Government Nanny Alert

Raging Bee: Second hand smoke is definitely a cause of lung cancer. While the gambling prohibition is definitely anti-freedom and nannylike (not to mention hypocritical), the second hand smoke issue is more problematic.

The best approach on this is educating people on the hazards of second-hand smoke. Here are the numbers for the US as best I can tell:

87% of lung cancer death occur by smoking directly.
2% of lung cancers are caused by second hand smoke,
and up to 300,000 upper respiratory tract infections in
infants under 18 months old.
That means 11% of lung cancers are not caused by cigarette smoke, either first or second hand. I don't know if there is a difference in what stage the cancers are detected in smoker vs. nonsmoker.

All stats on a per year basis.

Or "Smoking makes the baby Jesus cry".

Dang, now I wish I had kids, preferrably between 3 and 5, because I would immediately teach them to smoke and gamble.

In fact, maybe I'll start a day care center where all the little toddlers sit around tables chain smoking filterless cigarettes and playing cards.

I can get the casinso to back me if I cut them in, I would imagine.

Via Radley Balko comes these two reports. The first is from Arkansas, where a bill has just passed both houses of the legislature that would ban smoking in any car if there's a child in the car. And the Arkansas governor loves the idea:

Huckabee said Friday afternoon that the bill sounded like a great idea.

"It's obviously protecting the child against secondhand smoke," the governor said at a news conference Friday. "I think it's a great bill. I'm glad that's cleared both houses. Delighted."

Anyone wanna start a pool on how long before it becomes a crime to take a child to McDonald's? Isn't this exactly what we want, the government telling us how to raise our children?

Ed: exactly what is the difference between poisoning your child quickly by feeding it with arsenic, and poisoning it slowly by making it inhale tobacco smoke?

I don't think civil liberties include the right to poison your children. Or anyone elses. If you want to smoke in your car and poison your lungs, it's fine with me, but don't make your kids suffer.

Um...has anyone published any studies detailing adverse health effects on large numbers of kids of secondhand smoke in cars?

I hate smoking: even the most considerate smokers get on my nerves, cigarette smoke smells like cat-litter soaked in ammonia, it's even worse when I have a cold, I'm allergic to some cigar smoke, it's a messy habit that permanently stinks up the smoker's residence, and I especially hate smokers who flick their (still lit) butts out of car windows (and, in one case, into my lap). But geez, this anti-smoking hysteria is getting out of hand.

Roman: you're right, but shouldn't we recognize a difference between smoking with good ventilation, and smoking without it? Also, shouldn't we confine the punishment to cases where medical harm to the child can be demonstrated?

That's insane. Bricks and mortar gambling is legal in Washington but online gambling is a felony? What possible justification could they have for that? Was there any debate on this bill?

I think Roman's right. Anything that increases your child's chance of dying earlier than of natural old age should be made illegal. In fact, this bill doesn't go nearly far enough. Given the relative mortality rates of second-hand smoke and auto accidents, it's clear to me that we should arrest any parent who's reckless enough to drive his children places in a car, whether he/she is smoking or not.

Please, somebody think of the children ...

I think Roman's right. Anything that increases your child's chance of dying earlier than of natural old age should be made illegal. In fact, this bill doesn't go nearly far enough. Given the relative mortality rates of second-hand smoke and auto accidents, it's clear to me that we should arrest any parent who's reckless enough to drive his children places in a car, whether he/she is smoking or not.

Please, somebody think of the children ...

This is exactly what I was thinking. Between the effects of second hand smoking and driving, driving is definately more dangerous than second hand smoke.

Roman-

The difference is that arsenic will kill all who take it, and do so immediately. But with smoking, we're talking about a small increase in long-term health risk that is difficult if not impossible to quantify. Would you like me to list all of the other things a parent might allow or do that might increase risks to health in the long term? What's the difference between allowing them to smoke in the presence of their children and allowing their children to eat junk food? What about the "obesity epidemic" we hear so much about today? Could that not just as easily be turned into a pretext for punishing parents for doing anything that might increase the risk of their kids being overweight? Think about how difficult it would be to do so. What would the government require that children be fed? Some say the key to stopping obesity is to eat more meat and no carbohydrates. Others think that the key to stopping obesity is to stop eating so much meat. Do we really want the government deciding what we can and cannot eat?

There are people who seriously want to ban competitive sports, particularly contact sports like football and wrestling, for kids. Why? Risk of injury. Every year, thousands of children suffer broken bones, concussions, or worse, from playing these sports.

I'm not for people blowing smoke in their child's face, for crying out loud. All of the smokers I know, including my own family, go out of their way to not expose their kids to smoke. My brother goes outside to smoke. I think that's a good thing. But we should be very, very careful about giving government the power to punish actions that might have some vague increased risk to someone's health in the long term - that excuse could be used to establish a virtual police state.

exactly what is the difference between poisoning your child quickly by feeding it with arsenic, and poisoning it slowly by making it inhale tobacco smoke?

I don't think civil liberties include the right to poison your children. Or anyone elses. If you want to smoke in your car and poison your lungs, it's fine with me, but don't make your kids suffer.

