Posted on 06/12/2002 10:32:54 AM PDT by Just another Joe
Q: Hasn't the EPA determined that secondhand smoke (SHS) is killing innocent people? Why on earth would they lie about something like that?
A: Since the 1960s most doctors and public health organizations have believed smoking to be a primary cause of lung cancer and pre-mature heart disease. Acting on this belief they urged everyone to give up smoking. It didn't work: people kept on smoking anyway.
In the early 1970s radical Antismoking groups like ASH and GASP began increasing pressure on mainstream health groups like the American Lung and Heart Associations . Such groups had previously avoided efforts for widespread smoking bans as too authoritarian and lacking scientific basis. By the late 70s however, they realized that the public health goal of reducing smoking was stuck: a new approach was needed.. While smokers resisted pressure to quit for their own health, a campaign promoting peer and family pressures through fear of SHS might be more effective.
Early propaganda studies involved such bizarre situations as burning 10 cigarettes in a 6.7m^3 chamber (i.e. a closed and sealed "walk-in closet"). The extreme optic and respiratory irritation of "nonsmokers exposed to smoke" was then publicized. More recent studies have looked for almost invisible increases in lung cancer risk among nonsmokers who live or work closely with smokers for 30, 40, or more years. The results of these studies are rarely statistically significant, and don't address casual exposures in public places. No effort is made to examine the effects of better ventilation in offices or restaurants in order to establish safe levels of SHS exposure. Research is directed almost solely toward producing political pressure for total bans.
Why is this? Because the most effective way of reducing smoking in America is thought to be segregating smokers, turning them into social "lepers", and ultimately convincing even smokers themselves that they are killing their children and co-workers. Therefore, research studies designed to "find" such effects are the ones that get funded.
In 1992 the EPA came out with a highly publicized "official" report claiming a small but significant excess risk of lung cancer in those exposed to SHS on an intense daily basis for periods of 40 or more years. They declared that SHS was a human carcinogen (that's what a "Class A" carcinogen is: Class A has nothing to do with any relative "degree" of carcinogenicity).
That finding was based on the results of 11 studies which had found almost no scientifically significant evidence to support such a conclusion. The EPA derived the conclusion only by changing their normal guidelines and standards. (for example, they lowered the standard 95% significance level to 90%.) On the basis of this report, thousands of businesses and offices throughout the United States banned smoking in the 1990s .
In 1998 the EPA report was finally declared invalid in a federal court and its conclusions were thrown out, though with much less publicity.
(Quote from Appeals Court Ruling Striking Down EPA Report.)
"In this case, EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun.... EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information; did not disseminate significant epidemiologic information; deviated from its Risk Assessment Guidelines; failed to disclose important findings and reasoning; and left significant questions without answers. EPA's conduct left substantial holes in the administrative record. While so doing, EPA produced limited evidence, then claimed the weight of the Agency's research evidence demonstrated ETS causes cancer."
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Q: What about the 400,000 people who are killed every year by smoking and secondhand smoke (SHS)? Where do they get those numbers from?
A: First, a common tactic of Antismokers is to mix numbers up with each other to make things appear as they wish. Thus, a statement about SHS will often include the phrase "deaths from smoking and secondhand smoke" and then go on to cite a huge number. That number is NOT derived from actual death certificates, but from a computer program called SAMMEC, and is largely a guesstimate of deaths among smokers from smoking itself. The propaganda trick is making that number prominent when talking about SHS even though it has almost nothing to do with SHS.
Second, even the discredited figures used in the EPA report relating SHS and cancer were MUCH stronger than any evidence relating SHS to heart disease. The EPA did not even *try* to claim such a link. The "hypothesis" that there COULD be such a link is taken by many Antismoking activists and publicized as an actual "finding". This allows them to magnify the threat of SHS to a figure many times higher than even the EPA claimed.
In fairness, some recent research has begun to lend a tinge of credibility to a link between heart disease and SHS, but there has been no official determination that there is any basis for such a claim, and certainly no "finding" that normal social exposure to SHS poses any such risk . Indeed, one of the largest and most recent international studies ever done (WHO Report 1998), actually found that children of smokers were 20% LESS likely to get lung cancer than matched children of nonsmokers!
From the US Dept. of Transportation's Dec. 1989 report ... For business passengers, flying 480 hours per year for 30 years ... the lifetime risk of premature cancer death expressed as number of expected premature deaths per 100,000 flying cabin occupants -
Ascribable to ETS : .27
Ascribable to in-flight Cosmic Radiation: 504 (East-West flights)
Here we see that the risk from in-flight cosmic radiation is some 1867 times higher than the risk from ETS. Yet the risk from cosmic radiation is routinely ignored, while that of ETS causes apoplexy, hysteria and scatological comparisons.
But it is MY choice. I choose to take this LEGAL substance. (I've tried and failed to quit a number of times) So I'm not an idiot about the health risks associated with smoking.
But if the people so convinced in shoving their own 'rights' and agenda's down people's necks, got off their HIGH moral ground, and stopped victimising smokers, while at the same time eulogising heroine users and giving them chance after chance in society, I might be prepared to listen.
But why should I, as a nicotine addict be shunned, when we're all supposed to open our doors to the 'touchy feely' hard drug abusing misfits, who can't deal with reality.
Granted, a cigarette has de-stressed me in a high-octane job from killing someone. But if I wanna quit, I won't go looking for the government to give me a goddamn nicotine patch to stop.
Oh, it is not.
