The Metro Louisville Hospitality Coalition, Inc., and the Highview Manor Associates requested the injunction so people can continue smoking in their establishments while the case is being decided.

Lies from Louisville’s Metro Heath Department [The Arena]
June 8, 2011
by Thomas McAdam
Louisville’s Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness (LMDPHAW) is still peddling its favorite brand of junk science, and has posted a colorful brochure on its website, warning of the imagined dangers of second-hand smoke (called ETS, for Environmental Tobacco Smoke).? Some of the more outrageous assertions made include:
•?5 minutes of exposure to ETS stiffens the aorta as much as smoking a cigarette
•?20 minutes of exposure to ETS causes excess blood clotting, increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke
•?30 minutes of exposure to ETS increases the build up of fat deposits in blood vessels, increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke
•?2-hours of exposure to ETS increases the chance of irregular heart beat that can be fatal or trigger a heart attack
•?Deaths due to heart disease caused by ETS rival number of deaths from traffic accidents
•?ETS exposure is the “third leading cause of preventable death”
•?In an 8-hour shift, a bartender inhales more cancer-causing chemicals from ETS than smoking half a pack of cigarettes
Pretty scary, huh?? The problem is, all of these “scientific facts” are lies.? They are completely made up; well-meaning inventions, with absolutely no basis in scientific evidence.? The brochure makes no reference to any laboratory studies.? Because there simply are none.
When Dr. Adewale Troutman, the former Director of LMDPHAW, was going around town talking up support for Louisville’s proposed (and ultimately adopted) indoor smoking prohibition ordinance, he told the Metro Council:? “There is no doubt that secondhand smoke poses a significant health risk.”? Troutman cited the discredited “Helena study,” which purported to show that, during a six-month period in which that Montana town outlawed indoor smoking (after which the city council changed its mind and rescinded the silly law), heart attacks dipped by 40 percent.
This much-touted “study,” performed by anti-smoking activist Dr. Stanton Glanz (not a medical doctor; his Ph.D. is in applied mechanics and engineering economic systems), is so unscientific as to be comical.? With what is known about the etiology and progress of coronary artery disease, are we really to believe that an illness that takes decades to develop will suddenly dissipate within weeks of a ban on indoor smoking?
The conclusions of the Helena study were totally debunked by an April, 2004, article in the British Medical Journal.? Scientific test studies of second-hand smoke exposure have been conducted where non-smoking hospitality industry workers wear electronic monitors that measure second-hand smoke exposure in the workplace.? Studies like the Oak Ridge Laboratories study found that non-smokers working a 40-hour work-week would ingest the equivalent of 10 to 15 cigarettes per year, working in a poorly ventilated hospitality venue.
In a well-ventilated hospital industry venue, the same worker would only ingest the equivalent of two to four cigarettes per year, working a 40-hour work-week.? Hardly a form of measurable health risk.? The “secondhand-smoke kills” sham was and is a methodology used to denormalize smoking in modern society.
If this is representative of the level of “scientific” evidence used by LMDPHAW and the Metro Council to abrogate the civil rights of Louisville’s smoking public, then the inmates have surely taken over the management of the asylum.
NOTE:? As an aside, you may question the use of the term “civil rights” with reference to smoking.? Your attention is directed to Kentucky’s Civil Rights Act, KRS 344.040, which protects your right to smoke.

