Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

...One would think that a combined study—showing ETS exposure from all sources, including the work environment, and including other smoking family members—would show a clearer relationship...

...And in 1986, a Yale University medical school study of asthmatics exposed to ETS showed that not only did the smoke not cause any acute respiratory risk—it actually decreased bronchial constriction...

...The fact that it failed to meet the EPA's own seven-point guidelines for epidemiological studThe American Spectator May 1992 27 ies of potential carcinogens (issued in 1989) makes it seem even more like advocacy...

...young white women who smoke are much more likely to be binge drinkers than are their nonsmoking counterparts (almost half are, a rate two to three times higher than that of nonsmoking women...

...Glantz, who runs cigarette-quitting seminars and develops anti-smoking regulations for profit, had this to say, at the 1990 World Conference on Tobacco and Health in Australia, about his motives for opposing environmental smoke: The main thing the science has done on the issue of ETS, in addition to help people like me pay mortgages, is it has legitimized the concerns that people have that they don't like cigarette smoke...

...While children have been shown to be sensitive to ETS, it has long been known that children are more sensitive to anything in the air, from ragweed to dust, and most people would grant to parents, not the state, the responsibility to keep them away from pollutants...

...Hans Jurgen Eysenck, whom Krogh describes as "perhaps the best known psychologist in Britain and certainly one of the most influential psychologists in the world in the area of personality theory," has attempted to taxonomize smokers' confounding factors, and considers them so extensive as to undermine, for the present time, attempts to use smoking as an etiological factor in disease...

...Finally, it goes without saying that science suffers for the cause of smoking prevention...

...Having rejected Partnership warnings about marijuana, he might subsequently reject more important warnings about riskier drugs such as cocaine or heroin...

...Who loses from willingness to accept bad science as a basis policy...

...The months since have seen anti-smoking activists calling for more legislation in public places, and tobacco interests and libertarians pointing out gaps in what they say is dishonest and politicized science...

...At first glance, calling poor ventilation a "syndrome" and a health threat appears as hysterical as using the word "choc-a-holic" to claim that the science-fictionesque terrors that afflict the true addict apply to someone who is basically a glutton...

...In real-life settings, the dangers of particulates are even less impressive...

...Old ladies in provincial towns were petrified...

...proving dangers to non-smokers from "environmental tobacco smoke" (ETS, or "passive smoke") has not been easy for anti-smoking activists...

...There are even those who muddy the water out of a genuine social concern...

...Michael Gough, program manager of the Biological Applications Program of the Office of Technology Asan's annual risk of contracting lung cancer-48 per 100,000—and see what danger he poses to her...

...Passive" smokers breathe largely through the...

...Within a year, the London Spectator was suggesting that this "public service" was actually spreading AIDS...

...Smokers tend to rank high in a constellation of characteristics that collectively are referred to in the now quaintly old-fashioned term "anti-social...

...But what if the cause itself suffers...

...The result...

...David Krogh, an anti-smoker, remarked on the smoking personality in one of the most fascinating books of 19912: Does being a Rotarian or a scuba diver make a person more or less likely to be a smoker...

...But the 1976 Legionnaires' disease outbreak is a sick-building incident that cost twenty-nine lives, and occupational studies tend to bear the pro-smokers out: in only 2 to 4 percent of indoor air quality problems is tobacco smoke the major culprit...

...Even shoddier is the failure of most of the lung cancer tests to probe cancers histologically—that is, by sampling for oncogens in cells of the infected organs...

...Put simply: maximizing in every way possible the most extreme scenario painted by the EPA study, a smoking husband has a 1-in-7,700 chance of giving his wife lung cancer in a given year in the future...

...a 1987 Shanghai study by Dr...

...We're on a roll, and the bastards are on the run...

...They tend to be more rebellious, be more defiant, and have higher levels of misconduct...

...Despite the seemingly graver threat, the EPA rated diesel only as "Group B: Probable Human Carcinogen...

...Using foreign studies to arrive at cancer links is like using African numbers to measure the threat of AIDS in North America—the entire mechanism of infection may be different...

