Huckabee's National Smoking Ban

[im_a_pepper]

But you must understand, it's for the greater good!

Huckabee will start a nationwide smoking ban. http://www.breitbart.tv/html/4958.html
I quit smoking for my own health, but this is just wrong. Who wants the government to interfere with business owners and the individual's rights? This is seriously messed up in my opinion.

[Omnis]

There's already a thread on this.

[Nefertiti]

Since I can't find the other thread I will just say this here. I don't see anything wrong with this. It will help people to quit if they can't smoke in so many places. It is smoking bans and higher taxes that have reduced the number of smokers in this country.

And it is a workplace safety issue as he says. It also is a customer safety issue. I don't want to walk into a restaurant and find out after I am inside that I am going to have to breathe someone else's smoke. It's not someone else's right to pollute the air I have to breathe. Think about all those smokers going to public emergency rooms that we all pay for when they have a heart attack. We are all paying for this.

Now, it shouldn't be a jailable crime but a misdemeanor fine would be the best way to handle this.

[Vepr]

And it is a workplace safety issue as he says. It also is a customer safety issue. I don't want to walk into a restaurant and find out after I am inside that I am going to have to breathe someone else's smoke. It's not someone else's right to pollute the air I have to breathe.

You don't have to breathe the smoke, you can leave. The government has no authority to tell business owners whether or not they can allow their customers or employees to smoke.



Think about all those smokers going to public emergency rooms that we all pay for when they have a heart attack. We are all paying for this.

Then junk food should also be excessively taxed and restaurants shouldn't be allowed to serve food that doesn't meet certain nutrition standards. Same goes for anything else that could possibly be detrimental to your health.

I’m not even a smoker and these ridiculous bans piss me off

[Thomas Jefferson]

Since I can't find the other thread I will just say this here. I don't see anything wrong with this. It will help people to quit if they can't smoke in so many places. It is smoking bans and higher taxes that have reduced the number of smokers in this country.

And it is a workplace safety issue as he says. It also is a customer safety issue. I don't want to walk into a restaurant and find out after I am inside that I am going to have to breathe someone else's smoke. It's not someone else's right to pollute the air I have to breathe. Think about all those smokers going to public emergency rooms that we all pay for when they have a heart attack. We are all paying for this.

Now, it shouldn't be a jailable crime but a misdemeanor fine would be the best way to handle this.

:confused:

So you're against businesses like restaurants and offices making their own rules regarding smoking? You are endorsing a policy consistent with how a police state operates (i.e. socialism). It's not your right to decide others do to their own health.

If you don't want to walk into a restaurant and breathe someone else's smoke you have a few options, for instance, don't go in the restaurant (you don't own the restaurant, it's not your right to force them to ban smoking). Or, write them a letter voicing your opinion and peacefully try to get them to change your policy (i.e. petition signing).

As for your last point, we should work to end taxpayer dollars funding public health facilities...not add MORE government involvement. Smoking laws = more taxpayer money going to the POLICE to enforce these laws.

I'm not a smoker either but this is just ridiculous.

[cjhowe]

You don't have to breathe the smoke, you can leave. The government has no authority to tell business owners whether or not they can allow their customers or employees to smoke.


Then junk food should also be excessively taxed and restaurants shouldn't be allowed to serve food that doesn't meet certain nutrition standards. Same goes for anything else that could possibly be detrimental to your health.

I’m not even a smoker and these ridiculous bans piss me off

Why stop at consumption? Mandatory callisthenics. Oh, and lets pair couples off at birth and mandate they can only have sex with each other and STDs will be a thing of the past. Trust me, it's good for you.

[PennCustom4RP]

Wasn't Prohibition tried once before? That worked out well...

[1000-points-of-fright]

The health police should just come clean and call for the criminalization of tobacco. That's what they want even though the taxes fund so many of their health programs, which never made any sense to me.

The tobacco industry should pull an "Atlas Shrugged" and just stop for several months. The economies of several states would come to a grinding halt.

I also don't smoke.

[Ozwest]

In Australia the government has banned smoking anywhere indoors except your home or your vehicle. Pubs, Restaurants, and entertainment venues are suffering big-time.

[Margo37]

The government has no authority to tell business owners whether or not they can allow their customers or employees to smoke.

Well they sure do in Maryland, not certain if it's by county or what.

