God and Tobacco

[halloweenjack]

From a Decatur (Illinois) Herald & Review story on local hospitals banning smoking on their premises, starting July 4:

Taylor said she feels it would be inconceivable to ban smoking in a person's car.

"When you've got somebody in (the hospital), you need a break for a cigarette," she said. "I'll smoke in my car if I (want to). Only 14 percent of people are against God, but the 86 percent of people who believe in him are getting their rights taken away in public areas. Now it's working its way down to cigarettes. Next, they're going to tell us we can't smoke in our own homes."

When they said that it was inappropriate for the Ten Commandments to be posted in courtrooms, I didn't say anything because I wasn't a fundamentalist looney. When they said that it was inappropriate for someone to fire up a cancer stick at Marlboro Man Memorial while Uncle Clem was having most of his emphysematic lungs taken out, I didn't say anything...

Comments

[mariness.livejournal.com]

:: blinks ::

I would think that a hospital is the one place where we would agree that people shouldn't be able to smoke -- if only because, unlike, say, a bar, non-smokers can't exactly choose not to go to the hospital. And, as you note, several people end up in the hospital because they smoked. I would think that hospitals would be trying to actively discourage smoking.

And since you can't smoke next to the person's bedside anyway, even going to a designated smoking area is still leaving them. So how precisely does that differ from leaving to go smoke in your car?

*************

On another note, I've watched someone die of lung cancer.

I never smoked before that, but now I avoid second-hand smoke whenever possible.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

When our high school got the lecture with the slide show that showed the guy with tongue cancer and the guy smoking a cigarette through his tracheotomy hole, I was glad that I hadn't picked up the habit some years earlier, when some of the kids at the group home tried to teach me to smoke. Still, I smoked those little cigars for a short while in college... I have a small white growth on the tip of my tongue that my doctor is 99.9% sure is just a hypertrophied taste bud, but I'm still going to get it snipped off and tested in a couple of weeks.

[bleakdesolation.livejournal.com]

Dunno how the God thing is relevant. But your own car is your own property, and it does in fact have its own separate air filtration unit (your air conditioner) so it should be perfectly fine to smoke in there. Plus, do you want nicotine deprived hosp employees getting all shaky and spastic and trying to insert an IV into your arm? Shit, I don't! The folks who are making these rules aren't thinking.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

I think that she's trying to draw a comparison between the supposed "banning" of religious symbols and observations in public (really just a few people working against official government endorsement of religion, but whipped up by fundamentalists, and the politicians that they support, into a fictional national crisis), and similar banning of smoking in public places. Conservatives are often quite successful at putting godless secular humanists and health Nazis under the same liberal umbrella.

I think that the hospitals are banning smoking both for the reasons that Mari cites above, and also because they're trying to limit their health insurance liability both now and in the future. One thing that the article mentions is that hospital employees can buy nicotine patches at wholesale prices. I know that smoking serves other functions for people--such as giving an excuse to get the hell away from annoying coworkers and managers for a few minutes--but at least they wouldn't be jonesing.

[bleakdesolation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess you could make do with a patch. Though when Keith tried them, he got nauseated.