Lately I've been working on a monograph about making biomedical decisions. If you're interested in reading the first topic, which is shamelessly anti-smoking, look beneath the cut.
One thing to bear in mind about this monograph is that I make no attempt to be objective. I give *MY* side, and then a list of questions by which *I* arrived at the decision in question.
If you are a smoker, you might want to not read this, as I refer to smokers as voluteers for lung disease.
Please bear in mind that this is wholly opinion based on fact.
I. Giving Yourself Cancer
People who know me know that I am not just a non-smoker, I’m an anti-smoker and I am one for very good reasons. To understand my view, you have to first understand what I left the leadership of CUEW to do. In 2005, I took up a low-member on the totem pole position in research at one of the United States’ premier Cancer Treatment and Research Centers. Mostly, I took the position because I like to eat and have a roof over my head, but I could’ve made more money in industry, and I stuck to the low-paying, often menial work of physical research because I believe in it.
I walk past the lobby of the hospital part of our center everyday to get to my lab. On mornings when I don’t feel like giving 100%, the sight of some child half dead with leukemia coming in for more drug therapy is like a slap in the face. I love what I do, even when it makes me crazy, because if that child lives and has children of his or her own, and one of those children has leukemia, the drugs I’m working with might save that kid from going through what Mom’s went through.
If these kids were the only cancer patients I ever saw, I would probably do this job forever.
But they aren’t.
Every now and then I come upon a smoker in here for lung cancer who makes me want to throw my beakers to the floor and storm out, never looking back. I don’t mean the 80 year old who smoked back when they didn’t know it was awful for you, or even the under educated immigrant who didn’t grow up with warnings. The smokers that make me want to quit trying to help them are otherwise sane individuals, who began smoking when they already knew it could kill them, continued after scares like non-cancerous growths or throat polyps and stand outside under the no smoking sign with one hand on a cigarette and one hand clutching the stand for the IV dripping cancer drugs into their body.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think that if you are as rich as Bill Gates and you’re going to pay every cent of your medical bills out of pocket then you can smoke cigarettes under a ceiling fan in an asbestos factory while lighting up with hundred dollar bills dipped in coal tar. If, however, you’re in a country where your treatment will be covered by the government, subsidized by an insurance company or otherwise paid for out of, or partially out of, non-smoking taxpayer’s pockets, then you get one warning from your body, tops, before your decision to continue to smoke is just ripping everybody off and should be treated like the theft it is.
There are many things that people do to themselves that waste other people’s money. Some people are obese for no reason other than eating too much, some people do incredibly stupid things like climb mountains because they were there, or ski the highest slope as fast as possible and some people drink massive amounts of alcohol. The thing is that eating, climbing and skiing actually do good things for you...and so can that pint. Eating in moderation keeps you alive, climbing and skiing get you exercise and drinking (again, in moderation) acts as a muscle relaxant and sedative and may even improve your health .
Let’s look at the benefits of smoking, shall we?
The “protective effect” of smoking has been described as an apparent (tiny, but statistically relevant) reduction in population frequency of Alzheimer's disease, endometrial cancer, Parkinson's disease, ulcerative colitis and pregnancy hypertension. On the surface, these minor effects might seem like good reasons to smoke, but in reality, they are good reasons to ingest the active ingredients of tobacco. In fact, these protective effects are probably reduced by the burning of the tobacco.
Burning a compound destroys the essential oils and active compounds. This is why a good herbalist recommends making herbal preparations via cold extractions, such as infusions and cordials, over tisanes when possible, and never making tisanes with boiling water, only with hot water. There is not a single natural compound on our planet which should be burned to get the full effect, and in the case of tobacco and cloves , adding combustion to the equation begets new carcinogens where there were none before and makes the pre-existing carcinogens more effective at causing cancer. Add to that the reality of the existence of non-smoking methods of getting these drugs, including aerosolization and ingestion, and there is literally no reason to smoke except for personal enjoyment.
If you choose to smoke for personal enjoyment and take functional steps to prevent second hand contamination of others and property damage such as smoke residue (for example, if you rent an apartment, you are responsible and clean the smoke damage when you leave) you’re off the hook for most of the responsibility of smoking as long as you’re prepared to reimburse taxpayers and/or insurance companies the price of your treatment should you get something like lung cancer. You see, even if you paid $3000 a year for five years for medical insurance and never used it, you’d still not cover the $26,042 in initial costs that the EPA estimates that lung cancer will cost. That $26,042, by the way, is probably more than your nurses at the hospital who you go to will make in a year, so you might want to apologize to them.