[cjhowe]

Well they sure do in Maryland, not certain if it's by county or what.

We often forget to insert the word "federal" when we talk about government.

[Revolution9]

http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/articles/show/138962-100-year-old+celebrates+her+birthday+by+smoking+170%2C000th +cigarette
An iron-lunged pensioner has celebrated her 100th birthday by lighting up her 170,000th cigerette from a candle on her birthday cake.

Winnie Langley started smoking only days after the First World War broke out in June 1914 when she was just seven-years-old - and has got through five a day ever since.


©KNP
Winne Langley celebrated her 100th birthday the best way she knows how - smoking.
She has no intention of quitting, even after the nationwide ban forced tobacco-lovers outside.

Speaking at her 100th birthday party Winnie said: "I have smoked ever since infant school and I have never thought about quitting.

"There were not all the the health warnings like there are today when I started. It was the done thing."

Winnie, from Croydon, South London, claims tobacco has never made her ill.

She has outlived a husband, Robert, and son, Donald, who died two years ago aged 72.

The former launderette worker said she started the habit in 1914 - just weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28 - which sparked the First World War.

The 100-year-old, who is awaiting her telegram from the Queen today, said smoking helped calm her nerves during the two World Wars.

She said: "A lot of people smoked during the war. It helped steady the nerves."

Despite the numerous health warnings, Mrs Langley insists she's never suffered because of the habit as she "has never inhaled".

Nicotine helps Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Patients
Paul Mark
vermontcynic.com
Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:57 EDT


Nicotine is a widely seen drug found in tobacco products. It is usually associated with the negative effects of smoking, including the addiction and cravings. However, nicotine can be helpful for people with pathological disease states such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. A recent study done here at UVM investigated the cognitive improvements of three groups: smokers, normal volunteers, and contrasts those with trials of nicotinic stimulation in pathological disease states. Chemical receptors for nicotine are found all throughout the central nervous system, and stimulating parts of the brain with nicotinic acid have shown to be vital to memory function. Nicotinic acid is a B vitamin found in yeast, liver, eggs, and other foods and is also known as niacin, or vitamin B3.

Studies have shown that administering nicotine in low doses independent of tobacco is relatively safe and has a low abuse rate. The behavioral effects of nicotine are complex and depend on the amount you take, how it gets into your body, gender, and personality. This makes simple classification of nicotine as either a stimulant or depressant difficult. In the absence of nicotine withdrawal symptoms, nicotine will improve the performance of smokers on tasks demanding attention and logic. For smokers, or other people addicted to nicotine, cognitive performance is generally diminished during withdrawal symptoms, and does not return to normal levels when given a nicotine patch. In general, studies previous to this one showed that administration of nicotine improves response time, but impairs memory, attention to details while reading, and motor functions. Another study showed that compared nicotine with donepezil showed there to be equal improvements with each, though the nicotine was given as one dose and the donepezil was taken for a month before the testing was done. Donepezil is also known as Aricept, and is used to treat Alzheimer's disease. In the autopsied brains of Alzheimer's disease patients, a lower number of nicotine receptors were found than in normal brain tissue. The receptors lost are of a type called ·4,2, which is one of the major receptors for nicotine in a mammals brain.

Nothing in the above has touched on the issue yet, which is the use of nicotine to help those with pathological disease states. In the treatment of mild cognitive impairment, nicotine patches were worn for up to sixteen hours per day, and those who got nicotine as opposed to the placebo performed significantly better than before receiving the treatment, with nicotine improving the decision making portion of reaction time far more than sped up the actual movement. It also improved the accuracy of answers in another cognitive test. For those with Alzheimer's disease, the main improvement that nicotine caused was a reduction in errors in the new learning phase of a task and improvements in attention related task performance. This might be due to the simple activation of the nicotine receptors in the brain and central nervous system, or cause a cascading effect involving other neurotransmitters. For Alzheimer's disease, treatment with nicotine may turn out to be difficult, due to the loss of receptors in the patient's brain. For Parkinson's disease, both acute and chronic effects were studied, with improvements in both motor skills and reaction times. Effects were seen for many weeks after treatment ended. However, when added to existing Parkinson's disease medicine, no additional improvement was seen in the patients. In schizophrenic patients, smoking is more common, perhaps due to the ability of nicotine to lessen the symptoms of the disease, as it improves memory, attention span, and spatial perception. Those with ADHD also smoke at higher rates than the general population, and in this study current smokers recalled a greater number and severity of ADHD symptoms in childhood. ADHD sufferers benefit from nicotine, gaining greater concentration abilities and better response time.

