Talk:Tobacco smoking/Archive 1

message: So--is it a recreational drug or not? The anonymous editor who says it isn't wrote:
:I polled a several people today and all of them agreed. Tobacco smoking does not effect cognition, reasoning, language, motor skills, etc.
I say, nicotine is a stimulant. Its article says "it has a stimulating effect, increasing activity, alertness and memory." People certainly use it recreationally. It is undoubtedly a drug. Hence, it is a recreational drug.
Thoughts?
Lukobe 04:55, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Recreational drug?

message: I deleted "It should be noted that many of the studies used to determine how dangerous tobacco is are disputed.".  I have no problem with discussing the disputes, but just stating this boldly without support is useless.  Please add some supporting information.  RickK 02:55, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Disputed studies

message: On Friday, July 17, 1998 the U.S. District Court in North Carolina, acting on a lawsuit filed by the tobacco industry, struck down a 1993 finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that so-called second-hand smoke causes lung cancer. According to the Associated Press, the EPA's controversial report concluded that second-hand tobacco smoke should be classified as a Class A carcinogen and was responsible for more than 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year. That report has since been cited widely in decisions by state and local officials to restrict smoking in public places, including bars, restaurants, airliners, and offices. 
But the court ruled that the EPA had based its report on inadequate science and failed to demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between second-hand smoke and lung cancer. It further stated that the EPA followed improper procedure by not including industry experts in its deliberations, as required by law, and further criticized the EPA for having aggressively utilized the report's findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme intended to restrict plaintiffs' products and to influence public opinion. 
Said the court: EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun...[and] adjusted established procedures and scientific norms to validate the agency's public conclusions.
:It's true that the U.S. District Judge William Osteen made that statement in his ruling, but judges are not scientists, and their statements about science carry no more weight within the scientific community than the statements of journalists, priests or plumbers. The tobacco industry aggressively litigates and has won lots of courtroom verdicts in the past that were inconsistent with science and justice, some of which have later been reversed in subsequent court decisions. (The industry used to brag that they had never lost a liability lawsuit.) Judges are politically appointed, and increasingly they have been packed with conservatives. Moreover, there are reports that Osteen used to work as a tobacco lobbyist. And as the article currently states, EPA's assessment has been supported by a number of subsequent scientific studies from the World Health Organization and other leading scientific and health agencies. The term "junk science" in this context is mere name-calling, a common rhetorical technique tht should be greeted with skepticism.
:For an anti-tobacco group's take on Osteen's ruling, try this URL:
:http://www.no-smoke.org/epaback.html
::I think that the article should include information about the specific findings that Osteen disputed in the EPA study so that readers could determine for themselves whether they believe his ruling to be sound or not.  The two biggest problems that Osteen noted were that the EPA released its opinion on the dangers of environmental tobacco smoke before its own studies had been completed, and that the EPA disregarded its own internal scientific guidelines for confidence intervals and statistical significance in order to classify ETS as a carcinogen.  Can we add those specific critiques of the EPA data and let readers make their own judgements about the validity of the EPA study?
----
Re: "Many of the health and moral effects can be avoided through Smoking cessation" - I have never heard of "moral effects" of smoking, not even in Christian theology or mythology. I have doubts that it can be NPOV alluded to as fact that smoking causes moral effects. Jesus Blows Goats 07:24, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Junk Science

message: British entertainer Roy Castle attributed his death from lung cancer entirely to passive smoking.
I'm just about to re-phrase this, but thought it should be left here for the comedy value :)
Tjwood 15:12, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: and there's about a 1 in 6 chance that he was right, whether he made this pronouncement from beyond the grave or not :o) --EmmetCaulfield 17:32, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Amusing error 

message: I'm wondering if the "passive smoking" section shouldn't be broken out into a separate article? I notice references to "secondhand smoke" and "passive smoking" in other articles. Or should those phrases just be directed to the subsection of this article?
-Lukobe 17:28, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Secondhand smoke

message: on such an important topic?
Lockeownzj00 22:52, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Done, adding a picture of my hand holding a lit cigarette. No artistic value here, just a placeholder until someone comes up with a better, free, picture. -=vyruss=- 03:50, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  not ONE picture? 

