The shame that San Diego smokers feel

SurfPuppy: That quote was a tongue-in-cheek recommendation to our resident representative employer. His initial comment induced me to post on this thread. Providing his employees with Marlboros so they will burn their candles at both ends in his employ and then gift him with their unused pension money when they pop off early, would be very nasty indeed. A better suggestion. Give your non-smoker employees Nicorette Gum for Xmas. Although your pension fund won't profit from their early post retirement demise, you can enjoy their nicotine-improved job performance. The improvement is somewhat attenuated because nicotine is absorbed fastest and most efficiently by inhalation into the lungs via cigarette smoke. With gum chewers, as with pipe and cigar smokers, the nicotine is taken in through the bucccal mucosa. We cigar and pipe tobacco smokers do not inhale. Less job enhancement but better mortality. An aside. many therapeutic drugs can be absorbed more efficiently through the lungs than through the oral gastrointestinal route. We have a company here in San Diego, Alexza Pharmaceutials, which is betting the homestead on an inhaled medication system. Last year an off shore spammer on the major e-cigarette forum advertised a Cialis e-cigarette. ========= SurfPuppy, you are one of those people who say, "I KNOW it's true because I read it in the Union-Tribune: If the Union-Tribune prints it, it MUST be true." I hand you a US NIH scientific report and you hand me back news releases from a rabid propaganda mill. Look everybody! Here is the home page of SurfPuppy's information source. Shyster John Banzhaf's moneypot ASH. http://ash.org/ . ASH is also the source of Mamafirst's contribution.
— March 25, 2011 8:04 a.m.

The shame that San Diego smokers feel

Ponzi; "I have nothing against smokers, just smoking." Oops!
— March 24, 2011 4:55 p.m.

The shame that San Diego smokers feel

What's that in your smug, superior hand, Sniff-sniff? Are you smoking a kazoo?
— March 24, 2011 9:59 a.m.

Majority rule or minority rights?

A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on "What's for lunch?". We are not a democracy: We are a republic
— March 23, 2011 5:03 a.m.

The shame that San Diego smokers feel

Are the SD Reader comments restricted to anti-smokers only? You need a smidgen of diversity.
— March 23, 2011 4:50 a.m.

The shame that San Diego smokers feel

It seems the SD Reader webmaster won't even let me draw pictures for the kindergarden class. My links worked when I previewed them, but they are disabled in the published comment (including the one to the January SD Reader article). If you can bear the inconvenient truth, you can read the studies by Googling the titles.
— March 23, 2011 4:29 a.m.

The shame that San Diego smokers feel

Visduh: It would require a complete article to ungarble your history, and the Reader does not pay me for comments. In January I posted a comment on "Antismoking Law: Where Do the Smoker's Rights End?", as did Ponzi and you. http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2011/jan/19/ci… There are scientist, both pro-tobacco and anti-tobacco, who will whore their science to push a political agenda. (California has a plethora of the antis - two prominent ones right here in San Diego.) Then, there are scientists who are simply "pro-truth in science". S.J. Heishman, PhD.,is Chief of the Nicotine Psychopharmacology Section of the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. http://irp.drugabuse.gov/heishman.html The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the principal biomedical and behavioral research agency of the United States Government. NIH is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. http://irp.drugabuse.gov/index.html "Our Organization: Intramural Research Program (IRP) of the National Institute on Drug Abuse is dedicated to innovative research on basic mechanisms that underlie drug abuse and dependence, and to develop new methods for the treatment of drug abuse and dependence." NOW READ THE BLOODY REPORT!!! and stop whining at me because you're uncomfortable with an inconvenient truth. Here's another. You can link to the full text report from the abstract. "Beneficial effects of nicotine and cigarette smoking: the real, the possible and the spurious", John A. Baron. 1996. It is 14 years out of date. The Kevin Tracy group of molecular biologists have extended the knowledge by leaps and bounds since then. http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/1/58.abs… Why do I do this? Because I'm standing up for the underdog. Over the years I have spoken out for the Jew and the Negro and the women and the faggots and the undocumented aliens (who epitomize your "white, Protestant work ethic"). In this instance the target of your sneering comments is the smoker. You!! You with your pristine pink lungs and your lily-white lifestyle! You are the black hats, here. I AM THE WHITE HAT! I am the Lone Ranger. And you need a good kick in the self-estimation. I feel like I'm trying to discuss the theory of relativity with a kindergarden class.
— March 23, 2011 3:16 a.m.

