tobacco fumage in a free society

One of the costs of living in a free society is that tobacco control is an issue that (at least I think) should be given some press. Two quotes by John Locke (the actual, historical, enlightenment era thinker, as opposed to the dude from “Lost”) illustrate the necessary tension in the matter:

"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself."

"All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."

Any action taken by a government in order to make it more difficult for its people to smoke is always an infringement upon the first principle. However, any action *not* taken to reduce the well-documented hazards of second-hand smoke is an infringement upon the second (shouldn’t part of being free mean freedom from being poisoned?) Therefore, one of the few things that can be conclusively deduced is that there is no perfect solution to the smoking problem as long as there are people that want to smoke.

Clearly the first question we should ask about tobacco control in general is, “what is the ultimate point?” At the end of the day, we absolutely shouldn't care that people smoke or use tobacco products. We just don't want to see the ensuing morbidity and we don’t want to pay for anything. So something to remember is that we are, at the very core of our effort, only trying to curb the harmful effects of tobacco use, and if there was some way to sever the causal link between its use and the development of illness, then we no longer need be concerned about whether or not tobacco was being consumed.

After this question, different approaches to tobacco control will no longer stack up equally when viewed ethically. The three general types of control methods that I can think of are educating people about the consequences of smoking, legislation making it more difficult to smoke, and technologies to make smoking less harmful.

Education and legislation have had more success in the past, and have less potential for success in the future than a technological solution. Hear me out: from the middle of the 20th century, prevalence of tobacco use has declined among the US population, largely due to the education of the public about the associated risks of tobacco use. Among a certain segment of the population, education is *very* effective. This segment, of course, is the proportion of people that are willing to learn. On the other end of the spectrum are people that are apathetic toward whatever the "facts" might say, and these people are completely out of reach of any awareness program ever (or yet to be) invented. Legislation has undoubtedly played a part in the nationwide decline as well. It is effective as long as people obey the law, and more effective when multiple people are held to account (for example, it is unlawful for SA to sell a 12-year old kid cigarettes, and both the attendant and the kid have to break the law in order for a minor to buy tobacco). However, programs like increasing the tax on cigarettes and limiting locations where smoking is allowed, while making tobacco consumption more inconvenient do not really affect the smoking rates in the population. Legislation will *never* be able to achieve a high degree effectiveness, because the citizens it is meant to protect must willfully subject themselves to it or have it enforced under some kind of penalty. Technology has not offered as much in reducing the morbidity, although treatments for emphysemas and smoking-related cancers would probably fall under the technological solutions umbrella. However, as far as effectiveness goes, technological solutions do not have the same kind of limits set on them by human nature that education and legislation have. So, perhaps in the future the ethical balance will begin to tip this direction- as people begin to realize that interventions of any kind are unethical if their probability of success is nil. Unfortunately, right now, if I'm not mistaken, a public health program of this type would have the least empirical support for why it should be implemented.

Legislation is, by nature, an infringement on liberty. Really, it does not take choice away from people, so much as it simply makes certain options less appealing by associating them with various penalties. These all have to be enforced and thus further reduce liberties of those they are leveed against, as well as the greater society that finances this effort (through freedom of spending, etc.). Technological solutions are burdensome in that they take a lot of time, money and work to develop, and often they create new social and ethical issues of their own. Education is probably the least burdensome of the three, although mandatory education is, I suppose, a type of encroach upon freedom as well (although arguably not as severe as the kind legislation causes).

But also, a primary hurdle for an ethical intervention to clear is that of fair implementation. The major obstacle for all three of type of interventions that I suggested is SES, which is negatively associated with tobacco use. Things like the cigarette tax will hit the poor in society the hardest. One thing we know for sure is that making poor people poorer will *not* make them more likely to stop smoking; however, being poorer will significantly decrease their chances of being able to utilize technological solutions and being educated away from not using tobacco. The SES gradient ensures that any kind of punishment that we can attach to smoking will be more easily avoided by the well-to-do who break the same laws as the poor. Again, I think education would probably be more fairly applied than technological or legislative approaches due to the availability of the public school system.

Wow, I wrote a lot about this; I'm going to call myself done for now. But, in conclusion I am going to say that legislation is wholly undesirable compared to educational and technological approaches to tobacco control. Education would be the perfect solution in a perfect world, in which people were rational and made well-informed decisions based on data and long-term gain. Innovations in the physics of tobacco use and its consequences could one day be the most effective way to deal with the tobacco problem, but right now we're still waiting for said innovations to come along while hundreds of people die every day...

I don't know. Period.

The right to immorality (but only for the unbeliever)

TO every conscious being is given a responsibility by God to ensure that they themselves live morally. To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly before God; to have no other Gods before him; to love God with all their heart, mind and strength; and to see the man jumped by robbers on the way to Jericho, and, instead of passing him by, to bandage his wounds and see that he is cared for at our own expense. Living in this way is what God expects.

