UPMC Acts to Protect Its Employees' Health and Its Image: Bravo!

I react with elation to the announcement by health care titan UPMC that effective 1 July 2014, its employees will no longer be able to smoke at any time within their workshfts, including during breaks.  How could it be otherwise?  How does it look to the public for the registered nurse that has just counseled patients on how to improve their health to be seen destroying theirs?

Should UPMC tell its emlpoyees, "You are not permitted to smoke on our campuses, but you are welcome to place yourself in front of stores, restaurants, and residences in communities that border our facilities and to discard your ashes and butts there"?  Of course not.

Despite all that we have known about the dangers of smoking for decades, young people continue to take up the addiction at far too high a rate, providing new generations to kill for the ruthless and shameless tobacco conglomerates.  One of the ways to combat this is for smoking to become as inconvenient as possible and for the pursuit no longer to be socially acceptable.  UPMC's action will contribute mightily to this noble goal.

Does anyone believe that the Food and Drug Administration would approve the manufacture and sale of cigarettes if it were being offered today as a new product?  Of course not; tobacco is known to be responsible for the deaths of approximately a half million Americans each year.

To those who raise the bogus argument that tax revenue will diminish as the number of smokers decline, I say, "Terrific"!  That will be countered by the reduced expenditures for the government and insurers to treat the millions that are sickened by smoking each year, many of whom endure tragic, painful, lengthy, and untimely death spirals.

I believe that we will someday look back with astonishment on the era in which individuals went outside in all types of weather to ingest doses of poison and to heat their lungs to in excess of four hundred degrees.  The clout of UPMC has helped to hasten that day.  Bravo!