Sharp Rise in Young People Smoking Pipes, Cigars & Shisha

[Auxsender]

Still a small amount of the population, and yet they still won't be content until they've legislated against it. I suppose we all knew it wouldn't be long before countries tried to ban tobacco completely. What surprises me is that it's happened in the UK first!

Only in California. Everything is known to cause cancer in California. Even the drugs doctors use to cure cancer have that warning on them. Just that one state though. You're safe everywhere else. But the FDA hasn't evaluated any of those statements so it's meaningless.

The leading cause of death is birth.

Some folks love a good cause to get behind. I wish they'd put such efforts towards the Fentanyl problem instead.

Tobacco might kill you some day. Fentanyl will get it done posthaste. But let's worry about tobacco, shall we?

There are finite financial resources, material resources, and Human Resources to address issues in society. Additionally, there is only so much mental capacity people can take to focus on topics to address both on the administrative side and the public side. The more you widen your focus in a given genre (this case an umbrella of drugs), the less actual good you'll be able to do.

Also, depending on your state, they aren't really "on" the issue. In my state for example, it is illegal to prosecute drug use if the police are there for a medical call. You can literally be surrounded by drugs and paraphernalia and police can't do anything beyond handing a flyer to get help. They don't even take the drugs!

You can OD on fentanyl, get your nasal spray to get you out of it, decline transport to the hospital after your onsite medical examination and everyone just goes home. You can then do it all over again as soon as you want. To me, it seems to make more sense to allocate more of your finite resources to a more urgent issue than tobacco in the larger scheme of drug control.

Y’all acting like tobacco doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year in The United States alone.
Cmon now.

Tobacco Facts | State of Tobacco Control

Get quick stats and key facts about tobacco control.

www.lung.org

Tobacco

Tobacco fact sheet from WHO providing key facts and information on surveillance, second-hand smoke, quitting, picture warnings, ad bans, taxes, WHO response.

www.who.int

Current Cigarette Smoking Among Adults in the United States

See data and statistical information for adult cigarette smoking in the United States.

www.cdc.gov

 

[jaingorenard]

Y’all acting like tobacco doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year in The United States alone.
Cmon now.

Tobacco Facts | State of Tobacco Control

Get quick stats and key facts about tobacco control.

www.lung.org

Tobacco

Tobacco fact sheet from WHO providing key facts and information on surveillance, second-hand smoke, quitting, picture warnings, ad bans, taxes, WHO response.

www.who.int

Current Cigarette Smoking Among Adults in the United States

See data and statistical information for adult cigarette smoking in the United States.

www.cdc.gov

Sorry, but I wasn't claiming that tobacco can be dangerous at all. I just don't necessarily think that is a case for banning it or restricting it.

 

[fireground_piper]

Tobacco falls under the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. It still is a strawman, even if you compared the issues to marijuana, cocaine, or Tylenol.

And all roll up into the DOJ.

 

[Auxsender]

Sorry, but I wasn't claiming that tobacco can be dangerous at all. I just don't necessarily think that is a case for banning it or restricting it.

I’ll assume you meant “can’t” and not “can”.

Interesting that nearly half a million deaths PER YEAR in a country of 330M isn’t a case for restriction for you.

Earnest question:
In your mind, should anything be restricted at all for any reason ever?

 

[jaingorenard]

I’ll assume you meant “can’t” and not “can”.

Interesting that nearly half a million deaths PER YEAR in a country of 330M isn’t a case for restriction for you.

Earnest question:
In your mind, should anything be restricted at all for any reason ever?

I haven't looked into how that figure is calculated.

There are apparently almost as many deaths from obesity - do you believe in restricting what food people eat?

And, to answer your question in the most basic way, 'no'. I'm not in favour of banning or restricting things on a personal level from the perspective of public health. I think public health measures should only ever take the form of education or encouragement.

To be consistent, I would personally extend this to drugs. Having said that, I think a decent argument can be made that the societal degradation caused by some drugs is a good argument for restricting them, and this can't necessarily be made for tobacco (to be clear, this is not an argument I would make, although it is one I feel a lot of sympathy for).

