It's about 18min long, but well worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8

They've responded to a shrinking market in the US and other highly developed nations, by doubling down on their efforts to sell to everyone in the rest of the world. And woe to the country with a smaller GDP than Phillip Morris who decides to try to put restrictions on a pack of smokes.

It's going to pass.

https://industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/

I once happened to meet a researcher who spent some time with the data set and they had all sorts of horrific stories about how consciously evil the cigarette companies were. The one that sticks with me is the people planning marketing campaigns for mentally handicapped adults. I had no words. I still don't, really.

Cigarette makers shouldn't be allowed to lie about their product or mislead the public, but I believe they should still be allowed to sell it. Freedom means having the ability to do something that other people disapprove of or even to do things that are self-destructive, so long as they don't directly harm others. I hate cigarettes but I would not support a legal prohibition against them.

What is second-hand smoke for $300, Jim?

E:

I say this as someone who suffered a SHS-induced asthma attack that nearly killed me when I was 6 years old. That incident got my father to quit smoking cold-turkey. Smoking can directly harm others and second-hand smoke can travel and affect those around the smoker.

Unless the point is that SHS is "indirect" harm. In which case I argue that releasing mustard gas is "indirect" harm.

1 out of 10 smoking-related deaths are non-smokers [0]. We can demonstrate it causes harm to other people and it fails to follow the criteria of "it shouldn't cause direct harm to others".

[0] http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/tobaccocancer/seco...

The burning end of the cigarette? That smoke trail is SHS, as is the smoke that the smoker exhales. The exhaled smoke isn't as harmful as the burning cigarette.

People are exposed to larger amounts of SHS in enclosed places that traps the SHS inside. You don't have to smoke to create SHS, you merely have to light a cigarette.

How much and how concentrated SHS needs to be to be considered harmful is another story. Are designated smoking areas enough? How much distance does there need to be to let the smoke dissipate into smaller amounts and be less harmful?

I don't know the answers to the above questions - and I'm not going to trust any study funded by a tobacco company.

[1] http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/1/221.short

As long as the public is well informed, I'm strongly in favor of allowing individuals to make their own choices. The cult of anti-smoking needs to come to an end. The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places, and nobody reasonable has any question about the overall health effects of cigarettes. It's time to let people make their own choices.

As long as X can X freely in their own X while their children are there and unable to escape it, the X has not been eliminated.

...

As long as parents can endlessly stock junk food freely in their own homes and cars while their children are there and unable to escape it, the influence of junk food has not been eliminated.

The problem, fundamentally, is that people can be inconsiderate of others. I would classify someone who smokes in their car with non-smokers in their presence, children and adults alike, as jerks. It's a dick move. But don't try to legislate against every dick move - teach people to be more thoughtful of others.

Food doesn't fly from the pantry into the child's mouth however children can only eat what their parents buy them. There are minor deviations from this rule e.g. the child has money to buy something nutritious or they can source food from another household. Otherwise having junk food in the house pretty much guarantees it'll find its way into the child's stomach.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

For the sake of the exercise I can compare apples to oranges. The exercise is to identify fundamental flaws in the OP's reasoning, not make simple analogies. The OP wants to ban passive smoking in the most private of spaces - feel free to explain how you do that in a way that won't be worse than exposing a child to passive smoking.

The game isn't to find something exactly analogous to something else in order to expose the flaw in the structure of someones thinking. Example: take a gospel, replace every instance of the word God with Mickey Mouse. Is Mickey Mouse analogous to God? No, but the trick helps us analyze the original text in a more objective way.

My conclusion don't try to legislate against every dick move - teach people to be more thoughtful of others was an objective response to more laws governing what people can do in their own homes. Now let's explore it further because the concept of banning smoking in someone's home is fundamentally flawed:

How do you enforce such a law? Can someone just barge into your home, slap the cigarette out of your hand and give you a fine or take your children away? Could it be abused much the same way neighbors might falsely report you for neglecting a child because they have a beef with you? How much do you fine a person if the purpose of the law is to protect the children when fining the parents will leave the children with fewer resources? Do you give the parent a criminal record? Will that help the children more? What evidence is required before barging into someones home? Do you even barge into someones home or do you politely ask them at the font door "Have you been smoking in front of your children?"

