Tag Archives: home smoking ban

Be Afraid, be Very Afraid. Vancouver Takes Things to the Next Level

3 Comments

Vancouver isn’t the first to pass outdoor smoking bans. Nova Scotia has one, Halifax has one, and parts of California have them – although some of those have ditched all pretence and openly admitted ‘hey, we just don’t wanna see smokers, ok?’ How they get away with that I don’t know. Actually I do, it’s because it’s against smokers, not protected minorities. So everyone reading this, if you want to make a quick buck, influence politics and get your name in the news without any fear of repurcussions, jump on the anti-smoking bandwagon. Everyone else, well done, you still have your integrity.

Outdoor bans are slowly creeping through. Calgary has a bylaw that states smoking by doorways isn’t allowed. I’m not actually too against that, provided the distance you have to be isn’t stupid. It can be intimidating to walk through a crowd of people, and, fair enough, the smoke can be irritating to some. But let’s not get the cart before the horse on this – if smokers hadn’t been kicked out in the first place, they wouldn’t be crowding doorways. It’s nonsensical to all of a sudden proclaim ‘well now we can’t get to the door without breathing toxic smoke!’ because if you’d been a little tolerant and sensible in the first place, smokers would peacefully enjoy their tobacco in a separate room, or a ventilated communal room, indoors. So excuse them while they brave the weather huddled together in the only place there’s shelter – the overhang above the door. OK? OK. So while I can understand the argument against smokers gathering in doorways, I’m not at all in favour of ‘shunting them further down that way’. No, treat them like human beings, put a roof over their head while they enjoy their legal product that they bought and paid for, and we’ll all be happy. In the UK, the tax from tobacco provides about a quarter of the health services, so no one can afford to lose sight of the true cost of penalising smokers to such an extent.

What’s this post about? The Vancourier has released an article explaining how nauseatingly low the anti-smoking campaign has got there:

It’s official. Vancouver is a no-smoking zone. Butt them out on your shoe and fall in line.

A new bylaw takes effect today–in every Vancouver park (all 224 of them) and beach (except for Wreck) and along the entire seawall, smoking is prohibited. Anyone caught smoking will be fined up to $2,000.

Pretty sweeping huh? The anti-smoking lobby must have worked really hard to pull that one off. Actually, no. What makes this story even worse is the staggering fact that a handful of people have this sort of power:

This new bylaw, which outlaws a legal activity in a city of 570,000, was crafted and enacted solely by the seven-member park board–an entity few Vancouverites know anything about.

Wow. Seven people, controlling 570,000. As most Vancouverites don’t know the board even exists, presumably they’re an unelected body, so what right do they actually have to pull this off? Probably none. As for the reasoning behind this insanity (brace yourself):

According to [park board commissioner, Aaron] Jasper, the park board heard from “health care professionals” who claim secondhand smoke–even on a breezy beach–represents a health hazard. He noted the “environmental impact” of cigarette butts, and most bizarrely, went all Smokey the Bear on us. “Forest fires,” said Jasper, “are a grave concern.”

Forest fires? In Vancouver? Have there been any forest fires in Vancouver lately? Like since 1886?

“Well, this year there has been nothing I’ve been made aware of.”

Got that? Picked yourself up from the floor?
Secondhand smoke, which poses no threat indoors, is now a health concern now only outdoors, but along the coast with a strong sea breeze that barely lets you keep your hair and clothes. The serial killer of smoke can easily withstand such a gust of air though, and still find victims. I’d love to know who these “health care professionals” are that he’s been talking to.
Environmental issues of cigarette butts? Um, Jasper? There’s these things called bins, and people, well, put things in them that they are done using. And most of them have these other things called ashtrays on the top of them, used for, well, putting cigarettes in. These ‘bins’ and ‘ashtrays’ actually stop the cigarette butts winding up on the floor and thus remove the ‘environmental issue’ of discarded butts. Now you’re up to speed, can you review this policy?
Forest fires in Vancouver… I’m not even going to bother touching that one.

The bylaw gets worse, by the way (not that you expected anything less, no doubt):

Penalties not only apply to smokers but smoking accomplices. For example, if you light a cigarette for your 83-year-old grandfather who stormed the beach at Normandy but now resides in a wheelchair with limited use of his trembling hands, you can be fined up to $2,000.

