Tag: smoking

Is Anti-Smoking Based on Science or Morality?

Tobacco smoking is currently seen by many as the scourge of society, an action of those wanting to slowly kill themselves. It is common perception that this idea is based solely on scientific evidence that has accumulated over the past 60 years. Yet the truth is, smoking has always attracted the wrath of purists. In the past, ‘public health’ measures were not enacted because of scientific evidence, but a sense of morality – alcohol was condemned and labelled a sinful activity because of moral sensitivity, and the same was true of tobacco. So the question is, is the attack on smoking today once again borne of ethical reasoning, or scientific rigour?

 

When Christopher Columbus reached Cuba in 1492 with Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, his two men experimented with smoking the tobacco pipe; Columbus himself not only refrained but spoke against it, referring to Rodrigo and Luis as sinking to the level of “savages” for smoking. When they packed tobacco on their boat and returned to Europe, there was an immediate divide between those who loved it and those who hated it, even inspiring King James I to write ‘A Counter Blaste to Tobacco’.

 

In the 1600s parts of the world saw people actively punishing smokers. First-time ‘offenders’ in Russia were subjected to being whipped and having their noses slit before being sent to Siberia. If they were caught a second time, they were punished by death. Sultan Murad IV of Turkey castrated smokers, and 18 a day were executed. In China, smokers were decapitated.

 

Such activities did not spread to the UK or USA, but other restrictions existed. In 1900, Tennessee, North Dakota, Washington and Iowa banned the sale of cigarettes by law, and by the following year 43 American states were strongly opposed to smoking. In 1904 a woman in New York was sentenced to prison for smoking in the presence of her children, and a policeman arrested a woman smoking in her car, stating “You can’t do that on Fifth Avenue.” In 1907, businesses refused to employ smokers.

 

By 1917 the anti-smoking feelings were still strong, and the primary focus was on using children to stop people smoking. Doctors would tell smokers they would suffer from blindness, tuberculosis or “tobacco heart”. Like today, insurance companies and surgeons would enquire if their customers or patients smoked. The August 1917 issue of magazine ‘The Instructor’ was labelled “the annual anti-tobacco issue” and featured cartoons to demonise smoking, as well as articles stating: “One puff does not destroy the brain or heart; but it leaves a stain…until finally the brain loses its normality, and the victim is taken to the hospital for the insane or laid in a grave. One puff did not paralyse the young man in the wheel chair; but the many puffs that came as a result of the first puff, did.”

 

That run of anti-smoking lasted until 1927, in America at least, but none of our science of today had been collected by then, rather it was all based on a moral principle. Germany was producing its own anti-smoking campaign around that time, with the famous “The German woman does not smoke” posters, as well as public smoking bans. The 1950s was the decade that saw the creation of the now-famous studies by Sir Richard Doll linking smoking to lung cancer, and in this time were other researchers like Ernst Wynder, described as a fanatical anti-smoker. By focusing on smoking as a sole factor in a time when it had yet to be implicated in disease was perhaps a tip of the hat that the researchers wanted to find an association, as so many scientists strived to do at this moment in history. In light of the findings, it was mentioned that 10% of smokers may contract lung cancer. That figure has been dropped in more recent decades although it still remains true.

 

Things progressed again in the 1970s with what has become known as the Godber Blueprint. Sir George Godber was a WHO representative who spoke openly of the “elimination of cigarette smoking” with comments such as “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?” Godber laid out a plan to achieve that goal, much of which has come into effect, such as “major health agencies [should] join forces to create and produce anti-smoking material for mass media” and he said the following should happen: elimination of smoking cigarettes; include quit-smoking assistance in health insurance; create “a social environment in which smoking is unacceptable”, raise tobacco prices enough to discourage sales; ban all forms of tobacco advertising; and create committees of sophisticated politicians in every country to help pursue stated goals. Almost 20 years before the EPA’s report that second-hand smoke poses a threat to non-smokers, Godber was creating plans to convince people of that very thing.

 

With regards to second-hand smoke and the question of ‘morality or science?’, about 85% of the studies on secondhand smoke and lung cancer failed to find a significant relationship between the two. Of the remaining 15% most indicated a statistical positive relationship while some actually indicated a statistical negative, or protective, relationship.  The studies of course were all statistical epidemiology: not actual findings of cause and effect. Only 15% find an associated risk, and the average relative risk of those is only 1.17, which is categorised as statistically insignificant. Of the 85%, most are kept out of sight, the most famous probably being the study conducted by the WHO, the largest study performed on second-hand smoke and which was hidden by the organisation because its findings showed no ill-effect of secondhand smoke. Enstrom and Kabat also conducted a large study, for 39 years, into passive smoking. It was commissioned by the American Cancer Society and was funded by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program. When the preliminary data arrived and showed no harm was posed from passive smoking, the funding was pulled. This led the researchers no choice but to accept funding from the tobacco industry-funded Center for Indoor Air Research, although the results remain unchanged from what was discovered when the TRPRP funded it.

