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First of all, this is a good and fair pushback.
But I’d respond that I chose secondhand smoke for a reason. I similarly doubt there’s any measurable impact of
First of all, this is a good and fair pushback.
But I’d respond that I chose secondhand smoke for a reason. I similarly doubt there’s any measurable impact of being around a smoker every once in a while, but the language around secondhand smoke got more and more hysterical leading up to the widespread implementation of smoking bans, to the point that it’s not uncommon today to hear people complain that walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside is a risk to their health.
That’s basically absurd.
But the “no safe level of exposure” language has been used to justify such claims.
Finally, to be clear, even if you think this language is good and useful, there’s still utility in thinking about why that’s true, especially if hearing similar language about alcohol bothers you for some reason.
> to hear people complain that walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside is a risk to their health
Doesn't have to be the smoke itself that's harmful. Presumably, if you can smell someone's second-hand smoke, you're also inhaling the bacterial spray contained in their breath, no? Something I think about if I'm walking outside without a mask on and end up stuck walking for a while behind a smoker. I tend to put my mask back on.
The bacterial spray isn't unique to smokers.
That's what our immune system is for.
Covid is a problem at the moment but bacteria really aren't. Your chance to die from a bacterial infection randomly caught from someone in the street is minimal, and exposure boosts your immunity. And they are everywhere anyway.
You might get a cold for a few days but that's life.
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With over a billion smokers on the planet, or ~20% of the population, it’s not that absurd to worry about urban smoke outdoors contributing to urban pollution. Nor wood burning house & backyard fires either, nor cars, but that’s a different debate… We aren’t around smokers once in a while, we’re around them constantly. Even urban outdoor second hand smoke really is a higher risk than air travel radiation.
Yes I want the language to be specific about the levels of risk. I would agree that “no safe levels” is vague and less helpful than one or two percentile data points. That said, I completely agree with the CDC’s stance and language on both second hand smoke and air travel radiation.
Walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside IS a risk to my health and the health of my children. I have asthma as do my children. Both my children and I have had asthma attacks due to second hand smoke, even limited quantities. As a smoker you may not notice this but the smell from even a whiff of second hand smoke persists for a long time and it's awful. Our family gives smokers on the sidewalk a very wide berth.
Nobody gets to create a hazard to others walking on a sidewalk. If a business wanted to dispose of an equivalently toxic substance out in the open, they would be heavily fined and shut down. Why should smokers have a special right to do this and, incidentally, litter cigarette butts all over the place?
I'm extremely grateful to live in NYC where there is a (frequently violated but still) ban on smoking inside all public parks. I would absolutely support a sidewalk smoking ban and better enforcement of the ban on smoking in parks and within 25 feet of building entrances in NYC and limit smoking to private property with the smoker responsible for ensuring second hand smoke does not affect adjoining private property.
The primary difference between smoking and alcohol is that with alcohol, there is no equivalent to second hand smoke. When someone who drinks alcohol creates a negative externality for those around, they are ticketed or arrested depending on what they did, everything from drunk driving laws to drunken disorderly laws. I'd love to see a laws on the books similar to drunk driving laws that addressed the issue of smoking around minors.
Now if the CDC said there was no safe level of exposure to nicotine and so we should ban all nicotine gum, that would be absurd.
Well at least now nobody can claim I made up this objection.
Along the lines of second hand smoke, are there any levels of safe exposure to air pollution (considering recent studies saying that chronic exposure is equivalent to losing one year of education)? In that case, internal combustion engine exhaust might be a larger source of health risk than outdoor second hand smoke, depending on where you live.
You’re talking about the WHO link specifically? You’re right, that link doesn’t mention secondhand smoke because it doesn’t have a list of major contributors (doesn’t mention cars or factories either). I’d agree it’s probably not a great example of what you’re asking about. I really only posted the WHO link because the WHO uses similar language to the CDC saying things like ‘there are no safe levels of exposure to pollution.’ Might not answer your question, but I think the WHO pollution guidelines published a few months are good reading (https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/345329 https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/345329).
To clarify what I was talking about above, I’m saying the close exposure to smokers is high in urban areas -- in proximity, frequency, and density. There’s also broad consensus that the risks and harms of secondhand smoke are greater in proportion to proximity of the smokers, and that downtown urban areas where people congregate have higher concentrations of cigarette smoke than other places. I’m not personally claiming that average Pm2.5 air quality over time sees a measurable impact from cigarettes. (Even if true, I would expect cigarettes are dwarfed by cars --- but 6 trillion cigarettes a year isn’t nothing, right?) I’m really primarily claiming that being in an urban area like a downtown city center is high exposure to secondhand smoke, being very close to smokers is often a many times per hour occurrence in busy urban areas, walking and entering/exiting buildings.
The CDC link does reference the Surgeon General’s report, which links to a whole pile of primary sources on secondhand smoke. You can also Google around for primary sources for links between smoking and general air pollution. I just tried and found a handful of papers studying outdoor smoke exposure levels, e.g., https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/48/3/918 https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/48/3/918. The main consensus that I see is that for a range of small distances like 10-20 feet, outdoor exposure is plenty high enough to be very concerned about the risks, and that high traffic areas can collect smoke and increase exposure.
