Monthly Archives: January 2012

Anti-tobacco campaign, Smoking bans, Workplace smoking

Workplaces banning smokers — period. Is that cool?

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Here is something I’ve written about before, employers not only banning people from smoking on the premises, but refusing to hire smokers and firing people for being smokers.

This USA Today article looks at this. There are a growing number of companies that are doing this, even including nicotine in the list of things they drug test for. If employees test positive for nicotine, boom, they’re out the door.

Hospitals and health organizations have led the way on this. The reasoning is two-fold:

  • A) Smokers raise the health insurance premiums of everyone — smokers and nonsmokers alike. (And this is true. It’s been well-documented.)
  • B) Smokers also have a higher level of absenteeism and illness than nonsmokers and thus their productivity is affected (Also well-documented).

That being said, this still smells very wrong to me. I prefer the carrot approach to cutting down smoking, not the stick. This is kind of where I split from the rest of the anti-tobacco lobby.

I’m perfectly OK with employers charging higher insurance premiums to smokers. I think that’s completely fair because smokers do cost everyone money and should pay their share. At the same time, I’m also OK for higher premiums for being who are obese, because obesity causes nearly as many health problems as smoking (and may cause more premature deaths than smoking within the next 10 to 15 years.). But, refusing to hire people and firing people? Smells wrong.

What I personally would VASTLY prefer is if companies helped pay for smoking cessation programs for their employees, with the “carrot” being lower premiums if they are successful in quitting. If smokers don’t want to go through the program and are OK paying higher premiums, that’s their prerogative.

As far as I know, no smokers has ever won an anti-discrimination suit against a company for refusing to hire smokers or firing someone. I’ve scoured the Internet. People have filed suit, but I haven’t found a case in which a smoker has won or got a policy overturned. For the moment, it appears in certain states, companies have the right to do this. Apparently under federal law, smokers are not considered a “class” of person, so this is a legal practice under federal law.

People have sued and have won cases for being fired for being overweight. What’s the difference? No employer in his right mind is going to fire someone for being fat and then telling them that to their faces (places like Hooters can get away with this somehow). But, you can fire a smoker because they smoke on their own time?

A total of 29 states have passed laws protecting smokers’ rights, but in 21 states, companies can still fire and refuse to hire smokers. I really think this goes too far. I’m not comfortable with it.

(As an aside, I noticed one charity quoted — the American Lung Association — as not hiring smoking. Hah, OK, I can see that!)

 

phillip Morris, right-wing douchebags, RJ Reynolds, tobacco litigation, warning labels

Obama administration appeals court injunction on graphic cigarette warnings

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Good!

The Obama administration and the Food and Drug Administration appealed an exasperating federal court ruling on the legality of graphic warning labels on cigarette packs.

cigarette-warning-labels.jpg&q=80&MaxW=320

The judge ruled that the warnings violated Big Tobacco’s First Amendment rights by (and I’m simplifying here) forcing them to publish warning labels to provoke an emotional reaction so people won’t buy their product. (It sounds wacky, but there is some legal precedent there — as part of the First Amendment, there are limits to how much you can make people say things they don’t want to say.).

What I don’t totally get is the logic that text warnings on cigarette packs DON’T violate the First Amendment, but graphic warnings DO.

So, while graphic warnings are being put in place around the world, in America they are on hold.

Anyway, this is going to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and will very likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. With the business-friendly “corporate personhood” court currently in power, I would bet money Big Tobacco wins. We need a couple of those old right-wingers on the court to retire, dammit! (Though they never will as long as Obama is president).

COPD, emphysema, Lung disease, vaclav havel

Vaclav Havel, victim of smoking and lung disease

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havel

This is a catching up story. I actually have been meaning to post something about this for a couple of weeks.

Last month, Vaclav Havel, the first Democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia (and the Czech Republic, for that matter) and the father of the 1989 Velvet Revolution that freed Czechosolovakia from Communism.

Overlooked somewhat in the news Victor Havel’s death a few weeks ago is that he died from smoking. Havel, who led the Velvet Revolution that freed Czechoslovakia from Communism, will go down in the history as one of the great champions of Democracy in Europe. I can’t help but notice the irony that this guy had the cajones to stare down the fucking Soviet Union, but wasn’t able to break his addiction to nicotine. He had two surgeries to remove tumours from his lungs a few years ago. Ultimately, he died of COPD.

Havel was 75 and had suffered for years from chronic respiratory ailments. He was a notorious chain smoker, common in Eastern Europe still to this day.

Havel spent years in prison and was the first president of Czechoslovakia and oversaw the peaceful split between the Czech Republican and Slovakia. One of the great leaders of the late 20th Century, taken too young by lung disease and tobacco. He was a great man.

American Cancer Society, Cancer, Lung cancer, Lung disease, smoking, Tobacco, Uncategorized

New study: Cancer death rates in America dropping dramatically!

Great, great news.

down_chart

According to a new study released by the American Cancer Society, cancer death rates have dropped drastically over the past 20 years — 23 percent for men, and 15 percent for women.