BS Alert: The ‘third-hand smoke’ hoax
February 10, 2010
Thomas McAdam
What’s that you say? You’ve never even heard of the horrors of “third-hand smoke?” Well, we here at the Louisville Public Policy Examiner like to keep our readers on the cutting edge of pseudoscience, so that they may demonstrate their newly-acquired erudition at Sierra Club meetings and Metro Health Department seminars. Worse than DDT, Radon, and Trans-Fats combined, third-hand smoke—or, THS—may well prove to be the greatest scientific scare of the century. Not since the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959 has junk science been ratcheted up to such a hysterical level.
It all started in January of 2009, with a silly little article in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. A consumer telephone poll about beliefs surrounding the health risks of smoking, that had been conducted in 2005, had asked 1,500 people if they agreed with the statements:
• “Breathing air in a car today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of babies and children.”
• “Breathing air in a room where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of babies and children.”Those surveyed who stated they agreed or agreed strongly were categorized as believing third-hand smoke harmed the health of babies and children. Predictably, respondents who self-identified themselves as smokers, tended to minimize any perceived harm; while non-smokers were more likely to assume some harm from THS. Only 65 percent of nonsmokers and 43 percent of smokers agreed with the statements, which researchers interpreted as acknowledgement of the risks of third-hand smoke.
• The survey results were cited in the article as “evidence” that third-hand smoke had been “identified as a health danger.” This article in Pediatrics was not a clinical study, so it provided no original research that THS is an actual medical or scientific observable or definable entity, or that it has ever been shown to harm babies or children… or how such a thing might scientifically even be plausible.
Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff (pronounced “when-I-cough;” that’s really his name), the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, said in the Pediatrics article:Everyone knows that second-hand smoke is bad, but they don’t know about this. We needed a term to describe these tobacco toxins that aren’t visible. Third-hand smoke is what one smells when a smoker gets in an elevator after going outside for a cigarette, or in a hotel room where people were smoking. Your nose isn’t lying, the stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ’Get away.’
• So, the clever wordsmith Dr. Winickoff sent press releases around to the usual suspects in the leftist press, and soon got a bite from Roni Rabin at the New York Times, who wrote a perfectly outrageous article titled, A New Cigarette Hazard: ‘Third-Hand Smoke.’
Rabin talks about “…the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers’ hair and clothing, not to mention cushions and carpeting, that lingers long after second-hand smoke has cleared from a room. The residue includes heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials that young children can get on their hands and ingest, especially if they’re crawling or playing on the floor.” Mercy me! Those poor little tykes crawling about in all those carcinogens and radioactive materials! The horror!
For our Physics-challenged readers, we need to remind you that Polonium is a radioactive element discovered by Marie Curie and Pierre Curie in 1898 that is naturally occurring and widely distributed in small amounts across the earth’s crust. Your average diet naturally includes 1 to 10 picocuries (billionth of a curie) of Polonium-210 a day. Most (50-90%) leaves the body promptly in our stool and the rest decreases in our body with a half-time of 50 days. A smoker who smokes a pack of 20 cigarettes a day takes in about 0.72 picocuries of Polonium-210.
To put these numbers into perspective, that Russian spy, Litvinenko, is believed to have been exposed to 5,000,000,000 picocuries (5 millicuries). As is the fundamental principle of toxicology, the dose makes the poison. Ms. Rabin chose to make a lurid reference to Polonium-210 in a yellow-journalistic attempt to scare the hell out of her readers and start the junk-science ball rolling.
• Then, Ms. Rabin really jumps the shark: “Among the substances in third-hand smoke are hydrogen cyanide, used in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid; toluene, found in paint thinners; arsenic; lead; carbon monoxide; and even Polonium-210, the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006. Eleven of the compounds are highly carcinogenic.”And roll it did. Within months, the neologism “third-hand smoke” was getting more than 3 million references in a Google search. (Interestingly, the term “fourth-hand smoke”—the theory that you can get cancer from simply watching a movie in which Humphrey Bogart is smoking—is now getting 56,600 Google references. Stay tuned.)
By the way, if you’re still worried that Junior’s crawling about in all that THS left in the living room from Uncle Albert’s pipe smoking will render him unto the same fate as the late Russian spy, you need to check out Michael J. McFadden’s computations in Reason Magazine:
It would take one quadrillion days (2.74 trillion years) for that child to absorb 5 millicuries. Unfortunately the universe is only 10 billion years old, so the child would have to lick floors for 274 cycles of our expanding universe to match our radioactive Russian. Of course since he’d normally excrete most of that polonium we’d have to refuse to change his diaper until the end of that period… not a very pleasant thought. And then there’s that whole annoying fact that polonium’s half-life is only 138 days, so we’d just have to ignore the laws of physics as well in order to justify the story’s thesis…Money-hungry “scientists” across the land were quick to spot THS as a possible research goldmine. Dr. Hugo Destaillats, a chemist with the Indoor Environment Department of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, recently came out with a marvelous little “study,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS), in which he reports:
The burning of tobacco releases nicotine in the form of a vapor that adsorbs strongly onto indoor surfaces, such as walls, floors, carpeting, drapes and furniture. Nicotine can persist on those materials for days, weeks and even months. Our study shows that when this residual nicotine reacts with nitrous acid it forms carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines or TSNAs.
Now, Dr. Hugo is not a medical doctor; he’s an Assistant Research Professor at Arizona State University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His CV lists a Ph.D. in Chemistry (1998), from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. His “study” did not involve any clinical trials with actual human beings (or even actual mice or rats). He and his student assistants simply applied tobacco smoke to sheets of cellulose as a model indoor material, and determined that TSNAs detected on cellulose surfaces were 10 times higher than those originally present in the sample. That is, after spraying the cellulose sheets with nitrous acid.
In the PNAS paper, Dr. Hugo suggests various ways to limit the impact of the third hand smoke health hazard, including, replacing nicotine-laden furnishings, carpets and wallboard. Presumably, this simple—albeit pricey—technique will also eradicate all residue and vestiges of Radon and Trans-Fats also. Unanswered, of course, is the question of whether you could have equal success in reducing TSNAs on your rugs and furniture by just refraining from spraying everything with nitrous acid in the first place.Before you jump to the conclusion that Dr. Hugo is some sort of moron, you need to know about California’s Proposition 99. In November 1988, California voters approved Prop. 99, “The Tobacco Tax and Health Protection Act”, which instituted a 25?-per-pack cigarette surtax. Part of this tax revenue is deposited into a Research Account, to be appropriated for research on tobacco-related disease, by the TRDRP. For the bizarre little study we have outlined above, Dr. Hugo Destaillats was awarded $704,901.00 by TRDRP and the taxpaying smokers of California. Maybe Dr. Hugo’s not such a moron after all.
By the way, if you thought we just made up that reference to Humphrey Bogart a few paragraphs back, you need to check out Dr. Hugo’s research monograph: Indoor fate and transport of secondhand tobacco smoke. The Bogart photo you see above was lifted from that article.
God help us if the Louisville Metro Council finds out about THS. The city will never find enough landfill space for all those miles of carpet, wallboard, and tons of furnishings to be discarded when the Council bans THS. And Uncle Albert’s cardigan smoking sweater will have to be buried somewhere in the Yucca Mountains; encased in concrete. To protect future generations, you see.