 

[fireground_piper]

Y’all acting like tobacco doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year in The United States alone.
Cmon now.

Tobacco Facts | State of Tobacco Control

Get quick stats and key facts about tobacco control.

www.lung.org

Tobacco

Tobacco fact sheet from WHO providing key facts and information on surveillance, second-hand smoke, quitting, picture warnings, ad bans, taxes, WHO response.

www.who.int

Current Cigarette Smoking Among Adults in the United States

See data and statistical information for adult cigarette smoking in the United States.

www.cdc.gov

My position is strictly from a resource allocation issue. At least in the US, all of these agencies roll up into the DOJ and their budget. If you have a finite department budget to allocate to your various agencies, and the tobacco part of an agency wants more resources because there's an uptick in pipe smoking while my agency tasked on opioids is floundering, not only am I not going to want to increase the tobacco asset allocation but I'd likely look to decrease it (and any other areas) to put more into the opioid problem for the future fiscal years until it's under control. If you can get that issue under control at some point, you can re-balance your resources accordingly on future fiscal budgets to the agencies that need it for whatever your current and short term goals are.

 

[Auxsender]

I haven't looked into how that figure is calculated.

There are apparently almost as many deaths from obesity - do you believe in restricting what food people eat?

And, to answer your question in the most basic way, 'no'. I'm not in favour of banning or restricting things on a personal level from the perspective of public health. I think public health measures should only ever take the form of education or encouragement.

To be consistent, I would personally extend this to drugs. Having said that, I think a decent argument can be made that the societal degradation caused by some drugs is a good argument for restricting them, and this can't necessarily be made for tobacco (to be clear, this is not an argument I would make, although it is one I feel a lot of sympathy for).

I agree with you that education is vital to help the public make more informed decisions.

Food isn’t the only cause of obesity and people need food to survive. Both of these facts make your obesity “point” a classic strawman argument which of course is totally invalid and frankly, absurd but I believe it was your intention to use absurdity to highlight your belief that tobacco should not be restricted.

What specifically is the “societal degradation” to which you refer that is more harmful than hundreds of thousands of annual deaths? About 71k people die of Fentanyl annually in USA which is a tiny fraction of the amount of people that die from tobacco related causes.

I love pipe smoking but I understand that tobacco is a mass killer and thusly should be tightly regulated.

 

[Auxsender]

My position is strictly from a resource allocation issue. At least in the US, all of these agencies roll up into the DOJ and their budget. If you have a finite department budget to allocate to your various agencies, and the tobacco part of an agency wants more resources because there's an uptick in pipe smoking while my agency tasked on opioids is floundering, not only am I not going to want to increase the tobacco asset allocation but I'd likely look to decrease it (and any other areas) to put more into the opioid problem for the future fiscal years until it's under control. If you can get that issue under control at some point, you can re-balance your resources accordingly on future fiscal budgets to the agencies that need it for whatever your current and short term goals are.

The number of deaths caused by tobacco so vastly exceeds the number of all drug related deaths I would expect tobacco restriction to have the lions share of any domestic vice prevention budget.

I will agree that an increase in pipe smoking maybe isn’t the best metric to justify more money going to tobacco use prevention because so few people smoke pipes.

 

[ParkitoATL]

Y’all acting like tobacco doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year in The United States alone.
Cmon now.

seriously, if we wanted to save lives, we would ban sugar and booze.

 

[Auxsender]

seriously, if we wanted to save lives, we would ban sugar and booze.

Or at least educate the public better as our colleague mentioned earlier.

 

[sardonicus87]

You can't even fully trust the tobacco death numbers either.

Eat McDonald's 2 times per day and never exercise, smoke half a pack of cigarettes per day and die of cardiovascular related disease, they're going to list is as a tobacco casualty, not a casualty of a multitude of poor life choices or 14 super size Big Mac meals a week. That's happened many times in the figuring.

It's also equally off the point.

