Maine: Lawsuit fights AMHI smoking ban

MAINETODAY.com ^ | 10-30-03

[SheLion]

AUGUSTA — Lawyers representing mental patients have filed legal objections to a new no-smoking policy on the Augusta psychiatric hospital's grounds.

Peter Darvin, who represents nearly 4,000 past and present Augusta Mental Health Institute patients as part of a long-standing class action suit dealing with other issues, added his objection to the smoking ban to that case.

The issue of whether patients should be allowed to smoke on grounds outside the hospital building goes to AMHI Court Master Daniel Wathen, and the question could ultimately be settled in Superior Court.

So far the issue is academic. While patients aren't allowed to smoke in the hospital itself, state officials aren't enforcing the policy barring smoking outside while its standing remains in dispute.

The new policy to prevent smoking anywhere on AMHI land came in anticipation of a move to the state's new $33 million psychiatric hospital that will replace AMHI, said Associate Commissioner Jamie Morrill of the Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services.

The new Riverview Psychiatric Center is scheduled to open in January, and smoking would be banned anywhere within the area surrounded by the security fence, he said.

Morrill disputed the contention that patients have a legal right to smoke near the hospital.

All other hospitals in Maine and most, if not all, of the hospitals in New England, have banned smoking on hospital grounds, Morrill said.

"No hospital in the country says this is a patients' rights issue. It's a health issue," said Morrill, adding that patients and staff will receive help (FORCED) to stop smoking from the hospital's medical staff.

[SheLion]

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a LOT to do with the smoking bans imposed on patients at hospitals. The more bans put upon the patients the higher the GRANT MONEY the hospital will receive. The hospitals are chopping off the heads of their 25-30% of their patients who smoke in order to obtain their blood money for hospital renovations. I think the whole thing stinks.

[SheLion]

Puff Alert

[metesky]

Does this mean that if you don't smoke, you're nuts?

Or does it mean that if you want to quit, you've got to be nuts?

[SheLion]

Does this mean that if you don't smoke, you're nuts? Or does it mean that if you want to quit, you've got to be nuts?

What this MEANS is: the people who are smokers but have to go into this hospital are going to be used as pawns in the pockets of the Head Administration. By forcing the smoking patients to slap on a patch, (and be sure, this patch WILL be slapped onto the patients bill as well), the hospital is assuring itself of big ole grant money.

I've studied this and that big old RWJ Foundation worth billions and with a die hard hatred of smokers, is using their money to feed large grant money into hospitals that ban and control patients who smoke. Sweet, eh?

[SheLion]

I'm thankful they are being sued. It's about TIME the lawyers stood up for OUR side for once in this life!

[CSM]

I have to wonder if this hospital has any substance abuse patients. Alcoholics or drug users looking to quite, often turn to cigarettes as a release. If the hospital does have this type of patient, they are ultimately harming their recovery!

[Mears]

I'm with you. Most people in recovery from serious drug and alcohol addiction smoke. Banning smoking is cruel and unusual punishment as far as I'm concerned.

[SheLion]

I have to wonder if this hospital has any substance abuse patients. Alcoholics or drug users looking to quite, often turn to cigarettes as a release. If the hospital does have this type of patient, they are ultimately harming their recovery!

I'm sure that they do have patients like this. Yet they would rather over-medicate them in order to keep them from smoking. This is the most asinine punishment any hospital can put upon a patient. Even in a regular hospital, keep the stress level down is the key to recovery. Yet.......they are preventing smokers from enjoying a legal commodity that WILL keep their stress levels down.

Very cruel and inhuman punishment, if you ask me!

[SheLion]

Hospitals moving to bar psychiatric patients from smoking/Don't go nuts in Maine

07/18/2002 9:23 AM EDT

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) Thanks to the repeal of a state law, Maine hospitals are moving to prohibit psychiatric patients from smoking.

Maine Medical Center implemented a smoking ban in its psychiatric unit this month, a move that the hospital's interim chief of psychiatry said will help doctors take care of the patient's overall health.

'Our first concern is about health and about patients, and it's high time we made the statement that smoking is not OK in a health care environment,'' Dr. Girard Robinson said.

But some advocates for people with mental illness oppose the change, saying nicotine and the act of puffing away can have a calming effect. That's a big reason, they say, why smoking rates are estimated to be as high as 90 percent among the mentally ill.

Some patients will find it impossible to fight nicotine cravings as they struggle with their mental illness, advocates say.

Hospitals are ''going to find people walking out against medical advice, or they'll find people not calling at all,'' said Janine Elkanich, program director of the Portland Coalition, a social club for people with mental illnesses.

Before its repeal last year, a 1989 law that banned smoking in hospitals and made exceptions for psychiatric patients was crafted under the impression that tobacco would help the group during hospitalization.

Medical experts can give no clear explanation for why smoking is so common among the mentally ill, except that it has mood-stabilizing properties and that tobacco is viewed as a form of self-medication.

On the sixth floor of Maine Medical Center, in a tiny room on the psychiatric ward, a small knot of patients used to light up four times a day. While medical patients and employees had to leave hospital grounds for a smoke, the patients of P-6 were allowed two cigarettes each for every 15 minute break.

Now, smokers on this 26-bed unit get no such breaks.

Hospitals that have gone smoke-free also include St. Mary's Hospital in Lewiston and Southern Maine Medical Center in Biddeford. Spring Harbor Hospital in South Portland plans to be smoke-free by the end of the year. And the two state-run mental health hospitals, Augusta Mental Health Institute and Bangor Mental Health Institute, are examining the possibility of having similar policies.

