Sound Bites

Comments on their sound bites

Tobacco is the largest avoidable cause of mortality in the world

To the excellent analysis Lies, Damned Lies and 400 000 Smoking-related Deaths, explaining the methodological flaws in the computer estimates of smoking related morbidity and mortality, we need to add that the definition of smokers as determined by the CDC (Center For Disease Control, U.S.A.) is quite broad and calculates the risk factors of anyone who has smoked at least 100 cigarettes in his lifetime and either quit -- irrelevant of how long ago and how much one smoked -- or still smokes either regularly or occasionally --irrelevant of how long ago one started and how much and often one smokes -- thus ignoring the linear dose response model that if applied properly would produce more realistic and credible conclusions.

Anyone -- current, former or never smoker -- can get a smoking related disease and despite the best anti-tobacco experts, including Sir Richard Doll, who testified in the Scottish landmark legal case MRS MARGARET McTEAR vs. IMPERIAL TOBACCO LIMITED, it could not be proven that had it not been for an individual's cigarette smoking, he would not have contracted lung cancer .

When one looks at how smoking related diseases are distributed within the U.S.A. population, one can draw complete different conclusions from the sound-bite Tobacco is the first avoidable cause of mortality in the world . Indeed based on real people with real diseases giving real answers as opposed to computer estimates using risk factors as their base model, here's how diseases are distributed within the U.S.A. population. And let's not forget the broad definitions of current smokers and former smokers as explained above:

Smoking related disease	Current	Former	Never
Any smoking-related chronic disease	36.9%	26.0%	37.1%
Lung	20.9%	61.2%	17.9%
Other cancers	38.8%	33.2%	28.0%
Coronary heart disease	29.3%	31.8%	38.9%
Stroke	30.1%	23.0%	47.0%
Emphysema	49.1%	28.6%	22.3%
Chronic bronchitis	41.1%	20.0%	38.9%
Other chronic disease	23.0%	23.5%	53.5%
No chronic disease	19.3%	16.4%	64.3%

See

There is no safe level of exposure for ETS, secondhand smoke is in the same category of carcinogens as asbestos and benzene.

The no safe level of exposure for ETS sound bite originated with Surgeon General Richard Carmona's statement that he made during the press conference of his 2006 report: The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke: A Report of the Surgeon General. but is not included in the report itself. The closest resemblance to this statement is on page 65, which reads:

"The evidence for underlying mechanisms of respiratory injury from exposure to secondhand smoke suggests that a safe level of exposure may not exist, thus implying that any exposure carries some risk. For infants, children, and adults with asthma or with more sensitive respiratory systems, even very brief exposures to secondhand smoke can trigger intense bronchopulmonary responses that could be life threatening in the most susceptible individuals."

This is clearly speculative ("suggests...may") and it only applies to people who are extremely susceptible. Specifically, he seems to be referring to chronic asthmatics but there is no definition of what "very brief exposures" are. Ultimately, 'no safe level' means that no safe level has been detected with accuracy; it does not mean that exposure at any level is dangerous. Although the more accurate phrase that is used by some anti-tobacco lobby groups doesn't necessarily spell that out, it tends to be more honest by at least hinting as much: there are no known safe levels of second hand smoke 'known' being the operative word here. Much like potatoes, another nightshade plant that contains potentially harmful glycoalkaloids, it would take great effort to determine such levels. In the case of second hand smoke, the ends justify the means anti-tobacco philosophy will never allow such efforts to be undertaken. Similar to the conclusions about harm from potatoes, it's safe to say that common sense, decades of real life experience and epidemiological studies, dictate that there should be no reason for concern.

"The Committee considered that, despite the long history of human consumption of plants containing glycoalkaloids, the available epidemiological and experimental data from human and laboratory animal studies did not permit the determination of a safe level of intake. The Committee recognized that the development of empirical data to support such a level would require considerable effort. Nevertheless, it felt that the large body of experience with the consumption of potatoes, frequently on a daily basis, indicated that normal glycoalkaloid levels (20-100 mg/kg) found in properly grown and handled tubers were not of concern."

70% of smokers want to quit

Providing their surveys can even be trusted for their integrity, it is obvious that the anti-tobacco industry is confusing people feeling that they should quit because of social pressure and fear for their health, with people wanting to quit. Stop the de-normalization process and the outrageously exaggerated scare tactics , bring back some measure and conduct the same surveys all over and let's see how many smokers really want to quit. And no, as much as they want to blame the addictive properties of tobacco for people not giving up , smoking is as pleasurable to a smoker as eating candy is pleasurable to an obese person who wants to lose weight. Both feel that they shouldn't be doing it because this is what they have been conditioned to believe, but in no way does this make it less pleasurable.

