Mass Hysteria!!! Banning smoking indoors makes sense, banning smoking out of doors is pseudoscience and social engineering (no surprise it would be popular with some here)
From this month's Advocate:
[...] Michael D. Shaw, an environmental scientist (not a tobacco lobbyist), says that most anti-smoking activists “far too readily exaggerate the dangers.” The fact is most of the studies done regarding the dangers of second-hand smoke used non-smokers who were enclosed in claustrophobic situations with chain-smokers. Even then, some of the studies found no effects, but it’s been enough in recent years to launch a movement to ban smoking. For instance, in Calabasas, Calif., smoking has been banned everywhere outdoors where a person could get within 20 feet of a smoker. Uh, wouldn’t that be ANYWHERE? This ban, an outdoor ban, in the most populated state in the Union with over 36 million people, is outrageous.
Some claim that they are allergic to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), but that’s a fallacy. According to Shaw, “Based on the traditional definition of an allergen being an agent that promotes an immunological response, ETS fails that test, and so far, at least, can only be classified as an irritant.” So, people are “sensitive” to ETS. But who isn’t “sensitive” to smoke? Irritation is no reason to ban it, but avoid it; perhaps a move of the kiosks to the outside ring of the college, rather than the spine where more students walk, is the best answer.
To give examples as to how out of control the “facts” are getting, Shaw cited a study regarding the Center for Disease Control’s claim that ETS could explain the increase in Asthma since 1995. As asthma numbers were increasing though, the number of smokers was actually decreasing.
Activist Stanton Glantz, who was interviewed by ABC News’ John Stossel, had an even more outrageous claim. He told Stossel 20 to 30 minutes of exposure to second-hand smoke puts a person in serious risk of having a deadly heart attack. This “fact” directly contradicts Dr. Michael Seigel, a leading activist for banning smoking in restaurants and workplaces, who says his movement is distorting the real facts.
The biggest study on this topic, according to Shaw, covered 39 years, 118,094 adults, and a focus on 35,561 people who never smoked but lived with a spouse with known smoking habits, came to the following conclusion: “The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.”
The New England Journal of Medicine, published in 1975 when smoking was rampant in bars and other public places, concluded that the concentration of ETS contaminants was equal to the effects of smoking 0.004 cigarettes per hour. This basically means that a person would have to hang out in a particular bar with this average for about 10-and-a-half days straight to match the effects of one cigarette. Considering that each pack contains 20 cigarettes, a person would have to log 5,000 straight hours – or almost two-thirds of a year – in a bar to suck down that whole pack.
The point of my argument is not to support smoking at all. Knowing lobbyists as I do, it is entirely possible that these journals and studies were done with funding from known industry supporters, or even the industry itself. Far be it from me to defend criminals, but at some point, this superlative fraud being tossed around as “fact” must be stifled.
