smokes don't kill people...

September 21, 2004 11:39 AM

Man beaten to death for refusing to give out cigarette. In unrelated news, studies link nicotine addiction to a genetic predisposition for aggression.
posted by cohappy (31 comments total)

Right. This is all about the cigarette and not about the booze.
posted by jpoulos at 11:41 AM on September 21, 2004

alcohol, americas drug of choice. jesus, we are sick.
posted by Satapher at 12:01 PM on September 21, 2004

I cannot imagine being so drunk that I would attack someone for not giving me, or my friend or my relative, a cigarette. I'll never understand people who commit crimes in situations like this...I mean, some murders have financial motives or are crimes of passion, and therefore have something you can point to as a motive, but this? What I cannot understand is how anyone could be so drunk they think they'll get away with something like this, what with a bar's worth of customers watching.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:10 PM on September 21, 2004

Cigarettes don't kill people. People kill people.
posted by a3matrix at 12:18 PM on September 21, 2004

No, I kill people.

Now, gimme a cigarrette.
posted by jonmc at 12:22 PM on September 21, 2004

Maybe they thought they were doing him a favor since everyone knows that cigarettes kill.
posted by fenriq at 12:24 PM on September 21, 2004

I could kill for a smoke right about now.
posted by Capn at 12:32 PM on September 21, 2004

I just emailed this story to a co-worker who grew up in Cleveland and she said that the bar in question is in "a VERY tough area," so it stands to reason these might've been some tough customers in that bar. There's certain people who take any percieved slight as an invitation to combat, and when you drink, your impulse control takes a powder. I've seen enough bar fights to know that's true. The other people joining in can be attributed to drunken mob behavior.

So jpoulos is right, in that it's all about the booze in this case.
posted by jonmc at 12:33 PM on September 21, 2004

Folks, this is exactly why marijuana is illegal in the US, while alcohol is not. Using alcohol leads to positive results, like rage and violent, unprovoked murder, while using marijuana leads only to bad music and uncomfortable piercings, the Devil's own work.

(Seriously, though, this is base group instinct at its worst, and it's really quite nauseating.)
posted by uncleozzy at 12:34 PM on September 21, 2004

What I cannot understand is how anyone could be so drunk they think they'll get away with something like this, what with a bar's worth of customers watching.

what makes you think there was any thinking going on? you must have a very limited experience observing the effects of alcohol.
posted by quonsar at 12:36 PM on September 21, 2004

uncleozzy, marijuana legalization would undermine the culture of fear that is soooo important to maintaining our vigilance against terrorism.

Besides, the pot lobby is kind of lazy. Not like the rabid tobacco and alcohol lobbies.

quonsar, if the stompers were beyond the point of rational thought then the bar is actually liable for serving them too much alcohol. I get your point and have been there far too many times myself but its a stretch to say that several people didn't think about what they were doing as they stomped a guy to death.
posted by fenriq at 12:49 PM on September 21, 2004

The cigarette thing is a hook that the paper is using to make this a "story". Someone at the scene mentions that the fight started over a cigarette. That doesn't mean that the guy "got killed for refusing to give up a cigarette". We used to see this a lot during the gang violence of the 80s and 90s. Remember "the kid got killed for his Air Jordans"? Nobody was going around shooting kids just to take their sneakers.
posted by jpoulos at 12:51 PM on September 21, 2004

Someone at the scene mentions that the fight started over a cigarette. That doesn't mean that the guy "got killed for refusing to give up a cigarette".

Well, assuming the story is true, if they guy refuses him a smoke, and then a fight breaks out and the guy gets carried away kills him, he technically did get killed over a cigarette. I may be splitting hairs, but anyway you look at it, this was stupid and senseless incident.
posted by jonmc at 12:59 PM on September 21, 2004

"Yo, can I get a smoke?"
"Nah."
"I see. Would you like to reconsider?"
"Nah."
"You gotta problem bud?"
"Not yet."
"You want one?"
"Bring it."
"How 'bout you and I step outside."
"How about I kick your ass AND your wife's ass right here instead?"
"Let's go bitch!!"
{scrap}

All that for a cigarette. AWESOME!
posted by Witty at 1:00 PM on September 21, 2004

there's also a gigantic tobacco lawsuit trial starting today.
posted by amberglow at 1:05 PM on September 21, 2004

you gotta love the "christianity run amok" google ad.
posted by quonsar at 1:07 PM on September 21, 2004

> you must have a very limited experience observing the effects of alcohol.