There's also indirect death attributed to cigarettes/tobacco from non-users (second hand), but do those fentanyl or other drug numbers count children that died due to parental neglect, intoxicated driving, gang-related/trafficking violence and various other collateral damage, or is it only counting those directly killed by X drug? And also, are we seriously comparing ALL tobacco consumption forms to one specific opioid form (rather than all combined opioid deaths)?

There's a lot of ways you can calculate these things, and not everything is calculated in the same way. So it's not even comparing apples and oranges, it's comparing all varieties of apples combined to one specific variety of orange.

Furthermore, I don't see where anyone argued that tobacco wasn't deadly or unhealthy for you to be so bent out of shape about it.

 

[WerewolfOfLondon]

For me this is clear cut. People should be allowed to do exactly what they want to their own bodies, if they have private health and there is no public health care available in the country or state in which they reside. If public health exists though, then it is fair and reasonable to restrict the harm people can do to themselves. Just two different conceptions of what it means to be 'free'.

 

[jaingorenard]

For me this is clear cut. People should be allowed to do exactly what they want to their own bodies, if they have private health and there is no public health care available in the country or state in which they reside. If public health exists though, then it is fair and reasonable to restrict the harm people can do to themselves. Just two different conceptions of what it means to be 'free'.

Genuine question - what do you feel about a situation like the UK where the tax raised on tobacco far outweighs costs to the health service? And the other argument that normal aging costs more than early death from smoking?

 

[woodsroad]

'quotation from the text'' Cigars, Shisha, cigarillos and pipes are non-cigarette forms of smoking and can be more harmful as cigarettes''

Translation:
“Cigars, Shisha, Cigarellos and Pipes are taxed at a lower rate. We need to fix that.”

 

[WerewolfOfLondon]

Genuine question - what do you feel about a situation like the UK where the tax raised on tobacco far outweighs costs to the health service? And the other argument that normal aging costs more than early death from smoking?

Firstly, is it certain that the taxes raised by tobacco outweigh the costs (cigarette) smokers put on the NHS? Assuming they do though, it certainly makes the question less straightforward. I would have to say let them smoke as much as they want, any other answer from me would be something of a contradiction. That said, I do feel that countries with public health services, owe more to the health of their populations than simply making utilitarian calculations of how best to pay for health care. There is also a duty to make sure the population are informed, and where appropriate, strong armed into making better health decisions.

All told, I cant see how it can be right for a government to sit back whilst ill-informed individuals are exploited by corporations to destroy themselves with fags, fast food, and drugs. And even more than that, I can't see how it can be right to allow them to do so, because them doing so pays for healthcare for the rest of us.

 

[jaingorenard]

That said, I do feel that countries with public health services, owe more to the health of their populations than simply making utilitarian calculations of how best to pay for health care. There is also a duty to make sure the population are informed, and where appropriate, strong armed into making better health decisions.

I mostly agree, just not the 'strong-arming' bit!

All told, I cant see how it can be right for a government to sit back whilst ill-informed individuals are exploited by corporations to destroy themselves with fags, fast food, and drugs. And even more than that, I can't see how it can be right to allow them to do so, because them doing so pays for healthcare for the rest of us.

I think there's a big danger here of saying 'I'm making a well-informed decision and weighing pleasure vs risk, but you're just ill-informed and making a bad decision' (I'm not saying that this is what you're saying, I just think this sort of idea can stray into this territory). A lot of this often seems to be class-based. Even 'sin taxes' are aimed at stopping people who can't afford something from using it - a Canary Wharf banker isn't troubled by the taxes on cigs and alcohol.

I suppose this is exactly why I think public health measures should focus on education and provision of services to help people stop if they want to, rather than prohibitions (and I think there are other, practical, arguments against prohibitions). Even with education, you'll always have some people who are ill-informed and make bad decisions, but that's fine - adults in a liberal democracy need to be able to make bad decisions. Hopefully through education you could reduce this number.