New smoke-ban exemption eyed
Council considers ventilated rooms
January 8, 2008
By Dan Klepal, dklepal@courier-journal.com
The Louisville Metro Council is thinking about making a little room for smokers in the smoking ban.
Council members are expected to consider a new ban Thursday night to replace the ordinance that was thrown out Dec. 21 by Senior-status Judge Stephen Ryan. It would ban smoking in all public businesses, including Churchill Downs.
Some council members say they want to add an exemption to allow smoking in businesses with separately ventilated rooms, an exemption that was permitted in Louisville’s first smoking ban, adopted three years ago.
“Smokers make up 25 percent of the population, and right now they are out in the cold and the rain,” Kelly Downard, R-16th District, told council members at a committee meeting yesterday. “Is there not some way to protect their capacity to enjoy a legal product?”
The council’s Health and Human Services Committee debated a new smoking ban for two hours yesterday, before recommending a proposal that maintains the status quo. The proposal:
Won’t have an exemption for Churchill Downs — the provision in the old ban that led to the ban being tossed out.
Keeps the same fines for smoking ban violators as the old ban.
Won’t force business owners to call police on customers who refuse to stop smoking or leave.
But committee members decided to leave it up to the full council to decide whether smoking should be allowed inside buildings that have separately ventilated rooms, which can be found in a few Jefferson County bingo halls.
There is wide support for that idea among the 15 council members who attended yesterday’s committee meeting, but council President Rick Blackwell, D-12th, said he isn’t sure there are enough votes for it.
“If the goal is to protect people from secondhand smoke in public areas, then maybe this makes some sense,” Blackwell said.
Judy Green, D-1st, also said she would be willing to consider a compromise. “There’s a fine line to walk here. We can’t just kick smokers out. People’s livelihoods depend on this.”
Health Department Director Dr. Adewale Troutman told the council that he doesn’t believe separately ventilated rooms are effective.
“They are not effective at keeping carcinogens out of the air,” he said.
Council member Vicki Welch, D-13th, agrees. A nurse for 31 years, Welch said there should be no exceptions if the council wants to protect public health.
At least three of the eight bingo halls in the county spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the rooms after the 2005 law passed that included exceptions for separately ventilated rooms, according to Ron Morris, executive director of the Kentucky Charitable Gaming Association.
That provision was repealed in the 2006 version of the law, which took effect July 1, 2007, and included an exemption for Churchill Downs.
The bingo owners who invested in ventilated rooms are asking the Metro Government for repayment, as part of a lawsuit that successfully overturned the most recent ban. Ryan ruled that the Churchill exemption was unconstitutional, and that the ban wouldn’t have passed without it.
“Some of them spent well over $100,000,” said John Wilson, an attorney representing the bingo hall owners, adding that if ventilated rooms were allowed in the new law, it would probably resolve that issue.
Hal Heiner, R-19th, said the separate rooms will work only if that option is available to all businesses.
“I think it’s clear we can’t pick one industry,” Heiner said. “This is an option we should consider.”
The separate rooms won’t help bar owners, said John Dant, owner of The Back Door Lounge and president of the Metro Louisville Hospitality Coalition, which opposes a smoking ban.
“That just doesn’t work in a bar,” Dant said.
Dan Heck, owner of Seidenfaden bar in Germantown, said most of the fringe bars could never make that kind of investment, even if it would work.
“The businesses that can afford separately ventilated rooms are going to survive anyway,” he said. “When you got one room, you can’t separate it.”
Earlier in the day, Jefferson Circuit Court Judge F. Kenneth Conliffe set a Jan. 21 deadline for attorneys representing the hospitality coalition and bingo hall owners to respond to a Jefferson County Attorney’s Office request that Ryan’s ruling throwing out the ban be reversed.
Conliffe said there was a “stay” on Ryan’s ruling, which Assistant Jefferson County Attorney Bill O’Brien says means that the ban is still in effect.
But Troutman said there will be no enforcement of the ban until the council acts on Thursday. If a ban is passed then, Mayor Jerry Abramson will sign the ordinance that night and enforcement of the new ban will begin Friday.
“There’s enough uncertainty with it,” Troutman said. “We don’t want to add to that.”

Judge throws out Louisville’s smoking ban

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