I hate smoking. It's a filthy habit. It kills hundreds of millions of people, including bystanders. Just being around it nauseates me. Cities, states, and countries all over the world are banning smoking in public, and I couldn't be happier.
Saletan wants to establish his anti-smoking bona fides from the start. That way the article won't come off as smoker's rationalization or Big Tobacco PR.
In fact, it's such a rout, it's getting out of hand.
The problem with tobacco all along was that politicians and the public didn't recognize it as a drug. They called it a tradition, a "crop," and a "legal product." As though coca and marijuana weren't crops. As though a product's legality should decide its morality, instead of the other way around. When it came to smoking, culture overpowered reason.
Is that really the problem here? I wouldn't say so. Caffeine is a drug. It's even addictive to some degree. However, there's no Coffee Control section at the CDC, and there's a good reason for that. The difference between coffee and tobacco is that more than 400,000 Americans die from tobacco use every year. Tobacco use is a public health crisis. That's what makes it a public policy question. Identifying the core problem as being one of whether tobacco is a drug, a custom or not really misses the point entirely. Having developed this frame for thinking about the issue, Saletan proceeds to see the entire question in terms of comparisons to policies on other drugs and how we can alter the drug to make it less harmful.
Now public opinion and governments have turned against tobacco. But the anti-smoking jihad, born of science, is beginning to outrun it. Culture is trampling reason again, this time in the other direction.
OK. Now we're getting to the normal Saletan bullshit part. Just as pro-choice women evidently don't know they are killing a fetus, and stem-cell researcher proponents give Saletan the creeps, the tobacco control jihadis are evidently outrunning science, where I would suppose outrunning science means something like advocating policies that don't reduce tobacco use or exposure.
Nonsmoking areas in restaurants haven't worked too well. The smoke just drifts from one area to the other. To fix this, European countries are now isolating smokers in sealed rooms with separate ventilation. Lest any waitress encounter a toxic cloud, Holland, Slovenia, and other countries have outlawed eating in the smoking rooms. That's pretty harsh. I thought we were trying to remove smoke from eaters, not food from smokers.
Uhh, they're trying to remove smoke from the workers, because they believe that workers should have a safe workplace (crazy concept, I know). In these countries, restaurants and bars can have separately-ventilated smoking rooms which are off-limits to wait staff. How Lord Saletan thinks that patrons are going to eat in smoking rooms without interaction with wait staff is really beyond me.
Likewise, the point of recognizing tobacco as a drug was to regulate it as strictly as comparable drugs, not more so. Five months ago, a report by a British commission found that the financial health costs of alcohol and tobacco were equal. Tobacco was by far the bigger killer, but when the analysis moved beyond self-destruction to harming others, the annual death toll from alcohol-related car accidents exceeded the toll from secondhand smoke in the workplace. Drinking, unlike smoking, played a role in 78 percent of assaults and 88 percent of criminal damage. The commission concluded that if legal drugs were classified like illegal ones, alcohol would be judged more serious than tobacco. Instead, British law allows advertising of booze but not cigarettes.
The point of regulating tobacco is to deal with a public health crisis not to regulate it as strictly as comparable drugs (whatever that means). Frankly, I have no idea where he even got that idea that tobacco control advocates were sitting around calibrating the regulation of tobacco against other harmful drugs instead of crafting policy to reduce tobacco use and tobacco harm.
Regulation of alcohol is quite simply another topic. If Saletan wants to make proposals on how to regulate alcohol, he should go ahead, but it is well and truly irrelevant to questions of how to deal with the tobacco public health crisis.
The strangest thing about the current round of smoking bans is its focus on pubs. All over the world, reporters have been interviewing bar patrons about the merits of expelling tobacco. "It means I can drink and not come out [of] the bar stinking like an ash-tray," one guy in Hong Kong told Agence France-Presse after a night of partying. There's nothing more annoying than a stinking cigarette when you're trying to get stinking drunk.
The strangest thing? The focus of workplace smoking laws is on restaurants and bars because in many places there are already laws which ban smoking in workplaces other than restaurants and bars. Tobacco control advocates are trying to eliminate those exemptions and extend workplace smoking bans to all workplaces. That means extending the law to take in bars and restaurants. Again, Saletan seems to completely fail to see how workplace safety is the critical factor in workplace smoking laws.
Tobacco myopia isn't just a British problem. In South Korea, a university president has proposed to permit booze but "remove smoking students from our school." In Amsterdam, coffee shop patrons will soon be allowed to smoke marijuana but not tobacco, despite evidence that two joints cause as much noncancerous lung damage as five to 12 cigarettes.
I'm not quite sure what the point is about tobacco myopia. I thought the thesis of this article was that the tobacco "jihad" had overrun science. But it seems that all Saletan wants to complain about is how weak alcohol regulation is. Maybe he should have written an article about that instead.
Furthermore, Konkuk University is a private university. They can establish any admissions policies they want. I fail to see how that's a question of public policy. I also fail to see what is controversial about the proposed alcohol policy. "In addition, Oh will start a campaign for a responsible drinking culture at the school." Is Salatan in favor of an irresponsible drinking culture instead? The legal drinking age in South Korea is 19, so most college-age students can legally drink.
