NC Smoking Ban. Good or bad?

I agree, and also think that villifying smokers is the "in" thing to do. You junk food junkies just wait. You're next.

 

They're going to be taxing sugary drinks and then what, twinkies (wish I could get chocodiles on this coast)?


Mike

 

Saw a bumper sticker yesterday:

Non-Smokers are just pi$$ed that Smokers have more fun.

 

:lol::lol::lol:

 

I read this in my home town paper today. I wonder if the huge reduction in heart attacks was related to the smoking ban or not. If there is a true correlation, this really is a stong argument to ban smoking in public. I realize that not all news stories are 100% accurate ... but a 40% reduction in heart attacks is a sidnificant number.

Coughing up more evidence
Monday, October 05, 2009



In the debate over smoking in public, many arguments have been trotted out. But for sheer simplicity, it's hard to beat good old cause-and-effect.

Research published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology has drawn one of the most direct correlations yet between smoking bans and better health. Scientists examined data from more than dozen places in the United States, Canada and Europe where smoking bans had been enacted. The findings: Where smoking bans were in effect, the percentage of heart attacks dropped significantly.
It's the latest research in a string of studies that have concluded the same thing. "One startling study in Helena, Mont.," the Kansas City Star reported, "found that the annual heart attack rate dropped 40 percent after the city banned public smoking. After a court suspended the ban, the rate shot up again."
It couldn't be clearer. Not smoking in public makes a healthier environment for everybody. Who could possibly oppose that? To be against that, by extension, would put you on the side of dirtier air and a sicker population.
Smoke-free laws are fairly clear. Tobacco users still can fill their wheezing, tar-clogged lungs with as much smoke as they can handle. They just aren't allowed to fill other people's lungs with smoke.
Some people have tried to couch the public-smoking debate as a private-property issue. Since bars and restaurants are privately owned property, the owners should be able to allow whatever activities they want on their property, right?
But there's a big problem with that. These people so enamored with the concept of private property are overlooking the ultimate in private property -- our own bodies.
And in the same way that we wouldn't tolerate total strangers dousing our front lawns with gasoline, we shouldn't tolerate tobacco users who nonchalantly fill our noses, throats and lungs with secondhand smoke that the Environmental Protection Agency rightly identifies as a Class A carcinogen.
Some might read this and infer that we're not on the side of smokers. But in the big scheme of things, we are on their side. We want them to live longer and to be healthier.
The thing is, we want that for nonsmokers too.