The difference between smoking and say, drinking alcohol or eating unhealthy food, is that I can drink alcohol or eat cheeseburgers all day and I'm really harming no-one but myself.

"Ah, but people drive drunk and get in fights and do stupid things and cause all sorts of trouble"
Agreed, and we have laws against all those things. If you get drunk and kill someone, off to jail with you.

"Yes, but fat people are an enormous cost on the health system"
This is hard to discuss without going into the whole healthcare mess in the US, but as a broad point, it's nigh impossible to legislate against unhealthy behaviours to ones self. Where do you stop? Eating meat? Salt? Not exercising enough? What about people with disabilities?

But smoking? That directly and provably harms OTHER people in the same environment as you and they really have no recourse. If I walked into a public square swinging a sword around, it's not reasonable to say other people should just get out of my way.

So ultimately, as much as I dislike government legislating what you do to yourself (read my post history, I'm very pro-drug), I am ok with legislating that you cannot do something that harms other people in a public place.

Hell, I'd go further. I'm ok with government legislating that you can't smoke in your own home if, for example, you have kids. They didn't ask to live there, and it was your decision to have them, so sorry, no smoking for you.

And yeah, I'd say the same about alcohol. If your drinking is harming your children, then maybe you shouldn't have kids anymore.

No, that's human patience. Chances are that the detainee is an alcoholic, which is a medical condition, not a moral failing.

That these Norwegian cops didn't beat him indicates a common sense approach to the situation. That American cops almost certainly would have battered this defenseless man is an indicator of a toxic culture that seems to be worsening.

They didn't include glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Based on it's LD50 of 5600mg per kg of body mass it comes in on a par with pure alcohol at about 400g for a 70kg person or about 30 times less toxic than caffeine.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are places where they could add something like driving without due care and attention to, say, a speeding charge by claiming that the driver had no idea what speed they were going.

As for 'Hello, how are you', I can imagine that an officer could claim your speech was slurred (especially if you had something in your mouth at the time) and that gave them a reason to search the car for drugs or alcohol.

I'm not saying that either of these are likely, but in a situation where a cop is out to get you for any reason, pretty much anything can be used against you, so your best defence is to say nothing.

Uh... no... "Blood Alcohol Content" levels don't work that way...

He blew a B.A.C. of 0.28%, not 28%. Around a quarter of one percent of his blood was alcohol. Alcohol is THAT toxic to you, that less than half a percent can kill you.

28% is like, embalming fluid kinda shit...

His .28 is like, 2 dozen american beer or a Canadian six-pack.

I also figure he probably downed a flask to get rid of the evidence before being pulled over and that probably dropped him from "merely shitfaced" to "mortally endangered" by the time they tested him.

God, if he really had a pint of alcohol as blood then a) wow can he ever hold his liquor and b) he dead now c) explains why they were reluctant to tase him - woulda been quite a fireball.

If I had been God
I would have rearranged the veins in the face to make them more resistant to alcohol and less prone to ageing
If I had been God
I would have sired many sons and I would not have suffered the Romans to kill even one of them
If I had been God
With my staff and my rod
If I had been given the nod
I believe I could have done a better job

If I were a drone
Patrolling foreign skies
With my electronic eyes for guidance
And the element of surprise
I would be afraid to find someone home
Maybe a woman at a stove
Baking bread, making rice, or just boiling down some bones
If I were a drone

The temple's in ruins
The bankers get fat
The buffalo's gone
And the mountain top's flat
The trout in the streams are all hermaphrodites
You lean to the left but you vote to the right

And it feels like déjà vu
The sun goes down and I'm still missing you
Counting the cost of love that got lost
And under my Gulf Stream, in circular balls
There's ninety-nine cents worth of drunkards and fools

It's like the doctors have given you second and third opinions and told you your liver is failing, you have to stop drinking or you'll die. You won't die the next time you have a beer, but every beer takes you farther over the edge. You can say the bartender who knows this is blameless for serving you, because others gave you the alcohol that destroyed your liver and it took longer than one night, or you can work from now and realize that he's intentionally killing you in hopes of a tip before you stumble outside and keel over.
Working from today, our planet's liver is failing, there no transplant, and Trump just reopened the bar and is serving everclear. Chances are he can't accelerate things so much that Florida submerges in the next 3 1/2 years, that doesn't mean he can't make things be far worse, beyond the point of possible mitigation.

You may hold that theory, but climatologists disagree. We are past, but still near the tipping point, and every ton of CO2 takes us farther from a survivable rise. It's ridiculous to think that we're already past holding at 3.5 degrees global rise (edit: the maximum assumed to be survivable by civilization), so we might as well make it 5 degrees.