The authors of this study suggest that earlier negative results on the effects of nicotine were due to the fact that they used normal and non-smoker populations, whose cognitive performance is already at peak for the individual. The nicotine has a detrimental effect on the performance of the individual, while those who are impaired tend to show improvement when given nicotine. This seems to suggest that intermediate levels of stimulation with nicotine produce optimal results, and in those individuals who do not either respond to nicotine as strongly as the general population or ingest nicotine compounds in foods are helped by nicotine patches or injections. Too much or too little nicotine has a detrimental effect on the brain. The conclusion reached in this study is that nicotine has the greatest effect on tasks requiring attention. The authors suggest that short or impaired attention, impaired thinking and executing tasks are separate from the disease diagnosis and that nicotine and its receptors should be considered as a target for drugs for those with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or ADHD.

The gioverment is surely worried about my health.

Best
Randy

[Nefertiti]

:confused:

So you're against businesses like restaurants and offices making their own rules regarding smoking? You are endorsing a policy consistent with how a police state operates (i.e. socialism).

I'm not reading any further than this because you lost me already. A police state is not the same thing as socialism and socialism has absolutely nothing to do with where you smoke or not. Please everyone, before you use the word socialism, look up its definition.

I'm not for criminalization-my husband is a doctor and was a smoker until last year, having started at an age so young he doesn't actually remember when, and I know how much the addiction controls people. How the cigarettes chemically control people, not the other way around. Smoking is not a choice in the same sense eating junk food is. Someone may try smoking when they are young and naive and it's over. The effect of the chemicals has them hooked. If you don't recognize that then you aren't going to get anywhere. Many many smokers want to quit, but even of those that try, 95 percent of people who try to quit smoking fail, not because they don't want to quit but because their brain is slave to the chemicals. Cigarettes are the most difficult drug to quit. Smokers are NOT FREE. No one addicted to a drug who wants to quit is enjoying freedom. It may not be the government controlling them, but they are still being controlled by an external entity-the cigarette or other drug.

Creating an environment where it is harder to start smoking in the first place (eliminating it from the social environments where many people first try it like bars and restaurants) and where it is easier to quit because you can't smoke everywhere will help people who WANT to quit. It will give them their FREEDOM back.

[Vepr]

I'm not reading any further than this because you lost me already. A police state is not the same thing as socialism and socialism has absolutely nothing to do with where you smoke or not. Please everyone, before you use the word socialism, look up its definition.

I'm not for criminalization-my husband is a doctor and was a smoker until last year, having started at an age so young he doesn't actually remember when, and I know how much the addiction controls people. How the cigarettes chemically control people, not the other way around. Smoking is not a choice in the same sense eating junk food is. Someone may try smoking when they are young and naive and it's over. The effect of the chemicals has them hooked. If you don't recognize that then you aren't going to get anywhere. Many many smokers want to quit, but even of those that try, 95 percent of people who try to quit smoking fail, not because they don't want to quit but because their brain is slave to the chemicals. Cigarettes are the most difficult drug to quit. Smokers are NOT FREE. No one addicted to a drug who wants to quit is enjoying freedom. It may not be the government controlling them, but they are still being controlled by an external entity-the cigarette or other drug.

Creating an environment where it is harder to start smoking in the first place (eliminating it from the social environments where many people first try it like bars and restaurants) and where it is easier to quit because you can't smoke everywhere will help people who WANT to quit. It will give them their FREEDOM back.

The government has no business engineering an environment to deter legal behavior.

Not everyone that smokes tobacco is addicted. Those who became addicted to the effects of nicotine made a choice to become addicted.

[Revolution9]

I'm not reading any further than this because you lost me already. A police state is not the same thing as socialism and socialism has absolutely nothing to do with where you smoke or not. Please everyone, before you use the word socialism, look up its definition.

