centers for disease control, Lung cancer, Lung disease, smoking among women

Lung cancer rates dropping for men … and finally for women, too

October 11, 2011 Pepe Lepew 2 Comments

Great news from the Centers for Disease Control.

Compiling data from 2008 (it takes a few years to put this together), in a trend that began in the 1990s, the lung cancer rate for men in the United States continued to drop.

Better news, however, is the lung cancer rate for women dropped for the second straight year. Lung cancer rates for women have been highly stubborn in refusing to drop, even though the smoking rate among women has dropped over the past 30 years. The fact that more non-smoking women get lung cancer than non-smoking men might also have some effect on the lung cancer rate for women being so stubborn.

In 1999, the lung cancer rate for men was about 93 cases per 100,000 population. In 2008, that dropped all the way down to about 79 cases per 100,000.

In 1999, the lung cancer rate for women was about 54 cases per 100,000. That increased to about 57 cases per 100,000 by 2006, but then has dropped back down to about 53 cases per 100,000 in 2008. Finally, that lower smoking rate for women is starting to pay dividends (Remember, there is an infamous “30-year lag” between smoking rate and lung cancer diagnoses. Lung cancer really didn’t become an epidemic in America until the 1930s, after cigarettes became popular in the early 1900s.)

Again, this is outstanding news. Lung cancer is the No. 1 cancer killer in America (about 160,000 people a year), and more than any other cancer, it is almost directly the result of lifestyle choices. About 85 percent of the people who get lung cancer are either smokers or former smokers (about 90 percent of men and 80 percent of women).

The CDC study broke down the lung cancer rates by region:

In the South, among men, the lung cancer rate dropped from about 106 cases per 100,000 population in 1999 to about 88 cases per 100,000 in 2008 (Another way of looking at this is one male out of 940 in the South had lung cancer in 1999; back in the late 90s, the smoking rate among men in the South was still above 40 percent.).

In the South, among women, the lung cancer rate dropped from about 61 cases per 100,000 in 2005 to about 60 cases per 100,000 in 2008. Not much of a drop, but it might be the beginning of a long-term trend.

In the Northeast, among men, the lung cancer rate dropped from about 91 cases per 100,000 in 1999 to about 81 cases per 100,000 in 2008. Among women, the lung cancer rate unfortunately rose from about 55 cases per 100,000 in 1999 to about 59 cases per 100,000 per 2008. This is the one bit of bad news in the study.

In the Midwest, among men, the lung cancer rate dropped from about 97 cases per 100,000 in 1999 to 86 cases per 100,000 in 2008. In the Midwest, among women, the lung cancer rate has dropped from about 59 cases per 100,000 in 2006 to 57 cases per 100,000 in 2008.

In the West, there has been the most dramatic drop in lung cancer rates. The West also has the lowest smoking rates of any region in the country. Hawaii, California, Utah and Idaho are among the four lowest smoking rate states in the country.

In the West, the lung cancer rate for men dropped from about 77 cases per 100,000 in 1999 to about 60 cases per 100,000 in 2008, a decrease of 22 percent. In fact, the lung cancer rate for men in the West was roughly the same as women in the South in 2008.

In the West, among women, the lung cancer rate dropped from 50 cases per 100,000 in 2006 to about 45 cases per 100,000 in 2008. It appears the West is a driving force for that lung cancer rate finally beginning to drop among women nationwide.

Haruko sportswriter

Moneyball LIVES

October 7, 2011 Haruko Haruhara 3 Comments

Oh, how bizarre, we just saw this movie two days ago, about a poor baseball team attempting to compete against rich teams (in a league with no salary cap … helloooo … everyone else has one.).

Get this, the Red Sox didn’t even make the playoffs, and the Phillies and the Yankees don’t get out of the first round of the postseason — in short, they don’t get the slightest SNIFF of the World Series. These are the three fattest teams in Major League Baseball for payroll.

Combined, the Red Sox, Yankees and Phillies had a payroll of $535 MILLION — or $178.3 million each.

Meanwhile, the teams that are still alive? The Brewers, Cardinals, Tigers and Rangers have a combined payroll of $387 million — or $96.75 million each, barely more than one-half of the three fattest teams.