[CSM]

"Yet they would rather over-medicate them in order to keep them from smoking."

I hadn't even thought of that, good point! I can't imagine the number of people that will decline treatment or will quit treatment before it is completed.

[SheLion]

I hadn't even thought of that, good point! I can't imagine the number of people that will decline treatment or will quit treatment before it is completed.

I wonder how many people (who smoke) won't even go IN for treatment now. This has gotten way out of hand CSM!

[Humidston]

This is absolutely nuts! Government wants to impose ever-increasing rules, laws, regulations and bans on enough of mankind's activities so that no one can function without breaking one of them at least once a day.

Big Brother can fine or jail every last one of us, if they so choose! And this means we no longer live in a free country.

LEARN IT, LIVE IT, LOVE IT OR GO TO JAIL.

[lodwick]

Jackasses at work up there.

Cheers.

[Semper]

The hospitals are chopping off the heads of their 25-30% of their patients who smoke

Preventing patients from doing something which is clearly harmful to their health is a long way from "chopping off heads".

There is no "hatred" towards smokers - only concern over the unhealthy act of smoking.

Being addicted to the life-shortening, disease causing practice of sucking nicotine laced smoke into your body is not a form of freedom.

nic·o·tine (n¹k“…-t¶n”) n. A colorless, poisonous alkaloid, C10H14N2, derived from the tobacco plant and used as an insecticide. It is the substance in tobacco to which smokers can become addicted.

[SheLion]

Being addicted to the life-shortening, disease causing practice of sucking nicotine laced smoke into your body is not a form of freedom.

How long do you think I have been on this earth? FOUR YEARS? Semper, if it's so damn bad for us, why don't you go for an all out ban. Yes, that's it. Pull this hundred year old legal commodity off of the shelves. How about trying that?

You must think we in here are all a bunch of dumb azzes and I resent it. How dare you try to step on people especially when they are down and sick just because YOU say tobacco is such a killer.

You have a LOT to learn my friend!

[E Rocc]

There is no "hatred" towards smokers - only concern over the unhealthy act of smoking.

If the government is "concerned" about your "unhealthy" eating habits, should they be able to put you on a mandatory diet?

Being addicted to the life-shortening, disease causing practice of sucking nicotine laced smoke into your body is not a form of freedom.

We've already experimented with a government ban on a "life shortening-disease causing practice", and found it to be a dismal failure at best and noxious to liberty at worst.

-Eric

[Mears]

Caffeine is an alkaloid too.What do you want to do about that?

Too much of anything is bad,even coffee---ask anyone who has ever had a heart attack.

[Just another Joe]

There is no "hatred" towards smokers - only concern over the unhealthy act of smoking.

You obviously haven't had much of any dealings with true antismokers. To paraphrase, "The only good smoker is a dead smoker."
Most, the vast majority, of antismokers could care less about ANY smoker they don't know personally.
The sheeple of the movement have been brainwashed into believing that ETS will kill them as surely as a bullet to the head. Even when there is no valid scientific evidence or that the three largest studies done to date show no statistical evidence of any harm done to anyone that doesn't have a pre-existing medical condition.

As for being addicted to anything, what definition of "addict" are you using? Is everyone that smokes addicted? Cigars? Pipes? Cigarettes?

Why is it that when nicotine is administered via tobacco it's a 'bad drug' but when it's administered via a patch or a piece of gum it's a 'medicine'?

Smoking may not be a "freedom" but it sure is a liberty, and one that is being taken on the slippery slope to socialism for no other reason than some people don't like the smell.

[SheLion]

If the government is "concerned" about your "unhealthy" eating habits, should they be able to put you on a mandatory diet?

THERE you go!

Maybe hospitals should start stapling all the stomachs of the fat nurses and Doctors that work there.  And maybe they should start stapling the stomach's off all the fat patience they get.  The Surgeon General put forth a report that Obesity has now PASSED smoking, alcoholism AND homelessness for the nation's number one cause of death.  But do people like Semper bitch about this?  LOL!  Guess again! He, like many of the Anti-Smokers, just has his teeth sunk into people who enjoy a legal product!

Health & Science: Surgeon general warns obesity may overtake tobacco as leading preventable killer

Some 300,000 people a year die from illnesses directly caused or worsened by being overweight . The toll threatens to wipe out progress fighting cancer and heart disease, and could even exceed cigarettes' harm, Surgeon General David Satcher warned.

[SheLion]

The comments below are from the World Renowned Researcher, Wanda Hamilton:

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has given millions and millions to state "Tobacco-Free" coalitions to push for smoking bans and their professionals work with localities and states to enact smoking bans.  The money didn't go to the state coalitions directly, but instead was funnelled through a RWJF program called SmokeLess States, which the American Medical Association was paid millions to run.

 

The current Florida ban was worded almost exactly like their "model" legislation.  In fact, you can bet that the Florida Smoke-Free coalition had their attorneys craft the wording of Amendment 6 to follow the "model" as closely as possible.  The "model" was drawn up by attorneys working with Americans for Nonsmokers Rights, a heavily-funded organization based in California.

 

Here is a link to the SmokeLess States "model" ordinance.

http://www.smokelessstates.org/advocates/1_1_4_model.shtml

 

Click on the link on the site to read it. Some of the other links to documents listed on the left also make interesting reading.