PS: Risking others lives for fun or profit seems to exist in a weird mental place. Drink and drive? Speed? Drive while really sleepy? Second hand smoke? Pollution? CO2? Fire a gun randomly in the air?

As outlined in a separate comment in this thread, your solution is unenforceable unless you want to erode some pretty fundamental freedoms. THAT'S evil. No, wait...it's not evil. "Evil" is a gross oversimplification of things. It's anti-intellectual and avoids any sort of meaningful discussion of why people do the things they do.

You feel compelled to help prevent potential respiratory issues and cancer in children exposed to second hand smoke by policing what people do in their own homes. But in the process of policing this issue you potentially do more harm than good - how do you solve the issue? Fines? Makes the family poor. Criminal record? Makes the family poor. Take away the children? Your intentions are good but I can only see the medicine being worse than the malady.

I just suggested that risking lives should be viewed as more than just 'a dick move'. Cutting in a school lunch line is 'a dick move' dumping lead into a towns drinking water is worse than that.

PS: We used to think beating children was ok so times change even if few people in up in prison.

I did put words in your mouth but the implication of your original comment, that smoking around children be banned in the home, was that there would need to be some sort of policing of this activity. To police an activity in an individuals home we need to impinge on some pretty important freedoms. So we have a choice - a severe nanny state where we address shitty behavior on a case-by-case basis or teach people to be more thoughtful so that we can prevent shitty behavior from the outset.

PS: We used to think beating children was ok so times change even if few people in up in prison.

Sending a parent to jail for beating their child is wise because beating a child imperils the child's life. On the other hand, sending someone's parents to jail for smoking around them will be more damaging than exposure to cigarette smoke. The medicine is worse than the disease. What's more, you assume all people are rational actors which we know is fantasy - just because some people have gone to prison in the past for some random transgression won't be enough to stop another person from doing the same.

Even though this unfortunately isn't the case, jail should only be used to separate violent people from the general population - there are far better methods for dealing with non-violent offenders, chiefly community service or a fine.

Also, if you have 10 equally valid issues at a national level. Then 100% fixing one of them almost impossible and probably extremely expensive where making a 20% dent in all 10 of them is more valuable and probably far less costly.

I suspect this is not necessarily the case in countries with less public health education, especially developing or poor countries which is where Tobacco has shifted its efforts to grow or maintain revenue.

there's an external dialogue though, for sure... "it's more/less bad than you think"

Reduced, but not eliminated. People still smoke in far too many public spaces in the US. Try standing at the curb outside baggage claim at SFO or SJC. Or, outside many large office buildings.

The only place smoking should be legal is in the privacy of your own single-family detached home. Even then, only if you don't have any minors living there.

That's a bit like saying "the cult of modern medicine needs to end now that I'm healthy", isn't it?

Having won all the battles they should have won, the cult is reaching to win battles they shouldn't. Keeping people well informed about the choices they make is good. Keeping public places reasonably free of smoke is good.

But once you inform smokers about the consequences of their choices and prevent them from affecting those who don't want to make those choices ... it's time to step back and allow people to make their own decisions.

If somebody wants to make an unhealthy choice for themselves, I don't have a problem with it. Maybe they'll need to pay a different health insurance premium to make up for it, and that's okay, but otherwise it is not the prerogative of my self or any government to intrude on personal choices which have effects limited to the individual.

Only in the West. Here in SE Asia you're hard pressed to find a cafe or restaurant that isn't completely engulfed in cigarette smoke during business hours. Public smoking bans seem a long way off here.

It's not much of a choice when you're psychologically manipulated through marketing to start smoking and then physically dependent and mentally addicted thereafter.

