Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • January 22, 2014 Half a ban: Better than none As 2014 begins, the Ridgewood Village Council appears to be headed for a restriction on smoking on the sidewalks in front of the public schools. This is a great idea, but the fact that consensus could not be reached on banning cigarette smoking in the vicinity of Valley Hospital led to the dele- tion of that location from the proposed ordinance. A total triumph was averted in favor of a compromise with evil. Ridgewood Mayor Paul Aronsohn supported the pro- posal to ban smoking both on the sidewalks in front of the public schools and the vicinity of the hospital -- which hos- pital officials strongly supported at the council meeting. Councilwoman Gwenn Hauck, a supporter of Valley Hos- pital, agreed. Deputy Mayor Albert Pucciarelli, who is personally opposed to smoking, owns a smoke-free house, and drives a smoke-free car, wondered aloud if the local government could sustain a legal challenge to a smoking ban in public places. Former Deputy Mayor Thomas Riche argued that a comprehensive smoking ban could infringe on the rights of the public. Councilwoman Bernadette Walsh, also smoke- free at home and in the car, agreed and added that the present Ridgewood smoking ban restricting smoking by teenagers suffered from what she called “zero enforcement.” She said the police budget is already strained and probably would not be expanded to cover police officers telling kids and com- muters not to smoke in front of all of the Ridgewood schools at the same time. The arguments were realistic, and when Mayor Aronsohn took a straw poll, he concluded that an ordinance to ban smoking in front of the schools had a chance to be adopted and an ordinance to ban smoking near Valley Hospital -- even with the support of the staff -- probably did not. A bobtailed ban is better than no ban at all. However, some information offered by Alan Kantz, an outside con- sultant from a group that wants to reduce global smok- ing, should raise some pause for thought. Kantz gave out a number of numbers, but two were daunting: About 400,000 Americans die every year as a consequence of smoking, and about 40,000 Americans die every year as a result of sec- ondhand smoke. Smoking now kills more Americans in a single year than all our military deaths in World War II from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa. Secondhand smoking kills more Americans than the destruction of the Luzon Army and the Asiatic Fleet in the first months of the war, more than the air war against Germany 1942-1945, or more than the Battle of the Bulge, the single bloodiest land battle for Americans. The enemies we faced then paid for the awful, heart-breaking toll of American deaths. Air raids alone killed 650,000 German civilians and 800,000 Japanese civilians. Do the cigarette companies pay for American deaths? Of course they do. They pay the politicians so they can continue manufactur- ing cigarettes and killing more Americans, not to mention people in other countries who smoke because they think it looks American. The argument could be employed that anybody who smokes today is dumb. Two flaws emerge. The Nazi T4 Pro- gram, which antedated the Holocaust and served as a Holo- caust training program, focused on eliminating “useless eaters” including individuals with serious mental retar- dation and the chronically schizophrenic. Was this T4 monstrosity a moral act? Protestant and Catholic clergy objected to the program in public sermons. The real cur- tain-closer came when the soldiers in the Wehrmacht heard a rumor that anyone who became brain-damaged, blinded, or paraplegic in battle would join the T4 mental health vic- tims in medically induced death. The mere rumor shut down the T4 program. The technicians who would have been responsible for supervising the deaths were sent to fight the Yugoslav partisans, who seldom took prisoners. This was a great way to make sure the technicians never showed up in court after the war. Some of the physicians who endorsed the program or worked in the program lived to die of old age. It’s not right to kill smokers for money -- which is what the whole thing is really all about. Name any other fed- eral program, other than wars where U.S. interests are not directly threatened, that causes the deaths of thousands of Americans with the knowledge that they will die. One might argue that we could mandate the construction of safer automobiles with sturdier frames and lower horse- power, but cars actually serve useful purposes. Cigarettes do not. One could suggest we ban guns -- but the better idea is to make sure the guns do