Of the people that are blessed enough to realize that this lifestyle is, in fact, God's will, only some of them will realize that it is right but it is unlivable, because human nature renders us incapable of living to this standard. Thus, they ask for Christ's help, and study his example in leading this sort of life, and necessarily in doing so, they become part of the church. At this point, it becomes their obligation to see that the rest of the church is constantly looking to Christ to live as God commands, as it says in Hebrews,

“Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.”

However, christians should always be wary of holding the outside world to the same standards that we are held to by the word. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5,

“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.”

We may and probably will find it more difficult to maintain our standard of morality as our culture becomes more depraved, but that is *our* problem, not the unbeliever's. Their sin is all they have and it will not let go of them, even as God casts it into hell. God, in his wisdom, gave them free will "to do harm or to do good". How dare we declare him wrong by trying to make the moral decisions of others for them, even as we admit we are incapable of making our own?

3800 calories later...

I'm feeling the aftermath of my marathon-running stunt yesterday right now. Yesterday was great, finished with a personal best time (out of two marathons, but shhhh!) of 4:42:19 chip time or 4:48:24 race time. Thanks if you were one of the people praying for me!

The thunderstorms made things interesting. Running in the rain comes with a different set of hazards, namely chaffing. I had no idea nipples can bleed like that.

Like I expected, I'm feeling some muscle soreness too, maybe this is what it's like when you're eighty? I'm currently pretty much saturated on "vitamin I" , and I actually feel pretty good while I'm sitting here at the kitchen table, but going to my apartment's laundry room is going to be a special experience. Going down the stairs is what hurts the worst right now. But, I maintain that it's all still worth it.


It wasn't as hot yesterday as it was when I ran it last year, so I was able to shave about 25 minutes off my time. Because I am a huge nerd, and have previously decided that I would do absolutely nothing but sit around and heal today, I thought it would be fun to make a graphical comparison.

The fresh scent of a new posting

Today is, in all likelihood, the last day I will ever get to waste the Biostat department's money by blogging during the office hours they pay me to hold.

Please observe a moment of silence for this sad event.

I know, I know, it's a tough job, but someone has to do it. But enough about me, let's talk theory already.

Postulate #16: Athletes, in general, will always be sucky role models.
Even the casual observer can probably think of several instances of professional athletes exhibiting criminal behavior. I'll name a few: OJ, the 2005 Vikings cruise of debauchery on Lake Minnetonka, Michael Vick, Brett Myers' domestic abuse fiasco, Rae Carruth getting convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Headlines like these happen a lot. The obvious factor that people blame is background or socioeconomic status as adolescents, but I think that another more important factor confounds the relationship between pro athletes and violence. That factor is testosterone levels. Increased testosterone levels are highly correlated with aggressive behavior, but lo, they are also highly correlated with increased muscle mass. Therefore, in selecting for outcomes associated with higher muscle mass, like pretty much every professional sport does, you are forming a much more concentrated population of conviction-prone people. But what are we going to do, not care about how well an athlete performs on the field in order to have a more socially beneficial pool of heroes for kids? That would be ridiculous too.

Postulate #17: Having a rear spoiler on a car will lead to a significantly reduced lifespan of the car's transmission.
The theory in this case is that since the rear spoiler is functionally useless on a front-wheel drive car, the only people that would go out of their way to have one on their car are those people that just want to feel youthful or something because they have a fast and sporty ride. These are the same people that peel out as soon as the light turns green, and this undue acceleration will bring about the premature demise of the transmission over time.

I'm actually collecting data on this to analyze for my final project in my ANOVA and design class,
you can help me validate my theory by taking this ultra-easy 5-question survey that will take less than a minute of your time, please for the love of all that is good, click here.

Winter conversation tips

It's flippin' cold out. You know this. I know this. Everybody else in the Twin Cities knows this. Therefore it doesn't make a good conversation topic. Also, please don't tell me about how you "don't mind the snow, but the cold is terrible!". Everybody else shares this opinion; it's kind of like saying " I like money" or "I don't appreciate car wrecks".

You can keep the same point of view, but here's a little-known fact: if you say the opposite of what you really mean, people still tend to understand your point and can even be fooled into thinking that you're interesting. For instance, if you wanted to express your feelings about snow and cold, you could instead say "You know what? I love not being able to feel my face after spending 30 seconds outside, but I get absolutely infuriated by the sight of that cold white powder lying all over! What a mess!" People will still be tracking with you. Try it.

Just a thought.

No sense of proportion. Totally worthless.

Even though I horribly overestimated the size of her finger, Tara said she'd marry me anyway. Sweet deal.