SECONDHAND STATISTICS
NORDLINGER, JAY
SECONDHAND STATISTICS by Jay Nordlinger IN THE ANTI-TOBACCO CRUSADE, the number 3,000 is king. The most cherished statistic of that crusade is that 3,000 kids a day begin to smoke. The next most...
...These figures fly through the air like missiles, launched by politicians, regulators, and activists...
...The Western Journal of Medicine lamented the daily addiction of “more than 3,000 children...
...So what gets trampled in the end...
...Asked about this apparent leap, John P. Pierce, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the principal author of the original JAMA study, says, “What people did was interpolate from our work...
...The Journal of School Health stated that “more than 3,000 young persons, most of them children and teenagers, begin smoking each day...
...The authors found that “1 million new young persons per year are recruited to the ranks of regular smokers,” the equivalent of “about 3,000 new smokers each day...
...This is critically different from claiming a medical threat...
...Thus did young adults become “children,” the word of choice today...
...And what of the other 3,000—the number of kids per day who are said to embark on smoking careers...
...Judge William J. Osteen of North Carolina— tobacco country, his critics hurry to point out—was withering in his assessment of what the EPA had done...
...In time, a slew of scientific and general- interest publications began to refer to the JAMA findings, making ever more expansive claims, growing ever more careless with language...
...Former Food and Drug Administration honcho David Kessler reacted wearily when asked about the statistic at a congressional hearing last year...
...EPA administrator Carol Browner promised an immediate appeal, saying, “We believe the health risks to children and adults from breathing secondhand smoke are very real...
...Anti-tobacco warriors tend to treat any skepticism as either heresy or malice...
...The figure on secondhand smoke suffered a blow earlier this month when a federal judge ruled it a politically inspired fiction...
...The Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids has nothing but scorn for those who question the figure, asserting in its literature, “Everyone (except the tobacco companies) wishes it were not true, but it is...
...A Springfield, Mass., group called Stop Teenage Addiction to Tobacco (or, aptly enough, STAT) touts itself as the first to have publicized the 3,000 number...
...John McCain hold this statistic over the heads of America, citing it as a national shame that requires drastic measures...
...You can always debate,” he grumbled, but “it’s been vetted multiple times...
...Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The legitimacy of the science itself...
...We’re going to be able to show that almost a standard proportion of those who experiment become addicted,” he says...
...He is confident of the figure, maintaining that it has been amply documented since 1989, but he believes that “the number who are experimenting” is more significant...
...Even “Dear Abby” sounded the alarm...
...But are they true...
...The cigarette companies, needless to say, are master prevaricators, but their opponents can be equally sloppy with the facts...
...Those in his survey obviously did not acquire the habit on their 20th birthdays, but “at some point before that...
...In the war over tobacco, statistics will always be used as propaganda tools...
...The federal government’s Public Health Reports spoke of “children and adolescents...
...DONNA SHALALA OBJECTED THAT “NO ONE WANTS TO GO BACK TO SMOKING ON AIRPLANES...
...But Donna Shalala, secretary of health and human services, expressed the most sincere objection to the judge’s ruling, an objection that is primarily aesthetic and cultural: “No one wants to go back to smoking on airplanes, smoking in restaurants...
...The next most cherished statistic is that 3,000 non-smokers a year die of “secondhand smoke...
...Politicians from President Clinton to Sen...
...In a 92-page opinion, he faulted the agency for being “publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun,” for “violating procedural requirements,” for “adjusting scientific norms to validate” a pre-ordained result, for “failing to disclose important findings and reasoning,” and for installing a “de facto regulatory scheme” over the hated product, tobacco...
...The Clinton administration, of course, was aghast...
...As statistician David Murray puts it, “The science on secondhand smoke is not terribly good...
...Disinterested scientists, however, are less dogmatic...
...As David Murray observes, “Both sides are leading to the corrosion of science, deploying statistics to justify or rationalize their political agendas...
...Therefore, we ought to have the courage of our political choices, rather than pretend that the science compels us to do one thing or the other...
...But they were forthright as to the character of their sample: “For purposes of this analysis, only persons aged 20 years and older are included, as information was not collected on younger persons in any consistent fashion” during the relevant period...
...She warned readers of her column that the EPA had rated secondhand smoke a danger “on a par with asbestos and radon,” and that “one non-smoker dies of secondhand smoke for every eight smokers...
...He was deciding a case brought by the tobacco industry against the Environmental Protection Agency, which in 1993 declared secondhand smoke a “Class A carcinogen,” responsible for those 3,000 deaths each year...
...The 3,000 figure on kids began life in 1989, when the Journal of the American Medical Association published “Trends in Cigarette Smoking in the United States...
...Activists quickly seized on this study—construing broadly from the data—to trumpet an epidemic of underage smoking...
...On the strength of the EPA’s report, municipalities took to the ramparts, forcing restaurants to close their smoking sections, demanding that offices banish their smoking employees to the sidewalk...
...THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM CLAIMING A MEDICAL THREAT...
...No one wants to go back to polluting indoors...
...And quite possibly, there’s something biological about it...
...Three thousand, Pierce acknowledges, has become “a magic number, a hot political potato...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 45
