We talked about this before. Now the Surgeon General is going to unveil ugly and I’m sure expensive new warning labels for Cigarets.
I won’t go over what I’ve said before. I will say that NOBODY who’s ever smoked a cigarette ever thought they were doing something good for their bodies. Nobody said “Nah, I didn’t eat my broccoli with dinner last night, but I did smoke three Newports after dessert…the box is green, so its the same thing!”
I’ll just say in college I knew a guy who smoked these cigarettes, and he was quite pleased with them.
Again they’re adding lots of expense to the cost of making smokes (not to mention the massive taxes), and NOTHING will change.
Government is stupidity. End, FULL STOP.
“ever” is a long time, weerd.
yawn
Okay. Nobody in the past 50 years…
Even then. What happened when you took a drag off a smoke for the first time?
You coughed your ass off, and then you spat like you were in the Yankee’s dugout for an hour.
Maybe some minds were changed from listening to various doctor’s opinions, but I have my doubts…
My grandmother, who is in her 80s, remembers doctors bringing an exhibit of a smoker’s lung to her school to show everyone the dangers of smoking back in the 1930s.
So, nobody in at least the past 80 years, and I’m guessing people have known about it since doctors started doing routine autopsies.
And the 1937 Camel ad above didn’t even really argue that it was good for you, just that it calmed your nerves, which it tends to do for smokers (and is part of the reason a lot of them smoke it in the first place).
Yeah I was reading a great book on forensics and autopsies and the doctor said that as soon as he pops the ribs off he can tell if the person was a smoker or not. He can also tell if they lived in a big city or in the country, all by the color of the lung tissue from the OUTSIDE of the lungs, let alone if he did a cross section or a histology slide.
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Men-Tell-Tales-Anthropologist/dp/0385479689
I think you’re right, I suspect even in the BC days it was known, tho maybe not fully understood, and likely oft forgotten as science was in the various ages of Man.
yeah, it does seem patently obvious that smoking’s bad for you; people should have realized that right from the start.
remains to be explained, then: why did that “tobacco institute” spend money running front-page editorials (full-page ones, at that!) demonizing anti-smoking activism and painting themselves as victims of a “crusade” and claim this same activism amounted to “brainwashing”?
why did tobacco companies, for decades, bother spending money funding more and less bogus studies trying to show that tobacco use didn’t cause cancer after all?
seeing as they should’ve known all along they were pissing in the wind, and pissing their money away at that. do y’all really think these corporations and organizations were just being that bloody stupid?
No different than all the Joyce Foundation studies claiming that guns CAUSE crime.
Self Serving interests of misinformation. I certainly don’t agree with that behavior, and certainly would classify it as evil just as the actions of the Joyce Foundation is evil.
That being said, that information has had its doors blown off of it, so it really has little bearing on today.
(oh, and “in the BC days”? hard to know what the pre-common-era mesoamericans knew or thought about smoking, what records they kept about it didn’t survive into our time. tobacco is native to the western hemisphere and wasn’t introduced to europeans until after columbus. but you knew that, of course.)
Indeed, but they were smoking all sorts of other stuff back then such as opium and hashish, as well as god knows what else is fun to suck into one’s lungs.
Weed calms nerves too, but I think pretty much everyone knows it’s bad for you. Inhaling smoke into your lungs is bad for you. Period. If you’re too dumb to know this then sticking a picture on every pack of cigarettes isn’t going to help.
Also I’ve always been a biologist really, I used to ask my folks to slow down when going past a car wreck in the off chance I’d see somebody with an injury, and whenever I’d go to the hospital with my mom (an RN) I’d ask if I could see some blood (Generally a drainage tube from Thoracic surgery or blood being transfused)
I know a young Weer’d would think that box art looks cool no matter what I thought about smoking.
Ask a pot activist and they will tell you weed is good for curing just about anything. It has no health effects whatsoever – especially on brain function. Got a pot activist at work who is keen on bragging that he drives better stoned than I do straight sober.
What was I saying about brain function?
LOL! A good friend of mine who also has little use in the legalization of marijuana, but still stands for the lifting of the prohibition, was discussing the issue with me one evening. His money quote was:
“The problem with Marijuana legalization activists is that they’re all a bunch of stoners!”
The movement won’t amount to shit until regular people who have never, or only smoked weed in their youth see the light on what prohibitions actually do.