606.  Second-Hand Smoke and Bullshit 😳🔥😱

From the American Cancer Society: 

Secondhand smoke is classified as a "known human carcinogen" (cancer-causing agent) by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the US National Toxicology Program, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a branch of the World Health Organization.

From the Surgeon General

The scientific evidence shows that there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.

The only way to fully protect non-smokers from exposure to secondhand smoke indoors is to prevent all smoking in that indoor space or building. Separating smokers from non-smokers, cleaning the air, and ventilating buildings cannot keep non-smokers from being exposed to secondhand smoke.

NY Times May 2011 -- NEW YORK CITY’S ban on smoking in its parks and on its beaches won’t go into effect until May 23, but notices about the rule are already appearing on benches and lampposts around town.

Me – Innocent Non-Smoker -- Yet Double-Doomed

I’m screwed!  There is “no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke”.  So says General Surgeon.

I’m a goner – definitely a secondhand smoke goner – condemned to an early death that surely awaits me just around the coroner.  Tragically, such is the case for pretty much all non-smokers my age – people in their sixties -- and older.  We all grew up in smoke.  Loads of smoke.

I’m exceptionally unfortunate.  Like bartenders and cocktail waitresses, we former bar-band musicians have a double death sentence – to be served concurrently.  Playing in a typical lounge was like performing on the premises of an on-fire Marlboro factory.  Returning home from a four-hour gig, our clothes, and ourselves, reeked with smoke!  We didn’t think much about it.

My Smoky Youth

So -- for the first 30 years of my life I – a non-smoker -- was absolutely swimming in secondhand smoke, as was everyone else back then.  Can you imagine -- when at this modern moment one whiff of cigarette smoke is considered dangerous – that in those blissfully ignorant days of yore (“yore allowed to smoke”), the majority of adults -- yes, the majority -- happily lit up and we -- the minority -- didn't object.  Smoking had been an everyday part of American life for centuries; everyone was pretty much smoke-acclimated.

For most adults, having a cigarette evoked no more guilt or concern than having a coke.  That’s how “ho-hum” smoking used to be.  People smoked on airplanes; smoked in restaurants; smoked in cars, at parties, at ball games, you-name-it.  

which smelled like they’d been made with a clever mixture of tobacco and manure.)  We non-smoking students, free to move about the classroom, didn’t bother moving.  

So – it stands to reason – does it not? -- that if inhaling one breath of somebody else’s cigarette smoke at the beach is unsafe, then decades of inhabiting smoky homes, bars, cars, airplanes, etc., must be a guaranteed stone-cold death sentence.  Therefore, I grimly await the secondhand reaper.

Or do I? 

Rays of Hope – Flashes of Skepticism

Perhaps all is not lost.  Perhaps this whole secondhand smoke thing has a significantly high bullshit quotient; maybe it's -- like -- been puffed up.   I say this because, like winning gamblers in a supposedly rotten-odds casino, thus far none of my elderly non-smoking friends, acquaintances, relatives, band-mates etc. – all growing up breathing copious amounts of secondhand smoke daily -- have cashed in their chips and salsa due to smoke-related illnesses.    

It is this admittedly anecdotal evidence that has hatched in me a healthy – yes, healthy -- skepticism about the dangers of someone else’s cigarette smoke.  How can it be -- I keep wondering -- that none of my circle of non-smoking old-timers has yet dropped dead from this airborne plague?  It's bizarre -- like we'd spent decades listening to, say, oboe solos --

only to be informed that listening to even a single oboe-note is unsafe -- and yet after 30  or 40 years of  hearing zillions of them -- 

Jane Doe                            lived with                  Smokin' Joe Blow. 

There's a 95% chance that Jane’s death was unrelated to Joe’s smoke and a 5% chance it was.  There simply is no way to know for certain.  Thus, this 46k figure has to be based on statistical extrapolations that could be, to say the least, unreliable.  

The Lung Cancer Statistic

Same deal.  The second statistic – second-hand smoke is responsible for 3,400 lung cancer deaths in non-smoking adults – also strikes me as smoky-nebulous.  According to my exhaustive one-minute web research, nearly 160,000 Americans die from lung cancer each year, 85% of those deaths smoking-related, or 135,000.  This means, does it not, that 25,000 people die each year of lung cancer unrelated to smoking. 

