'second-hand smoke'

[Alex Linder]

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 2:00am BST 02/07/2007

All done with passive smoke and mirrors

Anti-smoking activists can celebrate today one of the most remarkable lobbying campaigns in modern politics. The statutory no-smoking signs outside every "enclosed public space", including churches, synagogues, mosques and Buckingham Palace, will always remind us how they find the smell of other people's smoke offensive. One thing they cannot claim, though, is that protecting people from others' smoke will save thousands of lives.

The scientific evidence to support their belief that inhaling other people's smoke causes cancer simply does not exist. In the course of writing a book on "scares", I recently trawled through all the scientific literature on the health risks of tobacco, ever since Richard Doll's seminal paper in 1950 alerted the world to the link between smoking and lung cancer (when 82 per cent of British men were smokers). Over the next 30 years, the realisation that smokers risked serious damage to their health led to a 50 per cent drop in the habit. But this divided people into three groups: more or less addicted smokers, generally tolerant non-smokers and fiercely intolerant anti-smokers.
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At the end of the Seventies, the anti-smokers first seriously turned their attention to what they called "passive smoking". Over the next decade, it is fascinating to follow how, try as they might, they could not come up with the evidence they wanted to prove that "environmental tobacco smoke" was directly harming non-smokers' health. They became greatly excited by a series of studies which purported to show a link between smoking and cot deaths. But these somehow managed to ignore the fact that, in the very years when cot deaths were rising by 500 per cent, the incidence of smoking had halved.

A further series of studies in the Nineties, mainly in the US, claimed to have found that passive smoking was causing thousands of deaths a year. But however much the researchers tried to manipulate the evidence, none could come up with an increased risk of cancer that, by the strict rules of epidemiology, was "statistically significant".

In 1998 and 2003 came the results of by far the biggest studies of passive smoking ever carried out. One was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation. The other, run by Prof James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat for the American Cancer Society, was a mammoth 40-year-long study of 35,000 non-smokers living with smokers. In each case, when the sponsors saw the results they were horrified. The evidence inescapably showed that passive smoking posed no significant risk. This confirmed Sir Richard Doll's own comment in 2001: "The effects of other people's smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me".

In each case, the sponsors tried to suppress the results, which were only with difficulty made public (the fact that Enstrom and Kabat, both non-smokers, could only get their results published with help from the tobacco industry was inevitably used to discredit them, even though all their research had been financed by the anti-tobacco cancer charity).

In the early years of this decade, the anti-smokers had become so carried away by the rightness of their cause that they no longer worried about finding disciplined evidence for their statistical claims. One notorious but widely-quoted study commissioned by 33 councils campaigning for a "smoke-free London" came up with the wonderfully precise claim that 617 Britons die each year from passive smoking in the workplace. No longer was there any pretence at serious debate. This was a propaganda war, in which statistics could be manufactured at will. (The European Commission's 2006 figure for annual deaths from passive smoking in the UK was around 12,000, some 20 times higher than the figure quoted by the British Government itself.)

By the time the Commons pushed through the smoking ban in February 2006, a kind of collective hysteria had taken over. MPs fell over themselves in boasting how many lives they were about to save. One Department of Health official was quoted as equating its significance to the Act setting up the National Health Service in 1948.

As clouds of self-righteousness billow out over England this weekend, the anti-smokers may be entitled to give us their view that smoking is a thoroughly noxious and nasty habit, even that it can exacerbate respiratory conditions such as asthma or bronchitis arising from other causes. They can even claim that the ban will save lives by persuading smokers to give up. But the one thing they cannot claim is any reliable evidence for their belief that passive smoking is responsible for killing people. Sir Richard Doll was right. It is merely a sanctimonious act of faith.

Justice prevails, but a little too late

Last Thursday, seven years almost to the day since officials of Sunderland city council strode up to Steve Thoburn's market stall to seize his scales and accuse him of the criminal offence of selling a pound of bananas, the same council passed a remarkable motion. It welcomed "the new ruling of the European Commission to allow the continued use indefinitely of imperial measures alongside metric measures", and "the statement of intent to allow the sole use of imperial measures by traders who wish to do so".

The council expressed "sincere regret" for the "premature death" of Mr Thoburn, who died of a stress-induced heart attack in 2004 at the age of 39. For four years he had been at the centre of the campaign led by his friend Neil Herron on behalf of Britain's "metric martyrs". Finally, the councillors resolved that they had no objection to the people of Sunderland petitioning for Mr Thoburn's Royal Pardon, along with thousands of people from all over the world.

