Sunday's Doonesbury- Mr. Butts is Back

[Divernan]

7. Asking addicts to choose between current withdrawal pain & unknown future pain of cancer.

I can imagine the wording: On a scale of one to ten with ten being ecstatic pleasure and one being unbearable physical agony, rank your physical state in withdrawal. Next, imagine yourself 50 years from now dying from lung cancer. Which do you choose? Unbearable pain now or hypothetical pain 50 years from now? Guess which one the addicts chose. Reading the account in the NYT, this shit "piece of research" sounds like a veritable push poll.

More from the NYT link:

The economists speaking out on Wednesday said a basic assumption consistent with traditional economic theory lay at the heart of the federal government’s miscalculation on the costs and benefits of the regulations: that most people were rational, well-informed market participants making decisions they would not later regret.

But smokers, they said, were different. A vast majority began smoking before age 18, when judgment is impaired. And many want to quit, but are addicted, and forgo the long-term satisfaction of better health for short-term pleasure.

“It would be ridiculous to suggest that a 16-year-old kid who has no idea what addiction means and feels immortal is a rational decision-maker when it comes to smoking,” said Kenneth E. Warner, one of the paper’s authors and a professor of public health at the University of Michigan.

Pleasure was not the only problem with the F.D.A.’s economic analysis, the economists said. For example, it did not count the benefits to nonsmokers of less secondhand smoke, or of reductions in infant mortality were fewer pregnant women to smoke, they said.