Secondhand smoke screen

Lex is in a tussle with the Allen County Commission. The commission is considering a county-wide smoking ban. The left leaning Ft. Wayne Journal-Gazette yesterday published a letter supporting the ban from a Ms. Carla Castro. In her letter, Ms. Castro claimed that 53,000 people a year die from the effects of secondhand smoke. That figure is absurd. The EPA puts the figure at 3,000. So Lex fired off a letter taking the editor to task. In no time they called back and asked to publish the letter. Here’s what I sent them:

Can anyone write to this page and have any foolishness published? Do the editors of this page feel any obligation to protect readers from hogwash or writers from making fools of themselves? Are you so hard up for letters that you will print anything? Carla Castro’s claim that 53,000 Americans die from secondhand smoke each year strains credulity. Reliable studies place the number of deaths attributable to secondhand smoke somewhere between 0 and 3,000.

A 1998 study by the World Health Organization, hardly a shill for tobacco companies, could find no link – none, nada, zero, zilch - between secondhand smoke and cancer. 32 of 40 other studies, almost all of them based on the experience of non-smokers married to smokers, found no evidence of secondhand smoke causing any disease at all. The other eight showed some association – but counter intuitively, some of the studies found that the non-smoking spouse was less likely to get a serious disease.

How about Ms. Castro and the busybody, nanny-state, I know what’s best for you, freedom crushing do-gooders on town councils and the County Commission require a sign for smoking establishments such as, “People smoke here. If you don’t like it, visit Castro & Crawford’s smoke-free establishments.” No doubt the busybodies are having trouble living their own lives, so they want to make up for it by telling the rest of us how to live ours.

Having jousted with this windmill once before in Montgomery, AL, I’m pretty sure how it will turn out. Someone will write in and say something like, “If Schumick and other smokers want to kill themselves, fine I don’t care. But don’t kill me and my family in the process.” Well I don’t smoke. I prefer the confines of non-smoking environment myself, particularly when dining. But the issue here is not about smoking. It’s about the commission telling businesses how to operate based on junk science. Reliable studies prove what we already know - secondhand smoke is annoying to about everyone, even smokers, but it won't kill you.

What’s next? Here’s a short list of things that annoy me while dining out:
- Fat people eating at the all-you-can-eat buffet, ban it.
- People who try to hide the fact that they haven’t showered by wearing too much cologne, ban them.
- People who try to act like big-shots by shouting into a cell phone for everyone to hear, ban it.

- Wait staff who try to earn a big tip by being overly friendly rather than providing good service, ban them.