Interestingly, here are other teams that have bigger payrolls than these four teams — the Cubs, Mets, Angels, Twins, Giants and White Sox, six teams that didn’t even make the postseason. In the case of the Cubs, Twins, Mets and White Sox, they didn’t even come close. The Tigers have the highest payroll remaining — 10th in Major League Baseball. The Brewers are 17th.

What does this mean? Yeah, baseball needs a salary cap and the rich teams still have unfair advantages, but you still have to build a smart team to win. The Red Sox and Yankees completely ignored their flawed pitching staffs while spending like drunken sailors, while the Phillies ignored their flawed offence while spending like a drunken sailor on pitching.

Sometimes, the world IS fair. A little.

Uncategorized

“Moneyball” spits up — a LOT

October 7, 2011 Pepe Lepew 6 Comments

There was actually some controversy over “Moneyball,” a pretty tame PG-13 flick about the book about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. There is one swear word, no violence and no sex, but some people were tweaked that almost constantly throughout the movie, Brad Pitt is seen chewing tobacco.

As you know, a lot of us fought long and hard to get smoking scenes out of PG and PG-13 movies. Hollywood has long had a fascination with smoking that became corrupt, archaic and then for the past few years mystifying.

Smoking scenes have dropped dramatically in PG-13 movies over the last two years. The issue to me are movies that make smoking and the stars who smoke appear glamourous. You and I know that’s BS, but kids 8-13 years old don’t. They see people onscreen looking glamourous with a cigarette in their hands and studies have shown this is a factor for encouraging kids to start smoking.

I didn’t really have a problem with the chewing scenes in Moneyball for two reasons. One, Billy Beane in real life was a big chewer (I have no idea if he still chews today.). The book Moneyball talked about his constant chew. So, it was included for authenticity. Secondly, it was fucking GROSS in the movie.

At no point do you actually see the spit, but Brad Pitt carried a cup with him at all times through the movie and every five minutes, you saw him spit his chew into the Dixie cup. I actually heard people in the theatre say, “Ewwww,” whenever he did this. Jonah Hill, playing his assistant, actually flinched a couple of times when he did it. It certainly didn’t make chew look glamourous. It made it look disgusting. I mean, having to carry a Dixie cup with you at all times where ever you go? Nasty.

Overall, Billy Beane came off like a slob in the movie. He also had a big pile of sunflower seeds on his desk at one point (A really disgusting habit I once had personally), and was constantly eating Twinkies and doughnuts and always had food stains on his clothing. The chew was part of his slovenly character. Not the usual Brad Pitt glamour role.

Brad Pitt has been guilty of glamourizing smoking in some of his early movies, such as Thelma and Louise, but he claims now that he has quit smoking for his kids.

Interestingly, I found two articles that take two completely opposite tacks on the spitting in Moneyball. Bloomberg Businessweek thinks it could actually help chewing tobacco sales because Brad Pitt is a glamourous movie star . I don’t see it, frankly. Like I said, most of the people in the theatre seemed to find it disgusting.

Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which I would expect to rail about the PG-13 rating, instead took a more reasonable angle. This pretty militant group points out that the movie highlights the problems of chewing tobacco in baseball, which is absolutely true. For some mystifying reason, chew is rampant in baseball. Billy Beane was a Major League player and kept up his gross habit as general manager of the A’s. Tobacco-Free Kids used the movie as an opportunity to advertise their “Knock Tobacco out of the Park” campaign, an effort to ban chewing tobacco at the Major League level (don’t laugh, it’s been banned in the minor leagues for several years now.).

Anyway, it was a very good movie, going to great lengths to humanize Billy Beane. I ended up understanding his reasons for turning down a glamour job with the Red Sox (stuff involving Beane’s daughter that was not in the book.).

My favourite part of the film was when the Red Sox offered him a huge contract and John Henry essentially told him right to his face, “we’re going to steal your ideas..,” which the Red Sox proceeded to go out and do, putting a huge emphasis on on-base percentage and OPS in the guys they brought onto their team while winning two World Series. The Yankees, Rays, Giants and plenty of other teams have likewise put the same theories into play, emphasizing OPS and on-base over batting average and steals. They have out-Moneyed Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, who have been a pretty mediocre franchise the last 5 or 6 years.

Anti-tobacco campaign, centers for disease control, Smoking bans

New data on smoking rates by age, sex, occupation — Miners smoke the most!

October 5, 2011 Pepe Lepew 2 Comments

Quelle shock, miners are heavy smokers!

