Secondhand smoke myth up in flames
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The Totalitarian Crusade Against Second-Hand Smoke
There are few issues that are as riddled with outright claptrap as the scare about what smokers’ puffing is doing to innocent non-smokers.
February 9, 2014
Brendan O’Neill
If there really were such a thing as a bullshit detector, a machine that bleeped upon encountering nonsense, it would probably go into meltdown whenever someone talked about second-hand smoke.
In the modern public sphere, there are few issues that are as riddled with myth, misinformation, contradictory claims and outright claptrap as the scare about what smokers’ foggy puffing is doing to us innocent non-smokers.
In recent years we’ve been told that second-hand smoke, or passive smoking, as some people call it, is as bad as smoking itself and can give you lung cancer. And apparently if you are surrounded by it in a car that has its windows closed that is like being in the most smoky, nicotine-stained bar you could ever imagine (if such bars still existed, which of course they don’t).
Yet it turns out that these claims about the toxicity and cancer-causing powers of other people’s smoke are either untrue or unproven. So how do prissy anti-smoking campaigners and health-freaky politicians continue to get away with churning out tall tales about second-hand smoke? Why won’t this panic die under the boot of actual facts? What gives it its Michael Myers-like ability to keep coming back, in a crazier form every time, wagging its warning finger at humankind?
The evidence-light nature of the second-hand smoke scare was on full display during British politicians’ recent mean-spirited attempt to outlaw smoking in cars in which children are present.
Last week, the House of Lords, our unelected second chamber, gave its nod of approval to a new Bill that would make it an offense to smoke in a car with kids, even if the windows are open. The Bill is now working its way back to the House of Commons, and if a majority of the members there agree that coppers should have the right to stop and threaten with arrest any motorist who has that apparently deadly combination of a lit ciggie and a child in his vehicle, then the Bill will become law and another bit of Brits’ everyday freedom will be stubbed out.
Smoking in a car with minors is already banned in Australia, Canada, South Africa and in some American states, including California, Maine and Oregon. These bans capture superbly the zealous miserabilism of the modern-day nannying’n’nudging set. They expose the new authoritarians’ casual disregard for the notion of privacy, so that even our privately owned vehicles come to be seen as fair game for petty laws to curb and control what was once perfectly legal behavior; they reveal the nannying lobby’s powerful distrust of everyday men and women, who are now viewed as so bone-headed and bereft of decency that new laws are required to prevent them from polluting their own children, both physically and morally; and they show what shockingly low esteem the ideal of autonomy is held in these days, so that anyone who stands up and says “I think adults should be free to choose what vices to indulge in and pleasures to pursue” is either laughed at for being naive or branded a wicked stooge for Big Tobacco.
So what evidence have British politicians cited for their desire to ban smoking in cars? Well, it’s not really clear. Peruse British media coverage of the second-hand smoke issue and I guarantee you will end up bamboozled.
One of our public health ministers, Luciana Berger, said last week that the evil of puffing in cars with kids has to be squished because “a single cigarette can create concentrations of tobacco smoke in a car that is 23 times more toxic than a typical house.” That “23 times” figure sounded familiar. Where have we heard it before? Ah yes, the prestigious British Medical Association (BMA) once claimed that lighting up in a car with the windows closed creates toxin levels that are “23 times higher than… a smoky bar.”
Excuse me? Which is it? Is smoking in a car so nasty that it turns your vehicle into a hurtling smoke machine that is 23 times more toxic than a smoker’s house or 23 times more toxic than a smoky bar? It can’t be both. You don’t have to be a peer-reviewed scientist to know that a smoky bar will be a hell of a lot smokier than a smoker’s house, so is smoking in a car 23 times worse than the former or the latter?
It gets worse. The BMA has got into trouble for its version of the “23 times as toxic” claim. In 2011 it was forced to correct a press release that said toxins in a smoky car were “23 times greater than in a smoky bar,” changing it to say that the toxins in a smoky car were actually only “11 times greater than in a smoky bar.”
