I’d love to see cigarettes disappear from the face of the earth and from its bowels too, but I have problems with this decision on the part of the Sarasota County Commission.

Citing the burden they place on taxpayers who pay for government workers’ health insurance, Sarasota County officials announced Monday that they no longer will hire smokers.
In Florida, the right not to hire employees who smoke was upheld in 1995 by the state Supreme Court after a prospective employee sued North Miami.
Sarasota County officials cited Centers for Disease Control research that put the annual cost of hiring a smoker at $3,400 a year in lost productivity and medical expenses.

Note that the policy applies only to new hires — country workers who currently smoke are not being mandated to give up either their habit or their job. The difference is significant.

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What typical reaction might the following passage have elicited had it been written four or five decades ago? And how does that reaction compare to the one it would generally elicit today?
I do not feel that people who have quit smoking nor have spent money on smoking-cessation products and services should be congratulated for their tasks. Offering up a positive retort only serves to reinforce the idea, ultimately, that it is bad to smoke. The simple congratulations – even if stated in a meaningless fashion, even if you really don’t care, even if it’s awkward to say nothing – means that one supports the status quo.
This goes hand in hand with why I hate (yes, hate) the “smoker acceptance lite” idea, which suggests that smoking cessation and the acceptance of smokers as people can co-exist. When people purposefully quit smoking, they’re saying that they are more willing to support society’s limited views on smoking and smokers than fight for broadening those views and definitions. When those same people later tack on “support” for acceptance of smokers, it feels hypocritical.
Pretty fruit-loops, eh? When widespread concern about the health risks of smoking first arose, the data were clear and many people paid heed, but the tabacky companies — and with them, a small but significant pool of obstinate and deluded smokers — loudly ran their yap-gaps about the whole thing being a scam. Today, only the truly insane or depraved would claim that smoking is anything but pestilential. Yet at the same time, smokers themselves need not be ostracized or maligned as human beings. (I have a post in the works dealing with a smoking issue of local concern in which puffwagons are getting the shaft.) In other words, it is possible to condemn the habit without condemning the human.
And yes, I had inspiration for this.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego have concluded that smoking cessation may indeed be “contagious.”
The scientists tracked over 12,000 participants in the now-famous Framingham Nurses Study for over 32 years and found that quitting tended to occur in identifiable clusters of people — most of whom did not know each other — rather than on a strictly individual basis. The implication: Somehow, when a smoker “impulsively” or “for no particular reason” decides to kick the habit once and for all, he is not only affected by the actions of those to whom he is in some way related by culture or other factors, but may in turn be affecting others.

“We’ve found that when you analyze large social networks, entire pockets of people who might not know each other all quit smoking at once,” says Nicholas Christakis, a professor in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy, who, along with U.C. San Diego researcher James Fowler, authored the study. “So if there’s a change in the zeitgeist of this social network, like a cultural shift, a whole group of people who are connected but who might not know each other all quit together.”

The phenomenon is an interesting one from an epidemiological and sociological standpoint, but the question of how to apply it to the smoking populace is a tricky one. It would seem that the factors playing into smokers’ higher likelihood of quitting in high-cessation areas or in families with quitters (even if the family members are geographically separated) are subconscious, not conscious, in nature.
The study results appear in today’s New England Journal of Medicine (abstract).

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego have concluded that smoking cessation may indeed be “contagious.”
The scientists tracked over 12,000 participants in the now-famous Framingham Nurses Study for over 32 years and found that quitting tended to occur in identifiable clusters of people — most of whom did not know each other — rather than on a strictly individual basis. The implication: Somehow, when a smoker “impulsively” or “for no particular reason” decides to kick the habit once and for all, he is not only affected by the actions of those to whom he is in some way related by culture or other factors, but may in turn be affecting others.

“We’ve found that when you analyze large social networks, entire pockets of people who might not know each other all quit smoking at once,” says Nicholas Christakis, a professor in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy, who, along with U.C. San Diego researcher James Fowler, authored the study. “So if there’s a change in the zeitgeist of this social network, like a cultural shift, a whole group of people who are connected but who might not know each other all quit together.”

The phenomenon is an interesting one from an epidemiological and sociological standpoint, but the question of how to apply it to the smoking populace is a tricky one. It would seem that the factors playing into smokers’ higher likelihood of quitting in high-cessation areas or in families with quitters (even if the family members are geographically separated) are subconscious, not conscious, in nature.
The study results appear in today’s New England Journal of Medicine (abstract).