There’s An Old Joke ……..

There’s an old joke the right likes to throw around to demonstrate media bias vis-a-vis a faux news article, End of the World Coming! Women, Minorities, and Poor Hardest Hit! Case in point, Rick Nauert, Ph.D. and Senior News Editor for several online sites, wrote an article in 2012 titled, Tall Task for Underprivileged to Stop Smoking. He opined, “When a smoker decides to quit, the task is never easy. New research finds the task is doubly hard if you are poor and uneducated.” Apparently, Researchers from The City College of New York followed smokers from different socioeconomic backgrounds after they had completed a statewide smoking cessation program in Arkansas where they found that “underprivileged and those from higher social economic backgrounds were able to quit (smoking) at about the same rate. However, as time progressed, a significant number of the underprivileged returned to smoking. Those with the fewest social and financial resources had the hardest time staving off cravings over the long run.”

So they could quit just fine, but lacked the discipline, I’m sorry, finances to stay off of nicotine. Are we to assume that nicotine acts differently in poor people’s bodies? Does the size of our bank accounts provide some sort of imperviousness to chemical addiction? “Americans with household incomes of $15,000 or less smoke at nearly three times the rate of those with incomes of $50,000 or greater. By six months post-quitting, the probability of their going back to cigarettes jumped to 2 & 1/2 times that of the more affluent smokers.” Don’t you just hate rich people? They get all the brakes!

In this study it is stated that stress is why many people smoke, but “those on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale suffer more hardships than those at the top, in the form of financial difficulties, discrimination, and job insecurity, to name a few.” Do you discriminate against poor people? I don’t. Are the researchers generalizing about poor people being mostly minorities? Sounds like it to me. Also sounds like a lot of lame excuse making as well. Besides, where’s the stress in being fired from a crappy job and just going on welfare, staying at home, and collecting free money? If anyone is suffering from discrimination these days it is the 1%.

“For people with lower socioeconomic status (SES), it can be tougher to avoid temptation as well. Lower SES groups, with lower paying jobs, aren’t as protected by smoke-free laws,” said the researchers, “so individuals who have quit can find themselves back at work and surrounded by smokers.” If I am reading that correctly, it sounds as though the poor are hurting one another…or did I miss something? “Also, fewer of them have no-smoking policies in their homes.” Now I see why there is talk within ranks of our government to begin legislating home-smokers. After all, these poor schmucks clearly have no idea what is in their best interest; better if the government just tell them what to do, and make them do it. That goes for all of us, by the way. “If we better prepare people with more limited resources to manage the types of stress they have in their lives, we’d get better results.” That’s right, we need yet more government intervention to tell people how to live their lives because, obviously, government bureaucrats and D.C. politicians know better than we do.

APA Reference 
Nauert PhD, R. (2012). Tall Task for Underprivileged to Stop Smoking. Psych Central. http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/01/23/tall-task-for-underprivileged-to-stop-smoking/33978.html

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   Deborah says:

   February 6, 2013 at 12:38 pm

   The common sense of this article should be obvious to everyone, but I know and work with people who lack common sense. I’m pleased Jean-Marc was able to put words to paper that makes it obvious and impossible to dispute.

   reply