It gets even worse. One of the key studies cited by the BMA as evidence for its massively reduced “11 times as toxic as a smoky bar” claim actually says something quite different. Published in the prestigious American Journal for Preventative Medicine, the study found that in a car with closed windows, smoking generated particulate concentrations of 272 micrograms per cubic metre of air. And it found that in bars, the toxins levels were either similar (smoky bars in Massachusetts had 206 micrograms per cubic metre) or were around double that found in a smoky car (smoky bars in New York reached 412 micrograms per cubic metre).
So to summarize—smoking in a car possibly makes that car 23 times as toxic as? a smoker’s house, 23 times as toxic as a smoky bar, 11 times as toxic as a smoky bar, or less than doubly as toxic as a smoky bar. Got it?
The flimsiness of the evidence offered for a ban on smoking in a car with kids is typical of the promoters of second-hand smoke scare. These folk have also told us that second-hand smoke is an “invisible killer” (in the words of Britain’s National Health Service) because it “causes lung cancer in non-smokers.” Lots of people believe this claim. But there’s no evidence to back it up. At the end of last year, the much respected U.S. Journal of the National Cancer Institute carried out an exhaustive study of the research and found”no clear link between passive smoking and lung cancer.”
Unperturbed by that blow to their evidence-low but hyperbole-high claims, the anti-smoking zealots have now started talking about “third-hand smoke.” This is the residue from smoking that sticks to walls and other surfaces. This week, a report from the University of California, Riverside claimed to have found that mice exposed to such “smoke” (it’s not really smoke, of course) became a bit more hyperactive and developed liver problems. One science website headlined its report on the new study: “Third-hand smoke just as deadly as first-hand smoke.” Seriously? Who but the most blinkered loather of the pastime of smoking could claim sans shame that touching a wall in a room where someone once had a cigarette is as bad as dragging nicotine into your lungs from an actual cigarette?
What next—”fourth-hand smoke,” to describe coming into contact with someone who was once in a room in which someone once had a cigarette?
Why does this fact-lite fearmongering about second and third-hand smoke trundle on even as the evidence for it either falls apart or is laughed out of existence by serious research? It’s because the whole idea of second-hand smoke isn’t really a scientific one at all. No, it’s more of a metaphor, a metaphor disguised as science. It’s a pseudoscientific allegory for our highly suspicious era in which we’re all expected, encouraged in fact, to see our fellow citizens, our work colleagues and even our own parents as toxic creatures whose very breath and touch might harm us.
What really underpins the obsession with second-hand smoke is not scientific evidence but today’s broader culture of mistrust, our profound sense of alienation from one another. Second-hand smoke is one of the main mechanisms through which we’re invited to see the world around us—its workplaces, bars, restaurants—as threatening, and that world’s inhabitants—strangers, our colleagues, our own families—as poisonous. It speaks to, and further entrenches, today’s fearful and atomised outlook, in which we’re more likely to look upon other people as corrupters of our health and minds rather than as potential comrades or friends.
The profoundly anti-social nature of the second-hand smoke nonsense is summed up in advice offered by the U.S. Lung Association. It says you can protect yourself and your kids from second-hand smoke by keeping them away from “places where people usually smoke”: “This could include restaurants, relatives’ homes, cars, etc. The chemicals in tobacco smoke get into curtains, carpets, toys, furniture, walls, car seats, clothing, skin, and hair…”
In short, everywhere and everyone is dangerous; invisible toxic elements lurk in granny’s carpets and restaurant curtains; in your cousin’s hair and your kids’ playmates’ toys; on park swings, on public benches, on buses. Better to stay at home, in a totally smoke-free environment, than venture into the filthy world outside your front door.
