Los Angeles, December 14, 2010 – "The rest of the story is that the Office of the Surgeon General somehow finds it necessary to lie to the American people in order to convince us of the hazards of smoking. Apparently, we are too stupid to understand that smoking is a bad thing if the truth is that smoking for many years causes disease."
That's Boston University professor Michael Siegel, no friend of tobacco, but a harsh critic of what he sees as overreaching by the anti-tobacco movement in its quest for Prohibition by any means possible.
His Monday (December 13) column at TobaccoAnalysis.Blogspot.com rips the Surgeon General's new report on How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease: The Biology and Behavioral Basis for Smoking-Attributable Disease.
Among his main points:
"Fortunately, it is simply not true that even brief exposure to secondhand smoke can cause cardiovascular disease. Luckily, it takes many years of exposure before the process of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) can occur. If brief tobacco smoke exposure could cause heart disease, we would sadly see many young people in their twenties and thirties walking around with cardiovascular disease, and many dying from it at those ages. Even active smoking does not generally lead to heart disease unless you smoke for many years. Thus, it is simply untrue to assert that brief exposure to secondhand smoke can cause cardiovascular disease.
This is the second time that the Office of the Surgeon General has misrepresented and distorted the science of the acute cardiovascular health effects of secondhand smoke. The Surgeon General's press release which accompanied the 2006 report on secondhand smoke made the same false assertion.
The press release's assertion flies in the face of common medical sense. How could it possibly be that a brief exposure to secondhand smoke can cause heart disease? It takes many years for heart disease to develop. It takes years of exposure to tobacco smoke even for a smoker to develop heart disease. I estimate that it takes at least 25 years of exposure (based on the fact that very few smokers are diagnosed with heart disease before age 40).
So how could it possibly be that for an active smoker, heart disease takes 25 years of exposure to tobacco smoke to develop, but for a passive smoker, it only takes a brief exposure?"
"Fortunately as well, inhaling the smallest amount of tobacco smoke does not lead to cancer. While the press release is correct in asserting that the tiniest amount of tobacco smoke can damage your DNA, it simply is not true that someone who inhales the tiniest amount of tobacco smoke may well develop cancer because of it. There is certainly no evidence to support such a statement.
Moreover, there is nothing in the Surgeon General's report itself which concludes that, or supports the assertions that a brief exposure to secondhand smoke can cause cardiovascular disease or cancer. These assertions basically come out of nowhere. They have been manufactured to create a sense of public hysteria, but they are unsupported by any science whatsoever."
Moreover, Siegel notes the hysterical nature of the report as unhelpful: "[T]he message is not particularly meaningful. One can say that there is no safe level of exposure to any carcinogen. There is no safe level of exposure to car exhaust. There is no safe level of exposure to the sun's rays. There is no safe level of exposure to X-rays. There is no safe level of exposure to the benzene that is found in some sodas. There is no safe level of exposure to radon in homes. There is no safe level of exposure to arsenic that is found in many people's drinking water.
"For that matter, there is no safe speed at which you can drive a car without risk of injury or death. There is no risk-free way to have sex with someone who has HIV infection. There is no safe method to travel from one place to another.
"So stating that no amount of smoking or secondhand smoke is safe is not particularly meaningful. It also didn't take a detailed report to draw such a conclusion. We knew that already."
But he notes the critical issue is dosage: "Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't it more useful and informative to provide the public with a sense of the relative levels of exposure to tobacco smoke in different environments and situations then to scare the public into simply thinking that any exposure is terrible and that (perhaps) all exposures are equally bad? I think that it is important for the public to have some appreciation of the strong and important relationship between dose and risk. And I'm afraid that the overwhelming emphasis on there being no risk-free level of tobacco smoke exposure may obscure the importance of the dose-risk relationship . . .
"If we are accurately informed about the dose-risk relationship, we are more likely to make rational decisions. If all we hear is the hysteria - that a single, tiny exposure to tobacco smoke can cause heart disease and cancer - we are more likely to ignore the entire message. We've all experienced such an exposure already, so we're all doomed, I guess. So what incentive is there to quit smoking or avoid secondhand smoke at this point?
Siegel notes that the ones who will suffer from this report are, of course, smokers, who will find areas to smoke more and more confined. As if the Surgeon General and the "scientific" community cared.
A more specific criticism of the report by truth-in-science activist John Jonik on the liberal Web site OpEd News is here. As I have warned many times in this space, nothing short of a lawsuit will slow down this march to Prohibition.
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:-)