Health Gained vs. Pleasure Lost

[oklansas]

It's a rather decent article looking at an FDA bill working its way through. An excerpt:

Buried deep in the federal government’s voluminous new tobacco regulations is a little-known cost-benefit calculation that public health experts see as potentially poisonous: the happiness quotient. It assumes that the benefits from reducing smoking — fewer early deaths and diseases of the lungs and heart — have to be discounted by 70 percent to offset the loss in pleasure that smokers suffer when they give up their habit.

FULL ARTICLE

 

[mso489]

Yes! I saw this article in The New York Times, and almost wrote a thread on it, but felt it took too much explaining. Thank

you for having the presence of mind to point this out. Some contract or federal economist added the value of pleasure to

the cost-benefit analysis of tobacco use, which is a whole new variable in the consideration of health effects. I think, from

a health point of view, this bears particularly on the health of older men, who may use pipes as a medium for social interaction,

etc., that would tend to throw the balance against the sole consideration of biological effects at higher doses. Anyway, it's

a really interesting article, and people should read it both for the pipe smoking issue and for the enlightened approach to

cost benefit analyses.