Of course, that’s just the initial assessment. Your actual treatment will be closer to $50,000 in the first year, and 2/3 of that the following one. You should get away with about $12,000 a year every year afterwards, for a total of over $150,000, assuming you live 10 years, which you probably won’t. Tack in another 20,000 in costs for the year you finally die, probably in a slow, painful, extended way. As if that’s not bad enough, these numbers are more than ten years old, and some people claim health care costs double every few years, so we’re looking at a conservative estimate of at least $200,000 for the cancer you volunteered for.
Statistically, when you’re diagnosed, you’ll no longer be required to pay your health insurance, and the government will pick up the bill. Do you think the extra buck tax on a pack of cigarettes is going to cover that? Maybe if you were a 54.7 pack per day smoker for 10 years. If the government ends up giving you other aid, like disability financial payments, you’re looking at needing to smoke more than a hundred packs a day to foot the bill, twice that if you have kids or a government pension for your survivors. Even if you think that only one out of ten smokers will get cancer , you’re still looking at having to smoke ten packs a day to cover the bill.
Our society is so screwed up that spending $30,000 on a cocaine habit is seen as a great tragedy and expecting others to spend $200,000 on your tobacco habit is completely within the bounds of morality.
So let’s step back for a second and think about the fact that most smokers don’t know and/or don’t care that they are costing the rest of us money. Some of them are jerks, some of them are uneducated and some of them have bought into the propaganda of the tobacco companies and really think that they are safe from lung cancer. Some of them are also probably severely mentally challenged, but that’s not their fault.
I’ve only met one Wiccan who was a Republican, and he was pretty strongly against people like the Christian coalition, and many Wiccan smokers in the US are Democrats, or apolitical, or independents, but don’t seem to care that their cigarettes pay for political lobbyists and for special trips for government officials and that those candidates seen as Right-Wing tend to get $3 from tobacco for every $1 given to candidates that oppose them. If you’re an independent, libertarian or other third party, it’s even worse, as your parties get virtually no money from the tobacco companies, and pretty much all of it goes to the big two. Smoking means Republican, and if you’re into that, more power to you.
Volunteering for lung disease is a biomedical decision that each individual should make at the personal health level and the personal fiscal level, but at the same time, our volunteers need to look at the big social picture. Whether you agree with my view or not, the decision to smoke, or to over indulge, or to take high-risk behaviors, should be made with the full knowledge of who pays the bills, who is responsible if things go wrong and stuff like that. A simple set of questions to use when handling this kind of decisions might read like this:
1. Who is ultimately responsible for the decision?
2. If I am responsible for the decision, who else is affected?
3. What are the fiscal, social and cultural risks of my decision?
4. Will those risks be dealt with by me or by other people?
5. If the risks will be dealt with primarily by others, should they have a say in my decision?
6. What else am I supporting by making this decision?
7. Do my beliefs and what I am supporting by making these decisions fall in line with each other?
8. Of the actions open to me, what does the least harm to others?
9. Of the actions open to me, what does the least harm to me?
10. If I choose to do these things despite the reasonable objections of others involved, am I capable of being responsible for the actions or will I be shunting the penalty onto people who’ve not done these things?
To smoke or not to smoke is ultimately the decision of the individual, but Wiccans, who are responsible for themselves must make their decisions with that fact in mind. If it effects others, it’s not your decision alone.
1.According to a August 17, 2005 Cnn/Money story, the worst paid jobs with the most expensive educations belong to Archaeologists, Clergy and a number of other professions I have trained for, including my current profession of Biomedical Research. I would be in heaven if my pay was the median pay of researchers they list in the story, but I make much less. Some of my less fortunate peers make under $15,000 a year and have to pay around $5000 a year in student loans. In one lab in my facility, 9 of the 11 lab techs are currently in default on their loans.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/15/pf/training_pay/index.htm
2. I’ve got a non-functioning thyroid gland, and that’s why I get frustrated with people who volunteer to be overweight.
3. http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/inthenews/MedicalReports/Longevity/1088617919.html
4. http://www.quit.org.au/quit/fandi/fandi/c03s14.htm
5. In the case of eugenol, found in cloves, there seems to be great benefit when it is ingested or applied to the skin, and it may even suppress certain kinds of tumors, but when smoked, it causes inflammation and may actually increase the size and speed of development of tumors. 6.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000509003850.htm; Alternative Cigarettes worse than real thing.: 7. http://www.drugabuse.gov/NIDA_notes/NNVol18N2/Alternative.html
8. http://www.epa.gov/oppt/coi/pubs/II_5.pdf; all the numbers that follow are based on this report.
9. One out of four will get some form of lung disease. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1721068/posts
10 http://no-smoking.org/nov01/11-26-01-1.html details 2000-2001 data.