Smoking Ban: Passive Smoking Is Not Harmful
SMOKING is now banned in enclosed public spaces. But what is such a space? “I am sorry sir, this is a non-smoking mountain” - Sir David Frost reports what an official told a friend about to light up on a skiing holiday at Aspen.
And Christopher Booker’s notebook tells us:
At the end of the Seventies, the anti-smokers first seriously turned their attention to what they called “passive smoking”. Over the next decade, it is fascinating to follow how, try as they might, they could not come up with the evidence they wanted to prove that “environmental tobacco smoke” was directly harming non-smokers’ health. They became greatly excited by a series of studies which purported to show a link between smoking and cot deaths. But these somehow managed to ignore the fact that, in the very years when cot deaths were rising by 500 per cent, the incidence of smoking had halved.
A further series of studies in the Nineties, mainly in the US, claimed to have found that passive smoking was causing thousands of deaths a year. But however much the researchers tried to manipulate the evidence, none could come up with an increased risk of cancer that, by the strict rules of epidemiology, was “statistically significant”.
In 1998 and 2003 came the results of by far the biggest studies of passive smoking ever carried out. One was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation. The other, run by Prof James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat for the American Cancer Society, was a mammoth 40-year-long study of 35,000 non-smokers living with smokers. In each case, when the sponsors saw the results they were horrified. The evidence inescapably showed that passive smoking posed no significant risk. This confirmed Sir Richard Doll’s own comment in 2001: “The effects of other people’s smoking in my presence is so small it doesn’t worry me”.
Posted: 1st, July 2007 | In: Twitterings Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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July 11th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
You forgot to mention that the 2 studies cited were actually funded by the tobacco industry, and both of the researchers have made a lot of money over the years from tobacco industry cash.
There are over 100 independent, peer-reviewed studies showing that passive smoking causes death and diseases.
Of course, don’t listen to me, listen to the tobacco companies themselves who have finally admitted that passive smoking is deadly, feel free to check their websites.
July 1st, 2007 at 12:35 pm
There’s a bright line between protecting others from breathing cigarette toxins and carcinogens, and moves to punish smokers for having become chemically addicted to smoking nicotine as children or teens, the time when 90% became hooked.
There’s also a bright line between truth and denial about why that next mandatory nicotine feeding has become the smoker’s #1 priority in life, more important than the friends left inside, wind, rain, cold, that harm to the growing fetus in the pregnant mother’s womb, or life itself. We’re told that the new law has up to 30% of England’s smokers planning to quit. I invite them to read the free PDF book “Never Take Another Puff” referenced at thousands of websites. It’s loaded with rationalization destroying insights and tips that help take the mystery and sting out of quitting. Yes you can!!
Breathe deep, hug hard, live long,
John R. Polito
Nicotine Cessation Educator
July 1st, 2007 at 11:52 am
Well, its not exactly suprising that the effects of passive smoking aren’t as bad as thought and just proves that the whole smoking ban legislation is the government jumping to a reaction again. Personally I am glad that the ban has come in and hopefully i will finally be able to quit the habit.
Recently I came across english nasal snuff tobacco and have been using this as a nicotine replacement, which has really helped me to cut down on cigarettes. Snuff is something I had never really come across before until someone gave me some in a pub. Since then I have been converted to snuff and use this as often as needed to take away the nicotine cravings.
As founder of Snuff Tobacco UK, I hope and think that the smoking ban will only help raise the profile and snuff and I hope to see a resurgence in the habit that is a lot cheaper, healthier and sociable than smoking cigarettes.