For Mr Herron, watching from the public gallery, it was a landmark. On the day it all started, he promised Mr Thoburn that he would one day get his scales back. (It finally happened two days after his friend's death, when Mr Herron marched into city hall to have them handed over.) "Now all we have left is to get that pardon," says Herron, "and the job is done."

Rainfall and shortfall

As thousands were forced to flee their homes in Britain's June monsoon, there came the sound of a particular chicken flapping home to roost. When Margaret Beckett made such a shambles of handing out EU subsidies to farmers, Brussels responded by withholding up to £350 million of its payments, leaving a massive hole in the budget of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Before being rewarded for her incompetence by promotion to foreign secretary, Mrs Beckett slashed the budgets of various of the more useful parts of Defra's empire, including a cut of £15 million in the allocation for flood defences.

As a big global warming fan, her Defra successor David Miliband refused to reinstate this cut, presumably because a drought-plagued Britain would no longer need defences against inundation. Cue, naturally, for the wettest June since records were kept. How apt that Mr Miliband should now be rewarded in turn with promotion to Foreign Secretary.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...1/nbook101.xml

[-JC]

My father farmed tobacco in the South with mules and left the farm to go to college because he didn't want to earn his living growing tobacco. Using it since his teens, chewing it and eventually smoking, convinced him that it was not a good thing-- highly addictive even before modern additives and generally nasty.

My father also died of what was called galloping consumption in my dad's youth-- in tobacco country-- lung cancer. He was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized, fast-growing tumor, that was already occluding blood vessels leading to his heart. His physicians assured him was inoperable due to the tangled mass of blood vessels and nerves involved. His prognosis was that he might live six months. He died in six weeks, 30 years after quitting smoking.

My earliest memories are of being held by my parents, both of whom smoked, and trying to avoid acrid "side stream smoke" curling up from cigarettes they held in their hands at the same time. Like an infant's skin, their noses and probably their lungs are more sensitive and irritable.

By about age eight, my parents took me to an allergist, thinking there was something seriously wrong with my upper respiratory system-- nose & sinuses-- and they were told it was simply the heavy smoking in the household and he sees it all the time. RAST tests were new in those days but my parents insisted on confirmation and, along with cat dander, ragweed and goldenrod pollen, which everyone knew from experience and common sense were a problem, the testing had a "strong" positive indication for tobacco smoke byproducts-- probably tar.

Being believers in the new god of the 50's-- science-- the both stopped smoking. Apparently my general health improved-- primarily weight gain, my respiratory problems went away instantly, and I can recall everything in our home did not smell bad when I came in from outside. That smell is a vivid memory from childhood that never ceases to repulse me when I go into a home or smell the clothing, skin, or breath of a smoker.

Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn whether the evidence is empirically-verifiable (etymologically-related to an archaic term for medical quackery-- "empiric treatment") or purely theoretical, subjective, or however a smoker might choose to dismiss it-- and I find smoker's thinking among the most tortured of anyone with whom I've ever wasted time believing I could debate. I rely on my own experience to develop my own survival strategy and prejudices, thank you very much. That works for me.

Assaults on perhaps the most tender interface between a human and their environment are cumulative. Ask anyone suffering from a syndrome of multiple lung ailments. Then read about PM-10 and PM-2.5, toxic mold, etc., and ask yourself if you want to add cigarette smoke to those unavoidable assaults.

30+ years ago, I worked one fall as a firefighter in the Northwest. Much of the time was spent putting new handles on hand tools, sharpening them, washing and drying hose, etc., you know, maintenance. But much was also spent inside doing project work like painting and in classes and meetings. Invariably most of these character smoked and I objected when it was right next to me. One jackass, the crew boss-- in a meeting, said-- and I'll never forget it, "You signed-on fight fire, man, and smoke bothers you?" Two of the only young men I worked with in those days are dead from lung cancer.

You want to search for something scientific, here's something I read years ago and my observations bear-out: The incubation period for lung cancer is very long and I recall seeing the figure 30 years somewhere. Yes, cardiovascular changes associated with smoking reverse rather quickly when one stops smoking but lung changes apparently do not.

Much advertising is simply slightly adulterated bullshit. The current foolishness about peripheral artery disease (PAD). Treadmill walking quickly doubles the capillaries in the calf-- something that can be uncomfortably demonstrated in the physiology lab by amateurs. Those suffering from PAD ("The risk is real," the Jew doctor on the TV commercial intones as he looks you in the eye) is because sufferers sit on their ass too much. Period. Drugs treat the symptoms.

