Lets presume it's perfectly acceptable to run with scissors.
let us also presume for a moment that everyone does so every day for
long distances and our economy depends on it and we all grew up doing
it so it's OK - they even make you pass a rudimentary test to do it,
and you can have a baby in one arm while you're running .. no problems.
Now let us assume some lawmaker becomes aware that some people have
wood handled scissors and zealously sets to banning wood handled
scissors because someone carrying a child while they're running *might*
get a splinter in the child - coz you can get splinters from wood.
�
makes sense yes?� no. �
There would be irony by the bucketload if something so silly were to go
ahead. �
Yeah there's a tiny chance they might get a tiny wood splinter, but
there's a FREAKING HUGE chance they could end up with a bloody great
steel splinter impaling them!
but like I said, our economy depends on running with scissors in this
mythical land - so the mythical lawmakers ignore the bigger danger,
legislate against the smaller one and set to a good hearty round of
self congratulation..
Farce.
OK I'm going from the land of the ludicrous to the land of the absurd..
yep, good old Oz.� I'm also going to cite some numbers and if
numbers hurt your brain, grab a school kid to verify stuff.. they can
do
those things we all forget as we grow older.
Here we go, the smoking in cars debate.
1 cigarette weighs approximately a gram, 800mg of which is tobacco,
which when smoked leaves approximately 200mg of ash - thus 0.6 grams of
tobacco is burnt, converted to smoke and breathed in by a smoker.
The health authorities tell us, a lot of this smoke is retained in the
body of the smoker although some of course is expelled, and some of the
burning cigarette produces the foul smelling smoke of todays modern,
cheap quality (but expensively priced!) cigarettes.
As to whether this second hand smoke causes any problems is highly
debated within the areas of medicine, research and epidemiology..
Interestingly, petrol driven motor vehicles produce in their exhaust
similar toxins to those oft cited by medical authorities in their
condemnation of tobacco.� The major difference being that cars do
not produce the drug nicotine, although cyanide, ammonia, carbon
monoxide, sulphurous acids, arsenic, and all the others are well
represented by car exhaust.� Until recently, lead was also a high
emission product too.� The biggest producers of many of the air
pollutants common to cigs and cars are emitted by motor vehicles
according to the world health authorities.
So?� how bad can it really be?� I mean we're told every day
tobacco is bad, but cars are everywhere and we don't see problems from
them do we?�� Well.. �
In 1987 when the US authorities ceased logging deaths from carbon
monoxide *while driving*, this gas claimed over 70 lives in a year,
that is to say over 70 people were overcome and lost their lives to
toxins produced while driving their cars - some in tunnels, but many
also died while driving on highways.� 'How is this possible?' one
would reasonably ask and the answer is pretty simple when you talk to
anyone who lives in the more remote areas of the state away from the
smog of our urban living.
You see, we in the city have grown up breathing car exhaust fumes from
childhood, on our way to school, work and on holidays.� We pile in
cars, line ourselves up on the freeways and drive 20 or so feet behind
the car in front.. who is 20 or so feet behind the car in front of him
and so on.� Anyone from the country will tell you that when they
find themselves on the freeways they experience burning eyes and skin,
a sore throat and migraine like headaches from all the exhaust gases
they are forced to breathe - and there is no escaping it.
We however, simply dont see it because we live with it all the time.
Time was when you could walk down the Hay Street mall and you'd not
notice cigarette smoke at all.� In the 70's and 80's, you simply
didn't notice it!� Many people smoked in the office, in their cars
and walking the street and aside form the odd cigar or pipe smoker,
tobacco smoke was just a background odour one grew up
experiencing.� Some people (and I pity them!) suffered badly in
these times - those susceptible to tobacco smoke, the sensitive and the
anti-smokers, though many non smokers would in a moment of frank
honesty tell you there were a few favourite cigarette brands they liked
the scent of.
It is different now - as a smoker I can honestly say the quality has
declined from those days when tobacco companies were as free to
advertise as clothing companies or alcohol companies.� Since the
demonization of tobacco, what is fobbed off on the smoker has been
getting worse and worse to the point now that whatever floor sweepings
are shoved into those thin paper tubes would not have been touched by
the most desperate derelict in the 70's - and we all are forced to
suffer the foul smelling garbage with distaste, smokers, non smokers
and anti-smokers alike.
but i digress.. �
The law as she blindly stands is about to be changed in West Oz in the
most amazing example of irony i have seen in a long time - the proposal
is, smoking be banned in cars carrying children. �
while on face value this may seem a good idea to some, it's a step
toward criminalization of smoking in cars - and if that succeeds, why
not drinking, fiddling with the radio, talking or anything else aside
from driving?� A double standard will of course apply somewhere..
After all, one cannot touch a mobile while driving but one is free to
drive one handed while chatting on a two way radio with complete
impunity.