What a dispiriting and divisive view of the world. Through the increasingly unhinged crusade against smoking, we have been cajoled with suspect science into viewing all people—even mom and dad—as the potential poisoners of our bodies and souls. The reason dodgy scientific claims about other people’s smoke keep emerging is because they are moulding themselves around, and offering justification for, an already existing social malaise—one in which we are invited to fear people, to fear the world, to disavow autonomy, and to trust the state. The specter of the threatening, toxic Other, of he who smokes, is one of the main ways in which the authorities now encroach upon our everyday lives and cynically split man from man.
Enough. I would prefer to run the risk of getting a hacking cough through freely mixing with smokers than to live in a detoxified, disinfected society in which we’re expected to judge every person and scenario by how many particulate concentrations they contain.
January 15, 2014
Michael Enright
There are a number of 50th anniversaries to mark in 2014. Some are good, like the Beatles coming to the United States. Some unfortunate, like the first appearance of the Bossa Nova. But in terms of overall impact on the health and well being of people, we should note that this is the 50th Anniversary of the special report on smoking by the Surgeon General of the United States.
It is hard to overestimate the value of the report by Dr. Luther Terry. He established for the first time, the clear linkage between smoking and lung cancer. And he did much more. Dr. Terry showed that smoking was a serious contributing factor in cardiovascular disease and emphysema.
The tobacco companies, of course, went ballistic and spent and are still spending billions to fight the essential wisdom of the Terry report.
It has been estimated that something more than eight million lives have been saved since the surgeon general’s report. Yet still, more than 400,000 Americans die each year from smoking-related causes.
In the decades since the report, municipalities around the world have passed a series of sensible laws restricting where people could not smoke; bars, restaurants, offices and on airplanes. It was about this time that well-intentioned people got carried away and began to proclaim the myth that second-hand or passive smoke caused cancer. It didn’t make sense. How could a few wisps of smoke not inhaled deeply cause lung cancer?
On the program As It Happens, I put these and other questions to a researcher for the Environmental Protection Agency. After some heated back and forth, he admitted:”Sure it’s crappy science, but look at the outcome–a smoke-free America.”
Anti-smoking activists were quick to pronounce that “Second Hand Smoke Kills.” Well, no, it doesn’t, actually. A recent article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute described the details of a study involving 76,000 women over a period of more than 10 years. The bottom-line conclusion: the study found no statistically significant causal relationship between lung cancer and exposure to passive smoke. The study did not explore if passive smoke exacerbates other lung conditions such as asthma and emphysema, which it probably does. It focussed solely on the question of whether or not passive smoke causes lung cancer.
Say the study’s authors: “To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine both active and passive smoking in relation to lung cancer incidence.” Now as an ex-smoker and someone who lost his oldest friend to smoke-caused emphysema, I realize how awful smoking is. But then I have to ask why anti-smoking activists don’t simply stick to the facts instead of alarming everybody with the assertion that passive smoke causes lung cancer when it clearly doesn’t.
The answer lies not in science but in culture. This was the thinking of study researcher Dr. Jyoti Patel of Northwestern University School of Medicine who wrote: “The strongest reason to avoid passive cigarette smoke is to change societal behaviour; to not live in a society where smoking is the norm.”
Well, bravo. An admirable objective. But that is social engineering, not medicine.
January 22, 2014
In my opening remarks on last week’s program, I said, “Anti-smoking activists were quick to pronounce that “Second Hand Smoke Kills.” Well, no, it doesn’t, actually.”
Read More.
The Passive Smoking Issue Is A Rorschach Test For The Ability To Think Scientifically
12/21/3013? By Geoffrey Kabat
Word of the latest “study” only recapitulates the confusion surrounding the issue.
What did this new, as-yet-unpublished study really add to what is already known on this question?? The answer, which came through clearly in the brief report was – very little.
Read More.?
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Second-Hand Smoke Proven Harmless – Again
12/19/2013? By Rush Limbaugh
The bottom line is that passive smoking, i.e., for those of you in Rio Linda, secondhand smoke, does not give you lung cancer.
Read More.
