Home : Smoking :

Honest Public Policies

After banning smoking in all public housing in St. Lucie, County, Florida ( by bureaucratic fiat) Housing Commissioner Richard Sneed made his case to a local paper: "There is no constitutional right to be allowed to smoke." Mr. Sneed missed the point. The last time we looked, the point of the constitution was to protect the individual from unwarranted intrusions into his life by the state--let alone by petty bureaucrats who walk around whistling l'etat cest moi.

The anti-smokers, of course, would prefer to frame the question tn terms of verbs instead of nouns, wherein "smoking" (not "smokers") can be blithely denied rights. (This, too, is a slippery slope. Eating meat, wearing perfume, and drinking liquor are also verbs, and Mr. Sneed might presumably "allow - or disallow - these prerogatives to his tenants.)

Smoking, however, is another class thing. "The title of smoker," to quote Chistopher Hitchens, is defined as simultaneously a noun and a verb, "denot[ing] something you are, as well as something you do." So when the law bans the verb it essentially bans the noun. And to argue any differently is sophistry at its height.

The question - no matter how it's fiddled with - remains: Do American citizens who smoke have civil rights? And the answer increasingly appears to be: No. In the course of the last decade - and often under the rubric of Nonsmokers' Rights - smokers, as a class, have been banished from public life and systematically deprived of a series of basic rights.

The result is that first-class American citizens, who used to be considered as equal before the law, are no longer even entitled to be "separate but equal," they're simply not entitled - to anything at all. In a putative democracy, our government, in print, is now boasting that Americans who smoke are "second class," in fact "second-class citizens." In fact, this boast is true.

On a practical level, there is simply no reason for the ban on American smokers. The "Public Health" argument, deployed by the EPA, is unconscionably flawed and distressingly familiar. Public Health as a rationale for legislation and segregation has a long and dishonorable record. Till the end of the 1950's, the identical kinds of arguments--the "menace to public health" - supported racial discrimination. It was widely accepted and officially tossed around that if a black person and a white person drank for the same fountain, rested in the same rest room, or ate from the same plate - even though the plate had been washed in between - poor whitey would catch his death. In the course of our history, the banner of Public Health - "statistically proven" and trumpeted by the press - has been used to discriminate - also to legislate - against the Chinese, the Italians, the Irish and the Jews...who've been fingered as the "causes" of polio, cholera, TB and bubonic plague. This is simply an old hustle with a new and malignant twist. While historically, a ghettoized people retained its rights within the confines of the ghetto, any ghetto designed for smokers is considered against the law. In other words, the law forbids a smoking car on a train, or any smokers-only restaurants, or movie theatres, or flights. (And by what rational standards can the law prohibit smokers form enjoying a public park?)

But these insanties in themselves haven't risen out of a vacuum. They're the natural-born spawn of an onslaught of propaganda - the most egregious, sensationalized attack by any government on a group of its own people since Goering invented hate as a tool of communication. Fifty million smokers are apparently the eggs to be broken to make the omelet of a health-obsessed society. By fair means or foul. And the means (meant to justify the ends here) are foul: Junk Science. Big lies. And the ancient, discredited and desperate black art that makes circuses out of a scapegoat.

This is dangerous business. Intolerance, uncorked you will find, is very difficult to lure back into the bottle; and unfortunately humans, as a lot, love to hate, to be told they're "superior," and to kick each other around. This will not be the first or the last time in history that hysteria will rule the day. But that a democratic government is sponsoring this hysteria makes the day inescapably and frighteningly sad.

In the Boston Phoenix, in the May 6, 1994 issue, an editorialist made a link. "Not long ago," he said, "this nation forbad another group, just as large, from gathering together in publicly licensed restaurants and bars...", and the result was a riot, the Stonewall riot. "Is this," he continues, "what the crusade against smokers will eventually come to? The creation of 'smoke-easies' to shelter poor smokers from the elements and the hatred of their fellow citizens? Will smokers be pushed so far outside that the only way to assert their dignity will be to riot against their sanctimonious oppressors?"

