Now that St. Louis has reached an accommodation with the Missouri Athletic Club and St. Charles has withdrawn its anti-smoking proposals, it is time for everyone to take a step back, take a deep breath, and revisit the reason for the bans.
The assumption has been that secondhand smoke is the most dangerous substance known to mankind. That even casual exposure will cause harm. This is based upon a misreading of the surgeon general’s report, which used the unfortunate phrase: “There is no known level of safe exposure.”
In fact, this can equally be interpreted as meaning that minimum safe levels of exposure have not been established. There are safe levels of exposure for arsenic, radon, lead, cyanide, chlorine and nerve gas (we use the last as bug spray and chlorine was a weapon in World War I).
That there is no threshold of causality flies in the face of toxicological principles. Medical science has long recognized the 30 cigarette per day threshold for significant risk. Bartenders in even the smokiest establishment have an exposure equal to perhaps six cigarettes per year.
The oft-bandied statement that secondhand smoke kills about 1,100 Missourians every year is patently absurd. Even OSHA, known for its meddling in every aspect of business, has since 2001 been unable to show a link between casual exposure and disease.
Originally written By Jay Rosloff – St. Louis
