O tobacco! Your glorious pedigree of shamans, kings, cranks, explorers, chiefs and heroes who drew upon your heavenly smoke has been thrown into the spitoon of history by the cold weight of scientific evidence.
It didn't take that long after its introduction, either. In 1604 diatribe, King James himself wrote that smoking was, "...a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." And aside from that unnecessary reference to hell, the good King more or less hit it on the head. But the effects wouldn't really make themselves into a serious epidemic before the mass production of cigarettes in the Victorial era, and really before World War I. Whiling away the ennui in the trenches between engagements, soldiers were customarily provided cigarettes as part of their ration. At the outset of "All Quiet on the Western Front", the protagonist, Paul, explains how he has managed to beg, borrow and steal 80 cigarettes from his fellow soldiers - roughly what it would take to get him through the day.
Anyway, before long we had something similar to what appears in the chart at right. Lung cancer, previously a rare condition, began to grow in incidence in the population on a twenty year lag with the growth in cigarette consumption. Statistical analysis aside, the chart is a rather stark representation of the negative health impacts of smoking. Of course, if you have a few free hours, the whole spectrum of known tobacco-related ailments can be perused at this wiki. To date, there have been thousands on thousands of studies linking this behavior to cancer and other diseases. In economic terms, various studies have estimated lost productivity and health costs to be somewhere between $7 and $40 per pack.
What I'm saying here shouldn't come as a surprised to anyone. The first government-sponsored anti-smoking campaigns in North America began as early as 1964 at the Surgeon-General's behest, and have since become almost ubiqitous. As long as I've been able to watch television, or string latin characters together to form words, I and the rest of the North American population has been bombarded with anti-smoking public service messages. Celebrities from all walks of life were drafted to save the children including an unlikely pair of Star Wars adventurers. One might question the believability of tobacco's presence in a galaxy far, far away or even the lack of studies of nicotine's impact on 'droids, but to a North American child growing up in the eighties, the message would have been clear and powerful.
All this rests in addition to restrictions on the locations available to smokers to indulge, the tombstone warnings now mandatory on every pack saying that horrible consequences are inevitable should you smoke it to its inevitable conclusion, and the gradual end of the formerly uber-prevalant tobacco advertising. The end result has been that as of 2004, half of all North American adults who have ever smoked have successfully quit, and the incidence of smoking in the population as a whole had dropped by about 10 percent between 1970 and 1995 (as an aside, its use continues to grow substantially in the developing world - so much so, that the World Health Organization considers it the single biggest cause of premature death worldwide). Philip Morris has made the case that this will only lead to increased costs to social services as increasing numbers of non-smokers live longer (non-peer reviewed study), but I shan't get into that discussion now.
But, those of us who haven't lived inside a tree for the last thirty years know all this, so you are no doubt wondering where Oatmeal is going with all this stuff?
Well, if Jerry Springer has proven nothing else, it's that the outer fringes of Western society are awash with bizarre people and notions (though in some ways that can be said of Western society - save that for another post). It should therefore come across as no surprise to anyone that there is a fairly active cadre of conspiracy theorists who feel that anti-smoking activism is nothing less than pure, Soviet-era propaganda. That is, in the most pure definition, it presents mostly truthful information, omitting certain aspects so that the observer comes to specific conclusions such as, that tobacco is unhealthy.
Now in a sense that can be said to be true of all public messaging intended to increase or decrease the incidence of certain types of behavior (such as drunk driving, for example). Many of these presentations can be said to lack the clear nuances that one might see in a peer reviewed paper. But frankly, a picture of a lung rotten with cancer sends a far more effective message than a pie chart with mortality statistics. They are ends to a social goal whose rewards to society have already been well established.
The movement to restore the respectability of smoking and scrape away the taint left behind by thousands of science based studies has numerous berths on the ether, my favorite being Smoking Aloud. If you spend too much time reading their main page, you may find yourself kicking yourself for not indulging in the health benefits of smoking all this time. While they invest all kinds of room on their website criticizing years of research, while their latest post reads like the front page of the National Enquirer, rather reminding one of that time Bigfoot was seen jamming with Elvis. The Libertarian arguments found on the page regarding personal choice have no place in a society where health care is publicly funded, but that is another topic for further discussion.
It didn't take that long after its introduction, either. In 1604 diatribe, King James himself wrote that smoking was, "...a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." And aside from that unnecessary reference to hell, the good King more or less hit it on the head. But the effects wouldn't really make themselves into a serious epidemic before the mass production of cigarettes in the Victorial era, and really before World War I. Whiling away the ennui in the trenches between engagements, soldiers were customarily provided cigarettes as part of their ration. At the outset of "All Quiet on the Western Front", the protagonist, Paul, explains how he has managed to beg, borrow and steal 80 cigarettes from his fellow soldiers - roughly what it would take to get him through the day.