I haven’t done a piece on the annual Centers for Disease Control report on cigarette smoking in the U.S. in quite some time.

This report takes a slightly different tack — breaking down smoking rates by occupation.

Overall, the adult smoking rate in America was 19.6 percent in 2010, down ever so slightly from the 19.8 percent in 2009, but roughly the same as the past 5 years, where it has hovered around 20 percent.

The CDC has been doing these surveys for about 10 years now, and they are very accurate. These entail surveys of tens of thousands of people each year.

The smoking rate among 18-24 year olds is 23.8 percent; among 25-34, it’s 23.5 percent; among 35-44, it’s 21 percent; and among 45-64, it’s 19.8 percent. Among people over 65, it’s only 10.2 percent.

The smoking rate for men is 21.5 percent and for women it’s 17.9 percent.

Here’s the stats I find interesting. Again, these numbers have been pretty consistent over the years. Smoking rate for high school dropouts; 27.1 percent. For high school grads, 21 percent, and for college grads, 9.1 percent.

So lack of education = higher smoking rate.

Another interesting stat. Smoking rate for people living below the poverty line, 27.7 percent; near the poverty line, 26.3 percent; middle income or upper income, 18.1 percent.

It’s not surprising since education level tends to correlate with income. What I find interesting is cigarette taxes have gone up astronomically in the past 10 years. An average pack of cigarettes nationally is about $5. So if you just smoke one pack a day (and that’s not a heavy habit), you’re spending $1,800 a year just on cigarettes. The people who can least afford that expense are the ones buying cigarettes and most hit by cigarette taxes. You can bet a lot of these people don’t have health insurance, as well.

The Midwest has the highest smoking rate, at 21.7 percent, followed by the South at 20.8 percent (bit of a surprise, but Oklahoma and Indiana have high smoking rates and I believe they are included in the Midwest). The Northeast has a smoking rate of 18.7 percent and the healthy and tanned West is lowest at 15.9 percent.

Now, as far as occupation, mining and food services have the highest smoking rates at 30 percent (let’s face it, if you’re breathing coal dust all day, I can understand why miners would feel, “fuck it” about smoking.), followed by construction at 29.7 percent. Everything else is below 25 percent. Interestingly, arts and entertainment has a smoking rate of 14.9 percent. That’s lower than I would expect, because there is a LOT of smoking in the music, film and theatre industries.

Health care and social assistance smoking rate is 15.9 percent, though health care support is 23.7 percent. The lowest smoking rate is in education, at 8.7 percent (not many school campuses allow any smoking anymore.) Interesting, a job classification as “physical,” (I assume this means trainers and people in rehab services) is 9.2 percent.

Anti-tobacco campaign, Big Tobacco, cigarette advertising, FDA, phillip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Surgeon General, tobacco litigation

Big Tobacco sues U.S. government over warning labels as being too “depressing”

August 20, 2011 Pepe Lepew 1 Comment

File this one under, “you have to be absolutely shitting me.”

Five Big Tobacco companies, led by (cue shock) R.J. Reynolds, the sleaziest of the sleaze Big Tobacco companies, filed suit against the Food and Drug Administration over graphic warning labels being required by the agency.

Get this, the complaint claims the labels would make their customers, i.e., smokers, “depressed, discouraged and afraid” to buy their products.

Oy.

That’s the FUCKING point! To DISCOURAGE and make people AFRAID to use the product.

Arrrrrggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!! Must …. avoid … kicking …. cat…..

These warning labels are all part of legislation signed into law in 2009 that gave the FDA regulatory authority over Big Tobacco. These same kinds of graphic warnings have been implemented in Great Britain, Canada and Australia (and they’ve been controversial in those places, as well.)

Altria, i.e. Philip Morris, as usual likes to play nice and has not joined this litigation. With 60 percent of the cigarette market cornered, Philip Morris doesn’t need to jump into these frivolous suits (and Philip Morris actually helped write that 2009 law to begin with, which is weird, because if their competitors can no longer advertise, they can cling on to that 60 percent market share much more easily.).

These images, which will be unveiled a year from now, include sickly children, people dying of cancer and diseased gums and lungs. These kinds of images have been on cigarette packs in Commonwealth countries for a few months now.

