When evaluating the effects of secondhand smoke on restaurant workers, many researchers take measurements right in the middle of the smoking section. This is not a good representation of what the average worker deals with. A 2000 study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory attached meters to waiters as they moved about the workplace. Significantly lower levels of exposure were found than previously thought; the researchers chalked it up to the efficiency of ventilation systems.
And just how bad is secondhand smoke? For every study that comes out and says it's horrible for you, there's another one that says it isn't. Take, for example, a paper published by the British Medical Journalin 2003. Two researchers looked at 38 years' worth of data for 118,000 Californians, focusing on 35,000 nonsmokers who lived with smokers. Their conclusion: "The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect." The link between secondhand smoke and disease, they wrote, "may be considerably weaker than generally believed."
Daniel Kramer
Todd and Lisa Line met on account of smoking.
Daniel Kramer
Dennis Keim puffs away at Cecil's on West Gray.
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This study was largely funded by the tobacco industry, a special-interest group with an obvious agenda. But at least you've got to give the researchers props for being transparent about it.
The antismoking camp touts the figure, time and time again, that secondhand smoke causes 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year in the States. This figure first popped up in a 1993 Environmental Protection Agency report. And the EPA doesn't have an agenda, right? Wrong. In 1998, U.S. District Judge William Osteen threw out the report, noting that the EPA "publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun" and "adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the agency's public conclusion," which is all a roundabout way of saying the EPA selected its data and tweaked the numbers to get its desired result.
"I've been looking at this issue for over ten years," says Dave Pickrell, 52, president of Smokers Fighting Discrimination, a local advocacy group. "If you say I don't have a right to smoke, then demonstrate to me in terms of good science why I should be prohibited.
"The whole crux of my argument is: Show me something real. Demonstrate something real. Prove something real. Real. Don't give me these artificial things that have been cherry-picked."
You're probably more likely to trust the health industry than big tobacco, but either way you're falling into the fallacy that the source of an opinion has a necessary bearing on the truthfulness of it. Consider this: Churchill and Roosevelt smoked, while Hitler and Mussolini were big-time antismokers. Whose side do you want to be on?
Oh, and one more thing: A lot of antismoking advocacy groups are funded by the pharmaceutical industry, which makes a killing every year off of smoking-cessation devices, such as gums and patches.
Smoke and Mirrors
On the day City Council voted on the smoking ban, Councilwoman Sekula-Gibbs showed up in a red outfit with her hair all done up. She smiled at her aides and looked determinedly at her colleagues.
"I think that by doing something today that is really meaningful," she told the council, "you can put it behind you and move forward and you can deal with issues you probably thought you were running for and that you were really being elected to deal with."
Yeah, thanks. This from a woman who forced City Council to forgo just about everything else in order to debate the issue for more than two months. She cared so much about council's time, she was threatening to clog up the system again if the vote didn't turn out as she wanted. But, hey, it's not like council had more important things to think about.
"The ban came up to take the heat off of air pollution and Safe Clear," says Pickrell, noting the two issues that were at the fore before all the antismokers took over. Safe Clear was the mayor's controversial plan to clear up our congested freeways by instituting mandatory towing of stalled vehicles, while air pollution -- the outdoor kind -- was finally acknowledged as being out of control, and the mayor promised to do something about it.
Until antismokers kidnapped the issue.
"If you care about air quality, then you must do something about smoking" was a common refrain from the public. The Houston Chronicle threw more wood on the fire, running an editorial saying secondhand smoke was worse for air quality than industry.
The thing is, as Mayor White has so much as said, you can decide whether you want to enter a smoking establishment. You can't decide which outdoor air you breathe.
"On sunny days in late spring, one only need take a look at downtown and the brown haze ring to realize that secondhand smoke is not the major problem in this city," says an M.D. Anderson staffer who wishes to remain anonymous. "Secondhand smoke cannot account for higher incidences of lung and brain cancer in the Gulf Coast region, but perhaps the massive amounts of pollutants that Baytown, Pasadena and other Gulf Coast cities pump into the air could explain some of it."