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Passive smoking – another of the Nanny State’s big lies
12/18/2013? By James Delingpole
Passive smoking doesn’t give you lung cancer. So says a new report publicised by the American Cancer Institute which will come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone with a shred of integrity who has looked into the origins of the great “environmental tobacco smoke” meme.
Read More.
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December 11, 2013
Although numerous studies seeking to find strong (or any) evidence of a link between SHS (secondhand smoke, or “passive smoking”) and lung cancer have failed to find such, the popular wisdom (shared by most scientists) is that SHS is indeed a cause of lung cancer. One reason for this widespread mythology is the failure of news media — both general and scientific — to take note of these studies.
Another example of this “conscious avoidance” has occurred recently. In June, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO, possibly the most prestigious meeting of cancer researchers), a Stanford medical student (Ange Wang) presented her (and colleagues’) evaluation of lung cancer and smoking histories contained in the vast Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) database. Their conclusion: among the 76,000+ profiles with all the requisite information, “among women who had never smoked, exposure to passive smoking overall, and to most categories of passive smoking, did not statistically significantly increase cancer risk.” The news report of this presentation only now has appeared on the website of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) — and as of today, no media have paid attention to either the original report or the current news item.
Read More.
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12/09/2013
Christopher Snowdon
New study finds no link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer
This news hasn’t got any mainstream media coverage, despite being reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and being a large, prospective study with 76,000 participants and 901 lung cancer cases, including 152 who never smoked.
I wonder why?
A large prospective cohort study of more than 76,000 women confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke.
Read More.
No Clear Link Between Passive Smoking and Lung Cancer
December 6, 2013
JNCI J Natl Cancer Inst (2013) doi: 10.1093/jnci/djt365
A large prospective cohort study of more than 76,000 women confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke.
“The fact that passive smoking may not be strongly associated with lung cancer points to a need to find other risk factors for the disease [in nonsmokers],” said Ange Wang, the Stanford University medical student who presented the study at the June 2013 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.
Investigators from Stanford and other research centers looked at data from the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study (WHI-OS). Among 93,676 women aged 50–79 years at enrollment, the study had complete smoking and covariate data (including passive smoking exposure in childhood, adult home, and work) for 76,304 participants. Of those, 901 developed lung cancer over 10.5 mean years of follow-up.
The incidence of lung cancer was 13 times higher in current smokers and four times higher in former smokers than in never-smokers, and the relationship for both current and former smokers depended on level of exposure. However, among women who had never smoked, exposure to passive smoking overall, and to most categories of passive smoking, did not statistically significantly increase lung cancer risk.
Read More.
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June 19, 2013
The results of these studies are totally contrary to common sense. If drinking one bottle of red wine per day is harmful, then it surely must be true that drinking two bottles of red wine per day must be more harmful, and drinking ten bottles of red wine per day must be disastrous.? How can it be true that cutting down from ten bottles of red wine per day to one bottle makes no difference to the outcome? But I must admit that that is a false analogy – very few people would be able to drink ten bottles of red per day without collapsing after the first three or so. However, the analogy holds if one considers, say, one glass of wine per day as compared to ten glasses per day. Here is the URL for the (tobacco control) study which Simple Simon quoted:
Read More
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Health consequences of reduced daily cigarette consumption
2006
Aage Tverdal, Kjell Bjartveit
Conclusions: Long-term follow-up provides no evidence that heavy smokers who cut down their daily cigarette consumption by >50% reduce their risk of premature death significantly. In health education and patient counselling, it may give people false expectations to advise that reduction in consumption is associated with reduction in harm.
Read More
They have created a fear that is based on nothing.
May 31, 2010
Effects of Secondhand Smoke Questioned … Again
Sylvia Cochran
Secondhand smoke is a sore topic for smoking-ban advocates and detractors alike. Recent news show that tobacco users and those opposed to smoking bans are gaining traction with an unlikely ally: science. Or are they?
