Yesterday,the City and County of SFO banned outdoor smoking in public places, like parks, the Zoo, Golden Gate Park and somehow, the ballpark, which I am not sure they exactly own. I believe its effective immediately.
Interesting. I know that several SoCal towns banned smoking on the beach, mainly so they wouldn’t have the sand full of butts.
Well, it does get kinda difficult cleaning up all those cigarette butts, but the motivation was probably for health reasons, no?
P.S. I like how you made “the Zoo” a proper noun. 
I’ve always wanted to visit the Zoo…
I went down to the nude beach the other day and it was full of butts.
Didn’t bother me a bit.
Yesterday,the City and County of SFO banned outdoor smoking in public places, like parks, the Zoo, Golden Gate Park and somehow, the ballpark, which I am not sure they exactly own. I believe its effective immediately.
Wow! I hope this spreads! Quickly.
Edited to add the quote, so it doesn’t look like I’m advocating the spread of nekkid behinds on the beach! [The sharks are bad enough . . . ]
Heh heh heh… opposition to smoking used to mostly be a cause of the religious right. I bet the religious right aren’t who got it through in San Francisco, though.
I’m probably in the minority, and in general I hate the government interfering in our lives, but I’d advocate banning smoking everywhere. IN other words, making tobacco illegal.
The fact is, we already ban things KNOWN to be harmful or lethal such as heroin etc. Tobacco kills more people than MANY other causes of death combined. It has absolutely NO redeeming features. It’s obnoxious to non-smokers. It stands a one in four chance of KILLING a smoker due to increased risk of heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. Smoking related fires kill many people including non-smokers such as children and firefighters called to the blaze, and cost municipalities large amounts of money in firefighting costs. Non-smokers get discounts on their health insurance sometimes, but we ALL pay the increased costs of healthcare used to treat the myriad of smoking related diseases.
The only downside I could see to outlawing tobacco entirely would be an economic hit to the tobacco growing states and it’s effect on jobs. That would certainly be a consideration, but I find it hard to believe that all of that rich soil so excellent for cultivating tobacco couldn’t be put to use growing something USEFUL… like food, clothing or paper fiber, timber, (maybe even tropical exotic hardwoods for whistlemaking… 
)thus creating jobs to compensate for those lost by banning tobacco.
Imagine if you just discovered tobacco today, and wanted to bring it to the market. Do you think for a fast moment that you would be able to do it? The FDA would laugh you right out the door faster than you could blink.
I know there are smokers here who would disagree, but that’s how I’ve felt about it for years. I’ve seen far too many people I love and care about die slow and agonizing deaths from this scourge, which is 100% preventable!
I have a different perspective. In Minneapolis you can not have smoking in restaurants and bars now. This has forced people out into the streets. Many restaurants have now started putting outdoor tables for people to smoke. It irritates me that in the past I could avoid smoke by not visiting establishments that allowed smokers. Now I have to walk past then in the limited space of the side walk. Businesses in the area had already been changing to smoke free and then the government (late as usual to popular demand) decided to make private establishments smoke free. The parks, sidewalks, and other government places are still smoking areas. Like usual, the government has exempted itself.
To be out in the open, I smoke Chesterfield Kings and cigars (haven’t had either in years, never quit, just haven’t had one) and would like to smoke where and when I want to.
As I understand it, tobacco leaves chemicals in the soil that prevent most other crops from growing there. Peanuts are an exception, but peanuts are second only to tobacco for the amount of herbicides and pesticides used on a crop, so its not a very good option for the environment. If you wanted clean soil, you would have to let it sit about 7 years fallow, which would be a pretty hard hit on someone’s pocket. Just like the crop it produces, tobacco is hard to quit.
We have had no smoking in restaurants for a few years now. It has forced me to stop going to restaurants and bars. I wish it was this hard to get started when I first became addicted. There are some new products in test right now that attach nicotine to a common virus. The idea is that, as your body learns to destroy the virus, it also learns to destroy nicotine. Once your body has learned to do this, there is no going back to smoking - ever. The treatment is by injection, once a month for four months. This is the type of treatment that I think will be best for me; something that doesn’t require will-power, and that can’t be undone later. The treatment does nothing for withdrawal symptoms, so it will be like an itch that you can’t ever scratch for a while.
djm
I’m in the minority with you. If smoking were illegal, people would still smoke and they would still die of emphysema, cancer, etc., but I cannot help but think the deaths would be fewer if tobacco were harder to obtain.
I remain of a mixed mind about it from a civil liberties standpoint. I know that ultimately, tobacco has done so much harm in this world, but I also am concerned at how quickly the government can sanction what was once socially acceptable behavior. The more power you surrender to the government to police you, the more quickly you can be subdued arbitrarily and you get used to it, which is the worst of all. I don’t want to have the Stockholm Syndrome, thanks.
As a smoker I go cheerfully outside any time I want to smoke. I carry along a butt-bag so I do not litter. These rules are not going to improve my health because I am going to be going around pissed off and that will make me smoke more. I cannot understand not permitting smoking in wide open areas where one can distance onself from those who are disturbed by smoke.
Our hospital now no longer allows smoking in the parking lot, even inside one’s own car. HA!!! Come and arrest me. I have cooperated fully with reasonable requests, but I have to draw the line somewhere.