'But smoking harms the children!'.� Well like I said, the second
hand smoke debate is still in the debate stage - some have decided to
err on the side of caution and suggest it *may* harm those nearby, but
to date their is no valid, recognized scientific evidence to back this
up.� Some earlier reports defending this stance have been
thoroughly discredited, but lets presume, without evidence, that it
actually may cause harm.
There have been proposals to ban smoking near children's playgrounds,
why not a ban on smoking in cars?
Lets go back to that half a gram of tobacco the smoker inhaled while
driving his or her car.� Let's assume they were driving the kids
to school, lit up and drove 5 kilometers.. which would take 5 minutes
at 60 kmh..
In that same time their car would consumed approximately 250 ml of
petrol - and blown the equivalent of roughly 500 cigarettes worth of
pollutants out the tail pipe.� That's 2 and a half cartons for the
non smokers.� 2-3 weeks worth of cigarettes for a smoker, and
close to $150's worth of cigarettes.� Yup - 25 cents worth of
petrol makes the same volume of toxic gases as $150's worth of
cigarettes.
I suggest if they were the only car on the road then they would have
clean air ahead and there would be no problem.� However assuming
there *were* other cars on the road, they would be traveling through
clouds of exhaust pollution and breathing in a fair proportion of
toxins already in the air. �
Some studies in the US showed winding up the windows actually increased
the levels of toxins (carbon monoxide, ammonia, nitrous and sulphurous
compounds and acids, long chain hydrocarbons, arsenic, cyanide, etc) in
the cabin airspace, so windows down, breathing deeply, the kids are
probably consuming tens of times the pollutants had mum or dad smokes
away (or in fact themselves, as they are legally allowed to do under
our laws).� Think about it!� Where do these gases go?�
They're not 'clean'.� They're not dissipating into the air.�
They slipstream, holding to the flow of traffic, even with crosswinds
passing the road the pollutants still trail behind the leading car and
are inhaled by those following.
If one were to doubt the validity of what I am saying - and I encourage
people to question - grab yourself a bottle of Red-X from a local motor
parts store and use it to clean your carburetter.� When it's
poured in it will colour your exhaust fumes white - Pour some in the
carby and watch just how much gas is being blown out the tail pipe, see
how it forms thick clouds, then panic and shut off your car for fear
that someone in the next suburb will call the fire brigade (!)� No
seriously - you'll be stunned at just how much gas comes out your
tailpipe that you cannot see. Poisonous gas, more poisonous than any cigarette and in vastly greater amounts than smokers produce.. But you breathe it, all day, every day, and you never notice a thing.
OK, so if you want to concentrate on the ONE chemical that exhaust gas doesn't make that cigarettes do, nicotine, then you might be interested in knowing that ncotine - even though it is intensely poisonous - hasn't kill a single smoker from overdose. Not one.
You may also be interested in knowing it's not considered a carcinogen. No, nicotine will not cause cancer, not according to any research. And you may also be interested in noting that many people get a fair chunk of nicotine in their diets anyway from tomatoes, egg plants, capsicum and most of the other foods from the pepper family (Solanaceae genus).
So where's the threat? Something is poisoning us and giving our population lung cancer, but is it the very, very small percentage of pollutants from cigarettes, or the HUGE percentage of vehicle exhaust poisons? A heck of a lot of non smokers die from lung cancer - and a heck of a lot of smokers never get lung cancer, emphasaema or any of the other diseases known as 'smoking diseases'.
Concerned? I am! I was particularly interested to discover that a search of the World Health Organisation web site uncovered a few IARC reasearh articles which show alcohol as being classified as a group 1 carcinogen, along with formaldehyde, asbestos, plutonium and other nasties. More interesting was that the cancers it caused were of the respiratory and digestive systems. Even more interesting was the suggestion that there was NO safe level for alcohol consumption.. not 2 drinks a day, not one - zero. And if you happen to be from East Asia, then you're even more prone to cancer from alcohol as you probably don't even have the enzyme needed to break down alcohol.
So with more and more cancers like cervical cancer being show to be caused by viruses and bacterial infections, many cancers being demonstrably caused by alcohol and not just statistical linked as smoking is, should there really be so much effort focused on smoking?
Before I'm accused of being mad, maybe consider for a moment that carcinomas are now suggested as being caused by a *lack* of sunlight by some researchers, rather than too much (and subsequently there's a bunfight going on in research circles as funding dollars are at stake here). "it is more common in professional and administrative workers than unskilled workers" - interesting no?
I just see a HUGE irony in the proposal to ban smoking in cars, the biggest producer of toxic and carcinogenic gasses in our lives. Any simple maths calculations will readily establish that a twenty-a-day smoker (heavy smoker) blowing out the burnt products of less then 10 grams of tobacco is really not the biggest threat to our health!
11:00 a.m. - 2008-12-04
Recent entries:
get up maddness - 2011-10-15
iMobiler - 2011-09-19
pirates! download piracy.. and Pirates! - 2010-03-19
Climategate reward - 2009-12-04
so you want to be a pirate? - 2009-04-21
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