(1)CigarMedia.TV. “OSHA Sets Safe Levels of Secondhand Smoke in the Workplace” (cached) (accessed March 21, 2010)
(2)OSHA. “TABLE Z-1 Limits for Air Contaminants” (accessed March 21, 2010)
(3)BMJ. “Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98” (accessed March 21, 2010)
(4)BMJ. “Environmental tobacco smoke and mortality in Chinese women who have never smoked: prospective cohort study” (accessed March 21, 2010)
(5)FDA. “FDA Warns of Health Risks Posed by E-Cigarettes” (accessed March 21, 2010)
Do Smoking Bans Reduce Heart Attacks? By Michael L. Marlow, Ph.D. The study concluded that bans do not significantly affect health outcomes in the elderly, working-age, or pediatric populations. From: Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 15 Number 1 Spring 2010.
Don’t Flatter Yourself: Why Survey Research Can Be Flawed
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Journal reference:
Ashok K. Lalwani. The Distinct Influence of Cognitive Busyness and Need for Closure on Cultural Differences in Socially Desirable Responding. Journal of Consumer Research, 2009; 0 (0): 090114112719036 DOI: 10.1086/597214
From the Magazine..WIRED..Jan. 2009
The Truth about Cancer
Scientists should stop trying to cure cancer and start focusing on finding it early.
It’s the smart way to cheat death.
Don Listwin learned about the 90/10 survival curve after his mother, Grace, was diagnosed with Ovarian cancer in 2000. Doctors had diagnosed her–twice- with a bladder infection and prescribed antibiotics. Not, suprisingly, that treatment didn’t work. by the time her doctor established that she had overian cancer , she was stage iv and 12 months from her death.
http://www.canaryfoundation.org/??? Don Listwin, founder of Canary Foundation(he was at Cisco
during’the right ten years,’ left the company in 2000 at age 41 with $100 million in the bank.) Typically, people like Listwin–wealthy, philanthropic, and touched by cancer’s ruthlessness–get on the cure bandwagon. But after looking at the numbers, Listwin was drawn to the problem of early detection. In 2004, he created the Canary Foundation, a research group with the single goal of bring a battery of screening test to patients and their Doctors by 2015, starting with ovarian
cancer and moving on to pancreatic, lung and prostrate.
The pharmacitcal industry spends nearly 8 billion annually on cancer research on cancer research, according to the International U nion Against Cancer, most of it steered toward drug developement and late- stage treatments.
The major cancer foundations spend lavishly on cure-based research.
The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation spent $180 million on cures in 2007; the Michael
Millken Prostate Cancer Foundation spends about 14 million annually pursuing a cure for prostate cancer; the National Cancer Institute spent just 8 percent of its 2000 budget, less
than $400 million, on detection and diagnostic research.. Compared to these sums, Canary’s
$ 5 million annual budget scarcely registers. Yet Canary stands out in the cancer research community because its focus is on early detection rather than treatment.
“Wendy Meslie a CBC anouncer and a breast Cancer surviver said,? 80% of funds go to research and development and 20% goes to prevention.
It should be the other way around.”
– Tom Laprade
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?Cure vs. prevention has been debated for years.Govs etc. like to claim they are doing both.This raises a real “head scratcher”.Many provincial govs especially will not screen for certain (& differing) types of cancer.They claim that the incidence rate is not high enough to make it worthwhile.Yet the incidence rates of these can be higher/about the same than their supposed ETS “death” rates which,as we know,have become absolutely vital to protect everyone from. Also govs. use OSHA guidelines for worker safety regulations but they won’t use OSHA’s (or other) air quality standards.
CBC Marketplace did a series on this a couple of years ago.(alot here)
Wendy Mesley was pretty outspoken on this.That is until Collishaw (PSFC) stepped in.
– A Newsletter Reader
LCA Responds to New York Times Article on Tobacco Funding for Lung Cancer Screening Trial
March 24, 2008
President and CEO
Lung Cancer Alliance
http://www.lungcanceralliance.org/nytimes_ielcap_tobacco_response_3_26_08.htm
Wonder why the Duluth News Tribune waited more than a week to publish this story? And then only used a wire story that was critical of the study and buried it in their “Health” section? We don’t wonder, either, and we told them why.
