09 Dangers Of The Antismoking Movement
Description
This article is from the Smokers FAQ, by jdawson@netcom.com (Joe Dawson) with numerous contributions by others.
09 Dangers Of The Antismoking Movement
~~From: Cantiloper@aol.com~~
The banning of smoking in fast food venues has moved the favorite
teen hangout from a setting with at least some level of adult supervision
out to the back lots of strip malls where predators and hard drugs reign.
Kids who might never have tried a joint or a snort of happy dust are now
hanging out in an atmosphere where such drugs will mix freely with tobacco.
Further, the message that nicotine is the "most addictive" drug, while
discounted by most adults as silly, is taken seriously by some kids.
Half the kids who try smoking never go on to be regular smokers.
That half has thus learned the lesson that addiction really isn't a
dangerous thing at all: why not try heroin and crack?
As cigarette prices rise, and the crackdown intensifies on underage
purchase and use of tobacco, we'll see smoking teens get pushed further
and harder into the real drug culture with its attendant dangers and
violence. School suspensions and expulsions of smokers will make things
even worse.
A recent movie portrays a pregnant teen who "huffs" everything from paint
thinner to glue. As the dangers of smoking are played up and kids see
their friends smoking with few ill effects, the dangers of huffing will be
downplayed although huffing gasoline, spray paint, and glue on a regular
basis will do far more damage far more quickly than smoking tobacco. As
cigarette prices rise and their availability as a mild and cheap "high"
for teens declines, we may well see increases in this particularly
dangerous activity.
Finally, this constant emphasis on nicotine as a drug will lead kids to
think of it as such and start using it for a real drug effect. Usually
nicotine is relatively benign: normal smoking, even for a novice, almost
never causes more than mild dizziness or nausea. Using nicotine as a "drug"
by stuffing a can of chew in one's mouth or chewing 12 nico-chicklets
for a "high" may actually produce deaths among our kids.
If the FDA succeeds in eliminating nicotine from cigarettes there's sure
to be a black market in pure nicotine that can be sprayed on tobacco
products to give them that good ol' kick. Again, this kind of thing will
pose a particular danger to children who experiment with it in either a
pure form or simply try smoking a stolen cigarette that happens to be
pumped up to ten times the normal nicotine level.
Of course the Antis will claim that these deaths will be few compared
to the ultimate savings from reducing the effects of teenage smoking
40 years down the road. Unfortunately, that "savings" may never appear:
as the Antis have played up nicotine as a drug and implemented more
and more strictures on smoking, the rate of teen smoking has done almost
nothing but increase. Remember the tens of millions spent on the Smoke-
Free 2000 program that was going to eliminate smoking among students?
Those are the very students that now smoke more than any before them.
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