Nice article, Stubbed Out, on how the smoke Nazi's and neo-prohibitionists succeeded in imposing a ban in Minneapolis and how apathetic the politicians and judges are to the plight of barowners' economic woes.

I've found at least one blogger sees the full picture and has turned up the heat.

LOL, it looks like I spoke too soon before reading through that blog. It appears there are at least a few more of them in the realm of alternate news sources attacking the local American Lung Association and their anti-smoking propaganda.

Some good reads are here and here.

Good reads.

Thank you lockjaw02 for visiting our site. I as well as a few other twin city bloggers do battle with local anti-smoking non-profit representatives regularly. It's good to have your support, feel free to stop into The Attic any time.

A hearty welcome to you, Smokeeter. But it is I who should be thanking you. I'm grateful for stumbling across your blog last night and was quite impressed with how well you and Craig phrased your arguments in debating the guy from the ALA. It took me many years of debating anti-smokers and researching for answers to their assertions to do as well.

Many folks like those posting here have been fighting the slow encroachment of the prohibitionists and anti-smokers for many years. At times it gets frustrating that too many Americans seem so complacent with the "can't fight city hall" syndrome. But our numbers are slowly building with each new attack on our rights and our liberties.

You can be sure I'll be stopping by The Attic from time to time to check out the topics of discussion. Glad to have you sign up over here as well. Folks here have been a big help to me in researching issues.

Great job in the blogs! Way to go, Smokeeter!

Seems to me more and more people are catching on to the anti-tobacco orgs' scams. The thing is that OUR number is increasing, but their numbers are either stagnant or decreasing, as their tactics touch more and more communities and create more and more enemies.

Those of you needing information to fight an upcoming ban may want to check out my other website:

http://fightcityhall.net/_wsn/page2.html

It details 2004 test results by the city of St. Louis Park, MN. regarding secondhand smoke and its comparison to OSHA permissible exposure limits. If there is one fact I would like everyone in this country exposed to it would be the above webpage. Please study and pass it on. The city's test result does more damage to the argument that secondhand smoke is a health hazard than anything else I have seen.

Hey, by the way any visitors to The Attic should take the poll in the upper right hand side of the webpage. The other members of the blog aren't too happy about how much time I dedicate to the smoking ban issue, so they're trying to shame me into submission. Only one vote per IP is accepted.

quote:

Originally posted by smokeeterMN:
It details 2004 test results by the city of St. Louis Park, MN. regarding secondhand smoke and its comparison to OSHA permissible exposure limits...The city's test result does more damage to the argument that secondhand smoke is a health hazard than anything else I have seen.

You can add this study to your list. Nobody would ever say the American Cancer Society, the Erie/Niagara Tobacco Free Coalition, and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute are tools of the tobacco industry.

This is what I wrote on it back when I stumbled across it in 2003:

I never saw this until today, but on October 30, 2002, the American Cancer Society announced the results of a new study, paid for by the Erie/Niagara Tobacco Free Coalition and conducted by people from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society.

Dr. Andrew Hyland of Roswell Park Cancer Institute, said, "[N]ow we have real evidence about how high the average amounts of secondhand smoke exposures can be for some workers in Erie and Niagara counties."

What they did was have volunteers wear passive nicotine air monitors for a minimum of four hours in different places.The monitors were then shipped off and analyzed. The results are shown as how many nanograms of nicotine exposure a person would have been subjected to in an 8 hour period.

They found that "workers in places with no smoking restrictions suffered the most exposure to secondhand smoke." That's not real surprising.

From highest exposure to lowest, here is what they found (these are averages):

Bingo halls-940 nanograms of nicotine per eight-hour shift.
Two local bars sponsoring "Marlboro Night"- 814.
Stand-alone bars and taverns-539.
Places with some smoking restrictions:
Workers in bowling alleys-110.
Bar areas of restaurants-80
Nonsmoking sections of restaurants that allow smoking in their bar areas-30.
Restaurants with enclosed smoking areas-20.
Where smoking is completely prohibited-No measurable exposure.

Now, what interested me in this study is that a nanogram is 1/1,000,000,000 (one-billionth) of a gram. And I was quite sure that cigarettes contain about 1 milligram of nicotine. A milligram is 1/1000 of a gram (one-thousandth). So a milligram is one million times bigger than a nanogram. Just a rough estimate looking at these numbers told me that the worst exposure (bingo halls-940) showed that employees were exposed to only 1/1,000 of the nicotine a smoker gets from one cigarette. In other words, it would take them 1,000 shifts to smoke a whole cigarette. That's almost 5 years.

