Compensate people & businesses damaged by special interest lobbying (Petition)

Clearing The Air: Anybody who's lost a hospitality business or job in the last 10 yrs should sign this petition to force lobbyists (RWJF) who profited from smoking bans:

The special interest laws enacted around the globe are funded by RWJF on behalf of their partner J & J, for profit and market share amounts to rent seeking legislation. Though the average person may appreciate the end result laws, the fact is that hundreds of thousands of people in the hospitality industry lose jobs and homes as a result

Nice :)

Only has 56 signatures so far.

Seems like it should have many,many more than that.

THE WAY FORWARD (Tobacco Control in Industrialized Nations: The Limits of Public Health Achievement)

PDF

http://www.publichealthreviews.eu/upload/pdf_files/10/00_Bayer.pdf

THE WAY FORWARD
The current state of affairs with regard to adult smoking in developed nations
that have already adopted muscular tobacco control programs poses a
difficult ethical and policy challenge. In the US, smoking among adults
stabilized between 2006 and 2008. In Europe, EU observers stated that
“overall prevalence has reached a level from which it will be difficult to show
further decline unless substantially stronger measures are implemented”.
18
For some, the data suggested that there was no alternative but to further
tighten the public health vise. The goal of limiting tobacco-related morbidity
and mortality provided ample warrant for pressing on. Others were less
certain. Rabin whose concerns about the potentially prohibitionist goals of
ever higher taxes were noted earlier,
23(p.1754)
 has thus noted: “It is important to 
retain perspective on the fact that for some smoking is a pleasurable and/or

psychologically rewarding experience. And correlatively, we should not lose 
perspective on the question of how restrictive a society we want to create—
that is, how-far we want to go in reducing individual autonomy, including 
what can be perceived as self-destructive behavior.” The issues are especially 
complex because significant decreases in the prevalence of smoking at the 
population level can only be achieved if measures are targeted at those at the 
lower end of the social gradient. To the extent that such individuals will bear 
the burden of increasingly restrictive interventions, questions of equity are 
bound to emerge."

The PDF is nauseating.

The part I copied and underlined was the best part and it was the final passage in the last two pages of the report.

What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits

What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits : Shots - Health Blog : NPR:

"The research was very much focused on trying to understand how to change people's attitudes," Wood says, "with the assumption that behavior change would just follow."

So researchers studied how to organize public health campaigns, or how to use social pressure to change attitudes. And, says David Neal, another psychologist who looks at behavior change, these strategies did work.

Mostly.

"They do work for a certain subset of behaviors," Neal says. "They work for behaviors that people don't perform too frequently."

If you want, for example, to increase the number of people who donate blood, a public campaign can work well. But if you want them to quit smoking, campaigns intended to change attitudes are often less effective.

There it is in black and white.

Sadly the rest of the article isn't quite as enlightening.

Relevant things can be found in almost all stories of this type,too bad I'm not a good writer or I'd have run with this one already.