Whaddya talkin' 'bout? I'm jus' standin' 'ere!
Posted on 06/03/2008 5:44:04 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Albany, NY (AHN) - What health warnings could not accomplish, taxes may. New York residents who could not give up the habit may finally surrender their packs with new state taxes of $1.25 expected to hike the cost to over $8 a pack in New York. The average cost is $5.82 across the states.
With the additional tax, the Big Apple residents would be paying $2.75 taxes per pack, the highest in the nation. The new revenue generating measure is expected to add $265 million annually to New York's coffers.
Convenience store and smokers are not happy with the price and tax increase, but health officials are. More than the increase in state income, health officials foresee an spike in smoking quitters by 50,000 adults and 7,000 teenagers.
Dr. Scott Sherman, a stop smoking expert, told Newsday, "The two biggest factors that have made a difference in New York City is the tax and the smoking ban, basically making it more difficult to smoke."
When the first cigarette tax hike was imposed in 2002, a 21 percent dip in smoking was logged among adults and 52 percent among high school students.
At more than $8 a pack, the habit burns up to $3,000 annually for people who light up one pack a day. Others, however, would still insist on holding on to the vice until their pockets could afford it. Mary Ryan of Forest Hills told Newsday her breaking point would be when nicotine would cost $15 a pack.
WOW! Thanks for posting this chart. Again WOW!
Idiots. Smokers will just get them clandestinely from out of state and there will be NO tax revenue. Nanny-staters are so f$%king stupid it’s amazing (and unfortunate) that they remember to breath.
I’d be surprised if more than 10 smokers here in the People’s Republic of New York change their choice in politicians over this issue even though they’ll grumble every time they buy a pack.
WOw! great! Thanks for the info. i’ll certainly check it out!
They would just change the laws to fix the "loophole" and as always, "protect the children."
The only real solution for our problem is to awaken the fifty odd million American smokers to the fact that antismoking "science" is nothing but a money making scam and that tobacco smoking is not merely harmless but it is the best single thing you can do for your health and longevity. As soon as the large numbers of smokers shake off the antismoking "death curse" ('smoking kills'... which keeps them paralyzed, unwilling to defend out of fear and guilt) the antismoking swindle will end overnight.
If every smoker were to help only two other fellow smokers snap out from under the antismoking spell of fear and guilt, and ask each to do the same within a week, in less than 7 months there would be an army of fifty million righteous, angry Americans declaring in one voice - Enough! And within 2-3 years from that moment, the typical carton will cost $12 (a fair, competitive price after regular sales taxes) and you could enjoy a cigarette anywhere you wish, like our fathers and grandfathers did back in 1940s and 1950s. These antismoking hysterias have come and gone many times before, and this one, too, will be gone soon.
Order your tobacco from D&R tobacco...look it up on the internet. D&R (Daughters and Ryan) sells the best selection of tobacco anywhere. Rolling my own for 3 years and will never pay more than a buck a pack ever again.
Whaddya talkin' 'bout? I'm jus' standin' 'ere!
I watched the movie “Blue Collar” from 1978 last night. Harvey Keitel worked at a gas station that sold smokes for 45 cents per pack. Then again, the gas cost about that much per gallon also.
Maybe the way to get the uncle of my back at last!
My own father was an example of this: he started to smoke in the early 1950s, and was a two-pack-a-day smoker until he quit in the late 1970s. And he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005. (Unfortunately, 30% of lung cancers occur in former smokers. Twenty seven years of heavy smoking causes permanent damage to the lungs.)
I think there is a reasonable role for government to promote public health and to protect the public. A public education campaign would be the least coercive and among the most effective way of discouraging kids from smoking. And I certainly don’t support “gestapo tactics”; indeed, I was suggesting a public education campaign as an alternative to high taxes or bans.
I know I am telling my age - but when I was a wreckless teenage - I had three expenses in my life. Gas to drag race on Sat. nights - Cigarettes of course - Everyone smoked - they were still smoking on I Love Lucy (reruns of course) and Beer by the quart.(Couldn’t afford anything else.)
All of them were about the same price. 50 cents.
Amazing how they have kept pace with each other.
They are all about 4.00 now.
Hmm - Conspiracy? If I were a lefty - I would make the case that if you are willing to pay 8.00 for a pack of cigarettes - then you can afford 8.00 for a gal of gas. Right?
My sister-in-law who continues to smoke lives in New York State - they cross the border in to PA, or go to the Indian owned casinos to buy their cigarettes.
The so called delayed-cancer/emphysema-from-smoking "theory" has been around since 1950s and the hypothesized "delay" has been growing, from ten years in the early days, when that seemed to fit the data at hand, to 40, 50 even 60 years these days, as the "theoreticians" have strained to make the "theory" fit ever more diverging data. The full curves of smoking rates and incidence rates of "smoking related" diseases, the peaks and valleys, simply don't fit, no matter how one shifts these delays. The delay-theory "works" only if one can change arbitrarily these delays as years go by, and also change these delay changes as you go from country to country.
Colby's book provides a good historical account of the statistical sleights of hand as they evolved over decades. A more concise source "The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking" lists some examples of the statistical anomalies. A book chapter on lung cancer recounts some of the almost comical "squirming on the hook" by the antismoking "scientists" trying to explain away why the randomized (as opposed to self-selected) quitting smoking leads to more lung cancers in the "quit group" than in the "smoking group." My post about lung cancer has additional links to online references and examples on this same issue (see especially Ref [4] that deals with mismatches in the 'delayed' curves). Søren Højbjerg has researched the anomalies in US lung cancer stats since 1950s and has published a series of eye opening articles here. Another in depth report lists hundreds of anomalies (pdf).