not fall into the hands of maniacs, dope addicts, or career criminals. Guns enable responsible people to protect their persons and their homes. Society has so conditioned the American people to accept death by lung cancer, emphysema, or heart dis- ease that most people no longer understand that the lung diseases are not a logical consequence of being born in America. One of the most interesting books I know is “The Health of the Presidents” by Dr. Rudolph Marx, a physician educated at Heidelberg who practiced for many years in Los Angeles. Dr. Marx -- no relation to either Karl or Groucho -- loved America and the American form of government. He studied the lives and deaths of every U.S. president from George Washington to Franklin Delano Roosevelt primarily to investigate their psychology and only secondarily to find out what ultimately killed them. We all know what happened to Abraham Lincoln (Con- federate agent), James Garfield (syphilitic maniac), Wil- liam McKinley (anarchist), and we endlessly ponder what happened to John Kennedy. Here are Dr. Marx’s conclu- sions on the people who died of “natural causes.” George Washington, probably strep throat aggravated by “bleeding” and dubious medical care; John Adams, extreme old age and hardening of the arteries; Thomas Jef- ferson, old age and ultimately heart failure; James Madi- son, arteriosclerosis affecting the brain, heart, and kidneys; James Monroe, complications of tuberculosis; John Quincy Adams, stroke in old age; Andrew Jackson, pulmonary disease leading to gastroenteritis; Martin Van Buren, heart disease leading to pulmonary disease; William Henry Har- rison, pneumonia leading to hepatitis and dehydration due to inept medical treatment; John Tyler, vascular thrombosis paralyzing the respiratory system; James Knox Polk, Asi- atic cholera leading to dysentery; Zachary Taylor, cholera followed by dysentery; Millard Fillmore, paralytic stroke followed by pneumonia; Franklin Pierce, cirrhosis of the liver due; James Buchanan, heart failure followed by pneu- monia; Andrew Johnson, stroke; Ulysses S. Grant, cancer caused by constant cigar smoking; Rutherford B. Hayes, heart disease including coronary thrombosis; Chester A. Arthur, heart disease complicated by kidney issues; Grover Cleveland, coronary thrombosis; Benjamin Harrison, bron- chial pneumonia; Theodore Roosevelt, coronary occlusion following tropical diseases; William Howard Taft, heart failure following multiple diseases related to being over- weight; Woodrow Wilson, multiple strokes, the last one fatal; Warren G. Harding, probable stroke after pneumo- nia; Calvin Coolidge, serious asthma problems and quack remedies, death probably by coronary occlusion; Franklin D. Roosevelt, multiple strokes. Only Grant died as a consequence of smoking, and he smoked cigars and died of cancer that expanded from his tongue. FDR, a smoker with his notorious cigarette holder, may or may not have had cancer, but it was stroke that killed him. Lung cancer was an extremely rare disease before cig- arette smoking was promoted by the tobacco companies as a way to appear bold, sophisticated, worldly, and even as a way to reduce weight and as a benefit to digestion. The time of cigarette smoking is gone. Cigarettes should be banned at the production stage and the tobacco fields should be planted with soy beans or peanuts, under govern- ment subsidy, if necessary. It took the Axis four years to kill 400,000 Americans in the 1940s. The cigarette com- panies do it every year. They are at war with us, and we should wake up and go to war with them for the good of the American people. Wyckoff Donations will bolster safety Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and Chapter 453 of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (an International Greek American advocacy organization) recently presented the Wyckoff Township Committee with funds for the purchase of rescue and safety equipment for the township’s fire department and ambulance corps. The presenters included George Gasparis, Chapter 453 president; James Giokas, Parish Council president; Pastor Economos Basil Gikas; and Nicholas C. Karras, St. Nicholas Parish Council member. The ambulance corps received a $2,000 donation to purchase emergency preparedness supplies such as cots and blankets. The fire department received $1,500 to purchase Multi Gas meters, one of which will be in the fire chief’s vehicle and one will be in the assistant chief’s vehicle. Currently, neither vehicle has any gas or CO meters and, since they are the first to arrive on the scene, these meters will assist in providing a more expedient evaluation of the emergency call.