Much of public television is propaganda. Much of it isn't. Much as I despise the politics perpetuated by EXXON MOBILE, I like Masterpiece Theater. I enjoy Nature and Nova. Of mainstream television news, which I watch, as did William Pierce, Ph.D. (Quantum mechanics, by the way, are the first to admit that most all of what they believe about how the world works is what they call theory, as in the "general theory of relativity"). However, those who cannot think critically, which is most everyone anymore, have no business with a television in their environment.

And I'll add one more comment guaranteed to piss-off smokers and sympathizers. In my experience, which is considerable, there is something wrong with people who smoke on a fundamental level that interferes with how they value themselves and therefore other people and that makes them hard to get-along-with. I can honestly say that, as an adult, I never had a satisfactory relationship-- business or personal-- with anyone who smokes. Thankfully I can spot many of them by the finely wrinkled skin: A former secretary of a board on which I serve recently approached me offering her assistance and I declined immediately simply because her face had the cracked, crazed look for someone who had sat at a desk chain smoking much of her career and within a week it turned-out I was right to avoid her.

Some behaviors belie a syndrome of other problems. Queers are more apt to put piss in the coffee urn at work, for example. I figure there is something fundamentally wrong with someone who puts "his" pecker alternately in black buttered goat custard dispensers and their "lover's" mouths-- plural. When I find out that someone is "gay," I avoid them in all situations like the plague that they are publicly and privately worldwide. I would gladly genocidally eradicate tobacco from the face of the earth, too.

Ask young, attractive women, with whom you'd like to mate-- those that aren't addicted to the many addictive alkaloids in tobacco burned at high temperature-- how they feel about smoker's breath, a yellow-brown mustache and yellow teeth, stinking skin, clothes, and home furnishings-- yours and hers. I think you'll end up discovering that you are handicapping yourself unnecessarily toward simply having a better life with an intelligent woman and having more intelligent offspring if you eschew smoking, chewing, snuff, what have you, Marlboro man propaganda notwithstanding because its brought to you by the same people who brought you Brokeback Mountain men.

[-JC]

Search for a Safe Cigarette
Series: NOVA
Grade level: Grade 7+
Closed captioned: Yes
List $19.95
But, seeing it is believing it. Turn the sound "off" and it is still compelling.

Special DVD features include: scene selections; access to the Search for a Safe Cigarette Web site.
On one DVD5 disc. Region coding: All regions. Audio: Dolby stereo. Screen format: Letterboxed.
Item # WG35659
ISBN # 1-578078-75-X
UPC # 783421 35 6597
2001

Is the tobacco industry really trying to reduce health risks? Where there’s smoke, there’s controversy. Every year 420,000 Americans die from the effects of cigarette smoke. But the tobacco industry’s efforts to confront its toxic products and create less deadly cigarettes have resulted in turmoil, failure, as well as an Academy Award-nominated film (The Insider).

In Search for a Safe Cigarette, NOVA gains unprecedented access to tobacco research and manufacturing facilities and asks the question: Can science help create a safer cigarette?

Journey inside a lit cigarette and see how superheated tobacco creates over 45 known carcinogens. Trace the little-known history of "reduced risk" cigarettes, and discover why safer cigarettes developed in the 1960s were discontinued. See how tobacco-specific nitrosomines damage human DNA.

Explore America’s love affair with cigarettes, including tobacco’s role in US history, shrewd cigarette marketing, and the impact of the Surgeon General’s warning. Then look into the future of "safer" tobacco products, like Accord, a new smoking system that features an external battery-powered tobacco lighter.

[Alex Linder]

You're conflating different things. Smoking has risks, and benefits, but in any case it has nothing do with the claims put out by the 'second-hand' propagandists.

BTW, your obervation about smokers being nasty personally is the opposite of what I've seen. The teetotaling mentality is a much greater threat to our living the good life than the smoker's mentality. Those who crusade against the flesh, whether drink, prostitution, smoking, or porn, are 99% of the time unpleasant and hypocritical people, and usually devotees of this or that crap religion like Baptism.

[Alex Linder]

By the way, the effects you describe from being exposed to smoke - as a child I had exactly the same problem, but never from smoking, which I rather liked the smell of, but from nature's green plants. Every time I came to Missouri as a child I would get nasty sick within 24 hours, purely due to pollen and the rest of the invisibles plants shit into the air around the clock.

