Saturday, July 11, 2009

Smoking Ban for the U.S. Military?

The nanny state is apparently sticking its ugly head into the United States military. Pentagon health officials are pushing Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ban the use and sale of tobacoo products by military personnel.

Fox News reports:

U.S. soldiers are trained to handle deadly weapons and smoke out enemies but they may soon find that they aren't allowed to handle cigarettes and light up a smoke.

Pentagon health experts are pressing Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ban the use of tobacco by troops and ends its sale on military property, according to USA Today.

Jack Smith, head of the Pentagon's office of clinical and program policy, told the newspaper that he will advise Gates to adopt proposals by a federal study that cites rising tobacco use and higher costs for the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs as reasons for the ban.


Although the government is within its rights to stipulate this sort of thing as part of soldiers' employment contracts -- which soldiers can turn down in favor of civilian employment if unsatisfactory -- that the government would be interested in this kind of regulation at all is concerning. Who will it regulate next?

R3VOLUTION!
Posted by at 7/11/2009 11:25:00 AM

13 Comments:

  1. Commander in Chief? lol
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  2. That's rediculous .. This smells like prohibition that was imposed on the people back during the early days (when my grandparents were kids). It didn't work then, and it won't work now, even on tobacco. It also smells like the government is preparing to put a ban on tobacco use on everyone else not in the military - which would put the tobacco industry right out of business. Like my grandmother used to say, you can't legislate morals.
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  3. support "stopthedrugwar.org" It's all the same. Some one else decides what is good for you. The US Government has been regulating morality for years. All for the good of the children.
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  4. Oh boy this won't work to our overall benefit.
    They raise taxes for revenue to help support the plans and projects they want to get done. they spend trillions of dollars at a drop of hat, claiming that raises taxes will help pay for it, then they ban the items they tax. not smart in the least
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  5. there is a picture of the president sitting, with his feet on that beautiful desk, smoking a cigarette. Last I heard the White House is a federal building, isn't smoking banned in all Federal buildings??????? hmmmmmmm
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  6. They want to determine who we should breed with to produce their next crop of slaves.
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  7. So let me try to understand this, a young man or woman VOLUNTEERS to protect our freedoms and rights, and NOW this President, WHO SMOKES, wants to take away their, the brave volunteers to our military, rights to smoke. What next, take away their rights to a nice cold beer?

    Lets loosen the rules so our troops can find and kill the bad guys. Lets get rid of the person or persons who came up with this idea, and cut our taxes from the savings. In fact lets not elect any LIBERALS to the Senate or the House
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  8. It would seem that this administration is doing all it can to decimate our Armed Services. First the cutting of the budget for the F-22 Raptor program and now this. Some times I think the downfall of this country is the purpose of these acts. That way some traitor in the white house can declare martial law and completely take over. He doesn't understand that it won't work.
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  9. I cant imagine taking away more rights of the military that fight for our rights. I understand they give up some of their rights when they join the military but this is too far. I understand that there are costs to military personnel smoking but what about the people in congress and the white house who smoke. They are just as much of a cost. Just think if there is a universal health care what will stop the government from doing this to everyone else?
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  10. Is everyone completely nuts? Let's just put it this way:
    (Real) HEADLINE IN A NEWSPAPER
    "Frequent fliers may be getting a dangerous dose" of secondary tobacco smoke.
    A “dangerous dose”? In an airport? An airport where hundreds of planes are freely spewing jet fuel fumes into the terminals’ air intakes??
    Looking at just two of the emissions that jets and cigarettes have in common shows how ridiculous this is. According to the Surgeon Generals' 1986 Report on Environmental Tobacco Smoke, a cigarette puts out a total of 3 mg of nitrogen oxide (NO) and 40 mg of carbon monoxide (CO). The 1995 EPA study on airplane emissions cites a single 747 takeoff/landing at about 115 pounds of NO and 32 pounds of CO.
    That's 52 million mg of NO and 14 million mg of CO if you do the math.
    Doing a bit more math for a typical 500 takeoffs/landings per day shows us that
    the nice clean smokefree air being pumped into those terminals has the CO equivalent of over 160 million cigarettes and the NO of Eight and a Half BILLION cigarettes.
    All of which is being shwooshed right into the lungs of travelers who are supposedly receiving a "dangerous dose" from a few cigarettes being puffed in secluded and sealed off terminal areas and bars.
    This insanity would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
    References:
    1986 SG Report pgs. 129, 130, 136
    EPA Report "Technical Data... Commercial Aviation" 09/29/95
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  11. I would say more like commander in thief. To deny those that we would commission to defend freedom and deny them the freedom of choice.

    Which I find ironic since a recent survey shows that up to 64% of navy and marine personnel use tobacco.

    Overall, 260 (64 percent) of the Marines and sailors surveyed used some form of tobacco. Of those, 213 (52 percent) smoked cigarettes, 145 (36 percent) used smokeless tobacco (dip, chew), and 98 (24 percent) used both.
    http://banthebanwisconsin.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/freedom-fighters-may-be-denied-freedom-when-they-get-home/

    Not much incentive to reup or join is there.
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  12. A couple of years ago a councilman in Winooski, VT wanted to boot the local veterans out of their posts and into the cold to smoke. He justified it by saying, "This seems like a good way to honor our veterans, to prolong their lives."

    The Councilman probably agreed with the Lung Association's spokesman, Joel Africk, who urged people not to send smokes to soldiers in Iraq even if those soldiers asked for them, saying "Tobacco use presents an immediate and real danger for our soldiers who are on the lines today... our troops should be sent care packages that don't kill."

    I suggest that Mssrs. Clark and Africk should spend some time with these fighting men personally, and discuss these issues of honor and danger with them as they stand in the snow outside their veterans' halls and huddle in trenches in Fallujah. I'm sure they'd find the discussions most enlightening and the end result of the discussions would benefit all of us.

    And the same holds true for those who'd try to ban active duty soldiers from smoking. Sad.

    Michael J. McFadden
    Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"
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  13. Are they serious??
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