By Brad Rodu, Ph.D.
Harm Reduction
Earlier this week, the New York Times editorial page opined about the effectiveness of banning smoking in public places as a means of cutting down heart disease risk. Citing a very small, six-month study of heart attack admissions to a hospital in Helena, Montana, the Times editors concluded that "a six-month ban on smoking in public places...appears to have sharply reduced the number of heart attacks."
The Times editorial is an example of dozens of news stories and editorials in recent months that uncritically accept the findings that a reduction of heart attack admissions from 40 to 24 in a six-month period was sufficient justification for banning smoking in public places.
The Times should know better.
This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the first time the U.S. government declared smoking a serious danger to health, the Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, published January 11, 1964. With evidence of over 7,000 biomedical research articles on the topic, the committee of the Surgeon General declared, "Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action."
The American Council on Science and Health releases...
Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You Information Tobacco Companies Don't Want Teens to Know About the Dangers of Smoking
Young people need to know that smoking negatively affects virtually every part of the body. The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) explains the extent to which smoking damages their health in a new teen oriented book, "Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You"
In a barely-reported but seismic event in public health history, Britain's esteemed medical journal Lancet this week called on Tony Blair to ban tobacco. That's quite a shift from the days when tobacco companies could still issue propaganda like the so-called "Frank Statement," which flatly denied that cigarette smoking had been shown to cause lung cancer. The fiftieth anniversary of that pronouncement arrives on January 4, 2004.
As ACSH's president, Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, put it in her 1984 book A Smoking Gun:
...Whelan argues that what Philip Morris really is seeking through regulation is a government seal of approval for a dangerous product. "Philip Morris wants FDA regulation because they want to get the blessing from the FDA when they come up with what they're saying is a safer cigarette," she says...
ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, Reason's Jacob Sullum, and others appear in John Berlau's Insight magazine article on the current battle over subjecting tobacco to FDA regulation:
http://www.insightmag.com/news/552374.html
New York's mayor Mike Bloomberg has joined the list of public officials seeking to import drugs from Canada where even American-made pharmaceuticals are subject to price controls in a quest to provide cheaper drugs for New Yorkers. And not just for government employees, as other civic leaders have planned, but potentially for the millions treated within the huge NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation system.
While at first glance this move might seem to make fiscal sense, in the long run it will squelch drug innovation and have devastating consequences for the future availability of life-saving and life-enhancing pharmaceuticals.
Should cigarettes be made illegal and currently-illegal drugs be made legal?
Defenders of cigarettes used to joke about such a scenario coming to pass, but with smoking bans becoming more popular and the idea of medical marijuana gaining some ground, it doesn't seem like such a far-fetched, mirror-universe idea anymore. And much as I hate to sound like my own thinking is on the cutting edge of absurdity, that outcome doesn't sound as unreasonable to me as it once did.
Information Tobacco Companies Don't Want Teens to Know About the Dangers of Smoking
Prepared by the American Council on Science and Health
Foreword by Justin Guarini
Editor-in-Chief: Kathleen Meister, M.A.
Editors: Kimberly C. Bowman, Gilbert L. Ross, M.D. Karen L. Schneider, Elizabeth M. Whelan, Sc.D., M.P.H.
"We always hear that motherhood and apple pie was something we respected...But any speech about apple pie would be punished by a tax penalty because I'm sure they feel it is too high in sugar."
Dan Jaffe, a v.p. of the Association of National Advertisers, reacting in an October 15 Adweek article to a proposal by the American Obesity Association that would end business tax deductions for the advertising of foods low in nutritional value.
"No. 1, smoking is a major factor in developing bladder cancer and was the first thing I changed."
former Houston Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich, announcing he had been successfully treated for bladder cancer, as noted by ESPN.com on October 14.
Robert Palmer died suddenly of a heart attack last week at the age of fifty-four, which is a bit young to die of a heart attack -- at least for non-smokers. But Palmer, who performed "Addicted to Love" and other hit songs of the 1980s, was a smoker.
We cannot be certain what caused his heart attack, of course, but we know that smokers are two to four times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and are 70% more likely to die from it than non-smokers. Smokers also tend to die from heart disease about a decade earlier than non-smokers (it is only their tendency to get heart attacks at a younger age that accounts for the statistic, which would otherwise be puzzling, suggesting that smokers are more likely to survive individual heart attacks than non-smokers).
Last month, a company called Freedom Tobacco International, Inc. offered celebrities lifetime supplies of their cigarettes and paid women to smoke the brand in hip Manhattan bars and nightclubs in an effort to draw attention to the brand.