...you are far less likely to wear a seat belt if you are a smoker...

...Does being in group A make you any more likely to be a smoker than being in group B? The answer to this is clearly yes...

...Second, on a more personal level, the smoking widower who has lost his wife to lung cancer—and whose being further stigmatized as a murderer and a "pariah" is the goal of the EPA report—loses again...

...On the other hand, I probably profoundly disagree with any use that might be made of those conclusions by Philip Morris or any other tobacco company...

...A particularly weak aspect of the 1990 EPA report is thatit relied on meta-analysis, or weighting different studies to arrive at an aggregate figure—i.e., not analyzing data but analyzing analyses...

...None of the three studies showed any statistical link between spousal smoking and lung cancer...

...James Le Fanu put it in Britain's Sunday Telegraph last May, "We could reach a situation where health activists, using dubious scientific evidence, will be in a position to blackmail us into behaving the way they think we should...

...It is a point starkly made by Dr...

...In addition, "active" smokers take deep breaths through their mouths and hold the smoke in their lungs...

...11 28 The American Spectator May 1992...

...Burch showed in the 1970s that Finns, who smoke only half as much as Americans, are twice as likely to develop lung cancer...

...The EPA even commissioned anti-smoking activist Stanton Glantz to write a chapter in its draft report on ETS hazards...

...t is easy to see how a study such as Hirayama's could be drastically wrong: if his subjects came disproportionately from working-class industrial areas (they did), and if smoking is more prevalent among the Japanese working classes (it is), Hirayama's wives of smokers would have a higher rate of lung cancer than wives of non-smokers, regardless of smoking behavior...

...It's rather like remarking that every cubic foot of ocean water contains ash from Mount Pinatubo, or that almost all of the paper money in Miami contains traces of cocaine—it's true, impressive, and meaningless...

...nose, which filters out impurities...

...David Burns, testifying before the Los Angeles City Council Health Committee, argued that particulates, "when smoking is allowed, [increase] about ten-fold from the background levels...

...Only limited histology was done even in the large and influential 1981 Hirayama study from Japan, which is the cornerstone of the ETS/cancer scare...

...Pro-smoking activists like to mention "sick building syndrome" as an major contributor...

...In 1990, two papers published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by stop-smoking researchers Alexander Glassman and Robert Anda showed that smokers were six times as likely as nonsmokers to suffer from major depression and twice as likely to suffer from chronic depression...

...The Hirayama study also relied on questionnaires, which made no attempt to determine which non-smokers were ex-smokers...

...This student then goes off to college, where his roommate smokes marijuana, with no apparent adverse effects and without going on to shoot heroin...

...That's 13 extra cases per 100,000...

...Such a backlash could result if people consider the questionable science of environmental tobacco smoke reason to ignore the surgeon general's and other warnings on the hazards of tobacco smoking itself...

...Kevin Dowd in the June 1991 issue of the British journal Economic Affairs, "it turns out, contrary to popular myth, that there is still no convincing evidence in favour of the adverse effects of passive smoking...

...176 pages, $17.95...

...Yet, a year previous to that, the EPA, having failed in its attempts to establish clear-cut and readily confirmable proof of the Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...Exposure to environmental tobacco smoke is difficult to measure by increments...

...How much particulate matter enters the air due to smoking...

...Then there is the question of confounding factors, like Dr...

...The EPA leaked a draft risk assessment describing environmental tobacco smoke as a "known human carcinogen...

...As a group they tend to rank higher than nonsmokers on scales that measure risk-taking and sensation-seeking...

...308 pages, $24.95...

...The ETS risk assessment is the only one the EPA has ever based solely on epidemiological evidence...

...Non-monogamous homosexuals and intravenous drug users, if convinced by the packet that their risk was no different from that of the rest of the country, now saw less reason "The main thing the science has done on the issue of ETS, in addition to help people like me pay mortgages, is it has legitimized the concerns that people have that they don't like cigarette smoke...

...It's very useful in narrowing down conclusions from a battery of similar experiments with similar controls, but irresponsible when used—as it is here—to draw common assumptions about disparate populations, especially when those populations have been established as having vastly varying rates of affliction...