[Leshrac]

From totse

You know how people list out all the chemicals in cigarettes and say stuff like "cigarettes have toilet bowl cleaner in them".

They then tell you how bad they are for you...

But they seem to forget basic chemistry:

Given that:

Sodium- Reactive metal
Chlorine- Toxic substance

BUT

Sodium+Chlorine= Table Salt

How do we know chemical reactions in cigarettes don't change to something less than harmful, maybe even good...

I just loved that post so much

[George Witzgall]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

BTW, your obervation about smokers being nasty personally is the opposite of what I've seen. The teetotaling mentality is a much greater threat to our living the good life than the smoker's mentality. Those who crusade against the flesh, whether drink, prostitution, smoking, or porn, are 99% of the time unpleasant and hypocritical people, and usually devotees of this or that crap religion like Baptism.

yeah, add homosex to that list, fucking hypocrites.

[odin]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

Smoking has risks, and benefits

What are the benefits of smoking?

[MikeTodd]

Originally Posted by odin

What are the benefits of smoking?

It gives the perpetually peeved something to gripe about!

[tuisto]

Originally Posted by odin

What are the benefits of smoking?

The only benefit for the (mass produced and poisonous) cigarette smoking idiot is his/her accelerated disappearance/premature death.

Hitler knew this too but Linder thinks he is wiser than Hitler.

[Leshrac]

Originally Posted by odin

What are the benefits of smoking?

It is a proven fact that smoking dramatically reduces the chances to have :

- Parkinson's
- Crohn's
- Alzheimer's

And ulcers, too

I'm too lazy to dig it up, do it.

[Bardamu]

Originally Posted by odin

What are the benefits of smoking?

There is one smoking benefit that I can think of and that is nicotine has an antidepressant quality. I would guess, without researching, from practical observation on myself and others that nicotine is a seratonin reuptake inhibitor.
Although generally smoking is a bad and nasty habit, especially in public.

[ATiii]

Originally Posted by -JC

My father farmed tobacco in the South with mules and left the farm to go to college because he didn't want to earn his living growing tobacco. Using it since his teens, chewing it and eventually smoking, convinced him that it was not a good thing-- highly addictive even before modern additives and generally nasty.

My father also died of what was called galloping consumption in my dad's youth-- in tobacco country-- lung cancer. He was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized, fast-growing tumor, that was already occluding blood vessels leading to his heart. His physicians assured him was inoperable due to the tangled mass of blood vessels and nerves involved. His prognosis was that he might live six months. He died in six weeks, 30 years after quitting smoking.

My earliest memories are of being held by my parents, both of whom smoked, and trying to avoid acrid "side stream smoke" curling up from cigarettes they held in their hands at the same time. Like an infant's skin, their noses and probably their lungs are more sensitive and irritable.

By about age eight, my parents took me to an allergist, thinking there was something seriously wrong with my upper respiratory system-- nose & sinuses-- and they were told it was simply the heavy smoking in the household and he sees it all the time. RAST tests were new in those days but my parents insisted on confirmation and, along with cat dander, ragweed and goldenrod pollen, which everyone knew from experience and common sense were a problem, the testing had a "strong" positive indication for tobacco smoke byproducts-- probably tar.

Being believers in the new god of the 50's-- science-- the both stopped smoking. Apparently my general health improved-- primarily weight gain, my respiratory problems went away instantly, and I can recall everything in our home did not smell bad when I came in from outside. That smell is a vivid memory from childhood that never ceases to repulse me when I go into a home or smell the clothing, skin, or breath of a smoker.

Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn whether the evidence is empirically-verifiable (etymologically-related to an archaic term for medical quackery-- "empiric treatment") or purely theoretical, subjective, or however a smoker might choose to dismiss it-- and I find smoker's thinking among the most tortured of anyone with whom I've ever wasted time believing I could debate. I rely on my own experience to develop my own survival strategy and prejudices, thank you very much. That works for me.

Assaults on perhaps the most tender interface between a human and their environment are cumulative. Ask anyone suffering from a syndrome of multiple lung ailments. Then read about PM-10 and PM-2.5, toxic mold, etc., and ask yourself if you want to add cigarette smoke to those unavoidable assaults.