Island nations, people who live South of New Orleans, and millions of others are already being displaced. It only takes one high tide (edit: or one extended drought) to wipe out low lying farmland permanently, and erosion has become an unstoppable force.

Trump is moving towards raising the level of multiple greenhouse gases we produce, Obama had us lowering those levels. Time can only tell what that actually means in tonnage, but 180 degree turnaround is awful enough. I agree, we also didn't do enough under Obama.

? Reversible means it can be reversed, not that it's easy. I don't know where you get that idea. Irreversible in this context means sending the temperature trend the other way before civilization becomes unsustainable. Eventually the planet should normalize unless we really follow Trump's lead wholeheartedly, then we might go full Venus. There WAS a magic bullet, being responsible with our atmosphere, but we argued over climate change until it was useless.

If, before it reverses (which it may not do at all, btw) the planet becomes inhospitable to humans, then for humans, it's irreversible. In 4 years we can do enough damage to 1) make the effects longer and harsher enough to make long term survivability impossible and or 2) go beyond the next tipping point where feedback loops reinforce each other, leading to a Venus like runaway greenhouse effect. We're damn close to massive methane releases (already happening) and if we don't avoid that, nothing will save civilization.
All that said, Clinton probably wouldn't do enough to avoid disaster either, but at least she accepted the science and agreed we should make efforts to mitigate the coming damages.

I'm definitely a pessimist, mostly because I understand the systems and human nature, and so I think we're totally hosed as a species.

...and much easier to burn it down if you spill your hard liquor. ;-)

I would love to see stats comparing home fires where the owner was intoxicated on weed vs fires where they were intoxicated on alcohol. I have no idea what those stats would show, but they would be interesting.

That would only be correct if no one in history had ever been killed or even seriously injured jumping from the 30th floor, but jumping from floor 31, almost no one has ever made it unscathed.....dumbass.
Implying marijuana is 30/31 as dangerous as alcohol means you're either totally ignorant of the facts or you're just a lying troll.
Duh.

Your video, One More Reason Marijuana Is Safer Than Alcohol, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Simple. This movie has a 1.2 minimum blood-alcohol rating.

Sorry @ant, please don't take this personally.

Fuck you, Michael Bay. You're an awful filmmaker and you haven't managed to elicit 0.01% of the emotion I felt watching the animated Transformers movie as a kid and while that was basically just an extended toy commercial, at least it had... Christ, I dunno... balls? A sense of fun? A stupidly awesome 80s soundtrack?("Dare" is still on my running playlist and it brings a smile to my face every goddamn time)

Eh, screw this noise, I'm off to watch the Thor trailer again.

Tl;dr: there isn't enough alcohol on the planet to make me enjoy this abomination.

This was obviously made by someone that's never worked with drug addicts, and has a idealistic view on the issue.

Normally when you aren't familiar with a certain demographic it's easy to judge and be dismissive of their issues. But once you get to know them and their struggles, you become more sympathetic, and you start seeing them as individuals. You find you have quite a lot in-common, and your prejudices are dropped.

Well for drug addicts (and alcoholics to an extent), it's the complete opposite.

I had never heard it claimed that cigars pose less/different cancer risks than cigarettes.

Google search provides mixed (as you might expect) results.

Cancer.gov, the Mayo Clinic, and WebMD all seem to suggest that cigar smokers in general tend to have lower rates of lung cancer than cigarette smokers (because they generally don't inhale, which I didn't know), but higher than non-smokers. And they have comparable or possibly higher rates of other cancers (oral, esophageal ... pancreatic) as compared to cigarette smokers.

Several results suggest that there is less data about cigars, results aren't statistically significant, etc. etc. and that they believe that cigars are much safer than cigarettes, if not entirely safe. But frankly, the pages I see (in a cursory search that I don't really have a personal stake in) promoting that view don't seem as ... trustworthy to me as the Mayo Clinic, or Healthcare Triage videos like this one (that list references right in the video).


No holier-than-thou attitude intended. ...Although I can say that I'm personally very glad I never acquired a taste for tobacco products of any kind. And a very low interest in alcohol consumption -- I go months on up to a year+ between drinks of booze without ever missing it. I sometimes avoid social situations because of smoke, which I suppose is a downside. But on the other hand, I'm enough of an introvert that avoiding social situations is probably something I'd be doing anyway... So at the very least I have more money to waste on other things since I'm not a smoker or much of a drinker.