Second Hand Smoke vs Gun Deaths

[Statistician]

For those of you that want to license guns or do away with handguns all in the name of public good, you might want to take up a different cause.

www.nyc.gov/html/doh/pdf/smoke/shsmoke2.pdf

[rock2me]

I don't believe the numbers. This is somewhat propaganda. Not to minimize there are harmful effects to smoking, sometimes there is a little over-zealousness in these types of articles. Smokers are just todays pariahs. WHo's next....drinkers, coffee drinkers, the obese.

Statements like this: "Just 30 minutes of exposure to second-hand smoke produces some of the same physical reactions that would occur from long-term smoking." So they are insinuating that 30 minutes of exposure is comparable to a 2 pack a day smoker for 20 years..??? Come on.

2700 SIDS deaths? How could they know? A friend's child died early on and he was a non-smoker. There was never a solid determination to the childs cause of death. How could these people determine it would be smoking related.

That said, I hope my children and friends never smoke.



Good Luck

[Riverguy]

My stats arent right...but there was something out a while back that there are 100 million gun owners in the US and 2000 accidental deaths due to guns.

There are 2.5 million doctors in the US and 200,000 accidental deaths caused directly from doctor errors. So doctors are something like 100 times more likely to kill you as guns.

So put that in your pipe and smoke away.

[non-smoking guest]

You know, I don't smoke, and like the post above, hope none of my children or friends ever smoke, but I could never figure out how our government got to the point of justifing a lawsuit against the manufacturer of a legal product. As much as I don't approve of it, people still are responsible for their own actions. If you want to make it illegal, make it illegal. But if it's legal . . .ah well, I know the answer. If the tobacco industry wasn't making a profit, they never would have been sued.

[House]

You are partly right.

If the tobacco companies would have been upfront from the start there would be no case. All they had to do was admit to the bad and then say, "Want that in a bag?".

Instead they lied and said they knew nothing about the effects of nicotine. I remember adds saying it was good for the digestive system. They said it was healthy all the while they were developing ways to improve the delivery and compound the effects of nicotine. As soon as they lied they opened themselves up to a lawsuit. Pure greed is what drove them to do it. Who knows how many would've never started thirty years ago when this information was known.

House

[targa2]

It's actually closer to 300'000 deaths according to Ralph nader.About 60'000 of them are from complications from hip fractures. Often doctors will give the elderly combinations of medications that intoxicate them and they fall down and break a hip.Many hip fractures in the very elderly result in death within 120 days.Looks like a lot of doctors failed "DISPENSING MEDICATION 101".Iatrogenic disease is another cause of death. These are diseases that are contracted while in a hospital due to the breakdown of the immune system and/or exposure to other sick people. Pretty cruel way to die at any rate.I once heard a guy compare this situation to the airline industry. If 300'000 people were killed each year in planes no-one would fly.