Like the originator of this thread I am *FED UP* not just with the smoking ban and the so-called reasoning behind it but the general "bad science" that is being bandied about as truth nowadays.
And it is these bogus, plucked out of mid-air, made up to suit a particula agenda or lobby group "official figures" that seem to be at the root of pretty much all of it.
So much so that "proof" seems to be a dirty word nowadays. It's simply good enough to say "most people agree that..." as if that makes it true!?
I'm sorry but I just don't trust anything I hear now, especially if it begins with "A recent study has shown that...". I think we all know by now that anyone can make any study "Show" exactly what they or their sponsors want it to say.
to take a humourous example:
Quote: ""watercress has been revealed as the latest cancer-fighting superfood.
Experts at University of Ulster announced yesterday that regular portions of the leaf can prevent damage to DNA that could lead to cancer.""
There, at last, the facts are clear.
Aren't they? How about if I added this:
Quote: ""The watercress industry-funded report has been called highly significant by its lead scientists. ""
Eh? you can't go around dressing up somethng like this as science - its nothing more than a marketing campaign!
As ever, most of us are not scientists nor do we work in these fields so we only "know" what we are told is true. Perhaps watercress is good for you - I doubt it does you much harm (pesticides aside) but how can anyone take a "study" like that seriously?
And its the same story with smoking, and, dare I say it, CO2 emissions being the cause of global warming.
Michael Crichton has made some testimonys to the US Senate about such matters - here is a snippet:
"In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was "responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults," and that it " impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of people." In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA. or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.) Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95% confidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified second hand smoke as a Group A Carcinogen.
This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian Science Monitor was saying that "Second-hand smoke is the nation's third-leading preventable cause of death." The American Cancer Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent."
Again, I'm no scientist - I've not done the studies and I can't say who is right or wrong but I do see this pattern appearing time and again:
1) wild claim is made by so-called "study group" - wild enough to make headlines (since unsensastional claims do not)
2) It's pounced on (or funded by) government as a great tax revenue stream and before you know it - its all "fact" and tied up in a nice neat bow.
3) Forget if it's even true or not - that's just become irrelevant. As long as most people believe it is true then that is enough.
So I don't see this as just a smoking issue - more about "bad science" and government and media manipulation and that has far wider implications from the food we eat to how we bring up our kids all the way to how we try to combat global warming.
