Debate over?

I saw a Ziggy cartoon one time. Ziggy was at a restaurant, sitting under a sign reading "All You Can Eat". The waitress had just set a plate in front of him and was saying, "There. That's all you can eat."

The Surgeon General's office has declared the debate on secondhand smoke "over". Is this because their latest report has produced a smoking gun, or has their waitress come up and said, "That's all you can debate?"

"Secondhand smoke debate ‘over.” That’s the message from the Surgeon General’s office, delivered by a sycophantic media. The claim is that the science has now overwhelmingly proved that smoke from others’ cigarettes can kill you. Actually, “debate over” simply means: “If you have your doubts, shut up!”

But you definitely should have doubts over the new Surgeon General’s report, a massive 727-page door stop. Like many massive reports on controversial issues, it’s probably designed that way so nobody (especially reporters on deadline) will want to or have time to read beyond the executive summary. That includes me; if I had that much time I’d reread War and Peace. Twice. But the report admits it contains no new science so we can evaluate it based on research already available.

First consider the 1993 EPA study that began the passive smoking crusade....

But the EPA’s report had more holes than a spaghetti strainer. Its greatest weakness was the agency’s refusal to use the gold standard in epidemiology, the 95 percent confidence interval. This simply means there are only five chances in 100 that the conclusion came about just by chance, even if the study itself was done correctly.

Curiously, the EPA decided to use a 90 percent level, effectively doubling the likelihood of getting its result by sheer luck of the draw.

Why would it do such a strange thing? You guessed it. Its results weren't significant at the 95 percent level. Essentially, it moved the goal posts back because the football had fallen short. In scientific terminology this is know as “dishonesty.”

Meta-analyses of small studies have their problems. What is really needed is a single, well-conducted, large study.

in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 2003. Research professor James Enstrom of UCLA and professor Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York, Stony Brook presented results of a 39-year study of 35,561 Californians, which dwarfed in size everything that came before. It found no “causal relationship between exposure to [passive smoke] and tobacco-related mortality,” adding, however “a small effect” can’t be ruled out.

Well, you know what? "A small effect" can never be ruled out. No matter how large a study you put together, you can never get the margin of error down to zero. There's always some tiny statistical error in a study, which means any "small effect" that's less then the margin of error will go undetected.

The reason active tobacco smoking could be such a terrible killer while passive smoke may cause no deaths lies in the dictum "the dose makes the poison." We are constantly bombarded by carcinogens, but in tiny amounts the body usually easily fends them off.

A New England Journal of Medicine study found that even back in 1975 – when having smoke obnoxiously puffed into your face was ubiquitous in restaurants, cocktail lounges, and transportation lounges – the concentration was equal to merely 0.004 cigarettes an hour. That’s not quite the same as smoking two packs a day, is it?

I'll save you pulling out your calculator. That's 1/208 of a pack per day, or 1¾ packs per year.

Tobacco-phobes (and in this case, it really is a phobia – an unreasoning fear – will say, "Oh, but secondhand smoke is much more dangerous than primary smoke.

I fail to see how it could be that much more dangerous, but even if we stipulate that, how can it be any more dangerous to breathe secondhand smoke than to be the smoker who's breathing both the primary smoke and the secondhand smoke?

When phobia runs public policy debate, the most bizarre "facts" are swallowed whole, as long as they give the right answer.