Shaun of the Dead, the funniest movie of the year so far (since the momentous marionette parody Team America has not yet opened), depicts a boring, underachieving British man named Shaun going on with his humdrum life, oblivious to the monstrous army of the walking dead that is taking over the world all around him. The juxtapositions as he walks to the local store, mere inches from grasping zombie arms, or smokes and drinks at the local pub, overlooking news reports about the end of the world, are chilling and hilarious.
And I can't help thinking it's a lot like most people's attitude toward cigarettes.
Harm Reduction
The credibility of the peer review process has come under vehement attack.
Scientists who receive no-strings-attached financial support for their research from demonized industries -- tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and food, among others -- are no longer deemed trustworthy.
Apparently, the rigors of the peer review process -- even in the world's best science and medical journals -- in addition to full disclosure requirements, isn't enough to prevent "biased" studies from being published. Activists -- displeased with results that undermine their agenda -- cry bias, and prestigious science and health organizations cave, preferring to appease the advocates, rather than allow the scientific method to weed out bad science.
I should be receiving a massive salary from Greenpeace and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. But let me explain.
Volokh.com notes that the American Cancer Society accuses a Cato Institute expert of opposing tobacco regulation in part because he has received money from the tobacco company Altria (Philip Morris) but the American Cancer Society overlooks the fact that Altria vocally favors FDA regulations, since they make Altria the de facto industry standard for cigarettes, making it harder for Altria's competitors to comply with regulations.
There is never a bad time to quit, no matter how hard it is, considering the deleterious effects smoking has on the respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and reproductive systems but some effects of smoking are permanent. Does quitting substantially decrease the damaging, continuing effects that years of smoking have on the body?
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.