After decades of incessant inflammatory propaganda and de-normalization techniques ( see Markers of the denormalisation of smoking and the tobacco industry ) portraying

Smokers as malodourous - Smokers as litterers - Smokers as selfish and thoughtless - Smokers as unattractive and undesirable housemates - Smokers as undereducated and a social underclass - Smokers as addicts - Smokers as excessive users of public health services - Smokers as employer liabilities .’’

And

‘’routinely “exiled” from others, obliged to smoke in often unpleasant surroundings such as parking lots, city alleyways and the delivery entrances to buildings, sometimes in inclement weather. .’’

Is it any wonder many smokers feel they should quit? Many pretend to want to quit simply to avoid lectures, harassment and even outright bullying from the authorities and their peers?

Smokers represent at least one quarter of the adult world population. If 70% of those remaining smokers truly wanted to stop smoking not only most of them would put the necessary effort to accomplish it like millions have done it cold turkey before them, but it is reasonable to believe that there would be more grassroots political pressure from them for governments to make it as difficult, inconvenient, costly and even illegal to smoke. There isn't, or at least there aren't any loud or publicized organized groups of smokers pushing for such measures. The only pressure governments are getting are from the professional anti-smokers, from corporate vested interests -- mainly the pharmaceutical industry -- and from some ordinary citizens emotional over having lost someone to a disease suspected to have been caused by smoking.

The Environmental Protection Agency has identified secondhand smoke as a Class A carcinogen.

The 1992 EPA report, which the fanatical anti-smoker James Repace helped considerably to inspire, was a particularly shoddy piece of work. The tobacco industry sued against it and in 1998 a US federal judge officially vacated the EPA’s findings on ETS (environmental tobacco smoke/secondhand smoke/passive smoking) and lung cancer.

The court’s finding against the EPA was based, for the most part, on the EPA’s doing meta-analysis on only some of the ETS/lung cancer studies it compiled, rather than on all of them, which the court likened to “cherry-picking", and on the EPA’s extraordinary move of switching from a conventionally used 95% “statistical significance” confidence level for its preliminary reports, to a rarely used 90% level for its final report.

The switch was necessary, in the biased eyes of the study’s authors, because the final report’s "relative risk" result came out as “statistically insignificant” under conventional computation. The 90% confidence level produces a tighter “confidence interval”, so on that unusual basis, the EPA result could be called “statistically significant". In fact, "statistical significance" is not, at any rate, any test of practical significance. It is the most base of standards and one which the EPA result did not meet by conventional calculation.

The EPA appealed, and won in 2002, on the issue that the court which had ruled against it did not technically have proper jurisdiction for the case. The finding of the appeals court was based only on the jurisdictional issue and not on the substance of the original judge’s finding.

Despite the EPA report’s especially abominable methodology, and its reputation as a slapstick blunder and a grotesque farce amongst knowledgeable persons, the public are largely unaware of these things, and tend to be impressed by big agencies such as the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Thus, and despite all, the 1992 EPA finding, which was RR 1.19 within 90% confidence interval 1.04-1.35, has been, ever since its first publication in December of 1992, and still remains a favorite amongst the tobacco control crowd, for its usefulness in inspiring fear and hatred of smokers across the world.

In 1992 the EPA decreed, based on its virtually insignificant 1.19 relative risk finding with the jiggered confidence interval, that ETS merited classification as a Class A Carcinogen, or “known cause” of lung cancer, the highest risk classification in the EPA’s armament. Also in the early nineteen-nineties the EPA had declined to classify electromagnetic radiation as a known (Class A) or even as a suspected (Class B) cause of cancer. Its rationale for that decision? That studies’ RR results did not consistently exceed the whole number 3.

With like caprice, the EPA has more recently classified sunlight as a known carcinogen. So should we all then live in caves? In plain, there is no reason to believe, and there is no rational evidence to support the idea, that ETS presents a risk of any ailment whatsoever. If we feared the common air, with all of its constituents, including cooking, heating, automobile, industrial, and myriad other sources of smoke, we would have to ban breathing itself. ETS is not a carcinogen. Combustion has always existed, and we can all live and breathe, above ground and under the sun, without hysterical fear. Fear of ETS is madness.

