[Vision2020] "Please do not continue to confuse people with facts."

[Ted Moffett]

While I think government regulation of addictive drug use in the workplace
(tobacco in bars, in this case) that has dramatic negative health impacts,
when employees sometimes breathe the drugs continuously during their shift,
is reasonable, I have doubts about restricting outdoor tobacco use.  For one
thing, this is not occurring in the workplace (unless the bar happens to be
outdoors), and outdoor use of tobacco does not concentrate the smoke as use
indoors.

But the twenty foot ban on smoking outside entrances to bars in Moscow does
not make it hard to find a spot to smoke outside some bars.  Consider John's
Alley.  Along the sidewalk in front of the Alley to the east is the south
wall of the Moscow Food CO-OP.  There are no entrances along this wall.
Twenty feet to the east from the south entrance to John's Alley is within a
quick few steps of a "legal smoke zone."

Anyway, drugs, sex, politics, economics and religion are main subjects (what
else?) that it seems are difficult sometimes to approach rationally and
factually...

What drugs are determined to be "hard" or "soft" is often not based on
objective medical knowledge, and the legal status of illegal/legal drugs is
sometimes not based on the rational application of medical science and
sociology.  Isn't cannabis criminalization an example?

Alcohol in quantities easy to consume induces dramatic impairment of mind
and body (and can kill, as the sad case of the U of I student who overdosed
on alcohol last spring reveals:
http://www.kxly.com/Global/story.asp?S=10258470  ), that use of
methamphetamine or cocaine, for contrast, will not, though long term abuse
of these drugs will impair function and injection makes overdosing a
risk.  Who injects alcohol?  Is this possible?  However, alcohol is the
number one drug associated with violent crime.

One of the signs of cocaine or methamphetamine use/abuse is increased
efficiency on the job, which is not associated with alcohol use.  And the
rates of vehicle accidents from cocaine or methamphetamine use is not very
high, unlike alcohol, which being a depressant reduces reaction time and
coordination.  Soldiers use methamphetamine for critical times in battle, to
increase their performance or stay awake.  Alcohol can also be physically
addictive, and damaging to health (liver).  It could therefore be classified
as a "hard" drug, as cocaine and methamphetamine sometimes are.

Though tobacco use usually does not induce the radical impairments of mental
and physical function that alcohol does immediately after a few drinks, it
(nicotine) can induce profound physical addiction; and the long term health
damage is severe, which is why, combined with tobacco's widespread
availability and use, tobacco is the leading cause of premature death.
Nicotine can also easily kill due to an overdose, if injected into the blood
stream, but tobacco smoking makes this outcome nearly impossible, from what
I have read.

Tobacco is insidious because a user can become addicted for years, with
minimal impairment of function (unless having high standards for
performance, as an athlete would) before the most serious health impacts
manifest (cancer and respiratory diseases, etc.).  People often seem to
tolerate "smokers cough," and the smell.  Alcohol's impairment of
functioning soon after a significant dose is a discouragement to abuse,
as some U of I freshmen every year, apparently lacking in experience,
discover after a night at the bars, leaving their dinner on the sidewalk, a
rite of passage for youth, some might claim...

If physical addiction and either radical impairment of functioning or very
serious negative health impacts on large numbers of people defines a "hard"
drug, tobacco would be the number one candidate, among drugs commonly used,
with alcohol second.

Heroin is highly addictive, but does not cause the extent of health problems
tobacco does, or at least not directly from only the effects of the
drug; and I don't mean because heroin is used much less than tobacco.  This
statement will raise eyebrows, but this is because people have not studied
the objective medical science, and are conditioned by socially constructed
myths about drugs and their effects.  Of course overdosing on heroin is
fatal, but the negative health impacts of heroin use are often due to
impurities in the drug, needles used incorrectly, and the life style of
addiction.  This is one argument for decriminalzing heroin (with regulation,
of course), given criminalization encourages many of the behaviors that are
damaging from heroin addiction.  Doctors who have had access to high quality
heroin, who know how to administer it, and avoid overdosing, and are
financially secure, have been heroin addicts for years, reliably carrying on
their medical practice with their addiction in secret. Below read an animal
study comparing cocaine to heroin; the effects of cocaine were clearly more
damaging than heroin:

http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/ARUreport06.htm
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It is rather amazing that five Nobel Prize winning US authors were
alcoholics, with some of them claiming alcohol had a "stimulating" effect on
their writing skills.  Info on this issue is from this excellent and
fascinating book, a great read:

http://www.slushpile.net/index.php/2005/09/06/bod-the-thirsty-muse/

Today’s Book-of-the-Day is *The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American
Writer* by Tom Dardis. The book examines the influence of alcohol on so many
American authors. And the list is incredibly long. Five of the seven (at the
time of publication) American Nobel laureates–Sinclair Lewis, Eugene
O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck–were
alcoholic. Similarly afflicted writers include Jack London, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, Dashiell Hammett,
Dorothy Parker, Ring Larnder, Djuna Barnes, John O’Hara, Tennessee Williams,
Carson McCullers, James Jones, John Cheever, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver,
Robert Lowell, and James Agee.

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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