...Gao and three researchers from the National Cancer Institute found that nonsmoking women who cooked with rapeseed oil had an incidence of lung cancer 2.5 times as high as those who cooked with soybean oil...

...Yet no combined study has ever shown a statistically significant association...

...Here is what the thirty studies that have been conducted to date report: twenty-four show no statistically significant link at all...

...2Smoking: The Artificial Passion...

...Publication bias, though not the EPA's fault, is also a factor—studies showing no link between ETS and lung cancer have tended not to be published, as they were non-news until the Hirayama study...

...six show a weak link...

...This is simply falsehood in the service of anti-smoking propaganda—a 1990 study of smoking sections in forty-one restaurants showed that only half of the particulates were from smoke...

...Making dire predictions of an epidemic, it warned that AIDS was an equal opportunity disease from which no one was safe, and urged extreme caution for all...

...But what about 'The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness...

...It's possible to measure the "respirable suspended particles" that surround a smoker, but very difficult to distinguish them from other particles that may be in the air from cooking, rug fibers, car exhaust, air-conditioning, etc...

...Patching together spousal studies, the EPA claimed that women married to smokers were 1.28 times as likely to contract lung cancer—and that ETS was to blame...

...How reasonable is it to torture him with the prospect that he is slowly knocking off his loved ones...

...Closer to home, paranoid anti-drug organizations like Partnership for a Drug-Free America may be exacerbating the drug problem by demonizing drugs like marijuana—mild compared to the President's Halcion, and quite innocuous compared to alcohol...

...The EPA went out on a limb to classify passive smoke as "Group A: Known Human Carcinogen," even though most of the studies showed no significant risk, some showed a negative risk, and the final risk ratio, after meta-analysis, was a slim 1.28...

...A 1978 study in the International Archives of Occupational Environmental Health claimed that it would take 11 to 50 hours in an extremely smoke-polluted environment to absorb as much nicotine as a smoker takes in from one cigarette...

...In 1985 the British government sent a hysterical mailing on AIDS to every household in the country...

...Smokers seem to have what can only be called a higher sex drive—or perhaps a lower sex inhibition—than nonsmokers...

...Anti-smoking activists would have us believe a tremendous amount...

...For one, the substances are chemically and quantitatively different: "active" tobacco smoke is made up of smoke particles—and plenty of them—while "passive" smoke is highly diluted, with a partially vaporous content...

...Finally, rates of lung cancer infection vary drastically according to race and nationality: British epidemiologist P.R.J...

...As Dr...

...men who are downwardly mobile relative to their parents are more likely to be smokers, while men who are upwardly mobile are less likely...

...While every nag in every airport waiting room complains about her "smoke allergy," no study has ever established allergenic properties in tobacco smoke...

...But electromagnetic fields were not deemed sufficiently perilous even to classify...

...As far as eating in restaurants is concerned, the cuisine might be as much of a risk as the smoke...

...As everyone knows, cancer metastasizes, and failure to distinguish between cancers that originated in the lungs and those that moved there from another organ makes the figures considerably "softer...

...Others may be motivated to push bad science not out of avarice but ignorance...

...Radical anti-smokers claim they have to act as advocates to counter the advocacy of tobacco companies, and tobacco interests do indeed have major budgets for their own independent research into smoking hazards...

...In Britain, where smoking was legal on subway trains until the mid-1980s and was until recently permitted on buses, the Freedom Organization for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco estimated that one would have to ride in the smoking section of a bus for fourand-a-half weeks to be exposed to one cigarette's worth of nicotine...

...Smokers rank high in impulsiveness...

...harms of ETS, had used a complicated and irregular scientific route to claim a minimal link...

...If so, the EPA's hasty risk assessment could create more than inconvenience, rancor, and diminished personal liberty—it could create smokers...

...Even with the 'rigged jury' of standard statistical procedures," wrote Dr...

...study has ever found such a link...

...For a closer examination of the grounds on which the husband is made a pariah, let's take the highest available estimate of a non-smoking wornthan ever to modify their behavior...

