Tobacco Prohibition, The Hundred Year War of the US

[rothenbj]

I found this site after picking up on a bit of the early Prohibition mentality. It gives a timeline from 1900l and very interesting-

Tobacco Timeline: The Twentieth Century 1900-1949--The Rise of the Cigarette

One of the thoughts I had in reading though this was the recurrence of mention of the soothing effect and weight control. Are we trading the diseases of the lungs for diseases attributed to obesity by moving more and more people away from tobacco use?

Also, many, many more people were smoking in the first half of the 1900's, but it appears more are dying from smoking now. Why? Is it the changes to what is in tobacco, are there other factors, are there exaggerated numbers?

One thing is for sure, they recognized a hundred years ago that it was the smoke (and probably a combination of other products that we inhale today) and not the tobacco/nicotine.

So little seems to change over time from this reading.

 

[JerryRM]

Rothen, I bet they manipulate the figures, like they do with gun deaths. They probably count everyone who smoked or used to smoke as a "tobacco related death" irregardless of what actually killed them.

 

[CJsKee]

Very interesting Rothen, thanks for posting!

Yes, folks are getting fatter, and they are also getting sicker, and I think the "war on tobacco" is partly to blame. We know that nicotine helps with weight control. I've also read research that points out that since smoking has been banned in public places (I specifically remember reading about on airplanes) that there has been more infections. Smoke has been proven to kill bacteria and viruses. Now that there is no smoke and, particularly in planes, a lack of ventilation, stands to reason folks are getting more infections.

Probably would be a good idea to pump PG through all our air systems!

 

[lonercom]

I want there to be "Tobacco Prohibition" so I can be the next Bugsy Segal.... Get rich selling bootleg cigarettes and e-juice; find a nice desert city to turn into a mecca of naughtyness and disappear in a ummm, wait.. that last part isn't too appealing but the rest would be cool.

 

[JerryRM]

I want there to be "Tobacco Prohibition" so I can be the next Bugsy Segal.... Get rich selling bootleg cigarettes and e-juice; find a nice desert city to turn into a mecca of naughtyness and disappear in a ummm, wait.. that last part isn't too appealing but the rest would be cool.

Yup, ya don't want to anger the "investors", if you get my meaning. Lead poisoning can be deadly.

 

[Kate51]

More than a hundred years....

A brief history of cigarettes, tobacco and smoking.

"those" people were around in 1800's!
1830:- First organized anti-tobacco movement in US begins as adjunct to the temperance movement
1898:- Tennessee Supreme Court upholds a total ban on cigarettes, ruling they are "not legitimate articles of commerce, being wholly noxious and deleterious to health. Their use is always harmful."

 

[rayneinspain]

Rothen, I bet they manipulate the figures, like they do with gun deaths. They probably count everyone who smoked or used to smoke as a "tobacco related death" irregardless of what actually killed them.

You're probably correct.

One way medical statistics are tabulated is from the data mining of ICD-9-CM diagnostic/procedural codes (ICD-10 in most other countries). As a 12-yr medical coder, it's my job to assign one of two codes for tobacco use when I see it documented: V15.82, History of Tobacco Abuse, or 305.1, Tobacco Abuse (current use).

I can absolutely see how the numbers of 'tobacco-related illness' could be skewed to support just about any medical claim, regardless of motive. Neither code denotes specific timeframe/duration of use, packs per day, or other variables...but each code stamps the patient permanently, with no control over the ethical handling of the information from that point on.

When you next read "New studies link [disease] with [substance]..." or "X% of diabetics also have [disease]...", some of that raw data may have come directly from ICD-9 code data.

Ever wonder why the health claims seem to change and/or contradict themselves every so often?

 

[JerryRM]

Those who want to run our lives have been around for a long time.

 

[rothenbj]

Very interesting Rothen, thanks for posting!

Yes, folks are getting fatter, and they are also getting sicker, and I think the "war on tobacco" is partly to blame. We know that nicotine helps with weight control. I've also read research that points out that since smoking has been banned in public places (I specifically remember reading about on airplanes) that there has been more infections. Smoke has been proven to kill bacteria and viruses. Now that there is no smoke and, particularly in planes, a lack of ventilation, stands to reason folks are getting more infections.

Probably would be a good idea to pump PG through all our air systems!

