Advocacy Research

Snake Oil, Hypochondriac "Science"

Over the past week or so we have seen "experts" advocating a complete ban on tobacco in New Zealand within ten years. As an interim measure, they are calling for the inevitable increase in taxes on tobacco, and much more radical, a ban on smoking in public places such as beaches and pretty much anywhere outdoors where other human beings are present or might be present some time in the future. These "experts" are actually "taxpayer funded health officials" aka bureaucrats. These health bureaucrats are very experienced and skilled at getting the government to swing in behind their causes.

They are politically savvy. They have tapped successfully into the "care for children" cause. They are now tapping into the "Maori problem" rubric, since plenty of Maori smoke. They know that if the smoking issue can be framed as one which disadvantages and hurts Maori, it will leapfrog in public traction.

The call from the Auckland Regional Public Health Service for a range of tough measures comes in its submission to the Maori affairs select committee's forthcoming inquiry into the tobacco industry and the effects of tobacco use on Maori.

Hopes are high among public health campaigners that the inquiry will re-frame debate on tobacco and make it easier for the Government to adopt radical measures to make New Zealand smokefree within 10 years.

The Auckland service wants the law banning indoor smoking at workplaces extended to playgrounds, outdoor eating areas, beaches, the area outside buildings, cars when a child aged less than 16 is present, public transport stops and pedestrian malls.

Pity the poor worker who has now been banned from work when it comes to smoking. Now he or she will be banned from smoking outside as well, if these erstwhile human controllers have their way.

These measures would greatly reduce smoking opportunities for workers and bar patrons, who have been forced outside or onto the street by the smokefree environments law.

The regional public health service is funded by the Auckland, Waitemata and Counties Manukau district health boards and the Health Ministry. The Waitemata DHB has already endorsed its approach.

Like all bureaucrats they believe in redemption through laws and rules and regulations. The Prime Minister hastily dismissed them as taking one nanny-state-step-too-far. But one of the reasons these folk are so effective is that they think long term. No doubt they are well aware that they are unlikely to make much progress under the current administration (apart from the tax increases, since the government is rapaciously going after every dollar it can expropriate with a modicum of political acceptance). But, they will be figuring that when Labour finally comes back into government, their banning of tobacco will be up front and centre. The inconceivable will become the inevitable.

Local authorities are already on the kick.

The call to ban smoking in many public places comes as an increasing number of local authorities are putting up signs asking people not to smoke in areas used by children, such as playgrounds, sports fields and beaches.

Auckland University banned outdoor smoking at its campuses from last month, adding to the statutory indoor ban.

Behind all this lies junk science. We are learning that there are few things more dangerous than advocacy science--which is where "science" becomes handmaiden to political causes. In fact whenever this has happened it has become downright dangerous. In the past eighty years advocacy "science" in the West has, well, advocated eugenics, compulsory sterilisation, forced population control, substituting food for bio-fuel production, and the compulsory expropriation of private property to combat "global warming". The damage inflicted by advocacy "science" has been considerable, indirectly causing untold human suffering, degradation, and death. All, we note, with the intent of "saving" humanity.

Rob Lyons details the junk science that lies behind the anti-tobacco crusade.

Advocacy research: what a filthy habit
New research suggesting ‘third-hand smoke’ is a major health hazard was spurred by policy, not hard science.
Rob Lyons

First we were told - quite reasonably - that smoking was bad for us. It increases the risk of a variety of diseases, particularly lung cancer and respiratory illnesses, as well as making heart disease and stroke more likely. No one who smokes regularly can be unaware that there is a fair chance that their habit will shorten their life, even if the immediate prospect of a stimulating drag is more enticing than a few extra years of old age. We’ve all got to die of something, at some point; it’s up to us to make a calculation about whether that nicotine hit is worth it.

