My Delegate, David Englin (D-45) introduced a bill banning smoking in restaurants in this year’s General Assembly session. The law takes effect today (December 1, 2009).
Shouldn’t Mr. Englin have had all of the facts before he imposed this law on us?
After reading through a lot of documentation and studies surrounding secondhand smoke, it is hard for me to believe that a ban on smoking in public businesses made its way through the Virginia legislature and actually was considered. After all, Virginia is a state rich in history, not only of tobacco production, but in producing champions of individual liberty and limited Government in George Washington and Thomas Jefferson among others.
Mr. Englin introduced the bill in January of this year and touted the following:
- 75 percent of Virginia voters support a statewide law to ban smoking inside all public buildings and workplaces, including offices, restaurants, and bars.
- 66 percent say they strongly support a statewide smoke-free law.
- 82 percent — including 58 percent of smokers — believe the right of customers and employees to breathe clean air in restaurants and bars is more important than the right of smokers to smoke in these places.
- 88 percent of Virginia voters agree that workers should be protected from secondhand smoke in the workplace.
These numbers come from a survey taken by the Mellman Group of 500 registered Virginia voters. In the study Mr. Englin based this law on, 85% of Virginia voters believe smoking is a moderate to serious health hazard.
Like the current ClimateGate scandal, the science surrounding smoking has been lying to us for years. For years, the anti-smoking activists have been telling us about the detrimental health effects that come with secondhand smoke. The science surrounding this ‘anti-smoking crusade’ is junk and I will explain why below.
But first, even if the above referenced numbers are accurate, they shouldn’t matter. Bans on public smoking are an infringement on the rights of both smokers and property owners.
If I take out a loan, invest my own money or risk my own financial security to start up a restaurant or bar, I should be able to serve my customers the way I want to. And my customers and employees ought to be free to make their own decisions about any risks they’re willing to take in exchange for service or employment.
Wait staff and bartenders at places that allow smoking work there because the job they’ve chosen usually pays well most likely through tips. When you get any job, you accept the conditions of a given employer when you choose to work for him. And you accept the general parameters of a line of work when you choose to enter that field.
Now that we’ve covered what an abuse of individual and property rights smoking bans like the new Virginia one is, let’s turn our attention to the science behind the anti-smoking crusade.
I have read several articles, editorials, and papers during my research that touted the success of New York’s public smoking ban. Not a single article made a mention of the fact that New York’s public smoking ban went into effect shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, just as the restaurant and bar business was taking its biggest hit in many years. The increase in sales then can be attributed to the return of normal customer flow, not just to customers who are eager to spend money now that bars are smoke-free.
I have read several articles about the ‘Miracle of Helena’ study which was brought about after Helena imposed a smoking ban in 2002. The study showed a 60 percent drop in the number of heart attacks in the six months after it took effect. However, what many of the editorials and articles failed to mention was that the study in Helena was based on really small numbers, with the town averaging seven heart attacks a month before the ban and four afterward. Aren’t heart attacks based on a variety of factors, not just smoking? A similar short-lived dip in heart attacks rates also occurred in Helena four years earlier in 1998 when there was no ban. If whatever caused the 1998 dip happened again in 2002, is the Miracle of Helena really a miracle?
When the smoking ban passed in February, Mr. Englin stated the following:
“People who work in restaurants that allow smoking are twice as likely to develop lung cancer,” said Englin. “Especially in today’s economy, it is wrong to force restaurant workers to choose between their jobs or breathing cancer-causing second-hand smoke.”
That statement is simply a complete fabrication of the truth. Also, as we stated above, shouldn’t restaurant workers have the right to work where they want?
Most anti-smoking crusaders, like Mr. Englin, cite a 1993 study by Michael Siegel, MD, MPH, titled “Involuntary Smoking in the Restaurant Workplace,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1993. Dr. Siegel’s study found a ’50% increased risk’ for restaurant workers to develop lung cancer in places that allow smoking.
What much of the public doesn’t know, and Mr. Englin obviously didn’t, is that Siegel’s “50% increased risk” was based on six studies that had absolutely nothing to do with environmental tobacco smoke in restaurants or bars. If you want to find out for yourself, read the study (I link to it up above).
In ‘Cooking the Books – A Restaurant Study’ by Martha Perske, she reports:
Even if Siegel’s “50% increased risk” were on solid ground (which it isn’t), it only means that the relative risk was 1.50. According to the National Cancer Institute, relative risks below 2.00 are considered “small” and “may be due to chance, statistical bias, or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident.”
