Posted on 02/21/2005 9:42:02 AM PST by SheLion
They had me until the Nazis marched in.
Even before a Michigan company called Weyco fired four employees on Feb. 9 because they wouldn’t quit smoking -- the company hoped to save a little money on health insurance -- Smokers Club was sounding the alarm about cigarette bans.
“The World Is In A Smoking War,” ran the headline on the notice e-mailed Jan. 10 from Smokers Club national honcho Samantha Phillipe. “Smoking Bans Kill People.”
“This failed experiment in modifying human behavior is killing people and it has to stop now,” she wrote. “Death certificates from secondary smoke exposure are zero, while death certificates from smoking bans and making a legal product politically incorrect are rising.”
The carnage is detailed on the group’s “Ban Damage” Web page, via www.smokersclubinc.com. In Massachusetts late last year, a college kid died after falling off a balcony; he had, perhaps, stepped out to smoke. In Colorado two years ago, a woman was shot and killed outside a bar, suspiciously near where smokers congregate. Near Pretoria, South Africa, just after Christmas, two guys were arguing about smoking when they took out a gun, struggled with it, and caught a little kid in the crossfire.
All this Web page needs is a pop-up Dan Aykroyd intoning, “Another smoking-related death, Jane,” to make the picture complete.
Smokers Club has a mid-Atlantic regional director, Michael McFadden of Philadelphia, who couldn’t have been more reasonable. Except for the Nazi stuff.
Even though I would ban smoking from the face of the earth -- screw health, the stuff just smells bad -- even I can see that Weyco was way out of line. I expected McFadden to agree.
“I think he had a right to do it,” McFadden says of Weyco’s chief. “He has just as much right to say, ‘I just want smokers here -- I don’t want to pay out pensions.’”
McFadden, apparently, is not your average cigarette advocate. He convinced Manhattan College to make him their first “peace studies” major in 1973, he says. Then it was on to “peace research” toward a doctorate -- never completed -- at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He spent post-college years knocking on doors on behalf of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.
“That background made me very aware of propaganda techniques, the way the government promotes war, and fallacious argument techniques, [like] waving babies in the air,” McFadden says. “The anti-smoking movement does the same thing: ‘We’re doing it for the children’ -- even though they’re primarily trying to get rid of smoking in bars.
“They very much do smell of Big Brother,” he concludes.
His epuffany, so to speak, came in the ’70s, when one of his housemates brought home anti-smoking literature that was “very disruptive to the community,” he says.
Now, at 53, he’s been doing nothing but volunteer pro-smoking work for the past three years. That, and ordering River City No. 2 in pound bags from Kentucky and rolling his own on a special machine he got from Canada.
His book, Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains, is available at his Web site, cantiloper.tripod.com. The first review McFadden displays calls the current anti-smoking push -- wait for it -- “the most astonishing political saga since the rise of Adolf Hitler …” Neither this review, nor apparently McFadden’s book, can resist quoting German pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous warning. You know the one: “They first came for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews …”
McFadden does warn of a next victim: alcohol drinkers.
Current public aversion to smoke is the product of sensitivity training more than actual physical aversion, he says. Holding our collective noses at alcohol’s fumes could be next.
In tobacco smoke, there are 6 class-A carcinogens -- ones that give cancer to humans -- he explains. (“The other 44 aren’t class A,” he adds. Not very reassuring, but OK.) Together, the class-A nasties add up to only one milligram per cigarette.
One full gram’s worth of the class-A carcinogen ethyl alcohol, on the other hand, can evaporate from pure alcohol each hour, he says: “If you’re sitting across the room, you’re breathing it, and I’m giving you cancer.”
There are 600 footnotes in McFadden’s book, and already my head is swimming from trying to calculate the relative deadliness of cigarettes smoked and drinks un-drunk. Sort of like what it feels like to spend a couple of hours in a smoky bar, even when I haven’t smoked or drunk anything alcoholic.
Except I don’t have the impulse to burn my clothes now.
"McFadden does warn of a next victim: alcohol drinkers"
The obese. If Big Bussiness really thinks it can save costs by firing smokers, the Micky D's crew is next.
Despite my support of smoker's and personal property rights, I fail to see how smoking bans lead to people's deaths. In most of these cases, it could be said that it's the smoking that causes people to die, not the ban.
If I ever find a rolling machine that won't fall apart after using it for a week I will buy it. I have only ever seen one kind available. The one that constantly jams up.
Are you talking about the Supermatic Premiere?
My wife can hand roll a cigarette perfectly and that's odd because she has never smoked cigarettes. Make me think mmmmm wonder she picked up that skill.
Since I have my scissors right there to trim the butt ends as I make them, I scrape the residue off about every fourth to tenth cigarette and everything works fine.
The only other cause of jamming that I've encountered is trying to use the too fine chafe at the bag bottom without mixing it with some long cut.
Or you could just be overloading the chamber.
I hope that helps.
HI,
I need a medical answer about nicotine testinig, please, if anyone knows.
What kind of testing do docs do, blood or urine, and how long does nicotine stay in system?
Reason I am asking, is lied to doc aboout quitting, sorta, and am going in for big surgery, doc won't do unless I am "clean", so need to know when the deadliine is before going to doc.
Apprreciate any feedback, thanks.
bump for question
Life Rule #2. - Always lie to your lawyer.
Bullcrap. Try that hiring policy, but have your appointment with your attorney set up beforehand.
The urine test kits used by employers will detect nicotine from two to four days after smoking a cigarette. You can buy these test kits online for $9.95. The test your doctor uses is probaby even more sensitive. Nicotine is easier to detect than most illegal drugs.
...
I used to date a female university professor who smoked (she eventually quit when she got pneumonia and had to stay in an oxygen tent for a while). She used to complain that the anti-smoking policy of her university meant that smokers had to go outside, even in the winter, making them more likely to get sick from exposure to the cold. I guess she was right.
Thanks so much for answering her question. I have been scratching my head trying to remember how they tested for nicotine!!
I know that they used to also use Carbon Monoxide testing (blowing into a machine) to detect if someone has been smoking. Don't know the specifics, though.
It works better for me if the tobacco's only very, very slightly moist. I have a spray bottle and give a one-pound bag a squirt and let it set for a day before rolling it. Works great, so far.
OH! And, I have the same model machine that SheLion's got. Ain't broke it yet, though.
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