Two big reasons — better screening and treatment, and a third reason obviously — a LOT fewer people smoking (Down from 50 to 60 percent in the 1960s to 20 percent today).

Get this, 40 percent of the overall decline in cancer deaths among men (and 34 percent among women) is caused specifically by the decline just in lung cancer deaths (Lung cancer is by far the biggest cancer killer — the next four cancer killers — colon, prostate, pancreas and breast cancer, kill fewer people per year than lung cancer alone.)

Still, even in 2012, about one-third of the cancer deaths in America will be caused due to smoking (and 160,000 of the 577,000 estimated cancer deaths in 2012 will be lung cancer, about 28 percent), according to the ACS. Another third will be caused by obesity and poor nutrition.

From the report. Estimated cancer deaths in 2012. I put this here just to illustrate the damage done by tobacco.

Total cancer deaths 2012 estimated: 577,000

1) Lung cancer 160,000 — 28 percent of all cancer deaths (85 percent smokers or former smokers)

2) Colon 51,000

3) Breast 39,000 (suggestions tobacco increases risk)

4) Pancreas 37,000 (Definite links to tobacco, 50 percent smokers or former smokers)

5) Prostate 28,000

6) Leukemia 23,500 (suggestions of tobacco increasing risk of certain kinds of leukemia)

7) Liver 20,500

8) Non-Hodgkin lymphoma 19,000

9) Bladder 15,000 (Definite links to tobacco, 50 percent smokers or former smokers)

10) Esophagus 15,000 (strong links to tobacco)

Anti-tobacco campaign, Big Tobacco, Tobacco

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition

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proctor_news

I can’t wait to get my hands on a book coming out in February, written by a Stanford professor about the evils of the tobacco industry, called: “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition”

Ouch, but $44.95? I think I’ll wait to see if I can get a used copy.

In this book, Robert Proctor (I’ve seen his name around in a few articles I’ve read), takes on the tobacco industry and argues the industry is not dying, but people still are.  Obviously, with the term “Holocaust” in the title, this book is no shrinking violet. I personally have called tobacco a “slow motion Holocaust,” having watched what it did to people in my mom and dad’s generation.

golden holocaust

I’m quoting liberally from a Stanford University article, which you can read in full here:

One author calls it “a remarkable compendium of evil” while another reviewer says “unpacks the sad history of an industrial fraud. [Proctor’s] tightly reasoned exploration touches on all topics on which the tobacco makers lied repeatedly to Congress and the public.”

Sounds like the kind of thing that will get my rage on. It sounds like it pulls no punches.

Big Tobacco tried to stop the publication of the book, actually subpoenaing Proctor’s emails and his unfinished manuscript and costing him $50,000 in legal fees.

Two other powerful quotes from the book.

For the industry, though, the cigarette represents the perfect business model. “It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive,” says investment guru Warren Buffett.

Proctor notes that “by artfully crafting its physical character and chemistry, industry scientists have managed to create an optimally addictive drug delivery device, one that virtually sells itself.”

Proctor explores several tobacco myths in the book. Among them:

Myth #1. Nobody smokes anymore. If you read the media, smoking sounds like a dying habit in California. That’s far from true, said Proctor. Californians still smoke about 28 billion cigarettes per year, a per capita rate only slightly below the global average.

So why do we have this illusion? “We don’t count the people who don’t count. It’s not the educated or the rich who smoke anymore, it’s the poor,” said Proctor.

Myth #2. The tobacco industry has turned over a new leaf. “The fact is that the industry has never admitted they’ve lied to the public or marketed to children or manipulated the potency of their project to create and sustain addiction,” Proctor said. “A U.S. Federal Court in 2006 found the American companies in violation of RICO racketeering laws, and nothing has changed since then. And the same techniques used in the past in the U.S. are now being pushed onto vulnerable populations abroad.”

Myth #3. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. Proctor pointed out that most people begin smoking at the age of 12 or 13, or even younger in some parts of the world. “Do they know everything?” Proctor asked rhetorically. “And how many people know that cigarettes contain radioactive isotopes, or cyanide, or free-basing agents like ammonia, added to juice up the potency of nicotine?”

Myth #4. Smokers like smoking, and so should be free to do it. And the industry has a right to manufacture cigarettes, even if defective. Proctor called this “the libertarian argument.”

“It is wrong to think about tobacco as a struggle between liberty and longevity; that tips the scales in favor of the industry. People will always choose liberty, as in ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ What people don’t realize is that most smokers dislike the fact they smoke, and wish they could quit. Cigarettes are actually destroyers of freedom.”

There are tobacco industry documents, he noted, in which smoking is compared not to drinking but rather to being an alcoholic.

Myth #5. The tobacco industry is here to stay. Global tobacco use would be declining were it not for China, where 40 percent of the world’s cigarettes are made and smoked. Proctor has a bet with a colleague, though, that China will be among the first to bar the sale of cigarettes, once their financial costs are recognized.

Anyway, sounds like a heavy read and a real unapologetic voice of anti-tobacco advocacy. Can’t wait.

Amazon link to the book.