You know that cigarette smuggling across state borders is the leading cause of Islamic terrorism.
while I do not consider myself a "nicotine addict" I understand exactly what you are saying.
I actually had an anti spouting that at me last night - that nicotine was more addictive than than heroine or cocaine. cut me a break.
It's my strong feeling that none of the anti's really believe that SHS kills. They just don't like the smell (they like the grant/settlement money, though).
However, trying to ban 25% of the population because you don't like the way they smell was never going to get up as a frontline argument.
These days, it's only the hardcore anti's who use SHS deaths (in ever increasing, hysterical numbers) to argue banning. Almost everyone else is now saying they don't like the smell, or it makes their clothes stink, or it destroys their dining experience.
Since the time man first discovered fire, until about ten years ago, humans have constantly been surrounded by smoke - first from camp fires, then from wood-burning stoves and fireplaces, then from smokers.
In the space of 10 years, the hysteria generated by the anti's has led to the banning of virtually all sources of smoke in society. So, while for over 1,000,000 years, smoke has been accepted as a normal part of human life, in less than 10 years people have become so oversensitised to it that they shrink back in horror and revulsion from even the smallest whiff.
And what is it that is so dreadful that the people of today cannot live with it, while the people of the past 33,000 generations have had no problem with it? Why, just a little bit of burning leaf.
We have, indeed, become a society of soft-headed, soft-bellied creampuffs!
Second-Hand Smokescreens
World No-Tobacco Day 2001 was yesterday. Sponsored by the World Health Organization, the theme was secondhand smoke. The event’s poster featured “Secondhand Smoke Kills” emblazoned over a photo of the Marlboro Man riding into the sunset.
WHO proclaimed, “Second-hand smoke is a real and significant threat to public health. Supported by two decades of evidence, the scientific community now agrees that there is no safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke… The evidence is in, let is act on it.”
That’s quite an ironic statement, though. It appears the WHO doesn’t even put much faith in its own research on secondhand smoke.
The WHO’s World No-Tobacco day web site lists, “Comprehensive Reports on Passive Smoking by Authoritative Scientific Bodies.” The listed reports include the 1986 reports from the Surgeon General and National Research Council, the 1993 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and two late-1990s reports from the California EPA.
For those unfamiliar with the reports, the list appears formidable. Otherwise, it’s just disingenuous.
The 1986 reports by the NRC and Surgeon General concluded secondhand smoke was a risk factor for lung cancer. But of the 13 studies reviewed, 7 reported no link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. Given the statistical nature of these studies, this split in results is precisely what one would expect if no true link existed.
Neither report produced much progress for anti-smoking activists. So they convinced the EPA to pick up the gauntlet.
Thirty-three studies on secondhand smoke had been completed by 1993. More than 80 percent of the studies reported no association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, including the largest of the studies. The EPA reviewed 31 studies - inexplicably omitting two studies reporting no association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer - and estimated secondhand smoke caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually.
Under the stewardship of the anti-tobacco Clinton administration, secondhand smoke hysteria caught fire.
Observing the “success” of the EPA report, the California EPA adopted by reference the EPA’s conclusions into the state agency’s own report. Little original or independent analysis went into the Cal-EPA report.
Just when it seemed anti-smoking activists finally succeeded in producing scientific reports establishing secondhand smoke as a health risk, a federal judge overturned the EPA report in 1998. He ruled the EPA cheated on the science.
Later in 1998, the WHO published the largest study ever done on secondhand smoke and lung cancer. The study reported no statistically significant association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. Oops.
Now let’s go back to the WHO’s list of reports on its web page.
The 1986 reports don’t carry any weight. That’s why the EPA did a new report. But the EPA report was in all important respects trashed by a federal judge - by implication, a fate also deserved of the California report that relied on the EPA report.
And the WHO omitted its own report from the list of “comprehensive reports” by “authoritative scientific bodies” no doubt because the “wrong” answer was reported.
If secondhand smoke really increases lung cancer risk, why all the smoke-and-mirrors?
Of course, lung cancer is not the only health alarm sounded about secondhand smoke. The science on these issues is also not as it’s hyped.
The WHO claims secondhand smoke causes between 35,000 to 62,000 deaths from heart disease annually in the U.S. But the WHO omits mention of an important New England Journal of Medicine editorial on the controversy.
University of Chicago Hospital health studies chairman John Bailar - hardly sympathetic to the tobacco industry - dismissed the link between secondhand smoke and heart disease, citing the poor quality of study data and evident researcher bias.
WHO claims, “Second-hand smoke also causes and aggravates asthma and other breathing problems, particularly in children. It is also an important cause of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).”
But researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examining data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveyreported in January’s Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine there was no association between secondhand smoke and asthma among 5,400 children aged 4 to 16 years of age.
No one knows what causes SIDS. Just this week, Wake Forest University researchers reported SIDS may be related to a genetic deficiency. Reportedly, the absence of a particular muscle enzyme allows fatty acid products to accumulate, producing a toxic effect causing heart arrhythmias and respiratory arrest.
Anti-smoking activists have yet to explain where were all the childhood asthma and SIDS cases in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when smoking indoors was commonplace and adult smoking rates were much higher than they are now.
Secondhand smoke is annoying to many nonsmokers. That is the essence of the controversy and where the debate should lie - the rights of smokers to smoke in public places versus the rights of nonsmokers to be free of tobacco smoke.
In debates over individual liberties, fabricated and propagandized science should play no role.
Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of the upcoming book Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001). Mr. Milloy may be reached at milloy@cais.com.
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