Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Sorry, that is not a reason to continue to allow people to smoke in public places. People will always do stupid things. The only dorm falls I've heard of involved drinking, not cigarettes.
Public places eh? You mean like in their own rooms? Sheeesh.
"A friend watched as Providence College sophomore John D. Langley slipped down a slick dormitory roof to his death on the pavement four stories below. ... Court records show that he left campus hours earlier to drink at local bars and that he and a suitemate then headed to the rooftop of St. Joseph’s Hall to smoke."
===
And I no longer have the URL for this one, just the text:
===
UA Student Dies In Apparent Accidental Fall, Police Say
-----------------------------------------------
Officials believe Little Rock freshman went on ledge to smoke
By Jeff Niese The Morning News/NWAOnline.net
FAYETTEVILLE -- A University of Arkansas student died Tuesday morning when he apparently fell from Pomfret Hall after he allegedly climbed out on a ledge to smoke, university police said.
Alexander W. Gilbert, 18, was pronounced dead at the scene at 12:20 a.m.
Late Monday night, Gilbert climbed out of a window of a fifth-floor dormitory room… apparently to smoke a cigarette, according to police. Pomfret Hall is a smoke-free area… an eight-story residence hall. Outside the rooms is a ledge that is 3 or 4 feet wide.
Investigators said that Gilbert landed on a concrete patio…
The university's policy on smoking was tightened earlier this summer when university officials prohibited smoking within 25 feet of any building.
Lt. Gary Crain said that, although it is not allowed by university rules, it is not unheard of for students to smoke on the ledges…
===
I had a third someplace ... the town or school began with a "W" but I can't dig it up right now.
Actually, the article you cited showed a range of 2 ppm to 5 ppm in its bar graph on page 473. 3 ppm seems to have been the average reading. So the Otsuka study, even using your own reference (which did *not* measure "about 6ppm") used a level 200% as smokey as the smoking flights of the 1990s. Since passengers generally had the choice of smoking or non-smoking flights at that time, it's quite reasonable to assume that there were a lot of dedicated smokers on the smoking planes: I doubt that anyone here would consider that if you doubled that smokeyness and compared it to the air inside a hotel room where no one was smoking that the two would be essentially "the same." To try to maintain such a position would simply make you look silly, Suzy.
Otsuka's smoke filled lounge was approximately equal to a smoke filled airplane.[/b]
Actually, what we've shown is that his smoke-filled lounge was between two times as smokey and four times as smokey as a smoke-filled airplane.
Two minor and one very large and very fundamental errors in that single sentence Suzy:
MINOR: the air contained 6 ppm CO, most definitely NOT 6% CO! I'll take that as a simple example of "sloppy writing" here though, similar to the "sloppy writing" you noted I engaged in at one place further on.here Suzy.
MINOR: You refer to the room as an ordinary smoking lounge with people coming and going and smoking as they wished. Suzy, do you *really* think Otsuka set this whole experiment up, with all the money and instrumentation involved, and then took the random chance that maybe no one would wander into his "smoking room" to smoke in a particular 30 minute period? Note that he does not say how many cigarettes were smoked, something that many studies of this type take note of, and a figure that is far more easily generated than those found by his air equipment, blood takings, and echocardiography. Ask yourself why he does not mention this. A reasonable person would assume that Otsuka took the precaution of also having a base number of cigarettes burning in that room in order to reach such high CO levels. Note how small the room was: certainly not a place more than a half dozen people would normally feel comfortable smoking in: a little less than 10 feet by 15 feet. There would certainly have been periods of no one or almost no one smoking there in a given 30 minutes. I do not believe it is fair to characterize it as an ordinary "smoking lounge" and most certainly reasonable to equate it to the exposures in a hotel room where no one is smoking.
MAJOR: The exposure did NOT "cause a large, significant drop in blood flow through the arteries of the heart" It caused a significant drop in CFVR: Coronary Flow Velocity Reserve -- actually a very important distinction as explained by Dr. Siegel in his article about conflating these two measures. Read: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary: Conflating Coronary Blood Flow and Coronary Flow Velocity Reserve: The Basis for Anti-Smoking Groups' Misleading Health Claims for the full explanation and discussion.
Again, see Dr. Siegel on this. And I will admit that in the thousands of words I've written here so far, I have had at least one, and perhaps even two instances of inadvertent wording errors, in this case referring to a "smoke-filled room" as a "smoke chamber." You'll note I already apologized for the error.