Last but not least, Saletan is just plain wrong that "coffee shop patrons will soon be allowed to smoke marijuana but not tobacco." He evidently failed basic reading comprehension because the article he links to makes it clear that the regulations are the same for tobacco smoke and marijuana smoke. "Coffee shops will be treated in the same manner as other catering businesses. They will be smoke-free," Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende told NOS television. "It would have been wrong to move towards a smoke-free catering industry and then make an exception for coffee shops. People would not have understood that." What part of "Coffee shops will be treated in the same manner as other catering businesses. They will be smoke-free," was unclear to Lord Saletan? Coffeeshops will be able to have separately-ventilated smoking rooms just like any other bar, cafe, or restaurant and patrons will be able to smoke tobacco as well as marijuana. But, hey, who needs facts when you can just claim it's so?
In the private sector, the tobacco crusade has turned personal. According to a recent survey, 1 percent of companies refuse to hire smokers. Some use random urine or breathalyzer tests to spot nicotine. If you flunk the test or refuse to take it, you're out. Officially, the rationale is that smokers cost companies too much money in health insurance. But some policies go further. One company forced out several smokers, including at least one who wasn't on the company health plan. By her account, employees were told that the ban applied even to nicotine gum and patches, which don't produce secondhand smoke or drive up insurance premiums.
Smoking status (or even nicotine use) is not a protected category under employment discrimination law. Short of making it a protected category, this is each company's choice, not a public policy question.
Urine tests are a warning sign that the war on smoking is morphing into a war on nicotine. The latest target is snus, a tobacco product that delivers nicotine without smoke. Despite studies showing it's far safer than cigarettes, most European countries allow smoking but prohibit snus. In the U.S., sponsors of legislation to regulate tobacco under the FDA are resisting amendments that would let companies tell consumers how much safer snus is. The president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids complains that snus will "increase the number of people who use tobacco," letting "the big companies win no matter what tobacco products people use." But the goal shouldn't be to stamp out tobacco or make companies lose. The goal should be to save lives.
10 paragraphs in, we have finally hit something that could be said to be relevant to the science and tobacco control policy. Scandinavian snus is in fact a very familiar product to Americans. It is very similar to American "snuff", "dip", or "moist smokeless tobacco", Skoal, Copenhagen, and Kodiak, etc... Snus usage is undoubtedly safer than smoking tobacco, although not safe. Nicotine in smokeless tobacco still contributes to heart disease and high-blood pressure and carcinogens in the tobacco can cause oral cancer and other cancers. The public health question regarding snus or snuff is whether it would be beneficial to public health to allow smokeless tobacco manufacturers to market smokeless tobacco as less harmful than smoking. The problem is that a message that smokeless tobacco is less harmful than smoking may simply encourage more non-smokers to use smokeless tobacco without appreciable numbers of smokers switching from smoking to smokeless tobacco. That would do nothing to reduce harm. As of yet, there has been too little research to know either way. I can certainly understand the concerns of European tobacco regulators who don't want to start another tobacco problem by allowing Snus use outside Sweden without knowing whether it will actually reduce the number of smokers. In any case, this is definitely not a case of the tobacco "jihad" outrunning the science, but of the science being insufficient at this time to make a policy recommendation.
After this the article just gets weird. Saletan throws in a criticism of the pro-smoking crowd for good measure but then goes back to criticizing tobacco control advocates, claiming that they can't decide whether more or less nicotine in cigarettes is bad. There are downsides to both raising and lowering nicotine in cigarettes. Higher nicotine cigarettes would lead to higher smoking initiation because they would be more addictive to youth smokers. However, lowering nicotine levels in cigarettes would lead to compensatory smoking among current smokers, exposing those smokers to more carbon monoxide and carcinogens. There is nothing contradictory about criticizing Big Tobacco for manipulating nicotine (in order to gets kids hooked) while being having reservations about lowering nicotine levels.
Instead of indiscriminately vilifying tobacco, we should reengineer it. Bypass the combustion, purge the tar, dial down the nicotine—whatever serves public health.
There's Saletan's one sentence solution to the global tobacco crisis. Reengineer tobacco. Let's talk about real tobacco myopia here. Tobacco Control isn't something that was first thought of last Monday. Scientists have been studying the problem of reducing the harms of smoking and other tobacco use since at least the 1950s. There are many recommendations which are so common that it boggles the mind that Saletan would throw out his reengineer idea and leave it at that. Effective tobacco control requires reengineering tobacco marketing, packaging, and retailing, implementing effective youth access controls, higher tobacco excise taxes, increased spending on tobacco prevention and cessation programs, and limits on exposure to second-hand smoke.
In 2000, the Surgeon General even wrote a whole report on the best-available science on the subject.
http://www.cdc.gov/...
Thinking that we just need to reengineer tobacco shows that Saletan has no idea what is involved in this question. I don't know why Slate continues insulting their readers by publishing garbage like this.
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