From: bell@cs.unc.edu (Andrew Bell)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs,talk.politics.medicine,sci.med
Subject: Re: From _Scientific American_
Date: 26 Jan 1993 02:00:31 -0500
Organization: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
NNTP-Posting-Host: beethoven.cs.unc.edu

In article <1k1gkqINN285@armory.centerline.com> mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) writes:
>In article <1993Jan21.095319.28095@muddcs.claremont.edu> ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu (Eli Brandt) writes:
>>Sale of lethal products is self-limiting,
>>while bureaucratic stupidity is self-replicating.

>Self-limiting at what level?  Tobacco shows no signs of being self-limiting
>because of death of its users at the current level of almost a half million
>a year in the US alone.  Remove limitations on advertising, remove
>epidemological studies that show the clear connection, remove programs that
>educate about the hazards, and I suspect that an addictive drug such as
>tobacco could double or triple its toll.

Hardly likely, since the people dying now started smoking when more than
50% of the population smoked, so you're running out of victims.  Even just
counting those who smoke now, to triple it you've got to have everyone
smoking.  Hardly likely.

More to the point, what the Jesus Humphrey Christ does this have to do with
anything anyone has been saying on the net?  All we're saying is make
the FDA advisory.  The real question regarding tobacco would be "what
effect would outlawing tobacco have?"  Perhaps because cigarettes have
relatively weak psychoactive effects, tobacco prohibition would be more
productive than alcohol Prohibition was.  But there is an alternative
I'll mention later, without the harmful side effects of Prohibition.

>What is self-replicating (or even spontaneously generating) is the willingness
>to convince people to poison themselves rapidly or slowly to make a buck.

Making a buck by poisoning people rapidly can only happen in a black
market.  Otherwise, legal action can be taken against the manufacturer.
But come up with drug laws, and the sellers can't prosecute.

As for slow deaths, it's not like most smokers don't know the risks of
smoking -- you would have to be from another planet (ok, another country
at the very least) not to know of the hazards.  The manufacturers may
be willing to lie through the Tobacco Institute, but tobacco really is
a special case.  It has hundreds of years of use, during most of which
the price was high enough to limit its use by most.  Only with the
invention of the cigarette rolling machines did the per person use of
cigarettes skyrocket, beginning somewhere around the beginning of this
century.  But any new product that comes on the market will not have
the hundreds of years and millions of person user base to keep it
around after reports of the dangers come out.  Moreover, there's no
legal safer alternative to tobacco that might help users overcome their
addiction by replacing it with another less harmful addiction.  Early
20th century physicians treated alcoholics by making them morphine
addicts, believing it to be a less harmful addiction.  (With a safe
supply of legal morphine, this is probably true...)

At least tobacco addicts are only killing themselves.  The FDA is
killing other people.

   Andrew Bell
   bell@cs.unc.edu



Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs,talk.politics.medicine,sci.med