The shame that San Diego smokers feel

Mamafirst: Speaking of whoop-de-do, I looked up your news article "Study: smoke breaks cost thousands: Study finds one smoking employee costs $12,000". Read the article instead of just the whoop-de-do headline. Here tis: http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/Study%3A-smoke-break… Honeybun, no way does a 15-minute cigarette break four times a day tot up to $12,000 a year. The article actually said: "According to an Action on Smoking and Health study, smokers average four 15-minute breaks a day; that's an hour of the workday spent smoking ..." According to California law an employer is required to permit an unsalaried employee a 30 minute lunch break and two fifteen minute relief breaks per 8-hour work shift, one AM and one PM, whether the employee uses it to smoke or to stand on his head practicing yoga. So the non-smoking employee, like the smoking employee, takes two 15-minute breaks a day, anyhow. Which leaves two extra 15-minute breaks (one-half hour a workday) taken by the smoker, assuming that the Action on Smoking and Health (a propaganda mill) statement is accurate. Read the comments under the article: "On average employees get a break every 2 hours, how hard is it to only smoke every 2 hours??? I am a smoker and I have no problem smoking only on my scheduled breaks." and "This is stupid. It takes maybe 5 minutes to smoke a cigarette, tops, so try like 20 minutes a day ..." If you will exert your mind and read the Heishman paper I provided you a link to, you will read that a smoker really doesn't feel a need for a cigarette until after about two hours without. And the two legal California relief breaks take care of that nicely. Many of those smokers Reporter Deegan interviewed were likely taking their regular legal twice daily 15-minute relief break. As for the misleading headline insinuation that smoke breaks cost $12,000 per year per employee, the article actually said; "According to the study, a single smoking employee can cost employers over $12,000 a year in added medical care costs and lost productivity." Medical costs aren't smoke breaks. Most of the so-called "smoking related diseases" are the diseases of old age and their medical costs do not begin to accumulate until the employee is off the employers' insurance and onto Medicare. And if the employee dies soon after retirement because he is a smoker, the money remaining in his pension fund reverts back to the employer. Really, the smoking employee is a win-win for the employer. The employer gets the benefit of the smokers' nicotine-boosted brain power, most medical costs are deferred until after the employee retires and is on Medicare, and the employer gets all that money back from retired pensioners who die early from smoking related diseases. A clever employer should give cartons of Marlboros for Xmas.
— March 21, 2011 11:10 p.m.

The shame that San Diego smokers feel

My apologies. I did not have an URL for the Heishman paper, so I routed the reader through a Danish article which contains a link, but is quite pro-smoking. Here is an URL which will take you directly to a PDF of the Heishman report, "Meta-analysis of the acute effects of nicotine and smoking on human performance". http://dengulenegl.dk/blog/wp-content/uploads/201… Visduh, it is true that there are all sort of studies out there that "prove" all sorts of opposing things. "Scientific Studies" is a massive industry and researchers pay the mortgage and send the kids through college with their salary from grants. That means that if they want to stay employed, they had better write studies that please the grantors. If in Engineering, we cherry-picked data and fudged statistics as the propaganda oriented study authors do, bridges would collapse and airplanes crash, killing hundreds of people at a whack. It is wise to view studies with a skeptic's eye, read the study instead of the whoop-de-do news article, and check out the source of the funding.
— March 21, 2011 10:43 p.m.

The shame that San Diego smokers feel

Ponzi: So you think those smoking employees don't give the very best? Wrong! The smokers have the very best to give. In 2010 the U.S. government published a groundbreaking meta-analysis of studies on nicotine effects on the brain, "Meta-analysis of the acute effects of nicotine and smoking on human performance", by S J. Heishman et al. The research was supported by the (US Gov) Intramural Research Program of the NIH, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and funded by a NIH grant. You'll never read about it in the SD Union-Tribune. The Heishman meta-analysis was reported by Niels Ipsen, environmental biologist and Klaus Kjellelrup, researcher, in "Science is conclusive: Tobacco increases work capacity", http://dengulenegl.dk/English/Nicotine.html The article gives a link in its reference list to the full-text Heishman report. The report provides sound scientific proof that smoking and nicotine have a significant positive effect on job performance. Nicotine boosts attention, precision, motor skills, speed and memory. It makes the brain faster and more precise and gives the brain more stamina. Generally nicotine boosts the brain to work 10-30% more efficiently in a number of areas. For example, nicotine experiments show that smokers in prolonged working situations are able to maintain concentration for many hours longer than non-smokers. It is illustrated in the trial, "The effects of cigarette smoking on overnight performance" of Parkin & Hindmarch 1997, where smokers and nonsmokers were to do five different computer tests from 8 o'clock in the evening to 12 hours later. In all tests the non-smoker concentration levels broke down after two hours - while smokers could maintain concentration until 4 o'clock in the morning thanks to the nicotine in the cigarettes. Smokers smoke because their brains work better when they smoke. Since experimental animals in laboratories have shown similar results, there is no longer any doubt among scientists: Nicotine - the active substance in the world's most unpopular plant - the tobacco plant - is paradoxically a "wonder drug" that leads to better job performance. Ponzi, California law prohibits you from refusing to hire a prospective employee because he smokes. It only permits you to require that he does not smoke on your time and on your property. The employer who refuses to let his smoking employee smoke on his legally required lunch break and two per shift relief breaks is putting hobbles on the smoker and dragging his job performance back to the lower level of the non-smoking employee. I've given you a link to the actual government report. Go read it and adjust your bigotry.
— March 21, 2011 3:14 a.m.