Uncategorized

The cartoon they showed me on my last night on Earth

August 16, 2011 Haruko Haruhara 15 Comments

When I was 9 I became seriously ill with a very severe case of bronchitis that wouldn’t respond to antibiotics.

I developed an extremely high fever (105 at one point) and was hospitalized. I actually don’t remember very much about it. I drifted in out and of consciousness for two or three days. They called my dad, who was on reserve duty across the world in England. It took him over 24 hours to fly from London to Rome, to Singapore, to Sydney and then to Auckland. They told him he better come quick because his daughter was dying.

Of course, they didn’t tell ME that. No one ever said anything to ME about “dying” until well afterward. But, the fact was the infection was raging in my lungs and threatening to kill me. At one point, they told my mum that if the antibiotics didn’t take hold, I might not last the night.

Again, I heard none of this. There was no melodrama for me. Just bad dreams, short periods of consciousness, being both hot and cold at the same time and not being able to move. I kept having bad dreams that I was strapped down to the bed and locked up in an asylum. In reality, I was simply so weak, I couldn’t move. They put a tube in my side to drain the fluid collecting in one of my lungs (I still have a nasty scar that looks like a birthmark). I remember my side hurting horribly and the horrible stench of infection.

I remember being surrounded with balloons and stuffed animals. Lotsa, lotsa, LOTSA stuffed animals. I was sleeping amid a zoo of plush.

At one point, they brought some videotapes of cartoons. It was a bunch of cartoons I had seen — a lot of Dr. Suess — but there was an odd one I had never seen. I nodded I wanted to watch that one.

They put the movie in and I immediately fell asleep, but woke up right as a long movement of music began playing. It was a really long crescendo, and it was a cartoon about evolution. A little drop of slime in a Coke bottle turns into a bug, then a fish, then dinosaurs. I managed to stay awake for the whole 15-minute cartoon. I was fascinated by how the dinosaurs danced to the music. Then, I fell asleep.

My da showed up in the middle of the night, exhausted from his 10,000-mile trip. He came into my room in his H.M. Royal Marine camouflage uniform (so out of place in a hospital room) and being the doofus he was, actually woke me up (I think he was afraid I was dead). I was so happy to see him, and he was so handsome in his uniform. And my fever was gone. While I had slept, it had dropped from 104 to 99. The antibiotics had taken hold. I was so mad when the nurse made him leave the room.

In the morning, I was still very very weak and couldn’t even sit up. I was in a lot of pain from the tube in my side (my da MADE the hospital drug me with morphine. Actually ordered them to do it.), but I was better. I suddenly realized I had scored the biggest bonanza of stuffed animals on the North Island. I must have had 50 new dolls and plush animals. My favourite was a stuffed kangaroo. I even had a plush Cat in the Hat hat that bugged the nurses but I still wore anyway. I got lots of sherbert, but strawberry was the only flavour the hospital had.

I asked about the cartoon, and no one remembered it. I didn’t persist; I probably should have.

Over the years, I wondered what that music was, and what the cartoon was. I never forgot it. Many years later, a movie was on TV and the same music came on. Oh my God, that’s the same piece of music in that cartoon they showed me in the hospital.

The movie on TV was “10.” And the song was “Bolero” by Maurice Ravel. So, I knew that much. I knew what the music was. When most people hear Bolero, they think of 10. When I hear Bolero, I think of this odd cartoon. One day, I Googled “Bolero” and “Dinosaurs” and “cartoon.” I found out the name of the cartoon was “Allegro Non Troppo,” by a very famous Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto. It was a very rare and difficult movie to find.

Many, many, many years later, we were in a funky record store in town; a place that actually carries vinyl records and really old Pixies, MeatPuppets and Black Flag CDs. I walked by a wall of DVDs and I suddenly recognized something.

I actually let out a gasp. The cover was the beginning of the dinosaur scene, a Coke bottle that had been thrown out of a rocket ship. It was that cartoon from the hospital. It was “Allegro Non Troppo,” sitting right there in a store in our town. It was only $9! Oh my God, I couldn’t wait to get it home.

Sure enough, it was the same movie. I actually bawled and bawled during the dinosaur part. It brought back such a flood of memories, a weird mix of painful and happy memories. I realized I associated that cartoon with seeing my dad again in that dark hospital room. Yeah, they weren’t telling me I was dying, but I could tell in the looks in their eyes something was pretty wrong. I was scared deep down inside, until I went from sleeping to watching this cartoon to sleeping to waking up without a fever with my da in the room.

