James Rogers wrote:
> ...
> Incidentally, I find "antioxidant" as a generally poor excuse to take
> something. A fair percentage of all chemicals that have been described by
> science could be characterized as "antioxidant" in nature, and most are
> toxic. It is akin to when food companies started putting big "cholesterol
> free" stickers on all their vegetable base products, with the apparent
> implication that someone else was making orange juice or cold cereal
> with a ton of cholesterol in it. Or when health food companies fortify a
> food product with a couple common vitamins, but use longer technical names
> and tout it as having some type of scientifically engineered supernutrient
> that is unique to their product (actually, my favorite is the number of
> clever names they come up with for "starch" in their ingredient lists).
>
> -James Rogers
> jamesr@best.com
Sorry if this is off-topic, it has to do with product ingredients. I want to
know exactly what goes into cigarettes that I smoke. (Whether that is a habit
completely without benefit is an open question. Certainly, some choose the
nootropic, among other, effects, in light of knowledge of absolutely proven
health harms.)
It was on a news channel that some Mass. state law which required cigarette
manufacturers to divulge product additives was stricken (struck?), after some
tobacco companies filed suit. The reason for the judge's decision was allegedly
that requiring the cigarette manufacturers to divulge their products' ingredients
would be the release of trade secrets. Well, so it would be. I think that the
average user is not aware that there is anything besides tobacco in a cigarette.
In the U.S., it is so that tobacoo products are not governed by the Food and Drug
Administration, otherwise they would not be allowed under current rules.
Tobacco supposedly falls under the jurisdiction of the bureau of alcohol,
tobacco, and firearms. That federal bureau should be restructured into two
actually unrelated entities, the bureau of firearms and the separate bureau of
alcohol, cannabis, and tobacco.
A pack of cigarettes costs about a quarter to manufacture, and a dollar is spent
for each one on advertising. There are of course distribution, stocking, and
transaction costs, the rest is profit or tax.
About the tobacco lawsuits, damaged users haven't gotten any money from them,
basically. They are a ploy to avoid future litigation.
Here's a question: if a class-action suit is judged or settled, can others not
part of the class-action suit file their own? That is to say, there is a group
called class A that files suit, the suit comes and goes. Group B later files
suit, what does that situation entail? Does B lose legal footing for not being
part of the intial litigants for conditions?
My logically legal side says class B can slightly modify the suit, thus it would
be a new suit. To gain class-action footing for the suit under similar
circumstances would logically follow to be feasible.
Any product with a complete list of ingredients along with complete disclosure of
its known medical effects should be available legally without prescription to
adults that have (anonymously) agreed to be aware of its known effects and
disclaim damages from use. As far as I know, no one ever signed or verified a
waiver before lighting up.
If this is about melatonin, automatic web-search tells it to be a
neurotransmitter affected by exposure to sunlight that affects or is an indicator
of sleep cycles. I was confusing it with melanin, which has to do with skin
pigmentation. Of course, regular exposure to sunlight is good, too much of it is
bad. Like any other not absolutely inert substance introduced to the body, it
has various and complex effects.
-- Ross Andrew Finlayson Finlayson Consulting Ross at Tiki-Lounge: http://www.tiki-lounge.com/~raf/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:37:36 MDT