Following that line of argument, why stop at cars? Why not make it illegal to smoke on your own property if children are present? I'm sure the length of exposure in a household environment makes that a far more serious health problem. And why only protect children? Why not make it illegal to smoke anywhere if there is someone around who might not smoke?

Ed: recently, I saw a women in a car with a toddler on her lap, smoking, windows closed.

What should we do with parents like that?

Roman-

Criticize her. Shame her. But keep the government out of it.

Ed: recently, I saw a women in a car with a toddler on her head(like a hat) while reading, smoking, singing, gyrating, and drinking a 40. She was probably fat as well. I swear I saw it!

What should we do with parents like that?

Roman: if the cops found the car sealed, and nearly opaque clouds of smoke inside, they might be able to bust her for child endangerment, or "depraved indifference" or something like that. That might at least give them the ability to examine the kid and see how much, if at all, his health had been compromised.

I'm not sure about the smoking thing. I lean towards favoring these types of restrictions because the child has no choice in the matter. The government already plays nanny to a degree; for example by defining how much physical punishment is enough and when it steps over the line into child abuse. It's a qualitative matter in both circumstances, and I think it's ok to treat them as such.

For that matter, raising a child in a house that has not been tested for radon should be illegal. How about mold? Dust? Pets can cause allergies. Buy your kid a bike for his birthday? Forget it!

DOF, atari24: one could ridicule every attempt at child protection this way.

They aren't analogous situations. Bikes don't hurt children, bike wrecks do. The analogy would be to pushing your kid over while he's riding a bike. Same goes for the fast food analogy. The harm doesn't come from giving your child fast food (as it does with exposing them to smoke) but rather that it can potentially lead to bad habits. They simply aren't the same circumstance. Only in extreme situations does exposing your child to fast food lead to health problems based on those instances alone (not continually fast food consumption as an adult). In those situations the child IS taken from the parent.

I don't think one can ridicule every attempt at child protection this way, only attempts at regulating things that have an unquantifiable risk of harming them at some future time. We have laws that prevent a parent from beating their child to death or to the point of causing physical injury, and no one objects to them. We have laws forbidding serious neglect and no one objects to them. But when we broaden out such laws to cover things that might increase some future risk of ill health, there simply is no limit to the number of actions that could be banned on such a premise. There are lots of bad parents who allow their children to do things that increase their risk, from playing sports to eating bad food to not brushing their teeth often enough to, for that matter, not spending enough time with them or not paying enough attention to their homework. And while all of those things are bad, it's not the government's job to prevent every single bad thing that might happen to a person, even a child. The same rhetoric of "protect the children" can be used to justify virtually any intervention, so we have to be very careful to draw those lines.

That's why I say I am undecided on the issue. I want to hear more about exposure to second hand smoke in children first. But it seems likely that it does cause harm. I don't think we can compare this to instances of non-intervention (ie, not preventing them from playing sports, not forcing them to brush their teeth). Those would be the same as knowing your teenage son smokes but not stopping him. Here we are specifically talking about where the parent does direct harm to the child. Not that the parent allows the child to do harm to themselves.

Matthew-

There are many parents who force their children to play sports, however, and that would be the same thing. There have been many studies on exposure to second hand smoke that show that the risk is negligible. In one such study in St. Louis, for example, they measured the exposure to second hand smoke in smoking sections of restaurants and found that the average exposure was over 90% below the EPA's safe exposure limits. Now that doesn't translate exactly to a child's exposure, but a child is going to have two smokers present at most, while a restaurant may have dozens at a time. On the other hand, a restaurant will have air circulation equipment that the average home won't have. But even if a child was exposed to ten times as much smoke from a parent, it would still be far below the safe exposure limits. The dangers of second hand smoke have been vastly inflated. The actual studies that have been done show that the exposure is limited just by the mixture of the smoke with the far more voluminous air around us.

Ed: if this is true, than this law is unnecessary. I admit I never knew that such studies exist.

However, I wonder if it isn't so that smoke is more dangerous for children than for adults (mostly adults sit in restaurants).

I suggest criminalizing the phrase 'FOR THE CHILDREN!' because it causes otherwise reasonable people's brains to shut down.

The EPA estimates that there are about 3,000 deaths per year from lung cancer caused by second-hand smoking. But that's not the only issue, especially where children are concerned:

EPA estimates that every year, between 150,000 and 300,000 children under 1-1/2 years of age get bronchitis or pneumonia from breathing secondhand tobacco smoke, resulting in thousands of hospitalizations. In children under 18 years of age, secondhand smoke exposure also results in more coughing and wheezing, a small but significant decrease in lung function, and an increase in fluid in the middle ear. Children with asthma have more frequent and more severe asthma attacks because of exposure to secondhand smoke, which is also a risk factor for the onset of asthma in children who did not previously have symptoms.

http://www.epa.gov/smokefree/pubs/strsfs.html

Now, I could be wrong, but that sounds like significantly more serious than some unquantifiable reduction in life-expectancy.

Roman: "one could ridicule every attempt at child protection this way."

Yep. In fact, every new law should be subjected to analysis, ridicule, and outright scorn to illuminate its weaknesses and absurdities. If it survives all that, maybe it's worth a second look.