Discussing this issue at a Cato Institute seminar in 1994, senior editor, Sheldon Richman, concluded with this thought: "Ladies and gentlemen, liberty is under assault. I amnot a cigarette smoker. Most people are not smokers. But it is perilous for us to ignore this assault merely because it is aimed at someone else. Let's not have to say years from now, when they came for smokers, I didn't speak out because I wasn't a smoker - you know how the rest goes. How long before something you do is singled out by the health fascists? The cigarette may or may not be an unfortunate symbol of today's struggle for freedom in the United States of America. It doesn't matter. Like it or not, the enemies of liberty have made it so. So those of us who value liberty...must now rally behind it."

Miracle Of Helena

I could only laugh last April when I first heard about a study claiming that a smoking ban in Helena, Mont., cut the city’s heart attack rate by 58 percent in six months. A prominent op-ed in the New York Times hailed the Miracle of Helena  and urged readers to give it more credit than it deserves.

Citizens of Helena voted in June 2002 to ban smoking in all public buildings, including restaurants, bars and casinos. Doctors at the local hospital soon “noticed,” according to the op-ed, that heart attack admissions had dropped. Six months later, the ban was rescinded. Heart attack rates allegedly then rebounded to pre-ban levels. The bottom line is, “Secondhand smoke kills,” according to the op-ed.

That would certainly seem to be a reasonable interpretation -- if all you did was read and believe the op-ed. But, of course, my inquiring mind had a few questions to ask before coming to a “case-closed” conclusion on the Miracle of Helena. First, the study isn’t easy to evaluate -- but not because it’s rocket science. There simply is no study to evaluate.

The results were issued in typical junk science style via a quick-and-dirty slideshow presentation at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology. Six months later, the study still is not available to the public. Slick junk scientists often choose the “science-by-press conference” mode of releasing results because they know their immediate audience likely will not be able to ask probing questions -- a tough thing to do when only sketchy details are hurriedly presented to people with no familiarity of the research conducted.

Even so, anyone paying attention at the presentation should have picked up on the rather obvious problem with the supposed Miracle of Helena. Assuming the study information presented is accurate, fewer heart attacks seem to have occurred during the six months of the smoking ban. But a similar short-lived dip in heart attacks rates also occurred in Helena four years earlier in 1998. If whatever caused the 1998 dip happened again in 2002, the Miracle of Helena is really the Mirage of Helena.

I talked to one of researchers about that simple observation. After stumbling and stammering for an explanation, he finally referred me to the “study’s statistician,” Dr. Stan Glantz  (more on him later) - as if some statistical mumbo-jumbo would credibly explain why the 1998 dip in heart attack rates was just an anomaly but the 2002 dip was definitely due to the smoking ban.

Another glaring problem is the researchers’ failure to study any pre- or post-ban patients to medically determine the causes of the reported heart attacks. Given all the genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors that combine to cause heart attacks, it is quite bogus to attribute them to secondhand smoke, especially without examining any patients.

But why let conflicting data and insufficient data get in the way of a politically correct conclusion? I’m almost surprised that anyone is still trying to link secondhand smoke  with heart disease. The University of Chicago’s Dr. John Bailar - no friend of the tobacco industry - published in the March 25, 1999, New England Journal of Medicine his quite devastating analysis of the alleged link between secondhand smoke and heart disease.

On the other hand, I’m not surprised to see Stan Glantz’s involvement in the Mirage of Helena. Glantz’s colleague on the Helena study tried to pass him off to me as “professor of statistics.” But I know better. I’ve observed Glantz for some time. I’ve debated him on the radio. He’s a shameless say-anything, do-anything anti-smoking zealot.

Glantz has a Ph.D. in applied mechanics and engineering economic systems -- whatever that is, it is not statistics. He’s the director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education  at the University of California, San Francisco. He’s funded by the federal government to attack the tobacco industry. The National Cancer Institute, for example, gave Glantz $600,000 to “study” tobacco industry lobbying on the state level.

Just what kind of cancer research is that? It’s been about six months since New York City’s smoking ban went into effect. I asked Dr. Glantz’s colleague if he would be studying whether the NYC smoking ban experience confirmed or contradicted his Helena study claims. He mumbled something about such a study being too difficult because of all the data involved. But I can see where anti-tobacco researchers wouldn’t want to have too much data. It just might clear up the smoke they’re blowing in our eyes.

---

top of page

back a page