...No surprise there...

...It is not uncommon that when bad science is introduced into the structure of social policy, the entire edifice of proscription and caution collapses...

...Anything that reduces smoking has substantial health benefits, and making smokers into pariahs, for whatever reasons, does just that...

...As Michael Fumento has written of AIDS in these pages, "Occasional heterosexual cases will make news for the same reason that planes that crash make news while planes that land safely do not...

...If we accept, arguendo, the 1.28 risk ratio, the smoker's wife's risk rises to 61 per 100,000...

...Stanley Coren, a Canadian expert on "handedness," writes that a study in Michigan has shown that left-handers smoke considerably more than right-handers.' (They also die nine years earlier—and not due to smoking...

...Citizens wishing to exercise their liberties, of course, and not just smokers...

...studies based on the incidence of affliction across large populations...

...First of all, although irresponsible scientists have tried, one can't extrapolate lung cancer risk from the dosages active smokers take into their lungs...

...The correlations in this category are very strong...

...Given the ineffectiveness of exposure measurements, re-searchers have sought a link in epidemiological studies, i.e...

...When a similar assessment was made of diesel emissions in 1989, the risk ratio was 2.6 and all the animal laboratory tests came out positive (all were negative for ETS...

...Finally, we have reason to believe that smokers are more honest than nonsmokers in the view of themselves that they present to others...

...another study, from 1988, put the figure at 28 percent...

...26 The American Spectator May 1992 these things: You are more likely to be a smoker if you are divorced...

...There was obvious selective bias at work in the 1990 EPA risk assessment...

...He lives...

...New York: W. H. Freeman and Company...

...It's significant that the EPA did not cite a single U.S...

...Attempts to link heart disease to ETS have not borne fruit...

...Gao's rapeseed oil...

...nine show that being married to a smoker actually decreases one's chance of contracting lung cancer...

...You are more likely (and increasingly likely) to be a smoker if you are poor, for example, or if you are poorly educated...

...And that is a strong emotional force that needs to be harnessed and used...

...He begins to wonder if he's been lied to, and winds up trying pot for himself...

...The highest ever recorded for ETS was another Hirayama study, the so-called "Inouye/Hirayama," at 2.55...

...But the industry has no monopoly on the profit motive...

...Confounding factors in smoking are so numerous and unpredictable that it is almost impossible to unravel smoking as a cause from a welter of non-smoking behaviors that smokers engage in with shocking disproportion...

...Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard psychiatrist and drug specialist, as written up by Richard Blow in an excellent exposé of Partnership that appeared in Washington's City Paper last December: Partnership ads about marijuana "scare the hell" out of a high-school senior...

...While blood tests and urine samples do show that nonsmokers absorb nicotine from the smokers around them, it The American Spectator May 1992 25 is in such small doses that this can be seen as a triumph more for modern scientific calibration than for any causeand-effect relationship...

...It is not an attractive prospect...

...New York: The Free Press...

...An EPA review of the carcinogenic properties of electromagnetic fields in 1990 found several risk ratios over 3.0, as well as a "consistently repeated pattern of lymphoma, leukemia, nervous system cancer and lymphoma in childhood studies...

...Active" smokers take deep breaths through their mouths and hold the smoke in their lungs.'"Passive" smokers breathe largely through the nose, which filters out impurities...

...Three of the most comprehensive studies of passive smoke ever undertaken were inexplicably excluded from the risk assessment: the so-called Shimizu and Sobue studies from Japan, and the largest American case-control study ever conducted, by Luis Varela of Yale University, which was later published in the New England Journal of Medicine...

...study showing an ETS/cancer link in its risk assessment—in fact, no U.S...

...sessment, chooses to ignore the science of ETS in the interest of reducing smoking, as he indicated in an October 29, 1990 letter to Thomas Borelli, manager for scientific issues at Philip Morris: Without careful reading of the thesis [by Luis Varela, finding no link between ETS and lung cancer] or careful attention to the ETS issue, I tend to agree with the thesis and the general conclusions of your letter...