Re: Why Do Researchers Tell Lies About Smoking and Health?
- From: markwh04@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 25 May 2007 21:09:41 -0700
On May 24, 10:33 am, Duncan Smith <buzz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Maybe he's simply (and rightly) concerned about the science?
You don't need science to tell you that inhaling smoke is going to
fuck up your lungs any more than you need it to tell you that inhaling
smoke in a fire is going to kill you; or that extended periods spent
amongst the black soot in a coal mine is going to turn your lungs
black! You just need common sense!
In a similar way, you don't need an expensive research programme to
tell you that letting go of an object in the air is going to result in
its falling to the ground. There may be a science behind it, but it's
just completely stupid to think that any study needs to be wasted on
it -- particularly when, after it's done -- you only end up finding
out what you should have already known in the first place.
This is the same disingenuous bull that tries to sloff off the self-
evident relation between the lung disease of those who inhaled the
dust of the falling World Trade Center towers as something other than
what even a monkey had enough brains to (correctly) know.
Science (i.e. epedemiological research) are for things you DON'T
already know or that are not already as plainly obvious as (for
instance) the fact that putting your hand on a hot skillet will cause
pain.
When people deny the obvious (that breathing smoke from a fire is
going to cause damage from smoke inhalation), you have to begin to
wonder who or what's really speaking? (i.e. is it the addiction
speaking or the enabler of an addict).
BTW, my salary's paid by the Medical Research Council (who, I am assured, *are*
interested in getting the science right).
The UK issued the official announcement linking lung cancer to
cigarette smoking 51 years ago -- well before the US.
There was no excuse even for this delay. Your body, alone, already
tells you clearly that this is not something to engage in: the first
time you smoke, you practically choke.
Those mechanisms were not built into for show. They're you're body
telling you to stop doing that.
On the larger issue: there is a serious legal misconception that needs
to be cleared up. Putting stuff into the air that others have to
ingest or breath is NEVER a right. It may be legal, but only as
something that society grants to you as a license, never as a right.
Even electromagnetic radiation has to be licensed (the FCC in the US;
UV compliance, etc.)
The air and space around us is a public good (and the land we're on),
and one is never granted the right to contaminate a public good, only
a license. This is common law in the US, and I'm pretty sure, in the
UK as well.
.
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