30+ years ago, I worked one fall as a firefighter in the Northwest. Much of the time was spent putting new handles on hand tools, sharpening them, washing and drying hose, etc., you know, maintenance. But much was also spent inside doing project work like painting and in classes and meetings. Invariably most of these character smoked and I objected when it was right next to me. One jackass, the crew boss-- in a meeting, said-- and I'll never forget it, "You signed-on fight fire, man, and smoke bothers you?" Two of the only young men I worked with in those days are dead from lung cancer.

You want to search for something scientific, here's something I read years ago and my observations bear-out: The incubation period for lung cancer is very long and I recall seeing the figure 30 years somewhere. Yes, cardiovascular changes associated with smoking reverse rather quickly when one stops smoking but lung changes apparently do not.

Much advertising is simply slightly adulterated bullshit. The current foolishness about peripheral artery disease (PAD). Treadmill walking quickly doubles the capillaries in the calf-- something that can be uncomfortably demonstrated in the physiology lab by amateurs. Those suffering from PAD ("The risk is real," the Jew doctor on the TV commercial intones as he looks you in the eye) is because sufferers sit on their ass too much. Period. Drugs treat the symptoms.

Much of public television is propaganda. Much of it isn't. Much as I despise the politics perpetuated by EXXON MOBILE, I like Masterpiece Theater. I enjoy Nature and Nova. Of mainstream television news, which I watch, as did William Pierce, Ph.D. (Quantum mechanics, by the way, are the first to admit that most all of what they believe about how the world works is what they call theory, as in the "general theory of relativity"). However, those who cannot think critically, which is most everyone anymore, have no business with a television in their environment.

And I'll add one more comment guaranteed to piss-off smokers and sympathizers. In my experience, which is considerable, there is something wrong with people who smoke on a fundamental level that interferes with how they value themselves and therefore other people and that makes them hard to get-along-with. I can honestly say that, as an adult, I never had a satisfactory relationship-- business or personal-- with anyone who smokes. Thankfully I can spot many of them by the finely wrinkled skin: A former secretary of a board on which I serve recently approached me offering her assistance and I declined immediately simply because her face had the cracked, crazed look for someone who had sat at a desk chain smoking much of her career and within a week it turned-out I was right to avoid her.

Some behaviors belie a syndrome of other problems. Queers are more apt to put piss in the coffee urn at work, for example. I figure there is something fundamentally wrong with someone who puts "his" pecker alternately in black buttered goat custard dispensers and their "lover's" mouths-- plural. When I find out that someone is "gay," I avoid them in all situations like the plague that they are publicly and privately worldwide. I would gladly genocidally eradicate tobacco from the face of the earth, too.

Ask young, attractive women, with whom you'd like to mate-- those that aren't addicted to the many addictive alkaloids in tobacco burned at high temperature-- how they feel about smoker's breath, a yellow-brown mustache and yellow teeth, stinking skin, clothes, and home furnishings-- yours and hers. I think you'll end up discovering that you are handicapping yourself unnecessarily toward simply having a better life with an intelligent woman and having more intelligent offspring if you eschew smoking, chewing, snuff, what have you, Marlboro man propaganda notwithstanding because its brought to you by the same people who brought you Brokeback Mountain men.

The only people I've seen who smoke are either extremely unintelligent or have low hygiene. One woman I knew smoked so much that she said she was coughing up a lot in the morning. After I suggested she stop smoking I was told that she would "cut down" (a phrase loved by smokers but which has no real meaning or value). Needless to say she didn't. Her teeth are yellow, her voice closely resembles a man's and her breath is absolutely rancid.

Another argument I heard from one utterly stupid liberal woman who smoked those self-rolled ones (at least 25 a day) was that "she could die tomorrow" so there's no point giving up. After pointing out that if that were the case why not rob a bank or murder her enemies etc. she remained silent. Smokers themselves have an inferior personality which causes them to want to lust after something. After all only an idiot would pay for something that kills you.

When I was at school 95% of the ones who started smoking were remedials.

Alan

[john2020]

I agree with Alan.

[Mike Parker]

The Bogus 'Science' of Secondhand Smoke

Gio Batta Gori
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Smoking cigarettes is a clear health risk, as most everyone knows. But lately, people have begun to worry about the health risks of secondhand smoke. Some policymakers and activists are even claiming that the government should crack down on secondhand smoke exposure, given what "the science" indicates about such exposure.

Last July, introducing his office's latest report on secondhand smoke, then-U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona asserted that "there is no risk-free level of secondhand smoke exposure," that "breathing secondhand smoke for even a short time can damage cells and set the cancer process in motion," and that children exposed to secondhand smoke will "eventually . . . develop cardiovascular disease and cancers over time."