And if, despite permission from the driver, you light up inside a taxi that happens to be on park board land, you’re subject to punishment. Up to $2,000 worth.

This is actually quite tragic. Many members of the elderly generation enjoy nothing more than sitting on the coast, and many enjoy their pipes, cigars or cigarettes too. But they can’t do this, they have to remove themselves from the beach, smoke somewhere else, then totter back. This is inconvenient for everyone, but when we’re talking about a demographic of people which has a large number of wheelchair users or people generally unsteady on their feet, it’s disgraceful. They’re probably wondering what liberties they actually fought for back in the day. But, they’re also the one generation in society you can depend on to not give a damn and continue regardless, and thank God someone is doing that, because the ‘rebellious youths’ are nowhere to be seen.

But of course, this is done for our own good:

“This isn’t about punishing people, it’s about educating people,” said Jasper. “Your personal habits are your personal habits and as long as they’re not infringing on the peace and enjoyment of others and the health of others, continue whatever you’re doing. It’s not my place to tell people what they should do.”

It never ceases to amaze me, truly. Smokers can’t infringe on the rights of others, yet, as a legal product, smokers do have the right to smoke tobacco, so these rules and bylaws are affecting their own rights and freedoms. And as we all know, smoking on the beach or park isn’t affecting the health of anyone else, much less their enjoyment – and peace, peace?! I have no idea what he even means. The only way smoking disturbs the peace is when one of those omnipresent self-righteous fuckwits creates a scene by taking it upon themselves to cleanse the population, leaving it devoid of smokers. Smokers are pretty content and quiet when they’re puffing. Tobacco has that effect, you see.

“Our job is to make sure that everyone can have enjoyment of our parks and public spaces.”

Except smokers.

If this was a TV drama, I’d be enthralled, anxiously waiting for next week’s installment to find out what unbelievable plan will be unveiled next. But somehow, unbelievably, this is real. We can’t decide whether burkhas should be allowed in schools because we don’t want to offend anyone, but there’s not even a second thought to treating smokers like second-rate citizens. It’s like selling kids ice-cream and saying ‘oh, but you can’t consume it. No, it’ll kill you. Use it as an ornament, or go way out into the woods where no one can see you’.

I might just go live in the mountains.

Youths Want Landlords to Decide Smoking Status

4 Comments

According to a survey by Freedom 2 Choose, teengers think landlords should have the choice of whether an establishment permits smoking or not. The Morning Advertiser reports:

Members and supporters surveyed 1,312 under-25s in five different areas of England and found 99.7% think pubs and clubs should have the choice about whether people can smoke inside.

And 98.4% think pubs and clubs should be allowed separate smoking rooms.

Just 1.8% said the smoking ban deterred them from smoking, although 85% said it had affected their social habits.

Meanwhile, 85.2% agreed that second hand smoke does not pose a health threat.

What’s most interesting about this is that it’s young people, i.e. the generation brought up hearing the scare stories of smoking and passive smoking, the generation that has been PC’d, the generation that has always been accustomed to anti-smoking reports and legislation. So despite a lifetime of anti-smoking propaganda, the vast majority believe passive smoking doesn’t pose a threat to health and believe smokers should be allowed to enjoy their legal habit under a roof. Perhaps all is not lost.

This begs the question that if the public is not in favour of a ban, why do we, a supposedly democratic society, have one? How can we, in this age of technological advance and proposed tolerance to others, not allow separate smoking rooms or proven ventilation to combat the annoyance of smoke?

Older generations were never in favour of the ban, either. In fact, they were predominantly the ones smoking in venues like pubs or bingo halls, had grown up in smoky environments and smoked most of their lives. I’d bet any money that a similar poll of adults and the elderly would find similar results, because people are generally tolerant and smart enough to realise that they’re not going to get struck down with cancer by a night in a smoky pub. Not until we’re given a single name of a person who died from secondhand smoke exposure.

The public have spoken. We don’t want a draconian ban, and we don’t want our liberties removed.