I'm not for criminalization-my husband is a doctor and was a smoker until last year, having started at an age so young he doesn't actually remember when, and I know how much the addiction controls people. How the cigarettes chemically control people, not the other way around. Smoking is not a choice in the same sense eating junk food is. Someone may try smoking when they are young and naive and it's over. The effect of the chemicals has them hooked. If you don't recognize that then you aren't going to get anywhere. Many many smokers want to quit, but even of those that try, 95 percent of people who try to quit smoking fail, not because they don't want to quit but because their brain is slave to the chemicals. Cigarettes are the most difficult drug to quit. Smokers are NOT FREE. No one addicted to a drug who wants to quit is enjoying freedom. It may not be the government controlling them, but they are still being controlled by an external entity-the cigarette or other drug.

Creating an environment where it is harder to start smoking in the first place (eliminating it from the social environments where many people first try it like bars and restaurants) and where it is easier to quit because you can't smoke everywhere will help people who WANT to quit. It will give them their FREEDOM back.

Smoking Nazi!:D You make one hell of alot of assumptions. Bars and restaurants are where kids first try cigarettes? hahaha! You will pry my cigarette from my cold dead hand. Hitler banned smoking. Why? They also introduced flouridation.. Why are these two in conjunction here as well?



Randy

[Nefertiti]

The government has no business engineering an environment to deter legal behavior.

Not everyone that smokes tobacco is addicted. Those who became addicted to the effects of nicotine made a choice to become addicted.

Addiction is a choice??? Mwahaha!! That's even more nonsensical than saying that banning smoking in public places is socialism. I suggest you read the definition of "addiction":

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+addiction&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Oh and as for the Nazi comment, you lose. Google "Godwin's law."

[Vepr]

Addiction is a choice??? Mwahaha!! That's even more nonsensical than saying that banning smoking in public places is socialism. I suggest you read the definition of "addiction":

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+addiction&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Oh and as for the Nazi comment, you lose. Google "Godwin's law."

An effort has to be made to become a “smoker.” Smoking one cigarette doesn’t magically make you addicted to them; even smoking a pack of cigarettes for a week won’t make you addicted to them. Most people don’t enjoy the effects of a cigarette the first time they try them, it’s actually rather unpleasant - you would think that would be enough to deter them. If they continue to smoke, then over time their bodies will become addicted to the effects. This is a choice they made knowing full well the side effects it would cause.

[nexalacer]

Addiction IS a choice if you are aware that you could become addicted from the product in question. For example, I knew I could get addicted to heroin so I chose not to do it, yet I knew weed was not addictive so I partook.

I am from California, where smoking in restaurants has been illegal as long as I can remember, so it was very difficult for me to adjust to life in Japan, where EVERYONE smokes in restaurants and bars. But, I've managed, and honestly, while I can't fucking stand the smell of cigarettes (when I'm not drunk that is!), it's such an offensive violation of property rights to tell a business owner what he must do at his own business, I can no longer endorse no smoking laws. But I will give you a bunch of shit if you light up right next to me.... you can listen or not, but it's just as equally my right to annoy the fuck out of you with words as it is yours to annoy the fuck out of me with smoke! :D

[Nefertiti]

Addiction IS a choice if you are aware that you could become addicted from the product in question. For example, I knew I could get addicted to heroin so I chose not to do it, yet I knew weed was not addictive so I partook.

But I will give you a bunch of shit if you light up right next to me.... you can listen or not, but it's just as equally my right to annoy the fuck out of you with words as it is yours to annoy the fuck out of me with smoke! :D

I doubt many teenagers are that aware of the addictive nature or simply don't believe it or consider themselves invincible.

You are right about the social pressure though. Best way to make those dirty smelly bastards realize the errors of their ways! :p

And if you believe cigarette smoking is a choice, that your brain has not developed a dependency on nicotine, then have some respect for the majority of the population who don't smoke and just stop smoking. What's the difference if you smoke or not? I have never smoked a cigarette and believe me, I don't miss it. What is there to miss? If cigarettes disappeared off the face of the earth, I wouldn't miss them so why should you?

Of course, it's not so simple. The cigarettes are a vicious circle that create the need for themselves. You want cigarettes because you just smoked one twenty minutes ago. Your brain has become dependent on them. You need them to keep the brain chemistry steady. The cigarettes are the reason you need cigarettes. Those who never smoked before don't have this problem at all. We don't need cigarettes because we don't smoke them in the first place.

[Trance Dance Master]

Smoking is good for you.

http://www.forces.org/evidence/evid/therap.htm