message: Some problematic passages have crept in since the last time I looked at this article. Here are the changes I made and the reasons.
History:
:Most smoking restrictions and anti-smoking programs today focus largely on reducing cigarette use.
This statement may be true (since cigarettes are the most commonly smoked form of tobacco in modern times), but it really isn't part of the "history" of tobacco per se.
Health effects
I restored a list of chemical constituents of tobacco smoke that are known or suspected to cause cancer. This list appeared in earlier versions of the article and was deleted by someone who also committed a number of other vandalisms. The other deletions were restored, but this passage got left out somehow.
Pipe and cigar smoking
This POV passage was inserted originally by someone who was clearly passionate about trying to defend pipe and cigar smoking. It stated that "it is important to note that" risks "are far, far lower for pipe and cigar smokers." Although "far, far lower" has been toned down to "far lower," this is still not the language of science or objective fact. There is no quantitative meaning to the phrase "far lower." Likewise, saying that it is "important" to note this claim is merely an intensifier. Most importantly, the claim as stated is misleading. It is not true, for example, to say that cigar and pipe smokers "generally do not inhale the smoke into the lungs and typically smoke tobacco which is in a more natural state than that usually found in commercially produced cigarettes." They do inhale smoke into the lungs, and pipe and cigar tobacco is just as "commercially produced" as cigarettes. Here's what the American Cancer Society has to say about pipe and cigar smoking:
:Smoking cigars or pipes is not a safe alternative to smoking cigarettes.
:Most of the same cancer-causing substances found in cigarettes are found in cigars. Most cigars have as much nicotine as several cigarettes. When cigar smokers inhale, nicotine is absorbed as rapidly as it is with cigarettes. For those who do not inhale, it is absorbed more slowly through the lining of the mouth. Both inhaled and non-inhaled nicotine are highly addictive.
:Smoking cigars causes cancers of the lung, oral cavity, larynx, esophagus, and probably cancers of the bladder and pancreas. Cigar smokers have a greater risk of dying from cancer of the oral cavity, larynx (voice box), or esophagus compared with nonsmokers. The risk of death from lung cancer is not as high as it is for cigarette smokers, but is still several times higher than the risk for nonsmokers.
:Cigar smokers who inhale deeply and smoke several cigars a day are also at increased risk for heart disease and chronic lung disease.
:Pipe smokers are at increased risk of dying from cancers of the lung, esophagus, larynx, pancreas, and colon and rectum. They are also at increased risk of dying of heart disease, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The level of these risks seems to be about the same as that for cigar smokers. 
I have dealt with this passage by moving it into the "health effects" section 
Alleged health benefits
Another couple of paragraphs have been deleted that discuss alleged health benefits from smoking (notably the claim that Alzheimers Disease is more common among nonsmokers than among smokers). I restored those paragraphs, because they provide a scientific reference and analysis of a claim that is sometimes heard from tobacco industry defenders.
Passive smoking
I deleted the following passage:
:The main area of uncertainty remaining is in the strength of the dose-response relationship, relative to the intermediate biochemical mechanism involved. For individuals who smoke, the amount of tobacco smoked, the measured concentration of toxic compounds in the bloodstream, and the epidemiologically observed health risks all correlate in a reasonable fashion, strongly confirming the now almost universally held theory that smoking exposes the smoker to these toxic compounds, which cause disease. However, with respect to second-hand smoke, the epidemiological evidence of disease is consistently much greater than the biochemical measurements of exposure to toxic chemicals would predict. While the consistency of these results through various studies might cause them to just be accepted at face value, that secondhand smoke is somehow more toxic than direct smoke, this would force the conclusion that the nonsmoker is more at risk from a certain amount of smoke than the smoker is; and therefore would become safer by actually smoking a small amount than by just being in the presence of second-hand smoke. Although this would be hard to test on humans, it seems unlikely; so the question of the actual degree of risk from second-hand smoke remains open.
The problem with this passage is that it is unsourced and is in fact contrary to current science. To begin with, it states that several variables relative to the risks from smoking "all correlate in a reasonable fashion." However, there is no scientific meaning to the phrase, "correlate in a reasonable fashion." The passage then goes on to state that epidemiological evidence of disease is "greater than biochemical measurements ... would predict." Again, there is no meaning to this passage. "Biochemical measurements" don't "predict" things. To the contrary, the purpose of research is to discover the relationship between different variables, such as exposure to chemicals and disease. The only sense that I can make of this passage is that its author must think there is a strict linear dose-response relationship between exposure to toxic chemicals and incidence of disease. In fact, however, considerable evidence suggests that the dose-response relationship is a curve rather than a straight line. Moreover, the shape of the curve varies. It's not the same for every chemical.
Finally, the passage above makes a tortured argument to the effect that "various studies" suggest that secondhand smoke is more toxic than direct smoke, only to conclude that this idea flies in the face of logic and should therefore be dismissed.  In fact, however, there are no published studies suggesting that secondhand smoke is more toxic than direct smoke, so the whole passage is nonsense.
--Sheldon Rampton 17:37, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Various revisions 

