at least three or four years by the time they turn 18. Putting off the legal age for buying cigarettes another three years isn’t going to change that.
Secondly, I have a Libertarian enough streak that I buy the argument that at 18 kids can vote, join the military and go to prison for committing a crime. They can do anything except buy alcohol or weed — and I have a Socialist enough streak to see the logic behind laws trying to keep alcohol away from 18- and 19-year-olds, because 18-year-olds aren’t smart enough yet to know when they’ve had too much to drive, etc. (Like everyone over 21 is, but you see my point.).
Anyway, I’m all for keeping kids from cigarettes, but the best tactic is education, and spending resources on educating kids on why tobacco is bad, rather than spending resources trying to enforce a new law. I’m for common-sense solutions that I think will actually accomplish something, and I don’t see the common sense in raising the smoking age to 21.
