Posted on 02/05/2014 8:12:20 AM PST by rhema
Because we don't have enough to worry about and the news is slow and it's February and, well, the whole country seems to be suffering from cabin fever, a new level of smoking has been defined just to shake us up. I suppose, whenever there is a lull in the national conversation, you can always count on a medical researcher to bring up smoking, just in case we forget it is a nasty habit.
There is, as we all know, firsthand smoke. Firsthand smoke is when you actually light a cigarette while you are standing outside in a frigid doorway and start puffing away. Firsthand smoke is dangerous. We have been told that for about 50 years now.
There is also secondhand smoke. People who have quit smoking but accidently walk past the guy standing in the frigid doorway and smell the smoke from the guy's cigarette are exposed to secondhand smoke. Secondhand smoke is apparently responsible for there being no firsthand smoking anymore inside restaurants and bars and theaters and the like. A few of us actually remember when you would go to see the Saints play the Millers at the St. Paul Auditorium and you could hardly see the skaters because of the haze in the building.
Now, researchers at the University of California-Riverside have come up with a new hand. They have come up with thirdhand smoke. Thirdhand smoke is the smoke left behind by secondhand smoke on drapes and furniture and table tops and whatnot. In other words, it is the faint odor of smoke you get in many hotel rooms that have seen better days. Why it isn't the smoke left behind by firsthanders doesn't seem to make sense, but it does give a new heft to the seriousness of secondhand smoke.
I guess the secondhand smoke clings to surfaces and builds up as a toxic coating. When mice were exposed to thirdhand smoke, they started acting goofy and got a little hyperactive.
Manuela Martins-Green, a professor of cell biology who led the study, said in a statement reported by CBS News: "We found significant damage occurs in the liver and lung. Wounds in these mice took longer to heal."
By the standard of there now being a thirdhand smoke, we can never be safe. For if there is thirdhand smoke, doesn't it stand to reason there has to be a fourth- and fifth- and maybe even a sixth-hand exposure? I mean, if you buy a coffee table at a garage sale that was exposed to cigarette smoke, you are at least at a level four contamination. There was the original owner of the table, a smoker, all the secondhand smoke the table was exposed to on Sunday nights watching Ed Sullivan, the thirdhand smoke that has resulted in the table being so cheap in the first place and now the fourth hand, bringing that piece of furniture with its thirdhand effects into your dwelling, where, if you have mice, they will start acting goofy.
You have to grudgingly admire the zealots. They just don't stop. If they feel that they have not frightened enough people, they just come up with another hand.
I keep looking, but have yet to discover where the anti-smoking zealots stand on the legalization of marijuana. It seems to me that marijuana is just as dangerous as cigarettes. The residues are just as oily and toxic, thus meeting the criteria for first-, second- and thirdhand exposures. Not to mention that marijuana has the additional fault of contributing to obesity because marijuana smokers often consume whole loaves of Wonder Bread at one sitting.
But I have yet to see or hear the zealots go after marijuana. I don't see any billboards. I don't see any warnings. I don't see any force of public shaming beginning to gain ground. I don't even see any high-powered law firms looking for somebody to sue. Man alive, imagine what some of those early settlements would have been if they had had a third hand to work with.
you nailed it.
Always the Jew’s fault.
/sarc
“Potheads are not fully mentally aware. That makes them excellent democrat voters.”
What about people who are on dilaudid every day for pain?
Dilaudid is synthetic heroin.
I don’t care about pot, but the good news for those addicted to tobacco is that if you can’t get your fix, you will survive, the withdrawal isn’t that bad.
I’ve been through it several times, the last time was about 1984.
You’ll feel a lot better and be capable of more exercise activity once you beat it.
If you prefer the addiction to having better health, that’s fine too, it’s your business.
I agree; that is just what I was told.
That's it right there - No money in it. Wait until "Big Pot" companies mature like Big Tobacco did. Then you will see the lawyers crawling out from under the wainscoting.
Yeah., I can't imagine a pot smoker getting elected to congress, or to the mayorship of a major city, or governor of a state, or the presidency...
Twice...
Prohibition was a seconds long blip during thousands of years of alcohol being a fundamental leg of Western civilization, drug laws were dealing with a new problem that showed up just recently, for thousands of years it was rejected, it had never penetrated from the Arab/Orient, into white culture.
The drugs laws were just laws, not a duplicate of the strange, alcohol American prohibition.
For true alcohol prohibition, look to the cannabis based cultures.
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I’ve learned that when you see an apparent contradiction in the left’s policies, it’s because you’re standing too close and accepting their reasons as they have stated instead of what they really intend.
That probably would get them to turn against it, if the big tobacco companies started selling marijuana products.
Notice that libertarians have never been interested in two generations of tobacco prohibitions, even at the federal level, Obama himself has signed tobacco legislation, did anyone hear the libertarians going crazy for legal tobacco?
I think if you look at the two situations, reformers might be a bit more concerned about the one that people are being thrown in cages for using.
Auto correct in the truck. Rabid!
Not really, libertarians and lefties support things that they think advance reshaping and undermining Christendom.
“Because Pot turns people into liberals and useful idiots. That’s why.”
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Not really, that is like saying that driving a car turns people into liberals. Sure, a lot of liberals smoke pot but that isn’t what turned them into a liberal.
Plenty of losertarians are potheads.
Cannabis has always had the same effect on cultures that used it it.
They all resemble each other, and even in the Western world as pot penetrated to our young since the 60s, we see them come to resemble other Cannibis cultures as grubby, lazy, introverted stoners, who imagine that they are going somewhere, while they actually do little.
The rich internal fantasies of the pothead, while the world passes them by.
Exactly
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