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"Who still smokes?" as Denise Grady reports at the NYT that however bad you thought smoking was, it’s even worse. A new study has found that in addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, researchers found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. “The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health,” says Brian D. Carter, an author of the study. “It’s not a done story.” Carter says he was inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers but diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really low,’ ” Mr. Carter said. “We have this huge cohort. Let’s get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don’t already know.” The researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. "The Surgeon General's report claims 480,000 deaths directly caused by smoking, but we think that is really quite a bit off," concludes Carter adding that the figure may be closer to 540,000.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anal Pumpernickel on Saturday February 14 2015, @09:39AM
You sound like a fundamentalist libertarian
No, just someone who cares about the constitution and fundamental liberties. Do not make the mistake of believing that only a "libertarian" would care about such things. I just firmly believe that the US should strive to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave" rather than just pretending it is and violating people's freedoms in truly heinous ways.
People do not have unlimited individual rights.
No one said anything about unlimited. Unlimited individual rights would mean the right to murder, which I do not believe is a right.
I do, however, believe that we should set a very high bar before we decide to create laws, and I also believe the government should follow the constitution. This standard would eliminate the TSA, the NSA's mass surveillance, the drug war, and a number of other awful things. Indirectly affecting other people should not be enough to prohibit something for everyone, and a federal prohibition is simply unconstitutional, and therefore intolerable.
If people want to harm themselves with drugs, then so be it. If this indirectly affects me at times, the cost is well worth it.