Thank you for admitting that. Such was my memory of what I had read in the past. Not just "cigarette smoke" though, but almost insanely concentrated cigarette smoke: basically a 13 - 15 foot square "enclosed space" of normal height (60m^3) with 20 cigarettes smoked in it during a 20 minute period. If you take my website's example of a small neighborhood bar with just three air changes an hour, you'd have to have those smokers smoke 400 cigarettes per hour to equal Giannini's setup. I've gone to a lot of small bars in my life Suzy, but I don't think I've ever seen one quite like that.
Regarding the corn flakes study which you didn't read, you said:
Yes Suzy, that would be nice. Thank you. I don't use it as a central point very often as it only relates peripherally as a comparison to insanely concentrated smoke exposures, but please go ahead.
Finally you said: Unfortunately Suzy, you are misrepresenting what the studies show. "Exposure to hot water" is not the same as dumping a person into a cauldron of boiling water. Otsuka's smoke concentrations may OCCASIONALLYbe encountered in real life if you deliberately searched around, but they certainly can't be considered as ordinary "exposure to environmental tobacco smoke." And Giannini's levels are so outrageous as to be simply silly.
NOW THE IMPORTANT PART: Ask yourself why Otsuka and Giannini didn't use ordinary levels of exposure if indeed such levels would have shown any real effect. After all, it would have made their research so much stronger, wouldn't it? The answer is obvious: lower levels of exposure simply would not produce even the peripheral circulatory system effects they were looking for and thus could not be used to frighten people like you into supporting smoking bans.
I believe we've dealt sufficiently with the Otsuka and Giannini "instant heart attack" studies Suzy. If you're agreeable I'd be happy to give you another shot at defending a different type of study where you might have more success. After all, such success would certainly help you advance the cause of banning smoking in all hotel rooms ... that is what you're wishing for, correct?
I admit to the sloppy error of using % rather than ppm. Mea culpa.
As my previous post shows, hotel owners love smoking bans. Their business has not suffered because of them.
Bans may have started the ball rolling, but it is the favorable effect on the bottom line that has given momentum to the trend for nonsmoking hotels.
And, you know what? Considerate smokers do not mind the inconvenience of having to go outside to smoke.
So continue to try to pick apart the scientific studies on smoking. Be my guest. The nitpicking does no good. They show what they show. Brief exposures to environmental smoke in non-smokers cause changes in the blood vessels of the heart that promote atherosclerosis. The Otsuka study used a smoking lounge in a hospital, not an artificial laboratory setting.
My right to not have to breathe any of your cigarette smoke in a hotel trumps your inconvenience in having to go outside to smoke.
Hopefully you didn't "go out" on a window ledge Legal. I just got an email notifying me of another possible ban-related falling death: this time a 79 year old English lady out of a 20 foot high window. No details on whether smoking was actually banned in the building although the story mentioned that she evidently regularly would lean out of it to smoke (While standing on a stool? The story really could have been a bit better on the details!) I've known of instances where students in banned dormitories have died after such falls, but I think this is the first time I've heard of a possible "pensioner" (as they call them in the UK) death.
I take this to mean smokers really have poor judgment in general.
"A friend watched as Providence College sophomore John D. Langley slipped down a slick dormitory roof to his death on the pavement four stories below. ... Court records show that he left campus hours earlier to drink at local bars and that he and a suitemate then headed to the rooftop of St. Joseph’s Hall to smoke."
===
And I no longer have the URL for this one, just the text:
===
UA Student Dies In Apparent Accidental Fall, Police Say
-----------------------------------------------
Officials believe Little Rock freshman went on ledge to smoke
By Jeff Niese The Morning News/NWAOnline.net
FAYETTEVILLE -- A University of Arkansas student died Tuesday morning when he apparently fell from Pomfret Hall after he allegedly climbed out on a ledge to smoke, university police said.
Alexander W. Gilbert, 18, was pronounced dead at the scene at 12:20 a.m.
Late Monday night, Gilbert climbed out of a window of a fifth-floor dormitory room… apparently to smoke a cigarette, according to police. Pomfret Hall is a smoke-free area… an eight-story residence hall. Outside the rooms is a ledge that is 3 or 4 feet wide.
Investigators said that Gilbert landed on a concrete patio…
The university's policy on smoking was tightened earlier this summer when university officials prohibited smoking within 25 feet of any building.
Lt. Gary Crain said that, although it is not allowed by university rules, it is not unheard of for students to smoke on the ledges…
===
I had a third someplace ... the town or school began with a "W" but I can't dig it up right now.
Your first accident involves drinking, then smoking. The second is most definitely a candidate for the Darwin award. Perhaps his lung function was impaired enough that he didn't think he could make to the designated distance to smoke?