The point of all that is that antismoking doesn't even have statistics entirely on their side, without having to do some quite creative talking over the numerous anomalies. That problem is in addition to the much more serious problem with hard science of the tobacco smoking, which directly contradicts the antismoking "theory" that smoking causes any of the "smoking related" diseases.
But, a more important point in the mentioned post is that, even if you had all the curves fit perfectly with some fixed delay and which holds the same from country to country (none of it is even close to the real curves), what does that mean?
It means you have to conduct additional research, beyond the statistical "hint" using the methods of hard science (e.g. experiments, randomized intervention trials) to determine whether smoking causes these lung cancers or whether it is merely correlated due to some confounding (e.g. both, the therapeutic and harmful substances, may correlate with a disease hence one needs experiments to find out which one is the case).
When that was tried with tobacco smoke, all the results of hard science came out the "wrong" way. At the same time and with virtually no publicity, an increasing number of protective and therapeutic properties of tobacco smoke were discovered (mostly by pharmaceutical research as they sought over decades to replicate some of these effects with patentable substitutes), providing the underlying biochemical mechanisms that the "wrong way" animal experiments and randomized intervention trials on humans indicated to exist.
Basically, tobacco smoke is unique tonic for the immune & detox biochemical systems, nearly doubling all key antioxidants & detox enzimes (glutathione, catalase, SOD). By virtue of protecting and alleviating effects of many toxic and carcinogenic substances at work or from environment, this immune upregulation makes tobacco smoking a marker or a proxy for exposure levels to such substances, hence the smoking will naturally correlate with diseases caused by those substances. From this perspective all data fits without statistical anomalies or contradictions with hard science.
Heh. I can go to my friendly neighborhood convenience store and get a pack for $2.53. :)
Be ready for all the anti's on this forum to call you on this, and any other posts like this, as they hate scientific evidence that shows smoking isn't the all bad thing they feel it should be because they hate the smellllllll.
Best wishes
m.
Braggart!!!! =)
I am not sure which site you are referring to. The end-point of all information I am stating and providing links for is conventional scientific research (by universities, medical & pharmaceutical industry but which were not publicized in mass media) that I uncovered personally over years of reading. Electronic copies of some papers (some require subscription to journals which readers may not have) or some images may be stored on sites with variety of different topics for their own reason. I normally don't care what other agendas someone on a site may have, if the electronic copy of a paper or a graph has a valid source end-point (the proper journal citation or some such, which anyone can verify).
As noted in previous posts, last year I posted these facts in several medical and health forums and the facts withstood unscathed months of intense debate against dozens of medically and scientifically highly educated opponents. They brought in their own scientific papers and citation, which upon careful analysis turned out to support even more my statements on health benefits of tobacco smoke (e.g. see this almost comical twist on "smart drugs forum", where a recent (2004) scientific paper described rat experiments, claiming to demonstrate carcinogenic properties of tobacco smoke, and where buried inside their data one finds that smoking rats (even at smoking levels equivalent to smoking a carton a day) lived longer than non-smoking rats. The alleged harm was merely a weasel-worded spin in the abstract and intro sections, meant to please their sponsors (Pfizer). That's how far antismoking "science" has got since 1950s, having spent uncountable billions spent on their pursuit to show scientifically that smoking causes lung cancer, or any harm at all. It only shows that it is virtually impossible to scientifically demonstrate that the most potent and beneficial medicinal plant humans have ever known, tobacco, honed over at least eight thousand years by couple billions of life-long "test" subjects, is harmful. It just can't be done.
If you can be more specific about which link or a fact you find shaky based on some unrelated content on a server on which it resides resides via my link, I could usually provide multiple locations for each item.
I'm going to stick with mainstream medicine.
All the medical facts about the beneficial effects of tobacco smoke and the complete scientific absence of any harmful effects at all are purely the findings of the most mainstream medical research there is. It's just that those 'explaining' this science to you (bureaucrats, pharmaceutical industry staffers, contractors or PR agencies, journalists,...; note also that regular doctors you are likely to visit aren't scientists either, they parrot what they're told by Pharma sales reps, their bosses or bureaucracies which control their license) won't ever mention them on TV or news papers since the antismoking business makes tens of billions every year from this scam dressed up as science. It is not just few billions on nicotine replacement that J&J make (while their PR arm from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation spends billions for antismoking pseudo-scientific programs on TV or 'educational' materials for kids), or dozen of billions on smoking cessation drugs, but far more in treating tens of millions of additional patients due to diseases and conditions in which tobacco is protective or therapeutic, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, asthma, allergies, auto-immune diseases, chronic inflammations, arthritis, preeclampsia, obesity, depression, anxiety, ... and dozens more (see links provided in this more detailed post on financial motives behind antismoking "science").
The problem I have with this is that you are asserting, against virtually the entire scientific medical establishment, that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer or COPD. Even major tobacco companies now acknowledge these facts. You need to consider, what if you're wrong? You are telling people that a habit that is deadly isn't actually dangerous or might even be good for you. Someone might decide to not quit smoking as a result (or worse, to begin smoking), and then eventually become ill and die as a result. I would be loathe to end up in that moral situation.
Nice to see you around, nightlight.
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