More on anti-anti-smoking

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http://schmittysrants.blogspot.com/2005/06/more-anti-smoking-bs.html

Thursday, June 30, 2005

More Anti-Smoking B.S.
The kings of the phony statistic, the CDC, have come up with more absurd statistics about smoking. You see, for years the CDC alleged that smoking was costing our society billions of dollars because of health care costs due to the illnesses of smokers. Of course, this turned out to be another in a long line of colossal miscalculations by the CDC, because the CDC failed to take into account the money saved by smoking, because people die younger. When this factor was finally taken into consideration, an independent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded, "If all smokers quit, health care costs would be lower at first, but after 15 years they would become higher than at present. In the long term, complete smoking cessation would produce a net increase in health care cost."

Well, not one to give up after being completely wrong, the CDC has now concocted new numbers to try to justify its conclusion that smoking is costing our society money. Today, the CDC released a study that proclaimed that smoking causes $92 billion in productivity losses annually (a claim that was mindlessly parroted by the AP and other news organizations).

Unfortunately, the CDC study does not even explain what constitute productivity losses, let alone how the CDC reached such an absurd number. Is that referring to employees that die, leaving employers with no employee to do the work? Is so, then the study completely fails to account for the obvious beneficial factor of increased job availability. If the study is referring to lost wages for an employee because he gets sick or dies, and therefore cannot work, how does that personal wage loss constitute a societal cost? If anything, that is a societal gain, because, again, the employer can hire another employee to do the work.

The truth is smoking does not cost our society anything, in a dollar sense. The only "costs" are the unhealthy personal consequences that come from a decision to smoke. But the CDC and federal government have to be able to justify the billions spent on failed anti-smoking campaigns and frivolous lawsuits against tobacco companies. Look at the last sentence of the article: "[I]increased investments to the levels recommended by CDC are needed to achieve a greater health impact." They want more money, so they try to argue that they are saving society money!!!! But in the end, they really just want to interfere with a person's decision to smoke -- a decision that people need to be free to make for themselves.

# posted by Schmitty @ 12:08 AM