What I needed to know, to make a better estimate, was how much nicotine a smoker actually inhales from one cigarette. For that number I found a study by Martin Jarvis, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. He concluded that the machines used to measure the tar and nicotine yields in cigarettes do not do a good job at mimicking real smoking. The machines, smoking regular-yield cigarettes average 0.91 milligrams of nicotine intake per cigarette. Jarvis measured participants' cotinine levels and calculated the average nicotine intake is actually 1.31milligrams per cigarette.

So it seems that the most exposed workers (bingo halls) get 1/1,393.6 the nicotine as a one cigarette/8 hour smoker. But as the average smoker lights up about 15 cigarettes in that time frame, the bingo hall employee gets only 1/20,904 the nicotine as a smoker. And this doesn't figure in the other 16 hours in the day or the assumed two days off each week and vacations.

Looking at the exposure in a nonsmoking section in a restaurant (30 nanograms) and the exposure is over than 30 times lower, or about 1/650,000. And that's still forgetting the rest of the day, weekends, and vacation.

Now, maybe my numbers are off a bit, but not as much as the silliness these people suggest by these findings:

"Other studies have shown us that restaurant workers, who typically have greater exposure to secondhand smoke, are 50% to 100% more likely to develop lung cancer," said Leffler. "Until today, not much information was available on how much secondhand smoke different types of workers are exposed too. We hope that seeing this data will make people stop, before they light up, and think about how many other people they're harming."

I'm in Wisconsin as well, and I have been trying to tell people this since 1993.It is absolutely ridiculous to say that someone else's smoke will cause cancer. One idiot over here said that spending two hours in a smoky bar was equivalent to "smoking" 4 cigarettes! In addition to the study that you posted, the anti's like to spew the garbage about the alleged 4000 chemicals contained in tobacco smoke, but here is one example. Those chemicals are indeed present, but the amounts are so small that they are irrelevant. Arsenic is one of those ingredients....BUT, you would have to have 5000 people blowing smoke in your face all at once to be exposed to the same amount of Arsenic found in a typical glass of tap water! It's the DOSE that makes the poison, yet they use math in the form of "relative risk" to make things appear to be thousands of times worse than they actually are. The methods the anti's use as comparisons are like saying that an astronomer has predicted that a meteorite will hit Honolulu at 12:00 next Friday. Therefore, if you live in LA, you are twice as likely to be hit by the meteorite as someone in New York.....!

quote:

Originally posted by Pat:
In addition to the study that you posted, the anti's like to spew the garbage about the alleged 4000 chemicals contained in tobacco smoke, but here is one example. Those chemicals are indeed present, but the amounts are so small that they are irrelevant.

Actually, many of those 4,000 chemicals are assumed to be there. They are in amounts so small they haven't been able to measure them.

smoketeer- I have heard of you and your organization... love to sit down and chat sometime (Fargo, ND). Also found the fightcityhall site when ND thought about the stuff minnesota is/was considering ban-wise.

I'm sure you have heard it all

hazyshade, how goes the battle in ND. If it is ever brought up again, you guys need to push for a ban to match South Dakota statewide smoking ban- smoking is banned in all establishments except those establishments which have a liquor license.

Gotta love SD thumbing their nose at the Nazis like that.

how's your business goin, anyway?

What kind of competition do you run into with those things?

Hazyshade thank you for asking, business is horrible.

We had plenty of competition before local governments started helping the marketing departments of pharmaceutical nicotine companies. Johnson & Johnson with the help of one of their largest shareholders-RWJF lobbying efforts, has been the toughest competition I've ever experienced in 15 years. Not because they are a great marketing machine, but because they are unfairly influencing local government to do their job for them - namely mandate smoking bans as a way to increase market share of nicotine patch sales.

Acutally, I was referring to other smoke ventilation companies as competition.

Yours seems to be the only one getting an abundance of free press throughout this debate...I thought you'd be the first call (or at least first in the customer's mind) if your product was in demand.

How is RWJF cutting your share of the pie- smoke ventilation vs. nicotine patches?

As far as other air cleaning companies there is always some competition but not much. Smokeeter brand is in a class by itself.

A smoking ban is a totally different matter nobody buys aircleaners when smoking is banned.

RWJF is cutting into our share of the pie by funding the smoking bans, afterall they own $5.4 billion dollars of Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical nicotine stock, smoking bans are good for nicotine patch sales; which is the reason they provide all the lobbying funds to the non-profits to implement bans....politicians would never come up with a ban on their own.