[Vision2020] "Please do not continue to confuse people with facts."

[Joe Campbell]

Very interesting stuff, Ted. Thanks!

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 26, 2009, at 6:49 PM, Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com> wrote:

> While I think government regulation of addictive drug use in the  
> workplace (tobacco in bars, in this case) that has dramatic negative  
> health impacts, when employees sometimes breathe the drugs  
> continuously during their shift, is reasonable, I have doubts about  
> restricting outdoor tobacco use.  For one thing, this is not  
> occurring in the workplace (unless the bar happens to be outdoors),  
> and outdoor use of tobacco does not concentrate the smoke as use  
> indoors.
>
> But the twenty foot ban on smoking outside entrances to bars in  
> Moscow does not make it hard to find a spot to smoke outside some  
> bars.  Consider John's Alley.  Along the sidewalk in front of the  
> Alley to the east is the south wall of the Moscow Food CO-OP.  There  
> are no entrances along this wall.  Twenty feet to the east from the  
> south entrance to John's Alley is within a quick few steps of a  
> "legal smoke zone."
>
> Anyway, drugs, sex, politics, economics and religion are main  
> subjects (what else?) that it seems are difficult sometimes to  
> approach rationally and factually...
>
> What drugs are determined to be "hard" or "soft" is often not based  
> on objective medical knowledge, and the legal status of illegal/ 
> legal drugs is sometimes not based on the rational application of  
> medical science and sociology.  Isn't cannabis criminalization an  
> example?
>
> Alcohol in quantities easy to consume induces dramatic impairment of  
> mind and body (and can kill, as the sad case of the U of I student  
> who overdosed on alcohol last spring reveals:  http://www.kxly.com/Global/story.asp?S=10258470 
>   ), that use of methamphetamine or cocaine, for contrast, will not,  
> though long term abuse of these drugs will impair function and  
> injection makes overdosing a risk.  Who injects alcohol?  Is this  
> possible?  However, alcohol is the number one drug associated with  
> violent crime.
>
> One of the signs of cocaine or methamphetamine use/abuse is  
> increased efficiency on the job, which is not associated with  
> alcohol use.  And the rates of vehicle accidents from cocaine or  
> methamphetamine use is not very high, unlike alcohol, which being a  
> depressant reduces reaction time and coordination.  Soldiers use  
> methamphetamine for critical times in battle, to increase their  
> performance or stay awake.  Alcohol can also be physically  
> addictive, and damaging to health (liver).  It could therefore be  
> classified as a "hard" drug, as cocaine and methamphetamine  
> sometimes are.
>
> Though tobacco use usually does not induce the radical impairments  
> of mental and physical function that alcohol does immediately after  
> a few drinks, it (nicotine) can induce profound physical addiction;  
> and the long term health damage is severe, which is why, combined  
> with tobacco's widespread availability and use, tobacco is the  
> leading cause of premature death.  Nicotine can also easily kill due  
> to an overdose, if injected into the blood stream, but tobacco  
> smoking makes this outcome nearly impossible, from what I have read.
>
> Tobacco is insidious because a user can become addicted for years,  
> with minimal impairment of function (unless having high standards  
> for performance, as an athlete would) before the most serious health  
> impacts manifest (cancer and respiratory diseases, etc.).  People  
> often seem to tolerate "smokers cough," and the smell.  Alcohol's  
> impairment of functioning soon after a significant dose is a  
> discouragement to abuse, as some U of I freshmen every year,  
> apparently lacking in experience, discover after a night at the  
> bars, leaving their dinner on the sidewalk, a rite of passage for  
> youth, some might claim...
>
> If physical addiction and either radical impairment of functioning  
> or very serious negative health impacts on large numbers of people  
> defines a "hard" drug, tobacco would be the number one candidate,  
> among drugs commonly used, with alcohol second.
>
> Heroin is highly addictive, but does not cause the extent of health  
> problems tobacco does, or at least not directly from only the  
> effects of the drug; and I don't mean because heroin is used much  
> less than tobacco.  This statement will raise eyebrows, but this is  
> because people have not studied the objective medical science, and  
> are conditioned by socially constructed myths about drugs and their  
> effects.  Of course overdosing on heroin is fatal, but the negative  
> health impacts of heroin use are often due to impurities in the  
> drug, needles used incorrectly, and the life style of addiction.   
> This is one argument for decriminalzing heroin (with regulation, of  
> course), given criminalization encourages many of the behaviors that  
> are damaging from heroin addiction.  Doctors who have had access to  
> high quality heroin, who know how to administer it, and avoid  
> overdosing, and are financially secure, have been heroin addicts for  
> years, reliably carrying on their medical practice with their  
> addiction in secret. Below read an animal study comparing cocaine to  
> heroin; the effects of cocaine were clearly more damaging than heroin:
>
> http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/ARUreport06.htm
> --------
>
> It is rather amazing that five Nobel Prize winning US authors were  
> alcoholics, with some of them claiming alcohol had a "stimulating"  
> effect on their writing skills.  Info on this issue is from this  
> excellent and fascinating book, a great read:
>
> http://www.slushpile.net/index.php/2005/09/06/bod-the-thirsty-muse/
> Today’s Book-of-the-Day is The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the America 
> n Writer by Tom Dardis. The book examines the influence of alcohol o 
> n so many American authors. And the list is incredibly long. Five of 
>  the seven (at the time of publication) American Nobel laureates–Sin 
> clair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and 
>  John Steinbeck–were alcoholic. Similarly afflicted writers include  
> Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Cran 
> e, Thomas Wolfe, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Ring Larnder, Dju 
> na Barnes, John O’Hara, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, James  
> Jones, John Cheever, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Robert Lowell, a 
> nd James Agee.
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
> =======================================================
> List services made available by First Step Internet,
> serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>               http://www.fsr.net
>          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20090727/245a5b47/attachment.html