Posted on 11/03/2003 6:37:27 AM PST by 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.
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?
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!
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.
I wonder how many people (who smoke) won't even go IN for treatment now. This has gotten way out of hand CSM!
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.