SEE FOLLOWING:
Smoking Out Bad Science
http://www.junkscience.com/news/euwsjets.htm
“For the past 15 years the anti-smoking lobby has pushed the view that cigarette smoking is a public health hazard. This was a shrewd tactic. For having failed to persuade committed smokers to save themselves, finding proof that passive smoking harmed non-smoking wives, children or workmates meant smoking could be criminalized. Last week the science fell off the campaign wagon when the definitive study on passive smoking, sponsored by the World Health Organization, reported no cancer risk at all.”
“But don't bet that will change the crusaders' minds. smoking, like fox hunting, is something that certain factions want to ban simply because they don't like it. It has slipped from a health crusade to a moral one. Today, National No smoking Day in Britain will be marked by demagoguery from the Department of Health, which has already set its agenda to ban smoking. The U.K. Scientific Committee on Tobacco or Health (SCOTH) report on passive smoking, due out Thursday, is headed by a known anti-tobacco crusader, Professor Nicholas Wald of the Royal London School of Medicine.”
“However, it is now obvious that the health hazard of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) has been knowingly overstated. The only large-scale definitive study on ETS was designed in 1988 by a WHO subgroup called the International Agency on Research on Cancer (IARC). It compared 650 lung-cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people in seven European countries. The results were expressed as "risk ratios," where the normal risk for a non-smoker of contracting lung cancer is set at one. Exposure to tobacco smoke in the home raised the risk to 1.16 and to smoke in the workplace to 1.17. This supposedly represents a 16% or 17% increase. But the admitted margin of error is so wide--0.93 to 1.44--that the true risk ratio could be less than one, making second-hand smoke a health benefit. “
SEE ALSO:
EPA: Environmental Propaganda Agency
http://www.junkscience.com/news3/ibdostee.htm
"The Environmental Protection Agency jiggered the facts to push its notion that passive smoke causes cancer. The EPA's dishonesty was recently laid bare in court. But this was too late for thousands of businesses and towns that responded to the EPA's junk science by passing anti-smoking measures."
"In '93, the EPA released a report on secondhand smoke. It claimed that evidence showed that environmental tobacco smoke, or ETS, is a Group A carcinogen. Secondhand smoke causes cancer in humans, said the EPA."
"Highly respected scientists questioned the EPA's findings. But the big-government crowd and health storm troopers gleefully waved the report in lawmakers' faces. They demanded that something be done. "
"Soon, airlines, offices, restaurants and even bars declared smoking verboten. Smokers effectively became lepers. All based on bad science. "
"Tobacco companies sued. The result? U.S. District Judge William Osteen issued his 92-page ruling against the EPA on July 17. Some of its findings:"
* "EPA failed to comply with the procedural requirements set forth by Congress."
* "EPA failed to comply with the requirements" of the Radon Research Act, which it used to conduct its ETS research.
* The EPA's indoor-air quality commission "did not include individuals from industry or representatives from more than one state," as required by law.
* "Using its normal methodology and its selected studies, EPA did not demonstrate a statistically significant association between ETS and lung cancer. . . . Instead, EPA changed its methodology to find a statistically significant association."
* "EPA began drafting a policy guide recommending workplace smoking bans before drafting the ETS Risk Assessment."
* "Rather than reach a conclusion after collecting information, researching, and making findings, EPA categorized ETS as a 'known cause of cancer' in 1989."
* The EPA's "administrative record contains glaring deficiencies."
* "EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun."
* The EPA "adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the agency's public conclusion, and aggressively utilized the (Radon) Act's authority to disseminate findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme intended to restrict plaintiffs' products and to influence public opinion."
* "EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information. . . . (The EPA) failed to disclose important findings and reasoning, and left significant questions without answers."
”In short, the EPA lied."
For anyone (including myself, yes an admitted smoker) who compares these zealots as “nazis” I simply need remind all to one of Hitler’s many decrees (in his nanny-state efforts to protect his Aryan population ) by banning smoking in Nazi Germany.
PS. Before all of you non-smokers jump all over this, PLEASE, know that if any of you enjoy an occasional Big Mac (with fries) or Twinkies, or anything else which "do-gooders" deem "unhealthy," YOU, are next!!!
First will be "taxing" these unhealthy goodies; thereafter, the banning, thereof. Count on it.
You are, of course, correct....with one little caveat. there is a vast difference between non-smokers and anti-smokers. Most non-smokers, even while enjoying the results, do not support government mandated smoking bans in private businesses. Anti-smokers, OTOH, have decreed all private places are now public places and insist on government mandated bans EVERYWHERE.