Buddhism and smoking, what's your thoughts?

A discussion on all aspects of Theravāda Buddhism
Roland
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by Roland »

James the Giant wrote: Cellphones. And the multitude of tiny transmitters found everywhere these days.
In my office building there are 11 floors. Each floor has about 100 people in it. Each of those people has a cellphone, wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless LAN for their computer, and most of them have a bluetooth headset. Oh and most cellphones have bluetooth and wifi too. That's 7700 transmission sources in just one little 11 story building, and that doesn't even include the larger receivers and transmitters on the ceilings and the proper big ones mounted on the top of the building. Seven thousand!
The evidence is scanty now, but surely that must all be having some effect. Hopefully not eh.
There's a good documentary on the effects of electromagnetic fields/radio frequencies/cell phone frequencies/wifi on human health. I particularly found interesting that there are 16 or 17 studies on suppressed melatonin production in the pineal gland due to electromagnetic radiation (which apparently can cause cancers, especially breast cancer). And apparently, there are people who sensitive to certain frequencies and have to be careful to stay further away from cell phone towers. In this documentary, one guy would internally bleed. He found out it was because he lived with in eye sight of a cell phone tower. He had to insulate his house with metal sheeting and metal fortified glass.

They make a good point that we now basically have no control group to test the effects of cell phone towers and other frequencies because they are literally everywhere in the world now. Even if you do not have any wireless devices anywhere near you, cell phone reception practically covers the entire planet. So unless you are in a protected building or something, the frequencies are everywhere.

The cell phone companies know this, of course, but it would not be profitable for them to be fully honest.

The documentary is called "Resonance". It is on YouTube and Vimeo

http://vimeo.com/54189727" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
"No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley."

--Seneca the Younger (57 BCE- 65 AD)
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manas
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by manas »

GM food (Genetically Modified) could end up being more dangerous than alcohol, tobacco and drugs put together. We can give up drugs individually or as a society, but once the gene pool of a plant or animal (used by humans as food) has been polluted by GM, afaik, there is no way to undo it.

We might think GM is safe for now, but in experiments on animals (you won't hear of this much in the mainstream media), it caused sterility in just seven generations, among other health problems.

I do hope we can manage not to utterly trash this biosphere, and ourselves along with it

Metta
To the Buddha-refuge i go; to the Dhamma-refuge i go; to the Sangha-refuge i go.
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Kim OHara
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by Kim OHara »

Roland wrote:Interesting thread. I would say the next "smoking" would definitely be "hydraulic fracturing"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing

I live in a state that uses this process to extract natural gas. There is a huge list of chemicals used in the process. It also apparently causes methane seepage into ground water which will pollute tap water in households near the wells. People in the areas can literally light their tap water on fire. Also, numerous other strange health effects are caused in people who live around these wells. There is a documentary called "Gasland" that exposes these problems. As a reaction to this, a gas industry funded documentary was released called "Truthland" trying to disprove "Gasland". In response, the creator of "Gasland" released a response documentary to "Truthland" called "The Sky Is PInk", disproving further the industry's claims and denial of the harm they are apparently causing.

Ironically, the same PR firm that was hired by the tobacco industry in 1953 to tell the world that smoking is harmless and does not cause lung cancer, etc, is the exact same PR firm that a lobbying organization for the gas and oil industry hired to try to plant doubt in the minds of the public of the dangers of hydraulic fracturing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_%26_Knowlton" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
"Gasland" is one of the scariest movies I have seen, and fracking is a slow-mo environmental disaster. It's coming to Australia, too, but some of us are pushing back against it with some success.
But there is no mystery or irony about the disinformation campaign. The same small group of people have sold their services to (successively) the tobacco companies, the DDT makers, the CFC makers, and a couple more. They are now leading climate change denialism. Sound bizarre? It is, but it's true. Read Merchants of Doubt - see http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt.