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A 40-year study of Californians, the largest study on secondhand smoke to date, has reached the conclusion that anti-tobacco extremists have been dreading: their claims about the health risks from secondhand smoke are bogus.
The study was published in the May 17 issue of the highly respected British Medical Journal. American medical rags didn’t dare publish anything that doesn’t support their all-out assault on smokers and the tobacco industry. Rest assured, the only data that will ever see the light of day in American health media will be the usual junk science that keeps the grant money flowing and the politics going their way.
The anti-tobacco extremists are howling that the study was funded by tobacco money. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the American Cancer Society initiated the 40-year study and maintained the original database. The results are based on the ACS’s own numbers. The ACS did follow-up until 1972, after which follow-up was conducted at UCLA with funding from anti-tobacco money gained through taxes on cigarettes. That means smokers kept the study going.
In 1997, when anti-tobacco nannies learned that the study would prove that their hysterical claims about secondhand smoke were unfounded, they yanked the funding. For only the last two years of the study, funding was provided by the Center for Indoor Air Research, which indeed received its funding mainly from tobacco companies but which also no longer exists. To call this a study funded by Big Tobacco is ludicrous to anyone with a modest amount of common sense.
This study is bad news for anti-tobacco groups who’ve based their demands for smoking bans entirely on the myth that secondhand smoke poses a health risk to non-smokers. The anti-tobacco crusade is upset because this study was conducted according to reputable scientific standards, a notion completely foreign to anti-tobacco groups. What’s ironic is that the firestorm of controversy that they themselves are igniting might just prompt the media to finally look into the sordid history of junk science that the entire anti-tobacco crusade is based on.
In an historic first, we urge the anti-tobacco extremists to keep yapping.
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Read the entire text of the study here (You’ll need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to access the study. If you don’t have it, download it free by clicking here.)??
Dan Hass
FORCES Duluth
(When I asked a Duluth News Tribune editor why the News Tribune hadn’t published anything about the recent secondhand smoke study published in the British Medical Journal, I got the standard anti-tobacco response. The News Tribune finally did publish a wire story from the Los Angeles Times, buried in their Sunday “Health” section more than a week after the BMJ published the results of the study.
Below is the letter I sent to the editor, who never bothered to reply. Facts and common sense have a way of taking all the fight out of News Tribune editors.)
Your criticisms of the study fall short and sound suspiciously similar to the American Cancer Society’s press release attempting to discredit this study. With all due respect, did you review the study yourself prior to deciding there was “serious doubt” about the conclusions reached in the study? If not, who are you relying on for scientific verification of information contained in the study?
The claim regarding tobacco industry funding is a red herring. Funding from a research organization funded primarily by the tobacco industry came only during the last two years of this 40-year study. The data used for the study was collected, maintained and funded by the American Cancer Society. Extended follow-up until 1997 was conducted at UCLA with initial financial support from the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, a University of California research organization funded by California’s Proposition 99 cigarette surtax. When that funding was cut in 1997, follow-up and data analysis was continued at UCLA with funding from the Center for Indoor Air Research. The CIAR received funding primarily from tobacco companies and was shut down in 1999. In other words, this study was funded by the American Cancer Society and anti-tobacco money from California’s Prop 99 cigarette surtax until 1997. To look only at the funding from the last two years of the study and label this a “tobacco industry funded study” is ridiculous.
Criticizing the authors for only examining 10% of the study’s original participants is also nonsense. The American Cancer Society and the Prop 99 funding were yanked when anti-tobacco activists figured out that the study wasn’t going to say what they wanted it to say. The authors didn’t have the funding to review the data on hundreds of thousands of people, so they chose the largest single defined population pool (California) and used that as their database. There is absolutely no valid reason to criticize their decision. Again, the data came from information gathered in 25 states by the American Cancer Society, data which until this study was published was considered an unimpeachable source.