To be clear, I don't think the CDC is full of political operatives intent on fighting a culture war. What I think is that almost nobody at the CDC smokes, that they don't know many smokers, that they (correctly, more or less) perceive smoking to be a lower-class-coded activity, that there is probably near-universal agreement within the CDC that smoking is an undesirable (maybe even "gross") activity (associated with low levels of educational attainment).
On the other hand, they all fly in airplanes. They attach little or no moral weight to flying. Everybody they know flies on airplanes. Etc, etc.
I think it's unlikely that this isn't influencing their language. The risk of smoking, in their view, isn't something to be managed or weighed or compared; rather, smoking is an abhorrent activity that should be stamped out of existence.
How could that possibly not influence how they write about it?
That’s extremely heavy and unfounded speculation on your part. How do you know who flies, or what their morals are, or who they know?? You’re now attempting to move the goal posts to a different playing field entirely. Your beef was over radiation, which has extremely low levels of risk compared to air pollution, not the morals of flying. The questions about the environmental impacts of flying is certainly getting enormous amounts of exposure currently, why do you think people at the CDC are any different from the rest of us in that respect?
You’re still trying to paint a picture of hypocrisy where none exists. The CDC is presenting facts on risks, not moral judgements. The fact is that the risks of smoking are large, it kills many times more people than all causes of flying related mortality combined, and that is the reason there is a lot of information decided to educating people about those risks. Smoking is also one of the easiest things to change, it’s a choice, and it’s a luxury, not necessary for anyone to do. Why not try to reduce it? They’re not judging people who smoke as low class, they’re pointing out correctly that smoking is something that statistically harms people of low SES disproportionately, not just health wise, but financially. The whole idea is to try to help those people escape. It seems strange to me to spend any energy complaining about the CDC’s language of smoking, while ignoring the vast amounts of social damage left in the wake of Big Tobacco.
I don't care about the morality of flying and I'm not suggesting they should, either. That's the whole point. Of course they use stronger language wrt activities they look down upon than for activities they don't.
And maybe that's as it should be! Again, I am asking people to notice when this happens.
The CDC hasn’t been “politicized,” in other words; their project is intrinsically political.
> their project is intrinsically political
I don’t think that case has been made here, you’re failing to demonstrate it. I disagree that intrinsic politics has anything whatsoever to do with the safety of smoking vs radiation exposure of air travel.
There are times when other people politicize what the CDC says. Your comments here explicitly and repeatedly attempted to politicize the secondhand smoke recommendations. Covid is also one of them, and it seems like you might be dancing around and hoping to implicate Covid politics while trying not to talk about it directly. The CDC has been actively trying to stay out of the politics and simply help people understand the risks and statistics, and what choices they can make to reduce their risks.
> of course they use stronger language wrt activities they look down upon
They don’t look down on any activities. They report safety stats and safety guidelines. The language is stronger when the mortality rates are higher, period.
It's not a proof but I really enjoyed Zizek's thoughts on how fight against smoking is an ideology :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r238kp3ar_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r238kp3ar_A
Hehe, I don’t know who this is, but it was fun to watch. “I’m a kind of Stalinist fascist ... if I take drugs, then I become passive, and enemies can attack!” LOL!
So, the argument he didn’t even attempt to address in his comparison of smoking to other drugs is that smoking hurts other people directly, while other drugs don’t. The primary reason we have rules against smoking in public is it’s effects on people nearby who are not choosing to smoke. This entire thread was about secondhand smoke, and Zizek didn’t address it.
Similarly, the reasons we have some regulations on smoking in private, and the entire reason we have regulations on drugs is because of the direct damage it does, statistically, to the users, and to the indirect damage it does to other people. For the minority of bad cases, hospital visits for overdoses and car accidents, social services for addicts or their children, rehab, and loss of jobs are real issues. For the larger majority there are still measurable effects on drug users’ lifespans and on the economy.
We are a collective and have no choice about that. We have some shared resources that we need to agree on. If you want to enjoy freedoms, you have to respect other people’s freedoms. Where’s my freedom to breathe clean air if you smoke near me? (I happen to have some athsma, the risks to me of secondhand smoke are greater than mild exposure to carcinogens.)
So yeah, not only is it not a proof, it’s not even a reason to buy the argument that anti-smoking sentiment is ideological. To prove that it’s ideology, you need to demonstrate that smoking is safe.
The research and statistics are trending toward the conclusion that there are no safe levels of exposure to pollution, car/ICE or otherwise. The 2021 WHO report is pretty good/interesting stuff https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345329/9789240034228-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345329/9789...
Personally, I’m pretty certain that cars are a bigger contributor to overall air pollution than cigarettes. I would guess much bigger, however Googling this question will return studies that claim to show cigarette pollution is worse per gram of smoke or whatever.
I don’t know what it means to lose a year of education, that sounds like it could be a little hyperbolic, and hyperbolic stuff does get said unfortunately.
Anyway, we can and should work on both problems, cars and cigarettes, we don’t need to limit ourselves to which one is worse, they’re both bad. Smoking alone really does contribute significantly to early mortality globally, so it really is a problem to solve.
Cigarettes are also, unlike cars, a completely optional choice. Unlike the reasons to drive, the reasons to smoke are not backed by any economic needs or economic benefits aside from income to the tobacco companies. There is no socially redeeming value to smoking, where there is a lot for cars (jobs, food distribution, transportation & travel, etc). So, it will be far easier to stop people from smoking, and reduce overall death, than it will be to stop people from driving.