Yes, you guessed, it. From
July 19, 2012 CBS San Francisco:
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – Smoking anything other than medically-prescribed marijuana at San Francisco street fairs, festivals and other outdoor events held on city property would be banned under new legislation before the Board of Supervisors.
Supervisor Eric Mar said he introduced the proposal because of the health impacts ofsecondhand smoke when people light up in public.
“It’s widely known that secondhand smoke is responsible for as many as 73,000 deaths among non-smokers each year in the United States, and there is no safe level of exposure,” he said.
I was watching an old
Dragnet episode where Friday and Morgan are talking to a Timothy Leary-type of drug guru, looking for evidence on which they can bust him. It is a remarkably preachy episode in a series that is not strong on its writing or subtlety, but watching them go back and forth in 1968 about whether young people would eventually legalize drugs is quite interesting when viewed from today. Especially when viewed from watching what the future of America is: San Francisco, deciding for health reasons to ban cigarettes, but leave marijuana alone.
Yeah, that Dragnet episode had some good dialogue in the Friday vs "Doc" Leary segment. It's sad to see those old shows and see how much worse the world has become. Somehow I have to think the fictional characters would be glad to be retired or dead in today's CA.
ReplyDeleteOf course in the "happy" Bay they want to get stoned rather than treat their medical conditions since a pill with the pain management effect and without the high would not be good enough for them.
Who's to say the high doesn't help with pain management ^_^?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, while I don't follow this at all, I thought the one good argument for medical marijuana was as an anti-nausea drug that wasn't in pill form (the downsides of that method of administration should be obvious).
You'd think that producing second-hand smoke with anything would be bad. It's one thing to treat sickness with medical marijuana, in the privacy of your home; it's quite another to share that treatment with everyone around you in a public space!
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know anybody that's died of second hand smoke? They make these bold numbers that are almost certainly made up. And these people who think weed is perfectly safe even though there are no studies saying it's safe because we don't let them study it. I don't even think weed should be illegal and I wasn't even anti-gay marriage but the shove it down your throat attitude of both those groups makes it next to impossible to support them.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know anybody that's died of second hand smoke?
ReplyDeleteYou can only "prove" that epidemiologically ... and given that the FDA redefined the statistical threshold of scientific truth in order to get the results they wanted from their second hand smoke study, we can safely assume it's generally bogus.
Weasel word "generally" because for some it is unquestionably bad, those with allergies like me, no doubt others with various sorts of chronic respiratory condition.
I don't find it impossible or even unlikely that second hand smoke has hazards. There is likely some minimum threshold where the risk does fall to zero (as with radiation exposure). But I also have learned that there is a level of fanaticism to this that makes it hard to trust FDA. But excluding marijuana from the ban is just pro-pot bigotry.
ReplyDeleteOnce "medicinal" marijuana becomes commonplace there will be a large enough population to begin studies, and I predict they will show that partially burned cellulose and other plant fibers cause respiratory problems independent of genus and species.
ReplyDeleteI assume medically-prescribed tobacco is permitted.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting thought. A judge said in my presence once, "I can get a doctor to say anything I want, and I'm poor." Those last two words have to be taken proportionally, as our client was a multimillionaire.
ReplyDeleteOne person told me that smoking (tobacco) dried out his sinuses, and another told me that as a child she had asthma until she started smoking and she was afraid to stop for fear it would come back.
I wonder how many other people are in that second person's situation, and how if it were studied more it would affect the "catastrophic secondhand smoke" theory?