message: I just realized in reviewing this article that the passive smoking section referred almost exclusively to the relationship between passive smoking and lung cancer, when in fact lung cancer is only one of the health risks associated with passive smoking, and in fact is one of the lesser risks. Most of the controversy about health risks due to passive smoking has focused specifically on the risk of lung cancer, but there has been very little controversy regarding the other, larger risks. For example, passive smoking is estimated to cause approximately 10 times as many deaths due to heart disease as it causes due to lung cancer. I therefore put a paragraph at the beginning that discusses heart disease and other health risks before getting into the discussion of lung cancer. --Sheldon Rampton 04:21, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a great rewrite. I also like that you have put the science before the politics. --FOo 04:38, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrite of passive smoking section 

message: It would, IMHO, be very helpful if someone with familiarity and/or easy access to the epidemiological literature would dig out, and reference, typical or range (top & bottom) figures (complete with CIs, etc.) for baseline risks and RRs of lung cancer, COPD, heart disease, and overally mortality for (say) 20-a-day active smoking (as exemplar) and ETS. I'd be happy to do it myself, but I don't have access to the sources. Anyone in a university with a significant medical or allied dept. should, though.
IMHO, this would be much more informative than "X bazillion Americans died of Y" type figures, which really belong in health promotion pamphlets rather than NPOV encyclopaediae. 
IMHO, the long list of constituent compounds are, at best, of dubious value. That tobacco smoke contains N-Nitrosomethylethylamine seems a rather useless piece of information unless one knows something about N-Nitrosomethylethylamine. I would suggest that if one does, one already knows that it is a constituent of tobacco smoke since there appears to be no other reason for knowing what N-Nitrosomethylethylamine is.
IIRC, the US-EPA's (admittedly somewhat controversial) original ETS study states that the relative risk of lung cancer (spousal ETS exposure) is 1.19. Lung cancer RRs for pack-a-day smoking are between 13 and 20 (IIRC). If memory serves, the IARC report came in a little lower for ETS and lung cancer, about 1.17 or thereabouts. I read recently that the unconfounded baseline risk of lung cancer is about 1:10,000, making the risk for a pack-a-day smoker 1:600 or so (which seems low to me). It would be nice to have references to primary sources for this kind of information and data for CPOD and IHD/MI to remove the doubt.
Apologies to the statisticians for cruelty to numbers!
EmmetCaulfield 01:59, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relative and Unconfounded Risks 

message: I took out the reference to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the sentence that previously read as follows (deleted passage highlighted with italics):
:But to the extent that since this era, metropolitan and developed countries had (until September 11, 2001) almost complete immunity from the immediacy of wartime conditions, smoking has probably fulfilled less of a socially necessary function in metropolitan societies...while in marginalized war zones it continues to enjoy positive approval.
I think the reference to 9/11 makes two assumptions that are POV: (1) It assumes "metropolitan and developed countries" enjoyed almost complete immunity from wartime conditions prior to 9/11. This may have been true for the U.S., but it wasn't necessarily true in Israel, Beirut or for that matter parts of Europe. (2) It assumes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a moment of such significance that they have put the entire "metropolitan and developed" world into a daily state of warlike "immediacy." This isn't true even in the United States or New York City where the 9/11 attacks occurred. Heinous as 9/11 was, the attacks were dealt with and life on the streets of New York today goes on pretty much the same as before. There was much more of a feeling of "the immediacy of wartime conditions" in Beirut in the 1980s than there is in New York City or Washington, DC today.
As a general observation, I think the article in its current state devotes too much space to a discussion of David Krogh's book and his ideas about tobacco as a tool for social pacification. Krogh's ideas are interesting and may well be valid, but I don't see them being widely echoed in the peer-reviewed scientific literature or even in nonscientific media discussions of tobacco. Right now the discussion of Krogh's ideas gets six paragraphs in this article, which is too much in my view. If we're going to give that much space just to Krogh, then we'd probably need to give about 20 paragraphs just to Stanton Glantz, a medical professor and anti-tobacco crusader who has written numerous books and peer-reviewed articles in medical journals. And then once we've added Glantz, there are dozens if not hundreds of other writers and researchers who would also need to be added.
--Sheldon Rampton 07:37, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Took out 9/11 reference