Citing the lack of monitoring of the smoking status of participants’ spouses after 1972 almost makes my argument for me. Before 1972, exposure to secondhand smoke outside the home was significantly greater, and yet even then the risk was so small as to be nearly impossible to measure. Working forward until the late 1990s, exposure to secondhand smoke outside the home became almost non-existent, and the risk dropped even further.
Lack of follow-up and failure to include confounding factors have been accepted procedures for most of the secondhand smoke studies heretofore accepted as legitimate when they’ve been funded or published by anti-tobacco organizations and publications. To use that argument only against this particular study (as the LA Times does) is nothing less than hypocritical. The claim by the Times that this study disagrees with earlier studies flies in the face of reality when one takes the time to actually look at the past studies. No fewer than 80% of previous secondhand smoke studies have failed to find a statistically significant risk from exposure to secondhand smoke. I can forward a table with all the studies and their results listed if you’d like to review it. I’m usually labeled a paid hack or a stooge for the tobacco industry by local anti-tobacco lobbyists, so I’ll understand if you want something in writing to verify what I’m saying.
During the debate about a smoking ordinance in Duluth, the News Tribune took the lead in publishing every claim made by supporters of the ordinance without question and as if it was accepted fact. The fact that these claims were coming from paid professional activists and health industry officials with a vested interest in seeing a smoking ban enacted didn’t seem to raise any red flags with the News Tribune about the bias inherent in their claims. I tried endless times to tell your editorial board that they were only getting half the story and that there was plenty of scientifically valid evidence to disprove most of the claims made about the health risks of secondhand smoke. But nobody wanted to hear it.
The editorial board staked its position in favor of the smoking ordinance very early in the debate, and come hell or high water they weren’t going to be dissuaded by facts that contradicted their position. I find that reprehensible behavior by an organization whose obligation to its readers, as I see it anyway, is to present all sides of an issue and allow the readers to form their own opinions. Especially considering the tremendous impact this ordinance was bound to have on local small business owners, the News Tribune was derelict in its duty to its readers, never more so than in the debate running up to the referendum and initiative voting. There’s nothing at all wrong with having an opinion on any given topic, but to publish story after story after story that only quotes from press releases from anti-tobacco organizations and from self-proclaimed experts from one side of the debate did nothing to inform voters or allow them to make an educated decision in the voting booth. I find that unconscionable.
Again, this study reached the same conclusion as 80% of previous secondhand smoke studies, including the largest conducted in Europe. That was a 10-year study released in 1998 by the World Health Organization. But good luck finding it. The WHO did their best to bury the study when the results didn’t end up being something an anti-tobacco organization should be publishing, but they weren’t quick enough to stop the British media from publishing the results. The WHO has tried ever since to ignore the findings from their own study, even mischaracterizing the results when necessary.
The News Tribune isn’t alone in planting itself firmly on the side of anti-tobacco activists. It’s happened all over the country with most media afraid to publish anything that contradicts the claims made by the enormously wealthy and politically powerful anti-tobacco industry. But I live in Duluth, and the only major daily newspaper we have is the News Tribune. Your editorial board has apparently taken that fact as license to spoon-feed its readers only the information necessary to garner support for the board’s positions on local issues. If that’s the case, then the News Tribune has become nothing more than the official newspaper of special interest groups and not a source for news. Having opinions is fine. Deliberately omitting facts and available information is irresponsible at best.
To sum up, your arguments against this study don’t bear up to scrutiny and only parrot those of the American Cancer Society and other organizations with a vested interest in perpetuating the myths about secondhand smoke. I’m waiting for the day that one of your reporters decides to do a little research and discovers just how much deception and distortion has gone on. I assume he or she wouldn’t be allowed to write about it for the News Tribune, but there’s a book waiting to be written about the whole thing and a nice chunk of change for someone to make.