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ASTHMA:

If a child already has asthma, and if one of the active triggers for that child's asthma is tobacco smoke, then exposure to situations with a sufficient concentration of smoke can increase the risk of that child having an asthma episode. There are no exact figures on what proportion of children would be likely to experience this sort of thing at normal levels of social, public smoke exposure, even in indoor areas without special ventilation, but it seems like that the proportion is quite small.

Three important points to note in this area:

(1) There has been significant research indicating that exposure to secondhand smoke as a child may actually REDUCE the development of particular forms of asthma: the "Bubble Boy" effect coming from over-protection of children from environmental challenges may very well outweigh the more extreme concerns about "protecting" children from ordinary exposures to reasonable levels of smoke in the air. {CITATIONS NEEDED ON REDUCTION STUDIES!}

(2) Secondhand smoke is just one of many asthma "triggers" and is by no means the major threat to asthmatic children. For many children a walk in the park or a visit to a home with a cat may be more "dangerous" in terms of setting off an asthma attack than hanging out in the corner Free Choice tavern kicking back a few brewskies with mum 'n dad. (Not that we'd particularly recommend such outings...)

(3) Asthma has psychogenic triggers as well as physical triggers. To the best of our knowledge, no study has ever been done on the frequency of such things, but it is almost a certainty that many asthmatic attacks among children exposed to tobacco smoke are not so much a reaction to the smoke itself as they are a product of an emotional reaction that has been "taught" to the child by an overprotective parent.

A child whose mother goes into "panic attacks" any time a cat walks into a room because of her worries about the child's asthma may very well experience a full blown, quite real, psychogenic asthma attack upon the sight of a sterile, fake "robot cat" walking into a room where he or she is alone -- despite the utter absence of any real physical trigger. The same sort of reaction can obviously hold true for the sight of someone smoking as well. Unfortunately it is difficult to study this without stepping over the line in terms of experimental ethics, but "thought modeling," as above, would indicate such reactions would be likely; and these reactions could actually be overwhelmingly important in explaining the seeming increase in asthmatic and similar reactions to tobacco smoke - particularly among children - in the last decade or two.

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PNEUMONIA AND BRONCHIAL INFECTIONS:

A number of studies have indicated that children who live with smokers experience higher rates of respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia and bronchitis. Antismokers commonly ascribe this correlation to the higher levels of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) such children commonly experience in the home. There are several robust alternative explanations however: socioeconomic status confounding and dietary differences between families with parents who smoke and families with parents who don't are often brought up for consideration in this regard. Better done studies attempt to correct for such "confounders" but whether such corrections are accurate and adequate is questionable.

Additionally, an obvious confounding factor that seems to be very rarely considered is the respiratory health status of the smoking parents themselves. Antismokers will usually claim, with fairly strong evidence, that smokers experience more respiratory illnesses than nonsmokers. If we accept that as true, then it is logical that smoking parents will pass such illnesses on to their children more often than nonsmoking parents. Without adequately correcting for such a confounder it is literally impossible to say whether any increase in such illnesses among children of smokers has any relation at all to their smoke exposure: while it may seem unlikely to many researchers, it is indeed quite possible that the entirety of any such observed increase is due to such disease transmission rather than to secondhand smoke exposure.

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EAR INFECTIONS:

There appears to be strong evidence of a substantial correlation between parental smoking and ear infections in infants and toddlers. While the confounder of transmitted parental infections is something that should be considered, it does not seem as likely to be as strong a player as it might be in direct respiratory infections. If a child is prone to ear infections it would seem, overall, to make good sense to minimize or eliminate any regular exposure to higher levels of tobacco smoke. NOTE: there is no evidence supporting the concept that brief or very low levels of exposure, levels such as might be experience outdoors or during an occasional hour or so in an ordinary Free Choice restaurant setting or around a smoking friend of the parents, could cause such a problem even in children with histories of such infections.

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SUDDEN INFANT DEATH SYNDROME:

(whew... I'm all tired out. LOL! This section however should include the note from the SIDS Alliance as well as notes about all the uncertainties and varied hypothetical explanations for SIDS. Tobacco smoke exposure is only one of a number of suggested factors. Again, very simply, an increase in SIDS among children of smoking parents could easily be caused by such things as parental respiratory infections.)

Random TC Quotes

TC operatives have revealed plain daftness, along with intolerant, hateful, and ultimately prohibitionist views, with astoundingly arrogant frankness in public statements. Some random samples below.

