Dialogue?
We've been having a dialogue?
Funny, I thought you were making assertions and falling apart when you met resistance.
And no, I don't acknowledge that secondhand smoke is harmful.
The harm is in the acceptance of the myth.
This, God help us, has given you and your fellow hive members credibility and permission to cause harm.
Your "arguments" are tired and worthless and with every response to you, I can feel another brain cell dying.
I'll leave you to your fictions now; be sure to declare victory at your next Bund meeting and good luck on your march to Utopia.
Your head is buried deep in the sand. I'm not saying that secondhand smoke is harmful. The entire scientific community is saying that.
Go on, though, and believe that I am a member of some mysterious "hive" and that my arguments are incorrect. I care not, as I'm no longer going to debate you.
Actually, in terms of serious health problems that may be caused in non-smokers by exposure to secondhand smoke, it's all a matter of duration of exposure over long periods of time. People generally have difficulty in quantifying how much secondhand smoke they've been exposed to in their lifetimes. And so do researchers with regard to their subjects. That's why statistical studies on secondhand smoke are so difficult to design and why the science on the subject leaves so much room for honest debate.
It would be logical to think that those nonsmokers most at risk from secondhand smoke are those who have lived in close quarters with a smoker for decades. In fact, many of these studies were specifically on nonsmoking spouses of smokers, which found a slightly higher risk of smoking-related diseases in the study group when compared to a control group of nonsmoking spouses of nonsmokers.
Exposure to secondhand smoke consistently in a work environment over many years would also cause a slighly increased risk of smoking related diseases.
The question is whether this scientific background information, limited as it is, justifies the degree of government intervention in that has been occurring.
If you have a libertarian inclination, you would say that the answer is NO, and that some of these smoking issues are best decided by private sector regulation rather than by the heavy hand of government.