:jedi:
Kim
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Mr Man
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by Mr Man »

Kim O'Hara wrote:
Roland wrote:Interesting thread. I would say the next "smoking" would definitely be "hydraulic fracturing"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing

I live in a state that uses this process to extract natural gas. There is a huge list of chemicals used in the process. It also apparently causes methane seepage into ground water which will pollute tap water in households near the wells. People in the areas can literally light their tap water on fire. Also, numerous other strange health effects are caused in people who live around these wells. There is a documentary called "Gasland" that exposes these problems. As a reaction to this, a gas industry funded documentary was released called "Truthland" trying to disprove "Gasland". In response, the creator of "Gasland" released a response documentary to "Truthland" called "The Sky Is PInk", disproving further the industry's claims and denial of the harm they are apparently causing.

Ironically, the same PR firm that was hired by the tobacco industry in 1953 to tell the world that smoking is harmless and does not cause lung cancer, etc, is the exact same PR firm that a lobbying organization for the gas and oil industry hired to try to plant doubt in the minds of the public of the dangers of hydraulic fracturing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_%26_Knowlton" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
"Gasland" is one of the scariest movies I have seen, and fracking is a slow-mo environmental disaster. It's coming to Australia, too, but some of us are pushing back against it with some success.
But there is no mystery or irony about the disinformation campaign. The same small group of people have sold their services to (successively) the tobacco companies, the DDT makers, the CFC makers, and a couple more. They are now leading climate change denialism. Sound bizarre? It is, but it's true. Read Merchants of Doubt - see http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt.

:jedi:
Kim
Fracking was blamed for two minor earthquakes in the UK but the Govt. has given permission for fracking to continue.
SarathW
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by SarathW »

Nicotine patches! ;)
“As the lamp consumes oil, the path realises Nibbana”
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GraemeR
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Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by GraemeR »

Cittasanto wrote:Governments make a lot of money from tobacco also.
Which is why they restrict where it can used, rather than ban it.

With metta

Graham
danieLion
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by danieLion »

It is necessary to bear a few general points in mind. First we are citizens of a society in which, utterly uniquely for the first time in history, most people now live out their natural lifespan to die from diseases strongly determined by ageing. Thus the putative gains from 'prevention' (if real) are likely to be quite small. Next, the human organism could not survive if its physiological functions such as blood pressure (implicated in stroke) or level of cholesterol (implicated in heart disease) varied widely in response to changes in the amount and type of food consumed. These functions rather are protected by a 'milieu intérieur', a multiplicity of different feedback mechanisms that combine to ensure a 'steady state'. Hence truly substantial changes in the pattern of food consumption are required to change them and thus influence the types of diseases in which they have been implicated.

Next, man, as the end product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, is highly successful as a species by virtue of this phenomenal adaptability. Humans can and do live and prosper in a bewildering variety of different habitats, from the plains of India to the Arctic wastes. No other species has the same facility, so it might seem improbable that for some reason right at the end of the twentieth century subtle changes in the pattern of food consumption should cause lethal diseases.

Finally, the evidence for the Social Theory is overwhelmingly statistical, based on the inference that the lives we lead and the food we eat cause disease in the same way that smoking causes lung cancer. Sir Austin Bradford Hill's insistence that such statistical inferences by themselves have no meaning unless they are internally coherent, that is to say, when the several different types of evidence for an association between an environmental factor and disease (such as tobacco and lung cancer) are examined, they all point to the same conclusion. Put another way, no matter how plausible the link between dietary fat and heart disease might seem, just one substantial inconsistency in the statistical evidence undermines it....

The Social Theory was by the 1980's was very influential. It's protagonists were powerful men and women who had spent enormous sums of state and charitable funds to prove their theories so their admission of error would not just be humiliating but could destroy their reputations. They did not even seem to acknowledge they might have been mistaken, but believed so passionately in the veracity of their theories that any minor blemish--such as negative results of the heart disease trials--could be brushed aside.