 

[proteus]

Nothing on this planet prolongs my life or makes me immortal. Tobacco doesn't kill anyone any more than wearing clothes does. Hey everyone who wears clothes dies. I'm sure the air I breathe isn't good for me. The chemicals in the soil, the preservatives in food, the salt in my bacon, the ingredients I can't pronounce, the franken food grown from GMO and even so-called organic food isn't immune from cancer causing agents and it goes on and on. I can't avoid everything that purportedly might kill me. And if I i could I'd die due to the sheer amount of stress I'd put myself through worrying about everything that might kill me. I wouldn't smoke a pound of pipe tobacco a day but seriously I find it hard to believe a couple bowls would drop me like a cyanide pill would.

 

[sardonicus87]

I suppose this is exactly why I think public health measures should focus on education and provision of services to help people stop if they want to, rather than prohibitions (and I think there are other, practical, arguments against prohibitions). Even with education, you'll always have some people who are ill-informed and make bad decisions, but that's fine - adults in a liberal democracy need to be able to make bad decisions. Hopefully through education you could reduce this number.

Nevermind that even strong-arming, let alone outright prohibition, almost never works, all it does generally, is make the thing prohibited more dangerous.

Smoking is greatly reduced from what it once was. In the USA in 2021, it was estimated 11.5%. Probably consider most of that percentage skews much older and the next generation probably will smoke less. In 2005 it was 20.9%. So the number of smokers cut almost in half in the span of 15 years. It was 40% of adults that smoked in the 1970s.

Education clearly works. Those that continue are clearly aware of the risks and chose to do so anyway, as is their right, or anyone's right.

If you own nothing else in this world, you own your own meat-suit. Everything beyond that is fake. Money is fake, time is fake, etc... it's all human-constructed nonsense.

 

[WerewolfOfLondon]

I mostly agree, just not the 'strong-arming' bit!

I think there's a big danger here of saying 'I'm making a well-informed decision and weighing pleasure vs risk, but you're just ill-informed and making a bad decision' (I'm not saying that this is what you're saying, I just think this sort of idea can stray into this territory). A lot of this often seems to be class-based. Even 'sin taxes' are aimed at stopping people who can't afford something from using it - a Canary Wharf banker isn't troubled by the taxes on cigs and alcohol.

I suppose this is exactly why I think public health measures should focus on education and provision of services to help people stop if they want to, rather than prohibitions (and I think there are other, practical, arguments against prohibitions). Even with education, you'll always have some people who are ill-informed and make bad decisions, but that's fine - adults in a liberal democracy need to be able to make bad decisions. Hopefully through education you could reduce this number.

Yeah I hear you, the dangers you point to are exactly where it can go wrong. If we have officials telling anyone anything, the danger is always that such instructions will stray beyond what is empirically observable. So today we have fags are bad, which is an observable reality, and tomorrow we have flat screen TVs are bad because they encourage laziness, not so observable. And as you correctly state, this is nearly always based on class. We see poor people harangued for having necessities like phones, whilst we rarely hear anything about the middle class people who single-handedly prop up the cocaine industry.

But for sure, people have to be able to make poor decisions in a liberal democracy. Perhaps we need to have more restrictions on the companies that advertise all this crap. Maybe get as draconian with McDonalds as we do with big tobacco.

 

[MartyA]

I almost hesitate to type this out, because anyone arguing in favor of the relative safety of tobacco tends to look like they're rationalizing something they want to do, or just being a fool.

HOWEVER, pipe smoking, where the smoke is merely drawn into the mouth and blown out again, is probably the least dangerous use of tobacco. In the 1964 Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, which was the death knell of cigarette smoking, pipe smoking barely registered. The increased death rate of "moderate" pipe smokers over non-smokers barely registered, or at worst was a several percent increase. This is why many cigarette smokers tried switching to pipes, which probably increased the statistical dangers of pipe smoking since many kept inhaling the smoke. (which I couldn't do if I wanted to.)

So, at the risk of being an idiot, I'd say that WHILE TOBACCO IS A KNOWN, PROVEN, CARCINOGEN, pipe smoking is probably the safest way to enjoy it. You makes your choices and takes your chances.