Finally Recognised: Smoking Ban Main Cause of Pub Closures

2 Comments

This isn’t news to most people, we knew before July 2007 that the ban would have a negative effect on trade. How did we know this? Because we, paying, smoking customers, said we’d stop going places we weren’t welcome. We didn’t need a degree in economics to be aware of the fact that if paying customers stop turning up and spending money, the profits of the establishment will dwindle.

Oddly, a lot of other people seemed to think less paying customers would have no effect on profits or trade. Naturally, Stanton Glantz and his band of merry men knocked up a report or two claiming to prove that smoking bans had a positive effect on trade, but it’s pretty much a given these days that if Glantz says something, the opposite is true (bear that in mind for future reports). Never trust anyone who resorts to science by press release, because you can be sure the actual facts will be the opposite – otherwise they wouldn’t need to rely on press releases in the first place.

We were told that the recession was responsible for pub closures, bingo hall closures and basically all closures within the hospitality trade. I’ve never had trouble agreeing that the recession had some effect on it, however I was also always aware that pub closures had a very obvious pattern after any smoking ban around the world. We have the benefit of bans being enacted at different times around the world, Wales enforced theirs before England, parts of America had it before that. What we could always see, no matter what country and what year, was an immediate and predictable effect on trade.

Yesterdays Morning Advertiser acknowledged that we were right:

CGA data has been manipulated by CR Consulting to reveal a striking correlation in the rate of closures in England, Scotland and Wales following the smoking bans in each country.

Previously, the different start times of the ban have obscured the similarity of the decline across Britain, causing commentators to look to other reasons for pubs closing.

Now, the report says “the smoking ban is demonstrably the most significant cause of pub closures”.

“While there is significant variation in the trajectories of the pub estates before the ban there is an almost total correlation between the three GB lines after the ban. This indicates that they are affected by a strong common factor ­— the smoking ban.

“The correlation is in fact so close that the trend line for the three countries is identical.”

and

“With smokers being moved outside, the price premium [in pubs] can no longer be justified [by drinkers] so more people drink at home,” it maintains.

“This has a cumulative effect — as fewer people use the pub it becomes less of a social draw.”

Vindication sure is sweet. It’s pretty disgraceful that this needs to be printed in the news before people believe it, but as they say, common sense isn’t all that common

Thirdhand Smoke: The Plot Thickens

7 Comments

Since my last blog post about thirdhand smoke and Winickoff’s bogus study to further the anti-smoking ideology, I contacted the man himself with queries about his findings. I sent him the following email:

Dr Winickoff,

I read your latest ‘report’ with mixed feelings of great amusement and sadness. I fail to see exactly how you can claim that tobacco smoke travels down telephone lines and “air ducts, through cracks in the walls and floors, through elevator shafts, and along plumbing and electrical lines to affect units on other floors.”

Of course, I would be able to grasp rudimentary understanding of these claims had you provided evidence, but as you didn’t, I can’t. Referring to your own non-study on third-hand smoke is not proof of concept, especially when said non-study was utterly ridiculous anyway – sorry, but phoning people and asking if ‘third-hand smoke’ existed would it prompt them to quit smoking is not, in any level of study, demonstrative proof that third-hand smoke a) exists or b) poses a threat. The first rule of toxicology is the poison is the dose and furthermore, you admitted some time ago that third-hand smoke is mere smell.

You claim in your ‘report’ that Georg Matt and two other studies show that lingering tobacco toxins reach high levels, yet the levels are actually so low as to be barely present. Moreover, none of the three referenced studies mention tobacco smoke travelling between apartments. You must surely be aware that fabricating an argument is not science, is not persuasive, and actually means the evidence is lacking and therefore your entire premise is baseless?

It still perplexes me that decades ago upwards of 80% of American and British adult males smoked, in any area they pleased besides libraries, galleries and churches. If tobacco posed such a threat that the slightest wisp can cause disease, then living in a perpetual fog of the stuff should surely have killed off a vast percentage of the population. Instead, we saw a baby boom and generations getting stronger and living longer. While smoking rates dropped, cancer rates increased. While smoking rates dropped, asthma rates increased.