It’s actually a very dark and gloomy movie; one scene with an orphaned kitten is especially sad. But, this is the 13-minute sequence I love most.

Bolero by Maurice Ravel and Bruno Bozzetto.

Allegro Non Troppo “Bolero”

Uncategorized

Thank goodness for pink ribbons!

July 21, 2011 Haruko Haruhara 1 Comment

There was still a ton of snow on St. Mary Peak (9,350 feet), but on July 20th, we really thought there wouldn’t be enough to be an issue. I mean, it hasn’t snowed for more than six weeks.

WRONG!

About 3/4 of the way up, still way below 9,000 feet, the trail was completely blocked by deep snow. The snow was on a really steep slope, so it would’ve been really dangerous to try and traverse it. Yayyy. No use going on! Time to turn back.

Nope, someone had tied some pink ribbons along the whitebark pines. We followed the ribbons, bushwhacking up the side of the mountain.

“You told me you should never bushwhack,” I said. “That’s how people get lost and die, you said.”

“These ribbons must be here for a reason,” my boyfriend said.

We went STRAIGHT up the mountain, following the pink ribbons for 200 or 300 metres. I had gone to the top of St. Mary Peak before, so I knew the trail eventually did a big switchback, and we were headed in the direction where the trail was supposed to be.

About every 40 or 50 feet, there would be another pink ribbon tied to a tree. It was like following a trail of breadcrumbs. It was a little spooky because the whitebarks were about head high and so you couldn’t really see much of where you were going. Looking behind, you couldn’t see the trail at all anymore. Just a steep CLIFF.

Sure enough, after slogging up the mountain for 10 minutes, we found the trail. Sure enough, some Good Samaritan or maybe the Forest Service, had put those pink ribbons on the trees for a reason — to show hikers the way. From then on, the trail was clear. It was very, very cold, but easy walking. I couldn’t believe how much snow was still up there. The Heavenly Twins were just covered in snow. I really think some of that snow will not melt AT ALL this year. I hope the Canadian Rockies aren’t so snowed in!

Anti-tobacco campaign

Smoke Damage: Voices from the Front Lines of America’s Tobacco Wars

July 12, 2011 Pepe Lepew 2 Comments

Or … the more you know, the angrier you get

University of North Carolina sociologist Michael Schwalbe wrote this book, a collection of interviews from cancer patients, smokers, ex-smokers and anti-smoking advocates, after his father, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer at the age of 65. This is what he came up with: “Smoke Damage — Voices from the Front Lines of America’s Tobacco Wars.”

“Almost everyone knows that ‘smoking is bad for you.’ The purpose of Smoke Damage is not merely to repeat this message. Certainly, one purpose is to show, in concrete terms, how tobacco-related disease changes people’s lives for the worse, causing not just debilitation and premature death but also death but also emotional suffering for those who are connected to tobacco users,” Schwalbe writes.

This is a powerful book. Really one of the best anti-tobacco books I’ve come across. It really blew me away. And Schwalbe is not a professional writer.
Schwalbe simply allows people to tell their stories with no editorializing on his part. The book is a series of one-page interviews with a number of subjects involved in tobacco, with a stark full page black-and-white photo opposite the text. There are several professional anti-tobacco advocates that I’m personally familiar with included in the book, but most compelling are the stories from people physically devastated by their smoking habit; people breaking through holes in their throats, people hooked up to oxygen. This brings the reader up front and personal with what the war against tobacco is all about. I urge everyone to buy this book or check it out at their local library. You will not be the same afterward.

A common theme comes through all the stories — suffering, self-flagellation and most of all, anger. Anger at the tobacco companies for lying and allowing its customers to be poisoned. A common questioned asked by several of Schwalbe’s interview subjects, “Why was the industry allowed to do this..?”

Rather than give you my two cents, I’ll just let you read their stories yourself. Here is a sampling. These are perhaps about 20 percent of the stories in the book:

“They’ve still got people smoking in the movies. Actors and tough guy detectives — people who look sophisticated. And the people smoking in the movies are romancing the kids who watch them … That’s what makes them smoke. Nobody smokes for nutrition. They smoke for romance, in the head, in the mind. It’s a big game. We fall in love. It can’t be helped.”