Dr. Lynn Rosenberg of the Boston University School of Medicine agrees that “epidemiologists normally take seriously” only relative risks of 3.00 or greater. (Wall Street Journal, 1/3/95)
Indeed, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency refused to classify electromagnetic fields as a cause of cancer “largely because the relative risks… have seldom exceeded 3.0.” (EPA, October 1990, p 6-2, “Evaluation of the Potential Carcinogenicity of Electromagnetic Fields.”)
In 2001, the World Health Organization (WHO) on World No-Tobacco Day proclaimed the following:
“Second-hand smoke is a real and significant threat to public health. Supported by two decades of evidence, the scientific community now agrees that there is no safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke… The evidence is in, let us act on it.”
Let’s look at their evidence.
At the time, the WHO cited reports done in 1986 by the National Research Council and Surgeon General that concluded secondhand smoke was a risk factor for lung cancer. But of the 13 studies the NRC and Surgeon General reviewed, 7 reported no link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. Didn’t the WHO say “the scientific community now agrees that there is no safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke…”?
So what happened? The anti-smoking activists picked up steam under the anti-smoking Clinton Administration and got the EPA to commission 33 studies. More than 80 percent of the studies revealed no known association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, including the largest of the studies. The EPA in total reviewed 31 studies, leaving out two studies that reported no association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer at all. From the reviews, the EPA estimated secondhand smoke caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually.
Huh? And folks say science is NOT politicized?
Out of these controversial studies, the EPA went on and commissioned a study in 1998 in California which was eventually thrown out by a Federal judge as he ruled the EPA fabricated the science. Later in 1998, the WHO published the largest study ever done on secondhand smoke and lung cancer. The study reported no significant association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.
So if Mr. Englin and the other Virginia state legislators who voted for this smoking ban wish to restrict the individual liberties of Virginians with laws based on false and propagandized science, shouldn’t he at least provide ALL of the facts to the public before doing so? But then, the folks in Washington don’t read the bills before they vote on them either.
Here is a sample letter to be sent to any reporter on the “smoking” beat. It’s not likely that all such reporters are intentionally lying to us. It’s more likely that they Really Do Not Know what a cigarette is, or anything about chlorine, dioxin, PO-210 radiation, or fake tobacco….and more. Give them the benefit of the doubt…at first. If they ignore the info….then we know who they are.
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Dear______________-
If you pursue this “smoking” topic, you might find some useful back-up material at: http://ktc.com/~bdrake (Bill Drake knows more about what a cigarette is…and it’s not just tobacco by miles…than probably anyone.)
and http://fauxbacco.blogspot.com (My collection of references etc.)
Some integral points to consider:
- Smoke bans, by focusing on blaming and penalizing the victims and non-complicit bar etc owners, help the cigarette cartel evade enormous liabilities and penalties.
- As far as that goes, the “penalty” of the “Tobacco Settlement” was no penalty. Cigarette firms were allowed to pass the costs on to customers in price hikes. Also, “settlement” money was allowed to go right back to cigarette interests…from advertisers to ingredient-supplying Pharms and ag businesses and even to insurers that INVEST in (partly own) the industry.
- The language: “Smoking” is about individual behavior. Industrial Behavior, involving the gross contamination of so-called “tobacco products” with some of the worst industrial substances on earth, is not to be discussed; neither is the industrial fraud of marketing fake tobacco products as “tobacco”.
- Top smoke ban pushers are part of the cigarette industry…the so-far hidden parts—tobacco pesticides, chlorine industries, and pharmaceutical additives especially…and their insurers and investors.
- Top for-profit health insurers are multi billion dollar investors in cigarette manufacturers. No secret; it’s all in the public documents of the SEC. Such insurers join in the Blame the Victim scam to protect their holdings in the cig biz, but also in the tobacco pesticide mfgrs and the rest.
- The major “evidence” against “ETS” (environmental tobacco smoke) from the EPA was long ago tossed out of a Federal Court as fraudulent. That “evidence” is used anyway. If THAT material is the basis of any law, the law is illegitimate and challengeable on its face.
That is…No Public Interest has been shown to justify the bans.
There is a barge load of material available to justify banning untested and deadly non-tobacco cigarette adulterants….but we aren’t supposed to think about that.
- The EPA has material about a) dioxin in cigarette smoke, b) how dioxin is “unlikely in nature”, c) dioxin being a carcinogen (for one thing), and d) that dioxin comes from man/industry-made chlorine.
EPA “forgets” it’s own material when testifying for bans on “ETS”.