Such claims are certainly alarming. But do the studies Carmona references support his claims, and are their findings as sound as he suggests?

Lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases develop at advancing ages. Estimating the risk of those diseases posed by secondhand smoke requires knowing the sum of momentary secondhand smoke doses that nonsmokers have internalized over their lifetimes. Such lifetime summations of instant doses are obviously impossible, because concentrations of secondhand smoke in the air, individual rates of inhalation, and metabolic transformations vary from moment to moment, year after year, location to location.

In an effort to circumvent this capital obstacle, all secondhand smoke studies have estimated risk using a misleading marker of "lifetime exposure." Yet, instant exposures also vary uncontrollably over time, so lifetime summations of exposure could not be, and were not, measured.

Typically, the studies asked 60--70 year-old self-declared nonsmokers to recall how many cigarettes, cigars or pipes might have been smoked in their presence during their lifetimes, how thick the smoke might have been in the rooms, whether the windows were open, and similar vagaries. Obtained mostly during brief phone interviews, answers were then recorded as precise measures of lifetime individual exposures.

In reality, it is impossible to summarize accurately from momentary and vague recalls, and with an absurd expectation of precision, the total exposure to secondhand smoke over more than a half-century of a person's lifetime. No measure of cumulative lifetime secondhand smoke exposure was ever possible, so the epidemiologic studies estimated risk based not only on an improper marker of exposure, but also on exposure data that are illusory.

Adding confusion, people with lung cancer or cardiovascular disease are prone to amplify their recall of secondhand smoke exposure. Others will fib about being nonsmokers and will contaminate the results. More than two dozen causes of lung cancer are reported in the professional literature, and over 200 for cardiovascular diseases; their likely intrusions have never been credibly measured and controlled in secondhand smoke studies. Thus, the claimed risks are doubly deceptive because of interferences that could not be calculated and corrected.

In addition, results are not consistently reproducible. The majority of studies do not report a statistically significant change in risk from secondhand smoke exposure, some studies show an increase in risk, and ¿ astoundingly ¿ some show a reduction of risk.

Some prominent anti-smokers have been quietly forthcoming on what "the science" does and does not show. Asked to quantify secondhand smoke risks at a 2006 hearing at the UK House of Lords, Oxford epidemiologist Sir Richard Peto ¿ a leader of the secondhand smoke crusade ¿ replied, "I am sorry not to be more helpful; you want numbers and I could give you numbers..., but what does one make of them? ...These hazards cannot be directly measured."

It has been fashionable to ignore the weakness of "the science" on secondhand smoke, perhaps in the belief that claiming "the science is settled" will lead to policies and public attitudes that will reduce the prevalence of smoking. But such a Faustian bargain is an ominous precedent in public health and political ethics. Consider how minimally such policies as smoking bans in bars and restaurants really reduce the prevalence of smoking, and yet how odious and socially unfair such prohibitions are.

By any sensible account, the anachronism of tobacco use should eventually vanish in an advancing civilization. Why must we promote this process under the tyranny of deception?

Presumably, we are grown-up people, with a civilized sense of fair play, and dedicated to disciplined and rational discourse. We are fortunate enough to live in a free country that is respectful of individual choices and rights, including the right to honest public policies. Still, while much is voiced about the merits of forceful advocacy, not enough is said about the fundamental requisite of advancing public health with sustainable evidence, rather than by dangerous, wanton conjectures.

A frank discussion is needed to restore straight thinking in the legitimate uses of "the science" of epidemiology -- uses that go well beyond secondhand smoke issues. Today, health rights command high priority on many agendas, as they should. It is not admissible to presume that people expect those rights to be served less than truthfully.

Gio Batta Gori, an epidemiologist and toxicologist, is a fellow of the Health Policy Center in Bethesda. He is a former deputy director of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention, and he received the U.S. Public Health Service Superior Service Award in 1976 for his efforts to define less hazardous cigarettes. Gori's article "The Surgeon General's Doctored Opinion" will appear in the spring issue of the Cato Institute's Regulation Magazine.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012901158.html

[patriot]

If someone pulls in a drag and then blows it out. There lungs did not absorb all the crap. Second hand smoke is bad. If you walk into a bar where they smoke your clothes smell like smoke after a few minutes. They are stinking up everyone's air. I think we shold close the cigarette factories and if you want to smoke you can grow your own tobacco and roll your own.