— John Eastman, emphysema sufferer who lost his career in radio due to his disease

“I said to my son, ‘Smoking killed your father. It killed your grandparents. It killed your cousins. It killed you aunts and uncles. Why are you doing this?’ And he said between coughs, ‘I don’t know, Mom, I like it.'”

— Monnda Welch, who lost 10 family members to tobacco-related diseases

“I believe that if an alien from another planet — or historians, hopefully, a hundred years from now — were to look at the period from 1964 through to today, they would ask how a society knowing what we knew about what tobacco did — and does — could do so little. The leaders of our scientific and health communities in the 1960s had the incredibly mistaken belief that once the surgeon general had condluded unequivocally that smoking caused lung cancer and other diseases, society would respond. I don’t think it dawned on them that there could be an industry run by people wou would respond with such callousness and disregard. When you examine it, you recognize that if didn’t dawn on them was kind of unscrupulous, amoral foe they were facing.”

— Matt Myers, Campaign for Tobacc-Free Kids

“A lot of people who have laryngectomies wear stoma covers. I go out with mine open. I wear tank tops, sleeveless tops. And the more people that see me and are aware of it, the more who are going to be aware of the facts. I’m going to be like this for the rest of my life, and I don’t want to hide it. The first questions they usually ask me is, did you smoke? And I have to say, yes, because that’s the truth.”

— Terrie Hall, smoker who contracted mouth and throat cancer

“(Teenagers today) buy the illusion that I bought, which is presented through the marketing of the product, that smoking is cool. That if you smoke, you’ll be successful. You’ll be hip. You’ll be rocking. You’ll be macho. You’ll be sexy. You’ve be accepted, wanted, loved. When I do a presentation, I go through that whole list. And then, I go, ‘Bang! Lies! All lies! Don’t believe a word of it.’ I tell them what a con job it is, what’s in the product, the chemicals and carcinogens. You’re making them rich and you’re dying.”

— Alan Landers, former “Winston Man” who died of lung cancer

“When I started smoking, I thought I was bulletproof. What I found out is that I was vulnerable, that life is a fragile thing. I think it’s a gift from God. We’re blessed to have it. As long as smoking was good for me, the heck with anybody else. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I didn’t think it was bad. I never thought it would touch me. I didn’t realize John Wayne died from it. I didn’t realize Babe Ruth died from it. Nobody puts out a coroner’s report that says, ‘Hey, it was cigarettes that put John Wayne in his grave.'”

— Wade Hampton, survivor of larynx cancer

“Maybe, I’m naive, but I didn’t believe the United States government would allow a product like this to be sold and be legal, if they knew it was going to kill you. I also didn’t believe a big gigantic company like Philip Morris would sell ’em if they knew they were going to kill you. I didn’t believe they would lie under oath to the Congress of the United States. But then all these documents started coming out. And I said, ‘I was stupid.’ It was tobacco (that made me sick), beyond a doubt. I had bought their story. I admit, and I feel bad about it. But, I had bought into their lies.”

— Frank Amodeo, throat cancer survivor who has not been able to eat or drink through his mouth for 18 years

“I started looking into the issue and noticed there was very little in the overground press. All that magazines told you was what the ads told you. There was very little in the newspapers. I just thought, what’s going on here? This thing (tobacco) is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year, and nobody wants to talk about it? It looked like a great big fat conspiracy. That’s when I started getting involved in it and looking into things.”

— Gene Borio, former smoker and founder of Tobacco.org, which is where I get most of my tobacco news

“There are some people who disbelieve the connection between heart trouble and secondhand smoke. You’ve got the hardcore smokers who believe they’re not hurting anybody. With them they think it’s a right to smoke. I once had a doctor, he was a guest at my restaurant, tell me he’d seen no studies that could prove that secondhand smoke was harmful to anyone. The guy was a medical doctor. He was a smoker, too. Thank God he was not someone giving me professional help.”

— Mike Clark, non-smoker, bartender who required an angioplasty after breathing secondhand smoke most of his life

“The tobacco companies have hidden the truth from the American public. They have lied, deceived, cheated and caused a tremendous amount of grief and misery. They don’t care aobut our welfare or our health. They only care about profits. And that to me is one of the most unforgiable sins — to benefit from someone else’s misery, simply because of money. I can understand killing for revenge or jealousy. But not greed. I can’t understand that. And that’s what they done for years and year.”