• "The issue has arrived. We've gone from being 'those weird people' to technical experts," said TC favourite Stanton Glantz in 1986.
• Stanton Glantz in 1990 at the Seventh World Conference on Tobacco and Health: "the main thing the science has done on the issue of ETS, in addition to help(ing) people like me pay mortgages, is it has legitimized the concerns that people have that they don't like cigarette smoke. And that needs to be harnessed and used . . . we are all on a roll and the bastards are on the run and I urge you to keep chasing them."
• Glantz in 1992: "and that's the question that I have applied to my research relating to tobacco. If this comes out the way I think, will it make a difference? And if the answer is yes, then we do it, and if the answer is I don't know then we don't bother. Okay? And that's the criteria."
• ETS / passive smoking "lifestyle epidemiology" studies began appearing in 1981. The stated aim of socially ostracizing smokers dated back nearly a decade from this. In 1971 US Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld wrote: "Nonsmokers have as much right to clean air and wholesome air as smokers have to their so-called right to smoke, which I would redefine as a ‘right to pollute.' It is high time to ban smoking from all confined public spaces such as restaurants, theatres, airplanes, trains and buses. It is time that we reinterpret the Bill of Rights for the nonsmokers as well as the smoker."
• The trouble with implementing smoking bans back in the nineteen-seventies was that smokers and nonsmokers got along well and did not want smoking banned. So few bans went into place. The thorny problems of general amity and social cohesion, operating under a widely sane perspective amongst the public, were addressed at the 1975 World Conference on Smoking and Health of the World Health Organization, held in New York city, under Chairman Sir George Godber, a British physician and health official.

A policy of “fostering the perception that secondhand smoke is unhealthy for nonsmokers” (as described by Doctor Gary L. Huber, et al., in Consumers’ Research, July 1991) was initiated by Godber at the conference, with a specific aim “to emphasize that active cigarette smokers injure those around them, including their families and, especially, any infants that might be exposed involuntarily to ETS."

There was virtually no dissent amongst attendees at the 1975 conference as to the advisability of total dedication to smoking eradication, by any means necessary, or as to the utter worthlessness of persons who smoked. As Doctor Godber said:

"I imagine that most of us here know full well that our target must be, in the long-term, the elimination of cigarette smoking. ... We may not have eliminated cigarette smoking completely by the end of this century, but we ought to have reached a position where a relatively few addicts still use cigarettes, but only in private at most in the company of consenting adults.

"... First, I think we must ask ourselves whether our society is one in which the major influences exercised on public opinion are such as would convey the impression that smoking is a dirty, anti-social practice, spoiling the enjoyment of youth and accelerating the onset of the deterioration of age.

"... Need there really be any difficulty about prohibiting smoking in more public places? The nicotine addicts would be petulant for a while, but why should we accord them any right to make the innocent suffer?"

• Lady Elaine Murphy, British anti-smoker, cheerfully reiterated the “de-normalisation” (smoker vilification) policy as a continuingly vital tactic of the smoker pogrom, in response to a 2006 protest of the policy addressed to her by author Michael McFadden:

"Dear Mr McFadden,
You and many others have completely missed the point about smoking and health. The aim is reduce the public acceptability of smoking and the culture which surrounds it. We know that legislation which discourages all public smoking will have the better impact on public understanding and perception of smoking as an unacceptable habit. Hence fewer people will smoke, hence health overall will improve."

• The aim of complete humiliation and criminalisation of smokers was underscored by Action on Smoking and Health founder John Banzhaf in 2006: "Here we are literally reaching into the last frontier – right into the home. No longer can you argue, 'My home is my castle. I've got the right to smoke'."
• Common sense be damned; human nature begone; Action on Smoking and Health editor Joy Townsend said on BBC radio in 2012: “Well, it's very interesting because ... the tobacco companies always say that. If the tax goes up, this is going to increase smuggling. And they say it, it's one of their many deceits as it's not true.”
• TC junk scientist James Repace predicted violence against smokers in 1980: "People aren’t going to stand for this. Now that the facts are clear, you’re going to start seeing nonsmokers becoming a lot more violent. You’re going to see fights breaking out all over."
• Repace verbally assaults his critics (e.g. - forgive us for reporting accurately here - “I'm tired of your bullshit”, “get lost asshole”, “Fuck you, Dave”.)
• Hateful TC advocates virtually admit, in public, that they would like to see all smokers drop dead yesterday. A local resident wrote in protest to the press in 2005 after attending a Harvard School of Public Health meeting at which the Massachusetts Health Commissioner characterised smokers as “the scum of the earth”.
• “How punitive should public health get: smokers don’t deserve health care” (School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2012).