Smoking bans vs Civil Rights Part 1

Monday 26 October 2009

Basham and Luik
NYC: the city that never smokes

A proposal to ban lighting up in New York’s parks has exposed the puritanical agenda behind the crusade against smoking.

The truth about second-hand smoking is finally out.

Thanks to some unusual candour on the part of the anti-tobacco brigade in New York City, we now have official confirmation that banning smoking in public has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the health of non-smokers from second-hand smoke, but everything to do with stigmatising both smoking and smokers. Closer to home, new evidence from the National Health Service (NHS) shows that the public smoking ban in England has made absolutely no positive difference in smoking rates, despite claims made by its champions that it would.

In September, Dr Thomas Farley, New York City’s Health Commissioner, proposed banning smoking at all of the city’s parks and beaches (1). Dr Farley’s rationale for the ban has nothing to do with the risks that outdoor smoking pose to non-smokers, but rather with preventing people, particularly children, from having to see anyone smoking in public. Farley says, ‘We don’t think children should have to watch someone smoking’. Farley also defends the extension of the smoking ban to outdoor areas by arguing that it is ‘part of a broader strategy to further curb smoking rates’. New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, confirmed earlier this month that he would implement Farley’s proposal, arguing that the public is ‘overwhelmingly in favour’ (2).

Why have the champions of banning smoking everywhere, even in private accommodation, suddenly come clean about the driving force behind their crusade? The answer is that they have essentially won the war over public smoking. But why is this the case? The answer, sadly, is that for the past 15 to 20 years, the public has been bombarded with a carefully orchestrated government-funded anti-tobacco campaign to convince them – in contradiction of the scientific evidence – that smokers pose a deadly health risk to non-smokers, particularly children.

The scientific evidence has never supported the case against public smoking. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s seminal early 1990s report on second-hand smoke was severely flawed. Its critique of second-hand smoke was only sustained through a careful exclusion of non-confirming evidence and a non-traditional application of the statistical test known as confidence limits. The report was subjected to a scathing analysis by a US federal court, which rejected its scientific claims about the dangers of second-hand smoke, a finding that even on appeal was not reversed (3).

Moreover, a scientific study conducted by the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found that there was no statistically significant association between smoking in the workplace and social settings and lung cancer in non-smokers. Indeed, the majority of studies about second-hand smoke and lung cancer in non-smokers have found non-statistically significant associations both in workplace and domestic settings.

Of course, none of this startling lack of scientific evidence has moved beyond the scientific journals and into the public domain, which means that the debate about public smoking is a non-scientific debate. And this means that it can proceed on virtually any grounds, unchecked by the need for careful and verifiable scientific evidence. The anti-smoking movement has always known that the evidence about the risks of public smoking, or private smoking for that matter, to non-smokers was marginal, at best, and nonexistent, at worst. But this was fundamentally unimportant.