— Shannon Suttle, who lost both parents in their 50s to smoking-related diseases

“It’s the most difficult thing in the world to stop smoking, and that’s what frightened me so much. There were moments that I didn’t think I could because it’s …. more difficult to stop than it is for a junkie to kick smack. From what I went through, where I felt every single nerve-ending on fire and this desperation to get this thing, this feeling back — I understand it. That’s why — and I feel the exact same way about the drinking — that’s why you know, I will take it day by day until it ends, and I will keep looking over my shoulder.”

— Hollywood script writer Joe Eszterhas, cancer survivor, former chain smoker and now an active campaigner to get smoking out of film

“When my wife’s sisters were diagnosed with cancer and one of them died not to long after that — well, one day when I was thinking about it, and something just tore away and I knew I had to leave tobacco alone. That was my cash crop. That was a hard decision. And I have never regretted it. I think it was the right — well, I know it was the right thing to do.”

— O.K. Bellamy, former tobacco farmer who lost several in-laws to lung cancer

“I’m an economist and I ever much believe in the free market. But the free market only works if there are rules that the competitors have to comply with … in the case of tobacco, we’ve totally dropped the ball. So it isn’t really the industry that we can expect to heal itself or fix itself. It’s us. It’s our responsibility … Someone at this morning’s session was talking about their leaders being evil people. Well, maybe their evil. But, if so, they’re evil in virtually every major corporation in the country, because the leadership is interchangeable.”

— Ken Warner, University of Michigan dean, chair of editorial board of Tobacco Control

“What’s beautiful about a long trial is that the jury is not getting snapshots, they’re not getting soundbites, they’re getting the total picture. And the (Engle) jury basically came to understand that the tobacco industry was a bunch of liars. The jury saw through the lies and the duplicity and realized that their intelligence was being insulted. So they knew when they were being bullshitted.”

— Stanley Rosenblatt, attorney for the plaintiffs in $145 billion Engle lawsuit

Haruko sportswriter, Uncategorized

“Evel”

July 6, 2011 Haruko Haruhara 4 Comments

“Evel
The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American Showman, Daredevil and Legend”
Leigh Montville