Please, can you provide justification for your continued insistence of the health threat of third-hand smoke and these notions that second-hand smoke can travel along plumbing and phone lines to pose a threat to neighbours?

Thanks,
Rich

This initially received no reply, so I sent a follow-up email asking for a response and received this:

Thank you for your interest and intellectual engagement. Many of the compounds exhibit a stochastic pattern of harm. Understanding this concept will help you understand the science better.

Your Home is Not Safe

5 Comments

Most of us knew the ‘discovery’ of thirdhand smoke was nothing more than a new political leverage for the anti-smokers; something they could use to deny smokers fostering, adopting, teaching and smoking at home. This could never happen straight away, but in small increments. With vindication that we never wanted, this turned out to be exactly the case. In the USA especially, smokers are increasingly demonised and an increasing number of businesses refuse to employ smokers – even if they smoke outside of working hours. This is spreading to anyone using NRT, presumably in case they ‘relapse’ and go back to tobacco. Anyone following the F2C blog will be aware of the fuss Grampian hospitals have been kicking up to refuse anyone smoking on the grounds, including patients, with the penalty being that treatment will be refused. Completely illegal of course, but that never stopped them trying.

Michael Siegel reported earlier in the week how a new study has claimed that secondhand smoke exposure causes poor performance academically. The first point of common-sense is to simply ask if SHS causes poor academic performance, how come active smoking has positively beneficial effects on the brain and concentration, and how did we ever evolve with people smoking for our entire history?

As you might have guessed, the study was a crock of shit, as it simultaneously measured self-reported secondhand smoke exposure and self-reported academic performance. In other words, people estimated how much passive smoke exposure they had (I couldn’t ever quantify that, could you?) and also stated their academic performance. Not exactly rigorous science by any stretch of the imagination. So how much did their performance suffer? “Students exposed to SHS at home 1 to 4 and 5 to 7 days per week were 14% (95% CI, 5%-25%) and 28% (15%-41%)”

So, uh, hardly at all. Averages of 14 and 28%? Come on now. No real scientist would ever genuinely consider that noteworthy, so what’s the agenda here?

If exposure to SHS could impair the students’ academic performance and hence reduce their chances to succeed, then home smokers are depriving the students’ human rights to higher education stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—Right to Education (Article 26), which states ‘higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.’

Tobacco control advocates, educators, and human right advocators can also make use of our evidence to negotiate an expansion of smoke-free legislation to the home environment.

Ahhhh. The tried and tested “for the sake of the children” argument. Or, put in a real context, ” we have no evidence whatsoever that tobacco smoke impairs academic performance or cognitive ability, so we’ll tug at the heart-strings instead.” Although it must be noted that the study author is using the term “evidence” incredibly loosely, and it’s admitted by the researchers that there was a significant margin of error:

Although restricting our analyses to nonsmokers only should have largely reduced the confounding effects of unfavorable lifestyle factors associated with smoking, residual confounding cannot be ruled out because of the crude self-reported measures of socioeconomic status and unmeasured lifestyle factors.

In other words, they were unaccounted variables that could, and most certainly would, have affected the results – and if the results were affected, then there would be no “evidence” to push for a home smoking ban, and that just won’t do at all. Moreover, as Siegel notes:

In addition, there are other important confounding variables, such as parental involvement with the child’s education. In other words, there are many reasons why children who are more heavily exposed to secondhand smoke may do poorer in school, and the study cannot adequately rule out these alternative explanations.

Therefore, it is mystifying why the study goes ahead and concludes that the observed association in the study is attributable to a direct, causal effect of secondhand smoke exposure.

 Siegel makes another excellent point, that “because the study is cross-sectional, it cannot establish whether the academic performance problems might have predated the secondhand smoke exposure.” What he means is, no base level of performance was taken. It’s all well and good comparing smoke-exposed to non-smoke-exposed children, but without comparing the same child’s performance before and after exposure began nothing is actually being measured at all.

 If a child typically scored 70-90% on tests, then was exposed to secondhand smoke and his grades went down to 40-50%, and all other variables had been accounted for e.g. general change in attitude towards studies, then a case could exist for secondhand smoke impairing academic performance. As it stands, however, all we have is more pseudo-science, political bullshit printed in a journal to win support.