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If so many people are saying that second hand smoke has no effect, then why don't they call (for example) the oncology department at OHSU and ask them, or call any oncology dept that specializes in lung cancer?

I am no saying that second hand smoke is not harmful. I hate the stuff. But in answer to your question, one cannot just call the oncology department at a hospital because that would not be a valid way to study the problem. The oncology department at the hospital only sees sick people. Their sample is biased. They don't see the millions and millions of people who have had no ill effects. To simply call the people who only see sick people would be the same as doing a poll on whether or not welfare is worthwhile and only polling welfare recipients.

Maybe this little known article might clear up the idea of second hand smoke.

This article was published in the Sunday Telegraph in the U.K.

The article has since been pulled and seemingly purged from their archives.

"UK Sunday Telegraph...

Passive Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer - Official

Headline: Passive Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer - Official
Byline: Victoria MacDonald, Health Correspondent
Dateline: March 8, 1998

The world's leading health organisation has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect. The astounding results are set to throw wide open the debate on passive smoking health risks.

The World Health Organisation, which commissioned the 12-centre, seven-country European study has failed to make the findings public, and has instead produced only a summary of the results in an internal report. Despite repeated approaches, nobody at the WHO headquarters in Geneva would comment on the findings last week.

The findings are certain to be an embarrassment to the WHO, which has spent years and vast sums on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns. The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking - inhaling other people's smoke - and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups. Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer.

The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers. The results are consistent with there being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer.

The summary, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, also states: "There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood." A spokesman for Action on Smoking and Health said the findings "seem rather surprising given the evidence from other major reviews on the subject which have shown a clear association between passive smoking and a number of diseases."

Dr Chris Proctor, head of science for BAT Industries, the tobacco group, said the findings had to be taken seriously. "If this study cannot find any statistically valid risk you have to ask if there can be any risk at all. "It confirms what we and many other scientists have long believed, that while smoking in public may be annoying to some non-smokers, the science does not show that being around a smoker is a lung-cancer risk."

Well I would agree.

But I think that's where the differences are at. People who smoke choose to do so. And, not all who smoke contract ailments that smoking can cause, such as emphysema or lung cancer.
On the other hand, those who choose not to smoke are subjected to the same ailments as those who choose to do so, though not all second-hand smokers do not contract the ailments smoking causes. Why should they be? It is this group that I think the law is trying to protect. If restricting the locations where second hand smoke can cause damage without stopping the smoker from smoking altogether, then would it not be a win-win situation?
If not, then I would suggest it is not the non-smoker, but the smoker who is imploring the Nazi tactics of enforcing the harmful choices they make onto the lives of others. (No offense intended).

I doubt seriously anyone who opposes laws restricting second hand smoke has ever been thru chemo.

To simply call the people who only see sick people would be the same as doing a poll on whether or not welfare is worthwhile and only polling welfare recipients.

Why are you wasting your time?
The only improvement over ignorance is a dogmatic ignoramus.

To those pathetic creatures, every utterance they make is fact.
And they are always afflicted with "copernicosis", the incurable disease of being deluded into believing that they are the center of the universe.