Leigh Montville is a former sports columnist for the Boston Globe who has written books about American sports legends such as Ted Williams, Dare Earnhardt and Manute Bol. In his latest book, “Evel,” he tackles one of the most complicated American sports legends ever in Butte’s Evel Knievel. “He was from Butte, Montana, and his life was a grand, sloppy American saga.
“He was from Butte, Montana, and he traveled a long way, met a lot of famous people, made and spent a lot of money, kissed a lot of girls. He was from Butte, Montana, and he never left, no matter where he went,” Montville writes.
Montville uses this kind of breezy, conversational columnists’ style in relating anecdotes about Knievel’s wild and controversial life. He also does a good job of detailing the old days of Butte, still more or less a Wild West kind of town in the mid-20th century, and how this hardscrabble, alcohol-soaked blue collar city came to shape Knievel. “The charm of Butte always was the fact that there was no charm,” Montville writes.
He breaks up his narrative every few pages with “… a story,” about Butte, Knievel or one of Knievel’s friends. My favorite, “… a story,” was about Jean Sorenson, a foul-mouthed bar owner in Butte who shot down two former husbands and eventually went to prison when she shot a man dead in the 1970s — after she refused to serve a black soldier and he objected. She returned to Butte as the same bar fixture she had been when she was sent down the river. “This is the city where Robert Craig Knievel was born on Oct. 17, 1938,” Montville writes.
Part of what is entertaining and surprising in these early chapters is that former congressman Pat Williams was Knievel’s first cousin and grew up alongside him in Butte.
Knievel was a supremely confident fast talker, a con man, who always seemed to be working on an angle, or worse, a scheme. He was a thief, a bank robber and even an extortionist (he had a highly lucrative protection racket in Butte for a time), yet he always managed to avoid getting caught. His charm came to his rescue repeatedly. In this day and age, he likely would have been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Knievel tried to go legit as an insurance salesman, but grew bored and burned bridges. He began racing motorcycles throughout the West, but was actually (surprisingly) a poor rider. Finally, in the early 60s, he came up with a harebrained scheme to jump a motorcycle over a pair of mountain lions and a box of rattlesnakes. It was a disaster, but he made money and found his calling.
Knievel truly hit the big time in 1968 and it was for a failure. However, it was a spectacular failure. His attempted jump over the Caeser’s Palace fountains is what made Knievel a household name, especially after an amazing slow-motion footage of his crash was released. Virtually everyone has seen this footage at one time or another.
One of the secrets Montville reveals is that it was widely believed Knievel was gravely injured in that crash and was in a coma for weeks. He suffered several broken bones, but Knievel and his people exaggerated the extent of his injuries simply to drum up publicity. He never was in a coma.
Knievel made more money jumping now, but he really hit the big time when he agreed to allow a toy company to make an Evel Knievel action figure. Another surprise. Most of Knievel’s wealth came from a toy, not his jumps.
As Knievel became a bigger attraction, his ego grew bigger and the events of his life became even more outrageous. Montville has great fun relating the details of the 70s hedonism and violence that swirled around Knievel’s failed Snake River Canyon jump.
During the Snake River period, Knievel’s personality turned darker. The sly con man’s charm wore thin. Montville finds numerous sources that absolutely hated Knievel and spoke of his increasingly large ego, his anti-Semitism and his abuse of the people around him, both verbal and physical.
The worst of Knievel’s abuse was directed at his wife, according to multiple sources. He not only beat her, but constantly boasted of his sexual conquests with other women, often times directly in front of her. Knievel, never one to turn down a party, also began to drink more and more heavily, and grew more erratic and unpredictable. Finally, his whole world came crashing down around him when he beat his former publicist with a baseball ban, breaking both his arms. He was sent to jail, but more devastatingly, lost his toy contract and his gravy train. When he came out of jail, he was radioactive … and before long, broke.
At this point, Montville’s book feels like a big, long hit piece on Knievel, but “Evel” takes an interesting turn at the end … a turn that is weirdly uplifting, yet slightly disappointing. What is disappointing is more attention isn’t given to Knievel’s apparent life transformation toward the end.
The last several years of his life, Knievel’s hard living came back to haunt him. He often needed a wheelchair from his multitude of injuries. He needed a liver transplant from his years of hard drinking. He became a diabetic. He developed a severe lung disease (Ironically, despite his hedonistic life, he never smoked.) which eventually killed him. And his wife, sick of the years of abuse, finally divorced him. He was alone and lived in constant pain, and it was that pain that changed the daredevil into a very regretful and frightened man at the end.
Knievel expressed remorse many times during his final years for his choices. The man who spit in death’s eye a hundred times finally had his preternatural confidence shattered by pain. A few months before he died in 2007, he appeared to sincerely and genuinely become a devout Christian.
Montville breezes through this long sunset period of Knievel’s life in just a few pages, when I found myself wanting to know much, MUCH more about these final years and the radical alteration in his life view. That is my only disappointment with of “Evel.” Perhaps Montville found it too painful or invasive, but I personally think much more drama is to be found by a person’s spiritual awakening than the debauchery at the Snake River Canyon.

Smoking bans, Uncategorized

CDC predicts every state will have a smoking bans by 2020

April 21, 2011 Pepe Lepew

First of all, the headline is a little misleading. It says “Every state will ban smoking.” They aren’t banning smoking, they’re just banning it in bars and restaurants.

It will be interesting to revisit this in 9 years to see if the CDC is right. It’s not a particularly bold prediction, since there are only 12 states left that *don’t* have smoking bans. The article says seven — Texas, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Wyoming, South Carolina — but that’s incorrect. They forgot to mention Alaska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Alabama and North Dakota. It’s 12 states that do not *effectively* have smoking bans in either bars or restaurants.

What’s interesting is, in most of these states, the major cities all have smoking bans — Houston, Dallas, Austin, El Paso, Charleston, Louisville, Lexington, Indianapolis, Casper, Cheyenne, Kansas City, St. Louis and now Bismarck (Bismarck voters just approved a smokefree law — by a HUGE margin — about 60-40 percent). So, even though there are no statewide bans in these states, there really aren’t that many places in those states where you can still light up in a bar or a restaurant.

By coincidence, most of these states have high smoking rates and high lung cancer rates.

The article correctly states that smoking bans do drive down smoking rates and that hospital admissions for heart disease among *non-smokers* have consistently declined in communities that have smoking bans.