I think that evidence has been presented, many times over.
Funny then that neither you nor SuzyQ have been able to present it even one more time in the last ten pages or so. Do you think perhaps that none of the other posters want to see it? If they don't, then I won't ask you again.
"A friend watched as Providence College sophomore John D. Langley slipped down a slick dormitory roof to his death on the pavement four stories below. ... Court records show that he left campus hours earlier to drink at local bars and that he and a suitemate then headed to the rooftop of St. Joseph’s Hall to smoke."
===
And I no longer have the URL for this one, just the text:
===
UA Student Dies In Apparent Accidental Fall, Police Say
-----------------------------------------------
Officials believe Little Rock freshman went on ledge to smoke
By Jeff Niese The Morning News/NWAOnline.net
FAYETTEVILLE -- A University of Arkansas student died Tuesday morning when he apparently fell from Pomfret Hall after he allegedly climbed out on a ledge to smoke, university police said.
Alexander W. Gilbert, 18, was pronounced dead at the scene at 12:20 a.m.
Late Monday night, Gilbert climbed out of a window of a fifth-floor dormitory room… apparently to smoke a cigarette, according to police. Pomfret Hall is a smoke-free area… an eight-story residence hall. Outside the rooms is a ledge that is 3 or 4 feet wide.
Investigators said that Gilbert landed on a concrete patio…
The university's policy on smoking was tightened earlier this summer when university officials prohibited smoking within 25 feet of any building.
Lt. Gary Crain said that, although it is not allowed by university rules, it is not unheard of for students to smoke on the ledges…
===
I had a third someplace ... the town or school began with a "W" but I can't dig it up right now.
Yep, smokers especially get into trouble when they combine smoking and alcohol. Really bad for the health, you know.
Funny then that neither you nor SuzyQ have been able to present it even one more time in the last ten pages or so. Do you think perhaps that none of the other posters want to see it? If they don't, then I won't ask you again.
Shall we ask them? I'm quite willing to...
That you do not believe it does not mean it has not been presented.
No, I showed that a non-smoker in a smoke filled room equivalent to the average level of smoke in an airplane experienced significant cardiovascular changes, based on observation on the vessels of the heart after 30 minutes of exposure. I believe the airplane study I use is just as valid as the one you want to use.
I completely agree that our studies are equally valid Suzy. The FAA/DOT study I quoted found an average level of 1.4ppm and the study you quoted found average level of 3ppm. Combining the two would give us an average level of about 2.75 ppm. Otsuka however used a room with a level of 6ppm and Giannini used a room with a level of 35ppm. If you believe that 2.75 is equal to 6 or to 35, there's clearly not much more I can say that would make a difference.
I will say however that you did some EXCELLENT research showing that there's no need for a law regarding hotel bans. The articles you quoted show that there's quite a strong awareness in the industry as to guests' preferences and obviously any decently run hotel or chain will take such preferences into account.
Shall we now move on from Otsuka et al? Or would you, as your last post below indicates, rather concede on the scientific base of the need for hotel bans altogether and simply go with the not liking the smell thing? I don't usually argue with the latter: I may consider it intolerant, or, in the case of extremes, neurotic, but it's not something I argue with.
BELATED EDIT NOTE: Heh, no one is perfect on the fly, even me. :> The average of 1.4 and 3 is obviously closer to 2.25 than 2.75. Ahh welll.... 2.25 is even LESS equal to 6 or 35 so my point stands sound.
Last edited by Michael J. McFadden; 01-07-2012 at 10:04 AM..
Reason: Changed my first sentence to be more accurate and deleted the VERY extended accidental quote at the end.
Your first accident involves drinking, then smoking. The second is most definitely a candidate for the Darwin award. Perhaps his lung function was impaired enough that he didn't think he could make to the designated distance to smoke?
True, the first accident involved drinking, but it clearly wouldn't have happened without the smoking ban. I'd be tempted to agree with you on the Darwin Award ... but you should note the last line in that news story: for the Lt. to say something like that it must have been a fairly common practice for students to evade the ban by climbing out like that.
True, the first accident involved drinking, but it clearly wouldn't have happened without the smoking ban. I'd be tempted to agree with you on the Darwin Award ... but you should note the last line in that news story: for the Lt. to say something like that it must have been a fairly common practice for students to evade the ban by climbing out like that.
I'm only quoting this post, but I'll respond to the "in his own room" comment as well. A dorm is not one's private room. One does not own a dorm room. It's a rental.
As to the above, you don't know if the accident wouldn't have happened w/o the smoking ban. That is pure conjecture on your part. Drunks do stupid things.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