The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places

This is nonsense. I can't walk into my office without going through a giant cloud of smoke. Smokers are literally smoking right next to the signs that say, "No smoking within 30 feet of door" that are less than a foot from the door.

I have no respect for this abdication of personal responsibility.

>This is nonsense. I can't walk into my office without going through a giant cloud of smoke. Smokers are literally smoking right next to the signs that say, "No smoking within 30 feet of door" that are less than a foot from the door.

I likewise have no sympathy. There's a difference between an actual public health concern (my intention using 'nuisance') and the nonexistent right to not be offended. Sharing public space means being inconvenienced sometimes. There's a big difference between working in a smoky bar for 10 hour shifts, and smelling cigarettes for 30 seconds as you walk in a building.

This is probably not true. Sure, smokers know that cigarettes are harmful and that their live is probably going to be shortened by smoking, but they do not know the rates or severity of the various health problems.

For example Most men do not know that smoking is a leading cause of male impotence. People don't understand why their surgeon wants them to stop smoking (reduced risks during surgery; better healing after).

That's not it. Cigarettes also bring a large amount of pleasure to people. If you think that doesn't matter, replace it with candy bars, or any food that isn't part of the healthiest possible diet.

A tobacco addiction works by screwing with your brain's ability to perceive pleasure. The result is that most cigarette smokers do not get pleasure added to their lives by tobacco. It's just that they need to keep smoking just to keep getting themselves back up to feeling normal.

With the amount of caffeine addicts in the world I'm surprised at the hostility towards nicotine.

Similarly, people are much more against caffeine in the form of sugary energy drinks than caffeine in the form of tea, because energy drinks are bad for you while tea is moderately good for you on the whole.

I'm a smoker myself (quit a few times, for periods up to a year, I will quit again, but damn that addiction is going to chase me for life).

I'm not "vehemently" opposed to e-cigs, but I don't like them either. When they first appeared, I saw a few friends switch to e-cigs, and considered perhaps getting one for myself. But after a week or two, every single one of them "cheated" and occasionally smoked a real cigarette, citing that it just wasn't really the same. By now, nearly all of them have switched back to smoking real cigarettes.

Then I realized, e-cigs just keep the cravings and addiction going. I knew I wanted to quit, and quit for real. For me personally, from experience, only the first week or so of quitting is the hardest, after that the craving subsides (for some people this takes longer). Then comes the period where you're really happy you're no longer a smoker, feel cleaner, smell more things (not always good, but very worth it, and sign of progress). Then comes the long stretch where you just need to never, ever smoke a cigarette again, for the rest of your life. Because even just smoking one, after half a year, weakens that resolve, and I should consider myself "on notice" for at least a couple of weeks, because the threshold for smoking another one becomes so much lower, and before you know I'm back at step 0. It's (for me) not particularly hard on the day-by-day basis, it's the part that you can't ever give in to it again, for the rest of your life, that makes it hard to keep up.

That's why I don't like e-cigs. For someone who is really addicted, it just keeps the door open to fall back to regular cigarettes any time, because you don't do anything about the habit and nicotine addiction, you just make it less unhealthy as long as you stick to e-cigs only.

The only positive thing I have gained from smoking, is learning what addiction really means, therefore understanding other people's addictions better, and decidedly staying away from other addictive substances.

One of the more interesting bits of trivia about nicotine and caffeine is it is the mode of delivery that makes nicotine so addictive. If you smoked caffeine it would be as addictive as nicotine. Given we now have vaping it should be possible to smoke caffeine - I haven’t looked, but I would not be surprised if someone out there is selling smokable caffeine.

Yes, but it's worth noting that the increased risk of heart disease from smoking is due to more than just nicotine.

It in not only smoke that is harmful as people who chew tobacco suffer an increase in mouth cancer. While vaping should have a lower risk than smoking, it is not risk free. Since it is so new we won’t know for sometime how dangerous it is.

Of course that selfish harmful-to-others behaviour is going to attract condemnation.

