Second-Hand Smoke Craziness - Part Two

Are we heading to a new Prohibition? Or has it already arrived for smokers? If you have not been living in a cave for the last thirty years of so, you have been exposed to a lot of talk about the dangers of “second-hand” smoke.

Everyone knows that second-hand smoke is dangerous. We hear it constantly — especially in this time when smoking bans are commonplace and that proverbial cave looks like the last place that smokers will be allowed to hide in to light up.

Until, of course, someone complains that the bats and other cave wildlife will be harmed by tobacco.

One important statistic on the dangers of second-hand smoke comes from a definitive, careful study showing a clear-cut link between second-hand smoke and cancer in humans. The findings of the study, undertaken by the World Health Organization, were published in 1998. Their multi-year investigation found an unquestionable 22% relationship between cancer in adults and whether or not they had been exposed to “second-hand” smoke as a child.

A 22% relationship between second-hand smoke and cancer is much too clear to dispute. It is not a statistical anomaly. It is a proven fact.

The only problem is that the WHO study found a 22% decrease in the chances of adults getting cancer who had been exposed to smoke as a child.

More below the fold…

You read that correctly.

A World Health Organization study in 1998 showed that there was no significant risk of cancer to children from second-hand smoke. The study showed that the risk of developing cancer was actually lower for children raised in a home where one or both parents smoked.

You don’t believe it?

You think that if such a study actually existed, then it would have made the headlines and put to rest the spurious issue of “second hand smoke?”

Here is a link to an abstract of the scientific study.

And here is a link to a reprint of an article discussing the study from the European Edition of the Wall Street Journal.

This is the World Health Organization we are talking about here, not the American Tobacco Association. This is not a group that is in the pocket of Big Tobacco. It is not a smoker-friendly group.

It is also not a group that liked the results of their own careful, objective and scientific study.

As soon as it appeared in print, WHO officials started issuing statements “explaining” why it was not significant and why second-hand smoke is still a menace. You will not find this study — the largest of its kind on second-hand smoke — listed as a source on the WHO’s own World No-Tobacco day web site. You will only find reports that maintain the myth that second-hand smoke is dangerous.

Damn the science.

If the research studies do not say what they should say, then ignore the research studies.

Amidst all of the hysteria over second-hand smoke, or so-called passive smoking, I’ll bet that this is one scientific study that most people have not heard about. All of the recent laws passed outlawing smoking in public places, including restaurants, bars and even cigar stores in some localities, were passed after the facts from this comprehensive 1998 study were available. All of those smoking ban laws ignored good, solid scientific evidence that the dangers of second-hand smoke are mostly a myth.

But this study, and others like it that find absolutely no link between “second-hand” smoke and cancer, heart disease, or other fatal illnesses is the main reason that the anti-smoking crusaders have changed their sermons on the evils of smoking. They do not want these inconvenient and quite clear scientific facts brought up in an open debate. Instead, they resort to emotional and loaded talk about second-hand smoke as “passing gas” in public, or they speak of the rights of non-smokers to work in a smoke-free environment without pointing out that no health hazard is involved to the workers and they have a choice to work somewhere else.

I’ll go farther and bet that the anti-smoking-universal-smoking-ban crusaders won’t really care about these objective, scientific facts.

After all, they know that smoking kills.

They know that smoking is evil.

They know that people who smoke are bad people who don’t care about hurting other people, innocent children…and helpless kittens.

They know that smokers are…sinners.

Let the people say, “Amen.”

The truth of the matter is that the modern anti-smoking movement is not based on science. It is not based on medical research. It is not based on facts.

The anti-smoking movement is based on faith.

The current anti-smoking movement, like the Temperance movement at the turn of the last century, has a lot more in common with religion that it does with science. It is a quasi-spiritual, fundamentalist movement with all of the flaws, all of the intolerance, and all of the holier-than-thou superiority that comes with any extreme, fundamentalist movement.

We smokers do not even get the benefit of a “hate the smoke, not the smoker” mantra. We are demonized because we choose to do something that is perfectly legal to do.

Legal, at least, for the moment.

It has gotten to the point where even smokers have bought into the “I’m a sinner” mentality. We are embarrassed to smoke because we have been told for so long how dangerous it is to us, to those around us, and to the environment that we feel guilty. I am quite surprised that there hasn’t been a study showing conclusively that global warming is a direct result of smoking.

Well, while that hasn’t happened yet, the environmentalist crowd has been looking at the success of the anti-smoking movement and deciding that they could learn a thing or two from them on how to wipe out SUVs and other gas-guzzlers and cut down on the amount of pollution us evil Americans spew into the atmosphere. Guess what comes next?

Many smokers, when faced with the march of smoking bans across the U.S., Canada and Europe, simply shrug and say there isn’t anything that can be done. This will blow over. Or, if it doesn’t, at least we will still be able to smoke in our own homes.

Tell that to the smokers in Maine, Oklahoma and Vermont, where laws have been passed that forbid foster parents from smoking around children in their own homes. Tell it to parents in Virginia and Maryland, where parental smoking has become an issue in some child-custody cases.

One high-profile case in Virginia saw Tamara Silvius of Caroline County barred by a judge from smoking around her children as a court-ordered condition for child visitation rights.

Why?

Certainly not because of scientific facts.

To quote from that London Times editorial on the myth of second-hand smoke once more:

“The theory that cigarette smoke kills non-smokers was dreamt up 30 years ago by anti-smoking activists; only after inventing it did they attempt to prove it.

“Dozens of peer-reviewed scientific studies have followed. All point to a compelling consensus that there is no casual link between passive smoking and fatal illness. One of the most comprehensive studies was published in the British Medical Journal in 2003. It concluded: ‘The results do not support a causal relationship between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality.’”

This is not going to go away.

It is not going to get better.

In the face of fundamentalist Islam confronting the West, the West is retreating into a fundamentalist, moralistic society in which conservative Christians have an un-holy alliance with new-agers and the environmental movement to protect the innocents (and the planet) from us evil, sinful humans. The basic freedoms that we take for granted are being stripped away, one by one, and we are doing nothing to protest it.

This is not just an issue of smoking. It is an issue of the misuse of science and the manipulation of facts to justify governmental regulation, control and taxation. It is an issue of propaganda. It is an issue of freedom. Ultimately, it is an issue of tyranny by a moral elite.

Still not convinced that the smoking ban movement is a threat to much more than some misguided, addicts who need to be saved from themelves and prevented from harming others? Click here for an interesting article. Or, click here for another article on the same subject, and click here for an even more enlightening look at how the anti-smoking movement started.

This is an issue that will eventually touch all of us in some way, because it will not stop with smoking.

It will not stop with smoking bans.

It will not stop until the new Prohibitionists have once more outlawed everything that they morally object to in America. It will not stop until we are living the lives that all of us should be living, according to a group of self-appointed moral judges. Until we are all living lives that are pure and pristine and wholesome…and controlled.

What could be more reasonable than that? After all, all they want is what is best for us.

Whether we want it or not.

Posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 11:10 pm.