Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakeva | Hacker News Reader

But it's not. Smoking isn't contagious.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...

> Since the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, 2.5 million adults who were nonsmokers died because they breathed secondhand smoke.

Honestly the secondhand smoke research is very sketchy. Actually anything that becomes a public health issue ends up getting distorted by the public health establishment. Case in point: flu vaccines. They’re so ineffective that no rational person would ever waste time taking them, yet many of us do: https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influ... (note: the “no rational person” is slight hyperbole)

The better argument is that the actual social behavior of smoking is contagious, as any social behavior is.

The victims of secondhand smoke aren't someone standing on the street next to a smoker but people (and pets) who grow up in a household with smokers. Whether or not the numbers are what they are claimed to be it's hard to argue against the reality that thousands of children are subjected to the very real harms of secondhand smoke their entire childhood with no recourse, especially when they are most vulnerable.

I don't say this to say we should ban tobacco because "think of the children" but I genuinely think people seriously overlook this aspect. Someone smoking near you as an adult might be obnoxious but children in smoking households suffer and develop lifelong health problems for a vice that is entirely out of their control that many people don't even really see as a problem or think about.

Even if I take those numbers at face value, it's disengenuous to mix in those from 1964 and up until we banned public smoking nearly everywhere you can imagine. The last place you can smoke freely is your home, and this doesn't address that.

Ha, I hear this argument all the time and it’s actually completely wrong. All social behaviors are contagious. They do spread exponentially. Especially drug consumption / smoking.

Note: it’s not relevant but to be clear I oppose all drug bans (incl tobacco) and all the COVID restrictions. So don’t interpret my pointing out that social behaviors are contagious to be justifying the menthol ban.

This misses the point of what makes a contagion so bad. An outbreak of a contagious disease is bad because victims do not (usually) consent to them and often has limited or no means of protecting themselves against infection. A nicotine addiction is nothing like that.

That's true, but covid doesn't get you chemically addicted, nor does it have a bunch of companies attempting to coerce you into continuing to have it.

It sort of is actually.

If someone near you is smoking, so are you.

If someone near you is smoking, when you go home you aren't at risk of an ER visit in the next week. If someone near you has Covid, you are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com