When caffeine contains the above and my act of consumption means others also inhale those chemicals (SHS) then I'll care about caffeine as much as I do tobacco smoke.

Are you meaning to suggest that they have the same pharmacokinetics, or similar acute or chronic use symptoms?

This is where the whole "cold turkey" thing comes from and why quitting is so difficult for so many people

I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug, just as some people are addicted to gambling or facebook or video games. Some people just get addicted to anything that once gave them a positive emotion.

Edit: well you edited your comment twice since my reply, so I'll be right back with some information for you.

Overall synopsis: http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/cigarettes-o...

Mainstream overview: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/17/cigarettes-more-add...

> Nicotine is a drug found naturally in tobacco, which is as addictive as heroin or cocaine: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/tobaccocancer/ques...

Onset of addiction: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117976

Finally, understanding addiction of nicotine: https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/content/featured-study-understandin...

I experienced zero addiction for the first three months, and even after the full two years addiction was mild. I reduced my dose gradually over two weeks. There were no physical withdrawal symptoms, and only minor craving which went away after a few months abstinence. I'm no expert on heroin addiction, but I find it hard to believe it's equal to nicotine. Perhaps whole tobacco would be different.

It springs from the interaction between the two; different drugs have different addictive qualities, different people have different susceptibilities to those addictive qualities. Individual extreme outliers -- in both the more easily addicted and less easily addicted directions -- for any particular drug are to be expected, and don't disprove the general feature.

The only people who claim that are ones who haven't been addicted to cigarettes :-)

If you're only smoking once a month, the nicotine isn't building up enough to make withdrawal a problem. I'm not even sure there's enough nicotine in one cigarette that you would notice any withdrawal symptoms. And in a month, the nicotine from the previous cigarette is long gone.

Besides that, the hardest part of quitting is getting rid of the habits around it, and if you're only smoking once a month, you're not forming any habits. Try smoking a cigarette with your coffee first thing every morning for 6 months, and see if you still believe it's not addictive :-/

That said, I'm sure the strength of the effect can vary from person to person.

I do agree with you that the occasional cigarette can be very pleasurable.

I generally think everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want to themselves, as long as they're not being influenced by others in a way they can't control or are not fully aware of, which is what advertising and marketing generally is.

When you add in underlying physiological effects like chemical addiction to nicotine and sugar (and an ignorance of), this is clearly a case where individuals freedom and security is being infringed upon.

When the day comes that we can structure our society such that might does not make right, I'll agree with you, we should relax our laws and encourage more a more libertarian outlook. Until then, centers of power and capital need to be constrained by our legal system to protect the vulnerable.

As an example, the park nearest my house has a guy who comes by occasionally on some busy weekends to sell pot truffles. I'm sure he makes a modest living, but I have no worry about people getting dangerously hooked. If we were to let Coca Cola put the cocaine back in, though? Or to let 7-11 sell hash and crack, with prominent placards outside and a billion-dollar ad budget? No thanks.

My other half-serious plan is for licensing. Imagine that to be able to legally buy and take LSD, you have to take a 12-week class with practical exams where you drop acid with your instructor. I can think of no better way to remove the appealing mystique of drugs than to make kids turn up after school every Wednesday for a semester and have some teacher drone at them about mechanisms of action and key safety considerations.

Have we ever seen that play out for hard drugs, when capitalism is also allowed to work on treatment and rehab?

Most people put themselves firmly in a pro- or anti- legalization camp, but in reality there are major problems (and solved problems) with both approaches.

Fully legalize and you'll encounter this horrible scenario where big companies emerge to profit off addictions. They'll lobby governments domestically and abroad. They'll engage in all kinds of shady practices to protect their businesses, just as cigarette companies have. (the oft-proposed solution to the flawed status quo)

Don't legalize and you'll miss many opportunities to help addicts, allow the black market to continue, etc. All the things you're already familiar with. (the status quo)

It's complicated.