Anyway, before long we had something similar to what appears in the chart at right. Lung cancer, previously a rare condition, began to grow in incidence in the population on a twenty year lag with the growth in cigarette consumption. Statistical analysis aside, the chart is a rather stark representation of the negative health impacts of smoking. Of course, if you have a few free hours, the whole spectrum of known tobacco-related ailments can be perused at this wiki. To date, there have been thousands on thousands of studies linking this behavior to cancer and other diseases. In economic terms, various studies have estimated lost productivity and health costs to be somewhere between $7 and $40 per pack.
What I'm saying here shouldn't come as a surprised to anyone. The first government-sponsored anti-smoking campaigns in North America began as early as 1964 at the Surgeon-General's behest, and have since become almost ubiqitous. As long as I've been able to watch television, or string latin characters together to form words, I and the rest of the North American population has been bombarded with anti-smoking public service messages. Celebrities from all walks of life were drafted to save the children including an unlikely pair of Star Wars adventurers. One might question the believability of tobacco's presence in a galaxy far, far away or even the lack of studies of nicotine's impact on 'droids, but to a North American child growing up in the eighties, the message would have been clear and powerful.
All this rests in addition to restrictions on the locations available to smokers to indulge, the tombstone warnings now mandatory on every pack saying that horrible consequences are inevitable should you smoke it to its inevitable conclusion, and the gradual end of the formerly uber-prevalant tobacco advertising. The end result has been that as of 2004, half of all North American adults who have ever smoked have successfully quit, and the incidence of smoking in the population as a whole had dropped by about 10 percent between 1970 and 1995 (as an aside, its use continues to grow substantially in the developing world - so much so, that the World Health Organization considers it the single biggest cause of premature death worldwide). Philip Morris has made the case that this will only lead to increased costs to social services as increasing numbers of non-smokers live longer (non-peer reviewed study), but I shan't get into that discussion now.
But, those of us who haven't lived inside a tree for the last thirty years know all this, so you are no doubt wondering where Oatmeal is going with all this stuff?
Well, if Jerry Springer has proven nothing else, it's that the outer fringes of Western society are awash with bizarre people and notions (though in some ways that can be said of Western society - save that for another post). It should therefore come across as no surprise to anyone that there is a fairly active cadre of conspiracy theorists who feel that anti-smoking activism is nothing less than pure, Soviet-era propaganda. That is, in the most pure definition, it presents mostly truthful information, omitting certain aspects so that the observer comes to specific conclusions such as, that tobacco is unhealthy.
Now in a sense that can be said to be true of all public messaging intended to increase or decrease the incidence of certain types of behavior (such as drunk driving, for example). Many of these presentations can be said to lack the clear nuances that one might see in a peer reviewed paper. But frankly, a picture of a lung rotten with cancer sends a far more effective message than a pie chart with mortality statistics. They are ends to a social goal whose rewards to society have already been well established.
The movement to restore the respectability of smoking and scrape away the taint left behind by thousands of science based studies has numerous berths on the ether, my favorite being Smoking Aloud. If you spend too much time reading their main page, you may find yourself kicking yourself for not indulging in the health benefits of smoking all this time. While they invest all kinds of room on their website criticizing years of research, while their latest post reads like the front page of the National Enquirer, rather reminding one of that time Bigfoot was seen jamming with Elvis. The Libertarian arguments found on the page regarding personal choice have no place in a society where health care is publicly funded, but that is another topic for further discussion.
The Flat Earth Society was composed of individuals stricken with similar issues. Writing at the end of the 19th century, Samuel Rowbotham produced a thesis turning the physical world on its head. Starting as a project to insulate his literalist biblical belief system from reality, Sammy devised a model for reality which did away with the arrogant "Globo-centric" world that everyone thought had been comfortably established by that time. Instead, humanity existed on a giant platter while the known universe, a mere 3,000 miles away, spun about its environs like a garnish (perhaps this is in the bible, I'm not sure). Having spent time creatively devising explanations that somehow explained and supported it with rather dubious "scientific" experiments. He and his followers even managed to debate it successfully against more traditional researchers who had the combined weight of hundreds of years of data from astronomical observations and circumnavigations on their side.
Rowbowtham's movement continues to this day, in no less freakish a form, defying reason to strike it down. Sadly, it doesn't, but it does make a point with regards to humanity's desire to lie to itself. Cognitive dissonance is a state in which reality argues with one's assumptions causing anxiety unless the argument is somehow resolved. It is a tool, really, that has helped human society evolve and jump forward, by helping our intelligence integrate radical new ideas, like evolution, the Copernican universe, or the negative health impact of a formerly-beloved habit. At other times, though something goes awry, and we need to grasp at straws rather than move forward.
Rowbowtham's movement continues to this day, in no less freakish a form, defying reason to strike it down. Sadly, it doesn't, but it does make a point with regards to humanity's desire to lie to itself. Cognitive dissonance is a state in which reality argues with one's assumptions causing anxiety unless the argument is somehow resolved. It is a tool, really, that has helped human society evolve and jump forward, by helping our intelligence integrate radical new ideas, like evolution, the Copernican universe, or the negative health impact of a formerly-beloved habit. At other times, though something goes awry, and we need to grasp at straws rather than move forward.