I wish. Actually, no I don't.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:11 PM on September 21, 2004

"I told you I'd kill for a cigarette." -- Brock Samson
posted by speedo at 1:19 PM on September 21, 2004

Well, assuming the story is true, if they guy refuses him a smoke, and then a fight breaks out and the guy gets carried away kills him, he technically did get killed over a cigarette.

It's definitely splitting hairs, but I'd be more inclined to say that the guy got killed because he was pummelling the other guy in the face with his boot (or whatever) than for not giving up a cigarette.

I'm really just objecting to the way newspapers like to get all cutesy with stories like this. If my brother or father or son was beaten to death under these circumstances, I know I wouldn't want him to be known as "the guy who wouldn't give up a cigarette", regardless of how the fight started.
posted by jpoulos at 1:25 PM on September 21, 2004

Frankly I think an important but passed-over consideration (as usual) is that cigarette prices have been driven too damn high by the anti-smoking lobby. If smokes are cheap, people will buy their own packs.

You can't light a smoke in New York's Bryant Park without taking the risk of being hounded by smelly, unpleasantly insistent bums who want one.
posted by clevershark at 1:30 PM on September 21, 2004

I'm really just objecting to the way newspapers like to get all cutesy with stories like this.

I don't honestly know if it's cutesy as much as "urban horror mongering." Yeah, there are people capable of killing over something trivial, and I've seen people start fights over equally pointless shit, especially when drunk, but most people can get through an evening in a bar, even one in a shitty neighborhood, without killing or being killed.
posted by jonmc at 1:32 PM on September 21, 2004

Besides, the pot lobby is kind of lazy

"Pot smokers don't make it to the voting booth quite as often as they'd like." -Drew Carey
posted by clevershark at 1:32 PM on September 21, 2004

You can't light a smoke in New York's Bryant Park without taking the risk of being hounded by smelly, unpleasantly insistent bums who want one.

Yeah, the smoker demographic isn't what it used to be.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 1:41 PM on September 21, 2004

Well, how newsworthy would this have been if the headline had been "Drunks Stomp Another Drunk to Death" instead of the cigarette one? Its much more sensationalistic and hand wringingly worrisome to think that people are becoming as untterably shallow as to kill one another over as stupid a dispute as a cigarette.

Feed the Fear Culture! Fear your neighbors, fear the strangers in your neighborhood, fear your friends. Buy big guns, put bars on your windows and armorize your already tanklike SUV. Safety in fear. Fear is your friend.

Vote Bush.

/snark.

On Preview: Armitage Shanks, do you remember those nasty commericals hyping the "glamor" of smoking and showing some worn out old lady smoking in a crappy little room? The problem with the smoking demographic is that they keep dying, don't they know how hard that makes things on Big Tobacco?
posted by fenriq at 1:47 PM on September 21, 2004

Well, smoking in New York is kind of redundant anyway. On a positive note it does reduce the sensitivity of your sense of smell... this is usually a good thing during a typical New York summer.
posted by clevershark at 1:53 PM on September 21, 2004

Armitage Shanks, do you remember those nasty commericals hyping the "glamor" of smoking and showing some worn out old lady smoking in a crappy little room?

I grew up in Canada, where we had anti-smoking ads for kids featuring a bunch of smarmy nerds making fun of cool-guy smoker Nick O'Teen. I vaguely remember something about "it makes your teeth yellow, it makes your breath smell-o". It probably sold more cigarettes than all the Alive With Pleasure ads combined.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 2:57 PM on September 21, 2004

whats the difference between pot smokers and Prime Time whores?
posted by Satapher at 5:34 PM on September 21, 2004

you cant help but waste every second of your free time wathcing the shitbox
posted by Satapher at 5:35 PM on September 21, 2004

Armitage Shanks...thoose ads weren't as bad as the one where this dude doused a car (a Porche, I believe) with gasoline and then blew it up with a match he then used to light a smoke. The point was to highlight how much money you waste on cigarettes, but...exploding sports cars? That shit made me want to smoke, and I'm a life-long non-(tobacco) smoker
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:27 AM on September 22, 2004

Some of those ads were fairly effective (i.e., a beautiful young girl who lights up suddenly morphs into an old, coughing bag who strongly resembled the young girl) but some were damn stupid, like the one where a teenager lights up and turns into a huge cigarette. They pulled that one after they realized everyone was laughing at it.
posted by orange swan at 7:17 AM on September 22, 2004

Best of all were the ones they had when I was a really young kid, back in the early '90s, which featured a group of dancing bottles, cigarettes, pills, etc. singing "Users are losers, so don't be a user..."
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:02 PM on September 22, 2004