Help! Save Me from Those Who Want to ...Help ..... People...
After studying, for nearly 40 years, the health of 35,500 people married to smokers, US researchers found that they face no significant extra risk of lung cancer or heart disease. ...other people's cigarette smoke will not kill you.
The demise of a supposed major risk to public health might be expected to prompt celebration among medical experts and campaigners. Instead, they scrambled to condemn the study, its authors, its conclusions, and the journal that published them. The reaction came as no surprise to those who have tried to uncover the facts about passive smoking. More than any other health debate, the question of whether smokers kill others as well as themselves is engulfed in a smog of political correctness and dubious science. [emph. mine] [..all emph. mine]
So they try to monkey with the data in the same ol' ways that gave rise to that saying about lies, damned lies, and statistics. That's okay, but there's a lot of difficult number crunching and data masaging involved. The technique of choice is changing: "One technique is anything but abstruse, however. It involves simply ignoring results that do not fit." [Enstrom] Tired, but true methodology. Well... *tired*, anyway.
After the BMJ [That's the British Medical Journal, the one with the really good reputation] published it last week, [the author] has been subjected to a barrage of criticism: "The whole process has been aggressive, vitriolic hate," he says. The scientific evidence [...that the person puffing away next to you is not merely making your eyes water, but killing you as well...] is just not there, says Prof Enstrom. "But maybe we've gone past the point where anyone cares about the facts."
*sigh*
And, yes, the study is American, done right here in smoke-free California; yet they had to go all the way to Britain to be published. Despite the quality of their work, no one here would publish it. It is against the commonly accepted *wisdom*.
What it actually is, is draconian paternalism aimed at provoking people into becoming reactive children so that they can then be dismissed. Who, even a New Yorker, has the big brass ones to stand up and say "Get off my back! You don't like it, you go outside."
The key here is contained in Enstrom's statement, "...aggressive, vitriolic hate." The question is why does this particular issue inspire people get on their high, righteous horses? If someone is whistling, a habit I detest, I don't go over and screech at him to quit because he is searing my nerves. I leave. If someone is being generally creepy, I won't run at him with sneers and accusations. I go elsewhere. What other noxious personal habit provokes this kind of venom? Even spitting in the street, (eww) which can actually kill, now, with SARS, is barely noticed by passersby.
So what's the *real* deal? What real issues are getting projected onto this straw man -- the straw smoker?
Is all the vitriol and aggression focused on the smoker because he is the absolute last person you can get away with hating? Is he therefore the focus of all the hidden, saved-up vitriol that used to be spread around more broadly on the multiple bases of race, gender, class, and religion? In fact, you can discriminate against him, act it out in public, and it makes you a *good person.* "I'm trying to help him."
File under things that make me say, "Eeewww."
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