Second-hand smoke not hazardous?????

Has it killed you? Has it crippled you? Has it done anything to you that you could consider detrimental to your life? I was raised surrounded by smoke, and spent half my later teens in smoky bars, and took first hand smoke into my lungs for a good number of years, and it hasn't been detrimental to my life in any meaningful way. If anything's been hazardous to my life, it's been bad ideas, not second-hand, or even first-hand, smoke.

So is sunlight almost certainly harmful.

 but I've come to believe that 2nd hand smoke is almost certainly harmful.

It's all to do with concentration and exposure.

But one must always look to the evidence first and foremost before making new laws.

In this world, now, there are lots of "public" places I do in fact have to go. To address the smoking issue there, now, government rules are welcome.

Second-hand smoke not hazardous????? It's unfiltered tobacco smoke. Unless smoking is not a medical hazard at all...

As for proprietor's rules in private places, it's caveat emptor.

--Mindy

Thanks, great links.

As I said I do think stats are vastly exagrated and I accept that passive smoking leading to deahts has yet to be conclusively proven...However, I far from rule out that passive smoking may be generally harmful and I fully accept that it's very unpleaseant  for some.

As I have also said, this is all beside the point. 

The longest ever study conducted, mostly funded by the American Cancer Society until they discovered it was going to produce the wrong result, found no causal link between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality.

This study was carried on 118 000 Californians, including 35 000 couples over a 40 year period.

It was published in 2003 by the British Medical Journal by Enstrom and Kabat.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/326/7398/1057?maxtoshow=&HITS=10...

Here they are defending themselves against subsequent smear attempts by the anti-Tobacco lobby.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/327/7413/504?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits...

For someone who claims to be an Objectivist you don't seem to have a real grasp on what property rights entail...in a very fundamental sense.

Marcus, evidence is mounting. As far as I know it hasn't been conclusively proven and I'm sure the stats are vastly exaggerated and distorted but I've come to believe that 2nd hand smoke is almost certainly harmful. Personally, if a bar or restaurant has a balcony or a nicely sheltered outdoor space smoking bans don't bother me at all. that is all beside the point though.

If you own property, you decide what rules apply within it. Just as you can decide what clothes can be worn inside your establishment, you can decide what practices should be allowed within it. Simple. It's one thing for an anti-capitalist anti-liberty person to argue against this on their own principles but for someone like Mindy who allegedly supports the fundamental ideas of freedom to not get this strikes me as simply dense. It's incredibly basic.

The whole 'ahhh, but it is infringing on the freedom of others!' argument is so baseless it almost doesn't warrant a response but because I've gone through a couple of glasses of yellow tail I'm more than happy to take my argument to the extreme:

In a free society I should be able to open an establishment called 'The Cyanide Bar.' It would be a theme restaurant, the theme would be that heavy amounts of cyanide would be pumped through the bar at all times. So long as all potential patrons are made aware of this policy, that's fine by me. I have a right to decide what to do with my property, they have a right to decide what to do with their lives. In all likelihood though there wouldn't be enough punters to pay my rent and general upkeep (there would have to be a door charge, I doubt many would make it to the 1st glass of Guiness) so my business venture would most likely go bunk and The Cyanide Bar would be no more. Dreams broken and hope lost, I would probably have to open a new bar (if I had enough money left) and abandon my dream of a cyanide filled gathering place.

Oh the wonders of a free market.

...there is no evidence that passive smoking is harmful. The whole case has been manufactured by the anti-smoking lobby, whose real aim is to ban Tobacco altogether.

Then they will start on getting Alcohol banned. They are already well underway in the US and UK.

Not in a free society. The government would have nothing to do with it. It would be up to whoever owned it to set the smoking or non-smoking standard. If all owners allowed smoking, then you'd just have to put up with it, Mindy. Either that or don a gas mask if any of those filthy smokers are about.

any facility given such a task would be operated by the government.

If this is the crap they want, screw San Francisco.

 --Brant

Ignoring the issue of registering vehicles altogether, any facility given such a task would be operated by the government. It would not be a piece of private property. It would not be owned by an individual with the right to determine what takes place on their property. If people feel queasy enough to vote on it, they can ban smoking in public facilities. But if you want to patronize a bar in which the owner wants his customers smoking, learn to breathe nicotine, baby.

So, standing in line to renew my car registration, I should just put up with the smoke? No way.

--Mindy

No it's not. People have legs. They can stand up and walk the fuck away if they don't like cigarette smoke. It is not radiation. It is not Ebola.

...to protect people from, specifically, second-hand smoke?

--Mindy

Dead on the fucking spot. Those long-haired, barechested stoners of the sixties never were smoking, protesting and fucking for the right of all people to live in liberty. They were flailing and howling for some great god in the sky--a future government, if only they'd known--to come down and smash us all over the head with girlishness, mysticism, mediocrity and palid vegetarianism. The biggest bunch of "but-who-am-I?" pussies in the entire world.

... doesn't specify what these "radical" proposed restrictions are, so I looked them up. Most of them obtain already in NZ, and the sheeple have meekly acquiesced, just as I expect they will in San Fran:

_____________________________________________

Smokers would find it harder to buy their cigarettes and light up in public under two proposals under consideration by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has proposed prohibiting tobacco sales in pharmacies, including Walgreens and Rite Aid. The city’s public health chief said the proposal is modeled after rules in eight provinces in Canada but has not been tried anywhere in the United States.

Supervisor Chris Daly has proposed legislation that would vastly limit areas where people can smoke.

Gone would be smoking in all businesses and bars, which now make an exception for owner-operated ones.

Gone too would be lighting up in taxicabs and rental cars, city-owned vehicles, farmers’ markets, common areas of apartment buildings, tourist hotels, tobacco shops, charity bingo games, unenclosed dining areas, waiting areas such as lines at an ATM or movie theater, and anywhere within 20 feet of entrances to private, nonresidential buildings.

Mitch Katz, director of the Department of Public Health, said he strongly supports both measures - even if they are angering business owners who say it’s one more example of San Francisco City Hall overstepping its bounds.

"Tobacco remains the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the U.S. - period," he said. "It’s government’s responsibility to protect people from obvious risks."

Too bad the hippies of the 60's and 70's who resided in San Francisco aren't here today to protest this.

Wait: these people ARE the hippies of the 60's and 70's!

"Socialism may be dead, but its corpse is still rotting up the place." -Ayn Rand