So, it’s back to another Jane Doe extrapolation.  There’s no provable way to determine if her lung cancer death was related to Joe Blow’s smoke.  You can only statistically guesstimate.

(It is worth pointing out, by the way, that when a scientist's or statistician's examination of complex data has a strong underlying preferred outcome (i.e. "we really need to discourage people from smoking") 

there is always a high probability

                                                 of conscious or unconscious bias creeping into their conclusions.)

 But -- suppose these stats are dead-on.  That means about 50,000 non-smokers a year die from secondhand smoke-related illness.  That's not many more than the number of people killed each year in auto accidents, which begs the question:  Should we really be allowing people to drive?  

Measuring Secondhand Smoke

So -- actual smoking is pretty easily measured, i.e. Joe went through, say, a pack a day.  Second-hand smoke inhalation, on the other hand, would seem to be a terribly elusive thing to measure, like -- was Joe having a cigarette or two after dinner or flat-out chain smoking?  Was Joe gone a lot or mostly home with Jane?  Was their home small and poorly ventilated or large with windows always-wide-open? Did Jane roll cigars for a living??   

The Activist Fall Back Position -- One Size

Thus, since accurately measuring the amount of secondhand smoke someone inhales is beyond impossible, anti-smoking activists have taken the fallback position of one  - size  -  kills  -  all -- i.e. any amount of secondhand smoke is harmful to your health – pay no attention to those odds behind the curtain.

The Great Crowbar -- "It isn't that we don't want you to drive; it's just that you'll have to stay off paved roads."

The purely simple truth is that the do-gooders, who are supposedly only thinking of us, are not really bent on saving us from secondhand smoke -- they are bent on keeping us from ever having a cigarette.  And, secondhand smoke is the great crowbar with which they are prying cigarettes off the planet.  The do-gooders fully intend to eradicate all things tobacco. 

NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s recent hysteria-based law to make it illegal to smoke in a park or

on a beach

is surely only a step away from banning smoking on all public streets.  And surely smoking in one’s own home should also be banned.  Why, think of the non-smokers dwelling there – the children! 

 Or think about the poor plumber who has to be in the smoker's smoke-reeking home for several hours while the hateful homeowner smokes!  

This is bullshit dumped deep.  I believe I would have had to continuously haunt Central Park 24/7 since

 the day it opened in 1857 to inhale the amount of smoke I did in the 1980s on one 6-hour NYC to LA flight sitting in the smoking section of an American Airlines jet. 

Rays of Common Sense

So – perhaps my imminent secondhand smoke death isn’t so imminent.  Yet, well-meaning doctors and anti-smoking activists have decided that it is in our best interests to frighten-the-hell out of us:

 “Don't you realize there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.”

Well . . . there is also no safe level of exposure to driving on freeways. 

That practice will never be safe unless, of course, do-gooder activists either ban freeways or succeed in making the speed limit 15 mph, which would save, as mentioned above, about 40,000+ lives a year.  Such a speed limit really would, after all, be for our own good.  We'd just have to spend a great deal more time sitting in our cars inhaling secondhand gas.

I Conclude My Heretical Thoughts: 

If current trends are any indication, I calculate that very, very few of us non-smoking codgers who grew up in an era of heavy secondhand smoke will provably die of smoke-related illnesses.  And, the good news is that today's children are unlikely to inhale even one-ten-thousandth of the secondhand smoke my generation did.  

Unfortunately, the save-you-from-yourselfers are just getting started.  Having largely succeeded in preventing you from smoking practically anywhere except on the moon, they are now mobilizing to insure that you are not free to ingest too much salt or sugar or fat, etc.  (As I write this Mayor Bloomberg is attempting to force NYC restaurants to use less salt in their dishes.  He's already prohibited them from using trans-fats.)   

A restaurant owner is arrested for using too much salt in his recipes.

Back Door Prohibition

Smoking is a dreadful and dangerous habit, and should be mightily condemned and discouraged.  But -- I am against its prohibition, and secondhand smoke laws are being used as a back-door prohibition of tobacco.