Edited to say that I do know that smoking is very bad for one’s health. I fully support any efforts to get young people to never start smoking. And I congratulate anyone who has stopped smoking.
I am not sure of that. When some countries in Europe decided to tolerate marijuana, the number of people who used it did not increase. I think that prohibiting or legalizing any drug has a very small effect on its usage.
Some people want to make all drugs legal. The idea is to use the money used to fight drugs to prevent their use (actually, they say a small amount of this money would be enough to avoid more people becoming addicted). I don’t know if it would work… But I think it would be worth thinking about it.
If I don’t use heroin, it’s not because it’s illegal, it’s because I know it’s dangerous. I have quit smoking for the same reason.
Hemp ought to grow there. Hemp grows just about anywhere. They could grow it and use it to make . . . . uh . . . ropes. Yeah . . . ropes. Great big ropes for sailing ships and stage rigging. We need more ropes!
I suppose the anti-smoking crowd here in SF might start squirming in their seats a bit if the Nazi Anti-Smoking campaign became public knowledge.
Or maybe this was something the Nazis got right? :adminok:
=================================
The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933-45
by Robert N Proctor
professor of the history of science
Department of History
Pennsylvania State University
Culmination of the campaign: 1939-41
German anti-tobacco policies accelerated towards the end of the 1930s, and by the early war years tobacco use had begun to decline. The Luftwaffe banned smoking in 1938 and the post office did likewise. Smoking was barred in many workplaces, government offices, hospitals, and rest homes. The NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) announced a ban on smoking in its offices in 1939, at which time SS chief Heinrich Himmler announced a smoking ban for all uniformed police and SS officers while on duty. The Journal of the American Medical Association that year reported Hermann Goering’s decree barring soldiers from smoking on the streets, on marches, and on brief off duty periods.
“Tobacco capital” raining down to spoil the people’s health (Volksgesundheit), labour power (Arbeitskraft), demographic political goals (Bevolkerungspolitische Ziele), and the wealth of the people (Volksvermogen). (From Reine Luft 1941;23:117)
I’m with you on this, Cynth. While I stopped smoking two years ago today, I think the government’s meddling has gone way too far.
Paul, tobacco doesn’t damage the soil, anymore than any other plant does. But tobacco DOES grow well on marginal land and yield a good dollar amount per acre, which is why it’s so widely grown in places such as North Carolina, where the soil is (and always has been) extremely poor and most farmers are small family farmers with only a small acreage. There’s little else they can grow in sufficient quantities to support their families. When the small farms go out of business, they’re snapped up by the big agribusinesses, which build intensive hog and poultry operations on them…environmental disasters.
Try coaxing even a small garden out of NC’s red clay soil, and you can see the problem facing the tobacco farmer who has to feed a family from his few acres.
There are two very good options for tobacco farmers, none of which the government will allow them to explore because they are against the official “anti-drug/anti-tobacco” religion. One is the many medical uses for tobacco. The other is the cultivation of hemp, which does well on the same kind of land that supports tobacco growth, and which has almost the same economic potential.
Redwolf
Take the taxes out of Tobacco sales and you have a bankrurpt country..
What is lost on Healthcare is nothing compared to what is gained on tax.
It ain’t pretty, but it is true.
Slan,
D.
Gilder, thanks for that post. Very provocative info. As you doubtless know, Hitler was a vegetarian, an enviromentalist, supported euthanasia and gun control. The latter was justified to control “extreme right wing elements” according to propaganda of the day.
People get upset if one attempts to draw parallels to today, but I will say that it’s not certain where totalitarianism comes from on the polemic scale.
The first tobacco butt.
I wonder if tobacco was a well placed booby-trap by the Native Americans. Did they know it would eventually consume the White European invaders in so many ways?
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Native Americans harvest tobacco -- This drawing shows Native Americans working as slaves on a tobacco plantation run by Europeans. Disease and the hardships of slave labor soon killed most of the Native Americans working on the tobacco farms. African slaves were soon brought to the New World to replace them.due to allergies, etc - I have never tried smoking. I also have a very low tolerance to tobacco smoke - being around it in enclosed spaces will at the least, give me a headache, at the most, full blown asthma.
Tom, however, is a smoker. He does so ONLY outside, even when we are at other places, such as a restaurant, where it is ok to do so inside. He also is a “good” smoker, in that he throws away his filters in the garbage, etc., and his clothes or hair rarely smells of smoke. He makes it through the night without smoking, and I’ve seen him make it 7 hours (long flight) without doing so. He chooses not to try stopping at this time, and that’s his choice (he is also in great health).
I do appreciate private establishments CHOOSING to be smoke free. I do not appreciate the government telling them they must be so. For years, our break area at work was a smoking area, so I chose not to go in it. Didn’t bother me one way or the other. I can choose to not go to a restaurant that allows smoking.
I also know some tobacco farmers that would never be able to raise a different crop and make it financially. Tobacco is still Kentucky’s largest “legal” cash crop.
As for health costs - I’m not sure that smoking doesn’t actually free UP some money. While cancer, etc. does claim lives expensively, it tends to do so earlier than if the person hadn’t smoked. So you need to look at the true “costs” of how much a person would have used over the additional years they would have lived if they had not smoked.
Again - it’s a choice, one I may choose not to make, but one I don’t feel the government has a right to do, either.
But I also think marijuana should be legal - so what do I know??? 