This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: June 18, 2008 - "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Thus begins George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984. Published in 1949, the book envisions a totalitarian society 35 years hence, ruled by an omnipotent oligarchy personified as "Big Brother."
Though 1984 has come and gone, Orwell's novel remains timely. From it, we derive commonly recognized terms like the "Thought Police" (who prosecute improper ideas) and "Newspeak" (a politically correct jargon that subjugates critical thought to blind adherence to state dogma). Indeed, the adjective "Orwellian" has become the preferred descriptor for nightmarish oppression.
Though some developments have been evocative of Big Brother -- some of the draconian security measures advocated by the Bush administration come to mind -- I've long contended that the more immediate threat to domestic freedom comes from Big Mother.
She's the public face of the nanny state -- that all-intrusive political entity that seeks to reduce adult citizens to submissive wards of relentless governance. Hell-bent on protecting you from yourself, Big Mother orders rather than persuades and dismisses concerns for civil liberties as the whining prattle of petulant children.
This authoritarian mindset converts good ideas into bad laws. "I don't care if you are a 40-year-old taxpayer, wear your seat belt or you will be punished." Such indignities are permissible because they're inflicted for your own good.
Nowhere is Big Mother's influence better illustrated than in the on-going crusade against environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), better known as secondhand smoke. Essentially a state-sponsored hysteria, this campaign seeks to relieve you of the burden of freedom of association to protect you from a danger that doesn't seem to exist.
Despite overwhelming and much-publicized evidence that smokers die like fruit flies, some people continue to smoke. When challenged, these recalcitrants claim that smoking is an individual choice. No vigilant Mother can tolerate that kind of back-sass. But then again, if they're only hurting themselves ...
Creating the Case
In 1993, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that secondhand smoke was "responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmokers." The agency also announced that a research project was underway to substantiate that claim. It was the ideal paradigm for Orwellian science: first, reach a conclusion then conduct research to discover the basis for your assertion.
At the standard 95 percent confidence level, the EPA study found no statistical association between secondhand smoke and disease. By relaxing the standard to 90 percent (thus doubling the margin of uncertainty), researchers were able to assign secondhand smoke a risk factor of 1.19--a figure 60.3 percent below the normal reportable minimum of 3.0. Based on that finding, the agency classified secondhand smoke as a Class A carcinogen.
After the report was challenged in court, Federal Judge William Osteen issued a 94-page opinion in which he found 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..." Anti-smoking zealots dismissed Osteen's findings because he lived in North Carolina where tobacco is grown.
Meanwhile, the respected Congressional Research Service was commissioned by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA., to once-and-for-all determine the lethality of secondhand smoke. After nearly two years of study, the CRS concluded, "The statistical evidence does not appear to support a conclusion that there are substantial health effects of passive smoking. ... It is possible that very few or even no deaths can be attributed to ETS ..."
The CRS calculated that a non-smoker who lived with a heavy smoker and worked in a smoking environment had about a 0.2 percent (two-tenths of 1 percent) chance of dying from lung cancer because of ETS. For those who were only exposed at work, the risk dropped to approximately 0.07 percent (seven-hundredths of 1 percent).
Waxman subsequently issued a press release advising, "New Congressional Study Confirms Dangers of Environmental Tobacco Smoke."
Different Findings
The British Medical Journal reported the findings of a peer-reviewed 38-year mortality study of Californians which concluded, "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 strongest correlation researchers James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat found in that one was that non-smoking wives who live with smoking husbands experienced increased rates of widowhood.
The World Health Organization conducted a 10-year, seven-nation study that found no association between ETS and mortality. Elsewhere, blood tests were performed to measure nicotine levels in non-smokers routinely exposed to secondary smoke. They registered at levels of 0.5 percent (one-half of 1 percent) of that of active smokers.
Were those concerned about the deleterious effects of ETS relieved by these reassuring findings? Hardly.
Justifying a citywide indoor smoking ban, Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed that more New Yorkers die annually from secondhand smoke exposure than were killed in the World Trade Center attacks. The state of California (where the flying saucers come from) discovered that ETS causes breast cancer, The Christian Science Monitor cited secondhand smoke as the nation's third-leading cause of preventable death, and no-smoke.org now estimates that 53,800 Americans are killed yearly by the hazard. All this without a single autopsy report to bolster their claims...
Big Mother simply cannot tolerate free adults choosing to live as they please. If there really were popular demand for smoke-free saloons and casinos, the marketplace would respond. Note that though you can currently smoke in virtually every tavern in St. Louis, you may do so in none of the city's health clubs. But that sort of live-and-let-die solution is not going to satisfy the Thought Police. They generate moral panic to relentlessly expand their jurisdiction. And in the Newspeak of the day, SECONDHAND SMOKE KILLS!
There's more to be said on this subject, but I must close. The clocks are striking 13 and I hear a knock at the door...
M.W. Guzy, St. Louis, is a regular contributor to the Beacon. Data in this article came from British Medical Journal, 2003; Skeptic Magazine, Vol. 13, Number 3; Michael Crichton, "Aliens Cause Global Warming."