I find it disingenuous to vilify cigarettes and smoking when alcohol is considered not just okay but popular and socially acceptable. In social routines, as a non-drinker, I am an outlier.

Neither alcohol or cigarette smoking appeal to me. I personally find being around a smoker to be slightly more annoying than being around drunkards. But neither is pleasant.

Still, although I personally wouldn't be directly affected by alcohol prohibition, I am glad that I didn't live during the United States' experimentation with prohibition and I don't want alcohol prohibition today. Similarly, I don't particularly like the current prohibition of narcotics due to secondary effects. I also don't like where things are with tobacco—wherein smokers are essentially painted as evil or weak, and certainly not partaking in a habit they actually enjoy.

It would be different if smoking only affected the smoker, but as it affects the wider population (such as higher overall health care premiums), it deserves stricter controls.

And the "collective cost" argument is silly, because it can be applied to any personal liberty that negatively affects health.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s8yqj3EL7A

1) From your link, "The study doesn’t cover the many other ill effects of breathing somebody else’s cigarette smoke, of course, which include asthma and possibly cardio-pulmonary disease." So not debunked exactly.

2) Penn & Teller are entertainers (and illusionists). They present controversial opinions for the sake of a TV show. It is not journalism and shouldn't be accepted at face value.

ETA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller:_Bullshit!

Penn says, "right now, as I sit here, there probably is danger in secondhand smoke".

Asthma sufferers, for example, have all sorts of additional breathing difficulties when forced to breathe smoke (of any kind).

Heart disease is a bigger killer than cancer in many countries.

Plenty of non smokers also get cancer.

Obesity through junk food is a problem as well. It's being addressed separately.

If you want to do something disgusting do it in private.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...

Of course things are more nuanced, when it comes down to the matter of lifestyle and individual choice.

But it's kind of beside the main point. Which is: when it comes to their tireless efforts to tear down nearly any reasonable safeguards (whether in the form of health warnings on packaging, or access to minors) -- and especially the extent to which they resort to FUD and blatant anti-intellectualism to achieve these ends -- the tobacco lobby simply has no case.

I can and do limit my sugar intake but for a treat once in awhile I'll buy one of those extremely expensive yet extremely tasty imported dark chocolate bars and eat one little square as treat per day for a long while. I bet if I ate the whole bar in one sitting I could reignite my sugar cravings, but its just a gram or so of carbs so I'm good.

The counterexamples are I suppose e-cig vape people could just sniff the bottle, or people who drink one unit of soda no matter if its a 6 oz mini can or 64 oz giant cup.

Given the tobacco companies have historically been guilty of pretty much every evil known to mankind I would not be surprised to discover the "unit size cigarette" is at least partially constrained geometrically to maximize addiction, and a smaller or larger dose would result in lower addiction rates.

There might be a maximal addiction dosage of dark chocolate, but non-unit consumption of candy bars is so normal that it might not work as an addiction strategy.

Now no one smokes, but we have an obesity/diabetes epidemic, and people bring in homemade cookies or brownies every day.

I can just imagine the uproar if anyone proposed a sugar free office though.

Should we mandate showers too? I've known some people who didn't practice proper hygiene and had a rather repulsive smell. Maybe we should forcibly scrub them down.

Is that true? How many "social smokers" are there? I ask, because I do not know.

And, as the Surgeon General made clear:

http://www.theonion.com/video/surgeon-general-smoking-fine-a...

I quit nearly cold turkey (one month ramp down) and didn't touch one for about a decade. A few years ago I went through a "social smoking" phase for a few months where I'd bum a couple while out drinking, or during the day here and there. Maybe totaled like ten cigs a week or so.

There is a huuuuge difference. Social smoking is real.

The Chamber is pro heroin. Sounds nonsensical, doesn't it?

But I disagree. Free speech and the right to vote protections were given to individuals as basic human rights, and corporations are not people. More money should not equal more voting or lobbying power. I realize that is impossible to avoid entirely. Still, the more we let stuff like this happen, the more we dilute the value of our individual democratic rights.