- Any number of cigarette brands many contain zero tobacco. All laws aimed at “tobacco smoke” are off target because the term “tobacco” is never qualified. (Similarly, we may have Wine, with all the risks etc, but we also may have poisoned Wine. Subtle difference? Not to a homicide victim or homicide detective.)
As per Patent Number 3,978,866, for one, the smoke may well be Peanut Shell Smoke. Other patents have cig stuffing being entirely from corncobs. Some may be entirely from coffee bean hulls. …tobacco flavor and measured shot of nicotine added, of course. No studies exist re/ the safety of that to justify bans. Why no studies? Well, it would expose the cigarette cartel as a fraud, and same for the “regulators” who let it happen (for the sake of “sin taxes” and campaign funds and personal investments).
- I’ll bet not one pro-ban legislator is free of funding from, or other economic links to, big pharm, big insurance, big chlorine, pesticides or other “shy” (off the radar) components of the cigarette industry.
- Virtually ALL so-called “smoking related” or “tobacco related” diseases are identical to symptoms of exposure to dioxin…the famously deadly chlorine by-product. Many, if not most, of those diseases are impossible to be caused by smoke from any plant. It is vital to know that there are high levels of dioxin in smoke from typical (very non-organic) cigarettes and that it comes from A) chlorine pesticide residues and B) Chlorine-bleached cigarette paper. It cannot come from tobacco plants.
- No US official can now say they “didn’t know” about dioxin, or that “the jury’s out” on the matter. Too late. The USA has classified dioxin a Known Human Carcinogen, and the USA has signed the Stockholm Convention to phase out dioxin and 11 other of the worst industrial pollutants. Besides that…who cannot know about Agent Orange, Times Beach, Love Canal….or DDT?
- Anyone who testifies, under oath, that “tobacco kills” or that it causes such and such disease (beyond throat irritation and bad breath, perhaps) may be…probably is…guilty of perjury. One could rightly say that cigarettes contaminated with industrial carcinogens kill would be on target, however.
- Not far back, the US stopped (!) checking import tobacco for DDT…then for ALL pesticides. True. As if to say…”What pesticides?” That’s not Concern For Health…that’s concern for chem industry profits and liability evasion.
- It is still legal to use radioactive phosphate fertilzers on tobacco…despite sending cancer-causing doses of PO-210 rads into the furthest corners of unwitting, unprotected smokers’ lungs. No specific warning required. And no “concerned” anti smoke official has the human decency to even tell or warn anyone. (We truly have institutionalized psychopathy.)
- It is highly probable that most “anti ban” groups are, despite denials, somehow from, or assisted by, the cigarette cartel…if not the mfgrs themselves, then from the insurers or chem industries. (RJR agents “helped” Philadelphia bar owners fight the bans here. They failed, of course. That was the plan.) These groups perpetuate the Big Lie that “cigarette” is the same as “tobacco”. These groups’ job is to offer the most meaningless and guaranteed ineffective opposition as possible. None will mention the 450 registered tobacco pesticides, for starters. Ah, but neither will the Ban Promoters. It’s a Fake Battle. It’s like Pro Wrestling…for the entertainment and distraction of the audience, the entire US, and global public.
- Judges and jurors in “smoking” cases have, to my knowledge, NEVER been removed (recused) from decision-making positions for being economically linked to the cigarette industry…the pesticides, chlorine, pharm, ag biz, advertising and insurance parts especially. This is a Due Process issue. No small thing.
- And, as even the Anti Ban people will tell you, much of this ban push is from pharms (especially Johnson & Johnson) that do not want the competition from public domain, non-patented, natural tobacco to their patented synthetic nicotine-delivery products…and to other drugs that compete with tobacco in areas of digestive relief, alertness, stress relief, appetite suppression…and even symptomatic relief for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Yep. Tobacco is a medicine…like similarly-condemned marijuana. No natural medicines allowed in the Corporatocracy…re-birth of marijuana movement notwithstanding.
- The recently-enacted FDA bill to “regulate tobacco” ignores all of the above.
I’m not a scientist or MD, but I’ll be glad to elaborate if you think to pursue this. But it’s all right there via easy Google searches for relevant terms. It’s all just ignored. Big chlorine and the like are, you know, “too big to fail”. We humans though, can be demonized, slandered, shunned, illegitimately-prosecuted, fractured from society and even our own relatives, defrauded, poisoned and killed…and denied compensation. No problem there.
PS: If affected bar etc owners hire lawyers who disregard the above, we may have some serious cases of attorney malpractice.