<div>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. </div>
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<div>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."</div>
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<div>Anyway, drugs, sex, politics, economics and religion are main subjects (what else?) that it seems are difficult sometimes to approach rationally and factually...</div>
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<div>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?</div>
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<div>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: <a href="http://www.kxly.com/Global/story.asp?S=10258470">http://www.kxly.com/Global/story.asp?S=10258470</a> ), 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. </div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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. </div>
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<div>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...</div>
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<div>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. </div>
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<div>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:</div>
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<div><a href="http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/ARUreport06.htm">http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/ARUreport06.htm</a></div>
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<div>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:</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.slushpile.net/index.php/2005/09/06/bod-the-thirsty-muse/">http://www.slushpile.net/index.php/2005/09/06/bod-the-thirsty-muse/</a></div>
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<p>Today’s Book-of-the-Day is <u>The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer</u> 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.</p>
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<p>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett</p></div>