Guest column: Smokers push back

To Fred Ma and bob bob. Regardless of the smoking-related content in this op/ed, your comments are something you should be ashamed of, particularly because odds are you do not have the balls to go overseas and serve in the armed forces. I understand that you may not agree with the politics of the situation, but who are you to pass judgment on those who do? Whether you realize it or not, a lot of people that join the military and end up deploying do so because they are concerned about the well being of the individuals to their left and right...the politics of the situation rarely come into play, but you probably wouldn't understand that either since you're most likely a person with few friends or mommy and daddy sheltered you through your entire life so you think everything should be handed to you on a silver plate. And if those descriptions did not fit you then I'd be willing to bet that you're probably one of those people who plans to spend the rest of their lives in academia, getting degree after degree for what? So you can be called "doctor" in your history class....WOW what an accomplishment. Those men and women that deploy on your sorry behalf and live away from their families for a year or more have accomplished more in that year than your sorry excuse for a life will ever amount to.

In closing, I hope one day you wake up to find that you've lost everything in life, maybe then you'll start to appreciate things and realize that your complaining landed you there. Get a life, grow up and quit judging those who are willing to put their lives on the line for their friends...but then again, you probably have no friends so you'd never understand that.

And Mr. Rauen, thank you for your service, it is greatly appreciated.

The correlation that non-smokers get lung cancer from shs/ets is as bogus as getting cancer from a glass of water......
N-nitrosomines NNN is what john hopkins is trying to make a claim at for non-smoker lung cancer and shs.....that dog dont hunt and they know it.....N-nitrosomines is inorganic arsenic.....or pee cancer as some in the industry call it with a chuckle.......heres the deal, first dose makes the poison and here they have definatly lost their collective minds at johns hopkins.....inorganic arsenic is created in the body a chemical process however'' dose makes the poison'' you injest this stuff from eating grilled foods, drinking a glass of water and many other things.....point is dose....epa says that 29 picograms in a glass of water aint gonna harm ya nor will that grilled chicken ya ate lastnite....What your getting bombarded with is the biggest healthscare pack of lies since alcohol prohibition...as they ran the same healthscare campign back then on drink as they are on smoking.......94% WATER VAPOR AND AIR...........I just cant stop laughing.

tHAT BULL CRAP ABOUT RADIOACTIVE CRAP AND KIDS....the nutty lefties labeled it 3rd and smoke......I note how the person writing it purposely left that connotation out.......heres the laugh about 3rd hand smoke......Let me take one particularly important and egregious example: the January 2nd New York Times article on this research. The article reserves the spotlight closing paragraph of the article to provide the obligatory listing of nasty things found in standard cigarette smoke along with descriptive phraseology (e.g. “hydrogen cyanide, found in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid”). It finishes with one element particularly designed to terrorize parents in today’s world, “polonium-210 (Po210), the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006.”After reading such an article, what decent parent would allow smoking in their home, even if their children were not present. To go beyond that, what decent parent would even allow their children to associate with children of known smokers or allow smoking granny to stop in for Christmas and irradiate their children with the offgassing of KGB murder weapons? The claims, if true, would go far beyond reducing simple in-home smoking, they would drive deep and destructive wedges into our fundamental social fabric. Still, if true, perhaps the damage would be worth it. But are they true? Or are they the modern equivalent of the “yellow journalism” that has driven our society to irrational actions and even war in times past? I believe the latter is the truth. Since the Times chose to emphasize it in such scary terms, let’s take a look at this KGB killer highlighted in their story, the radioactive Po210. Some elementary research tells us that the Russian was murdered by a dose thought to be about 5 millicuries while a smoker smoking a half pack of cigarettes per day ingests roughly a half picocurie of this element. At typical nonsmoker living or working would likely get roughly a hundredth of the smoker’s dose, or about 5 femtocuries per day. A millicurie is a thousand microcuries, a million nanocuries, a billion picocuries, or a trillion femtocuries.It would take that nonsmoker a trillion days to absorb the dose that killed the Russian. Of course that’s secondhand smoke. What about our children and this “third-hand smoke”? A reasonable estimate for the amount remaining stuck to the 10,000 square feet of walls, ceilings, furniture, floors, and draperies in a reasonably ventilated 2,000+ square foot home would almost certainly be less than 1%, but let’s assume that 1% actually does remain and spreads out over that 10,000 square feet of surface. With ten cigarettes having been smoked while the child was at school and the house then thoroughly aired out, we’d then have 1% of a half picocurie (i.e. 5 femtocuries) spread over that surface. Let us suppose that your child has a “floor-licking fixation” and licks an entire 10 sqare feet of floor sparkly clean every day while your back is turned. That child will then have licked 1/1,000th of those 5 femtocuries into his system: 5 “attocuries.” So, how long would it take such a child to get the “killing dose” of the murdered Russian featured in the Times?In 1,000 days your child would have licked up 5 femtocuries.In one million days, 5 picocuries. In one billion days, 5 nanocuries.In one trillion days, 5 microcuries.It would take one quadrillion days (2.74 trillion years) for that child to absorb 5 millicuries. Unfortunately the universe is only 10 billion years old, so the child would have to lick floors for 274 cycles of our expanding universe to match our radioactive Russian.Of course since he’d normally excrete most of that polonium we’d have to refuse to change his diaper until the end of that period… not a very pleasant thought.And then there’s that whole annoying fact that the half life of polonium is only 138 days, so we’d just have to ignore the laws of physics as well in justifying the Times’ comparison.Even if someone wanted to quibble with these estimates, changing 1% to 10%, or 10 square feet to 100, or 10 cigarettes to 100 cigarettes per day… or even ALL THREE in attacking this argument… we’d STILL be talking three billion years of exposure along with a suspension of the basic laws of biology and physics. Other elements in “third-hand smoke” might be somewhat more concentrated, but still nothing that wouldn’t demand hundred, thousands, or millions of years of assiduous tongue-licking and total constipation. Dr. Kabat’s central point, the undesirability of confusing the science around smoking with the almost superstitious concern about such nonsensical concepts as “third-hand smoke” is valid, but he doesn’t go far enough in condemning either the gullible headline-seeking media or in recognizing the degree of harm caused by researchers whose agenda is driven more by politics than by science.Michael J. McFaddenAuthor of “Dissecting...

You fought for corporations, not for freedom. This wasn't WWII. This was the Iraq War. The other poster is right. Your friends deserved to die. Serving in the army means you had guts. I think you're very stupid though.

Yeah, smoke isn't dangerous. And that's why the NY Times published "A New Cigarette Hazard"

"Parents who smoke often open a window or turn on a fan to clear the air for their children, but experts now have identified a related threat to children’s health that isn’t as easy to get rid of: third-hand smoke.

That’s the term being used to describe the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers’ hair and clothing, not to mention cushions and carpeting, that lingers long after second-hand smoke has cleared from a room. The residue includes heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials that young children can get on their hands and ingest, especially if they’re crawling or playing on the floor."

A 2009 study from Johns Hopkins titled 'Lung cancer in never smokers: clinical epidemiology and environmental risk factors'

'Primary factors closely tied to lung cancer in never smokers include exposure to known and suspected carcinogens including radon, second-hand tobacco smoke, and other indoor air pollutants.'