 

Recently there have been suggestions or enacting of outdoor bans, with Milton Keynes almost having one and New York establishing one, despite no evidence to suggest that they benefit health of non-smokers. Indeed, anti-smokers today openly talk of keeping smokers out of sight and “denormalising smoking”. Although the difference today with the past is that there are now many vested interests with financial gains to be sought from the prohibition of tobacco, the similarity remains that much of the hysteria is based on a moral disagreement with the act. If the science is lacking, as it is on passive smoking, but bans are still in place and studies showing ‘undesirable’ results are hidden while those who do not agree with the literature are to be accused of being in the pocket of Big Tobacco, the scientific credibility is thrown into disrepute, and we are left wondering if those behind the numbers harbour similar feelings to Columbus himself.

 

 

Fire Safe Cigarettes Hitting Europe?

Although there has been talk of fire safe cigarettes reaching the UK for the last seven years, the measure has never come to pass. Now, though, the London Fire Brigade is reporting on its website that the European Commission has now agreed on a safety standard for cigarettes and the EU is expected to start selling reduced ignition propensity (RIP) cigarettes (otherwise known as fire safe cigarettes (FSC)) from November, 2011. The measure is defined as “voluntary” but if manufacturers do not comply their products can be removed from the market.  (As of today, the measure has not yet come into force, but is still on the cards.)

Traditional cigarettes, currently still on sale within the EU, stay lit until reaching the butt 99% of the time, while fire safe cigarettes, currently on sale in the USA, Canada and Australia, retain ignition only 10% of the time unless the smoker puffs to keep the cigarette alight. These cigarettes work by adding two or three bands of paper along the length of the cigarette, which reduces the oxygen flow and thus causes the cigarette to go out if not puffed at that moment. There are, however, questions over the safety of these new cigarettes.

The state of New York mandated fire safe cigarettes in June, 2004 and in January, 2005 the Harvard School of Public Health published its study on them. The authors tested nineteen compounds in the cigarettes and all nineteen had higher levels of toxicity than their non-FSC counterparts, with carbon monoxide levels being higher by 11.4% and naphthalene 13.9%. Naphthalene can cause myriad side effects if one is exposed to enough of it, such as anaemia, convulsions, vomiting and even comas. In addition to the increased levels of toxic compounds, the bands of paper are glued together with an ethylene-vinyl acetate, copolymer emulsion based adhesive, which is used as carpet glue or the tube used in a glue gun. There is evidence, therefore, that fire safe cigarettes contain higher levels of toxic compounds than ‘normal’ cigarettes, and in a time when much focus is given to the ingredients in cigarettes, should lawmakers not be aiming to reduce these levels rather than increasing them?

Away from laboratory testing and into real world cases, the Internet is awash with cases of smokers who since smoking fire safe cigarettes have suffered from various health problems, which promptly ceased when they switched back to non-fire safe cigarettes or rolled their own. Such is the extent of the problem, in fact, that a petition to remove these cigarettes from the market now has over 27,000 signatures, many of whom state health complaints from the cigarettes.

It has long been known that traditional cigarettes contain an accelerant to keep the cigarette burning. From a business perspective it makes perfect sense: if the cigarette burns faster, the smoker is more likely to consume more and thus purchase more. Rolling papers do not contain this accelerant and are well known for extinguishing regularly, causing the smoker to relight it. One of the most frequently mentioned facts about cigarettes is that they contain over 4,000 chemicals, and so the question is why not simply remove the accelerant to have the same effect as RIP cigarettes, rather than add more chemicals and increase the toxicity of those already present? In The Medical Journal of Australia in 2004, Simon Chapman wrote that “The elimination of citrate and other burning agents in cigarette paper thus appears to be a simple and effective means of dramatically reducing the ignition propensity of cigarettes.”

A final point to consider is the overall effectiveness of fire safe cigarettes. New York’s statistics on smoking-related fires show that there were 5.36 fires per 10,000 smokers in the four years preceding 2004 and 5.69 in the four years afterwards. In 2008, however, there were 6.37 fires per 10,000 smokers, meaning that the number of smoking-related fires have actually increased since the introduction of RIP cigarettes, which is even more troubling when one considers the smoking rate dropped from 21.6% in 2003 to 16.8% in 2008.

Unlike the heated discussions surrounding other smoking-related legislation like plain packaging, display bans and graphic warnings being based upon the likelihood of success and government interference in personal choice, the debate on fire safe cigarettes hinges on the safety of the product – according to the reports of those suffering from them, the risks of smoking have changed from an increased risk of disease later in life to an immediate impact on health. While no one would argue against cigarettes that do indeed lower the chances of fires (or are safer in any other way), the issue in question here is whether fire safe cigarettes are really the answer they are presented as.

 

*This entry first appeared at www.smokescreens.org, October 2011, and has been slightly modified here*

The New Fronts: Outdoor & Campus Smoking Bans

by Michael McFadden, author of Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains

 
Anyone who’s followed the War On Smokers over the last twenty years or so has seen the change from what seemed like quite reasonable requests to accommodate people who disliked concentrated smoke in the air of places they were required to be to a demand that smokers pretty much be relegated to a back corner parking lot on the dark side of the moon.