This collective self-delusion is not common and suggests the protagonists, in constructing their facade of knowledge, must in some way have been different from the mainstream of medicine. They were--being motivated by a shared set of ideological beliefs that might tactfully be described as idealist utopianism. They had a much grander, nobler vision than ordinary doctors in the surgery who spent their time treating the sick. They aspired to nothing less than the prevention of illness on a massive scale. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make the world a better place, but utopianism has its dangers. It presupposes a greater knowledge base than medicine possesses while, at the same time, it refuses to recognise the possibility of uncertainty--that some things might be unknown.

The utopians entranced by 'big' ideas tend to be dismissive of small details that get in the way. The are forever producing plans and setting targets for how people should change their dietary habits or how wealth should be redistributed but have no model of human action, no understanding of how people do change.
-James Le Fanu. The Rise And Fall of Modern Medicine, pp. 286, 333-34 (2000, Carroll & Graf)
danieLion
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by danieLion »

Roland
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by Roland »

danieLion wrote:
:clap: :goodpost:
"No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley."

--Seneca the Younger (57 BCE- 65 AD)
daverupa
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Re: Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

Post by daverupa »

Always the same smoking by night, aflame by day, for us anthills...
  • "And how is it, bhikkhus, that by protecting oneself one protects others? By the pursuit, development, and cultivation of the four establishments of mindfulness. It is in such a way that by protecting oneself one protects others.

    "And how is it, bhikkhus, that by protecting others one protects oneself? By patience, harmlessness, goodwill, and sympathy. It is in such a way that by protecting others one protects oneself.

- Sedaka Sutta [SN 47.19]
SarathW
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Re: Does smoking violate fifth precept?

Post by SarathW »

Bhante Pesala
I hole heatedly agree with you. I wrote my article about two years ago.
Then I was under the impression that Sotapanna will not strictly follow the five precepts.
However after joining this forum, I have a better understanding of this.
So it is impossible for me to imagine that Sotapanna person will have any addictions.
“As the lamp consumes oil, the path realises Nibbana”
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pilgrim
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Re: Does smoking violate fifth precept?

Post by pilgrim »

Just for interest sake, I understand that smoking for medicinal purposes is allowed in the vinaya. I can't cite the reference though. Maybe someone with more interest in the subject may be inclined to dig it up.
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Jerrod Lopes
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Re: Does smoking violate fifth precept?

Post by Jerrod Lopes »

Of course smoking when the vinaya was created is a whole lot different today. The tobacco in many regions that produce it is treated with chemical fertilizers and pesticides that were not available in the Buddha's time. Undoubtedly this changes from place to place, but I know in the US that tobacco, especially for cigarettes, is loaded with added chemicals not naturally found in the tobacco leaf itself. I thought that could be pertinent.
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pilgrim
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Re: Does smoking violate fifth precept?

Post by pilgrim »

Smoking is practised in a large number of cultures, even tribal ones. In modern and westernised cultures, smoking was considered socially acceptable until maybe a couple of decades ago when its adverse health effects became widely known. Smoking is bad for health, but it is not inherently morally bad so I don't think it violates the 5th Precept. The fifth precept prohibits the use of intoxicants - stuff that clouds the mind to the point that one easily breaks the first four. I think the question is not whether smoking violates the fifth precept but what one smokes that breaks the fifth precept.
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Cittasanto
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Re: Does smoking violate fifth precept?

Post by Cittasanto »

pilgrim wrote:Just for interest sake, I understand that smoking for medicinal purposes is allowed in the vinaya. I can't cite the reference though. Maybe someone with more interest in the subject may be inclined to dig it up.
this was brought up in another thread.
http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=13494" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
and in the Dhammawiki
http://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Cannabis" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
it is in the Mahavagga though smoking tobbaco would be referred to in this thread. which didn't come to be used or known for the purpose until the Americas were discovered.
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