The state of health in this country is many faceted. I think some of the more senior among us have the opinion that the do-good parents are so afraid of germs and dirt that their sweet little one's never develop a mature system to fight infections. I was at the eye doctor's taking my 91 year old mother for an exam so she could keep her driver's license (go figure). There was a young gal, 18-22ish as it's getting hard for me to tell, filling out one of their pre-exam forms. She pulls a bag of pills out and starts looking at them and listing each one on the sheet. She must have had a half dozen prescriptions. I may have taken that many different scipt pills in my 62 years.

I know when I was a kid, I wasn't getting rushed off to the doc every time I had a sniffle, I just worked through it. That has to give your immune system some benefits.

Most of the kids today don't get the exercise we got when I was a kid, always doing something. Today your fingers get most of the work sitting in front of computers and video games (kinda like me now ). We were always out running around and playing something. Heck, it took till I was in my mid 50's to stop doing that and I still get the itch to get on a softball team in the spring .

 

[Kate51]

rothenbj that is the soundest science in the world. No one has found a way to kill all the germs, so better to become resistant to them the old fashioned way. And then teach your kids sound personal hygiene habits. Don't try to raise a germ free one! You take them into a car and then expect they won't breath in CO2. Ridiculous.

 

[Vocalek]

One of the thoughts I had in reading though this was the recurrence of mention of the soothing effect and weight control. Are we trading the diseases of the lungs for diseases attributed to obesity by moving more and more people away from tobacco use?

Without a doubt, obesity is the predictable outcome of population wide smoking-cessation. Twenty years back, all of the Alphabet Soup Organizations claimed that smokers only gain 5 pounds when they quit. Yet everyone I knew who quit gained closer to 30 pounds.

Finally, some researchers started looking directly at the question, and found that the average weight gain is closer to 5 kilograms (1 pound = 2.2 kilos). The influence of smoking cessation on the prevalen... [N Engl J Med. 1995] - PubMed result

Then researchers discovered that when you measured weight gain made a difference, with those who were continuously abstinent for one year gaining 13 pounds. How much weight gain occurs following smoking cess... [J Consult Clin Psychol. 1997] - PubMed result

The problem gets worse over time. "Over 5 years, 33% of sustained quitters gained > or = 10 kg compared with 6% of continuing smokers. Also among sustained quitters, 7.6% of men and 19.1% of women gained > or = 20% of baseline weight; 60% of the gain occurred in year 1, although significant weight gains continued through year 5." Early and late weight gain following smoking cessa... [Am J Epidemiol. 1998] - PubMed result

Weight gains of these magnitudes are enough to push a normal BMI into overweight status, and overweight into obese.

 

[GtrSoloist]

(getting on soapbox---fair warning)

The Anti-smoking campaign is more than laughable. The Tobacco Industry is a cash-cow for everyone involved, minus the consumer of course.

Let's play my favorite game called, "Follow the Money" (insert echo here)

Tobacco companies get rich selling tobacco products to consumers.

Politicians get rich from Pro and Anti tobacco lobbyist contributions.

Pharmaceutical Companies get rich from selling NRT products and / or medications to help smokers kick the evil habit.

State and Federal governments get rich from taxing the sale of tobacco products and in a genius move, get paid again by the Tobacco companies to cover "health care costs" of smokers (The Tobacco settlement). The money they collect is in NO way used for health care.

I used to work for a small Midwest state. One of my duties, was selling tobacco tax stamps to distributors. In that small, underpopulated and admittedly poor state, The state government would take in about 2 million dollars a day in tobacco taxes. I can't even guess how much a state like California, or New York makes on a daily basis. (Although I'm sure you can find out, by law they usually have to make this information public knowledge.)

Tobacco has become the great scape goat. Everything is tobacco's fault. It's a nice little political sleight of hand. Make people freaked out about the evil tobacco plant while things you should really be worried about like: wars, the environment, pesticides, industrial pollution, contaminated drinking water, natural gas production, vehicle emissions, recycling waste, food contamination, ozone depletion, mercury levels, etc, etc, etc (I could go on for a long time,) gets a free pass or swept under the rug.

It's not any of the above things making you sick or giving you cancer, it's the guy standing outside in the snow smoking that cigarette who is killing your babies... let's lynch him...

I wish I were exaggerating, I really do. A couple of weeks ago I was watching the nightly news with live coverage from the gulf oil spill. In one segment they showed tar balls washing up on the shoreline and commented how people who were cleaning it up were having problems breathing, getting dizzy, headaches, etc.

The next segment they show the oil burning on the ocean, billowing clouds of black smoke filling the air. When questioning BP officials about the danger of the burning oil the BP official commented, "It's not as bad for you as smoking or breathing in second hand smoke."

People are smart, the public however is stupid.