1998 brought about the first huge leap from reason in that process when California banned smoking in all workplaces, including bars, that employed six or more people.  It was followed about five years later by bar bans in Delaware and New York.  A few years after that a massive three state electoral push funded by multi-million dollar TV campaigning brought referenda votes in Nevada, Arkansas, and Ohio also banning smoking in bars.  As of 2012 roughly half the states in the US have such far-reaching bans, often including even private clubs and casinos… despite clear and indisputably tremendous losses in gambling tax revenue (1)

With the roll toward hospitality bans seemingly moving along on its own at this point, the antismoking juggernaut has turned its attention to the next step: doing something about the Smoker Problem outdoors.  As usual in their canny step-by-step campaign methodology, they focused first on the pleasant outdoor patios that many establishments had set up in attempts to mollify their smoking clientele and maintain their businesses.  The Antismokers looked out through their windows over a meal and said, “Why should WE be locked up inside here while the smokers have the choice to sit outside in all that fresh air and sunshine?  Something MUST be done about this!”

Enter the push for outdoor smoking bans.

 

In some cases the antismoking lobbyists were able to push these bans forward purely on the basis of their money, power, and carefully rigged surveys that supposedly showed “wide public support” for such bans.  In other cases, where legislators proved to have a bit more backbone, antismoking researchers produced studies supposedly providing a scientific grounding for them.  In reality, once one looks behind the headlines, one finds that the studies actually provide no such thing: generally all that’s demonstrated is that smoke does indeed exist in outdoor smoking areas and that we do indeed have technology nowadays that can even measure and quantify it.  (2)  The science says nothing about any real threat to human health from the concentrations and durations of exposures involved, but the press-releases, “authoritative statements,” and headlines make up for the lack of science and outdoor bans have gradually been spreading like an ugly and slow-moving plague as they moved beyond patios to encompass public plazas, parks, and beaches.  We’ve even seen the argument made that beach bans are justified on the basis of the “fire hazard” caused by smoking while sitting on a quintillion tons of sand next to a sextillion liters of water

However there was one venue that the Antismokers were having a harder time with: outdoor bans on university campuses.  University students have the uncomfortable habit of wanting a bit more information than press-released headlines provide, and many of them had enough sense to realize that there was very little substance to any claims of a “health threat” existing from the passing and diluted encounters with smoke that students or workers might experience in their daily campus travels.  The “Smoke Free Campuses” movement had tens of millions of dollars behind it and was able to coordinate all sorts of “planning conferences” to push its agenda,(3) but still most universities resisted the clarion call to “Clean Air.”

So what weapon was left to bring traditionally unruly and authority-resisting student populations into line?  Simple: just as with previous smoking ban efforts, money was the key.  In the last few years, as Smoke Free Campuses has expanded its hold from 300 or so up to almost 600 campuses they have “played the money card” and begun blackmailing universities: if the school wants millions of dollars in grant money they have to obey the new rules and agree to ban smoking. (4) At first, in order to tone down the protests, administrators will always emphasize the idea that the bans will be “self-enforcing” and that violators will simply be “offered” education and help if they want to quit smoking.  Of course once the ban is in place and accepted as a de facto situation the velvet gloves come off and students face fines or even expulsion if they refuse to bend over and take it.

Is there *any* medical and scientific justification for such bans?  No.  They are purely and absolutely a simple attempt at social engineering: a plan to treat the students like lab rats, “electro-shocking” them until they conform to the properly desired behavior patterns.  Even if one accepts the Antismokers’ own figures on the threats of secondhand smoke exposure indoors, the threat from walking by smokers, even crowds of smokers on a regular basis near the doorways of buildings, is so small as to be outright laughable.  Accepting the US EPA Report’s claim of a 19% lung cancer risk increase after 40 years of daily workplace exposure and applying that claim, with proper adjustments for duration and dilution, the absolute risk involved for students on a smoking campus would indicate that allowing such smoking would produce roughly one extra lung cancer for every two hundred million student-years of exposure.  While there are a lot of “perpetual grad students” out there on the campuses, I don’t think there are any that can lay claim to that sort of perpetuity!

Outdoor smoking bans are generally unjustified in almost any setting.  Outdoor smoking bans involving entire college campuses are simply efforts at behavior control aimed at a population that is easily threatened and intimidated out of fear of losing their investments in their educations.  They make as much sense, scientifically speaking, as smoking bans based on worries about setting the beaches and oceans on fire!

 

References:

 

1) “The Lies Behind The Smoking Bans,” p.19.  http://kuneman.smokersclub.com/PASAN/StilettoGenv5h.pdf

2)  http://wispofsmoke.net/satire.txt

3) http://smokefreephilly.org/take-action/support-smoke-free-campuses/

4) http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2012/02/15/campus-smoking-ban-sparks-debate