Advocacy science could not stop at providing hard evidence of the health damage and dangers of smoking. Because governments now assert control over our bodies through public health systems, it was inevitable that the issue would spill over into laws, rules, and regulations over tobacco use. If the rapacious government was going to pay for treating tobacco related diseases, then would move to control its use.

But these things are relentless. Soon the advocacy moved on to second-hand smoke.

More controversial was the suggestion that breathing other people’s smoke might be dangerous, too. Okay, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if those nights of old spent steeped in a nicotine-tinged fug in the Dog and Duck didn’t exactly do one’s lungs the world of good. The smell certainly lingered on your clothes. Even then, anyone who remembers boozers in the past, or the top-deck of the bus on a winter’s evening, will know that the modern, well-ventilated, pre-smoking ban pub was a much less smoky environment. By rather dubiously extrapolating from some small personal risks, based on smoking studies that probably bear little relevance to twenty-first century Western workplaces, official estimates concluded that about 1,000 people per year die from ‘secondhand’ smoke in the UK. In July 2007, a ban on smoking in public places came into force in England. The tobacco lovers were turfed out on to the street.

Junk science just tore out another artery from the body politic.

But now we are moving from "secondhand" smoke to "thirdhand" smoke. The "thirdhand" iteration by junk science is critical to getting tobacco banned altogether.

Old tobacco smoke does more than simply make a room smell stale - it can leave cancer-causing toxins behind, Reuters reported today.

Researchers in the US found cancer-causing agents called tobacco-specific nitrosamines stick to a variety of surfaces, where they can get into dust or be picked up on the fingers.

Children and infants are the most likely to pick them up, the team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California reported.

"These findings raise concerns about exposures to the tobacco smoke residue that has been recently dubbed `third-hand smoke'," the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As Lyons writes, we are now moving from the stupid to the unbelievably stupid--except he puts it more colourfully:

Now, claim researchers, you don’t even need to breathe smoke in, you simply need to be in contact with smokers or touch surfaces that have been in contact with their smoke to be at risk. If the dodgy research that produced the smoking ban was bullshit, the claims made for third-hand smoking are in a whole new category: ‘beyond bullshit’.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California found that carcinogens from cigarettes linger in the environment on clothing, floors and walls long after smoke has dispersed. Worse, their shock-horror discovery was that some of these substances can then go on to react with these surfaces to produce more carcinogens. Mohamad Sleiman, the lead researcher, told Scientific American: ‘Our findings indicate that third-hand smoke represents an unappreciated health hazard.’

This is why smoking is being banned in public places by local councils in New Zealand where children might be remotely present, let alone parks with playgrounds where they are usually present in abundance.

This is not cold, hard-headed investigation; this is ‘advocacy research’. Those involved have decided that tobacco smoke is not just a threat to smokers but to everyone, particularly children. Unsurprisingly, their work then confirms this prejudice. Winickoff is asked in that Scientific American article why the label ‘third-hand smoke’ was chosen. ‘This study points to the need for every smoker to try to quit. That’s the only way to completely protect their children… Really, I think that what this says is that we need to have sympathy for smokers and help them quit smoking… [And also] that the introduction of this concept will lead to more smoke-free spaces in… public.’

So, now children are exposed to deadly agents if they crawl on a carpet or sit on a swing proximate to where a cigarette has been smoked. Really. Yes, really! Yeah, right. Science has become a nonsense--as it always does when it moves from research to advocacy.

The mere presence of carcinogens does not mean that we will suffer from cancer. In fact, we are bombarded with carcinogens every day. Our food is packed with them, particularly naturally occurring substances that plants produce to ward off pests. If the microscopic quantities of carcinogens in our carpets and on our clothes left by tobacco smoke are going to be treated as a potential health threat, that makes every cup of coffee a caffeinated, cancer-causing cocktail, too.

If the chemicals in cigarette smoke were really so deadly as Winickoff and Glantz imply, it would be simply inconceivable that people could live - as many do for 50 years or more - while smoking a packet of cigarettes or more every day. It usually takes decades of effort directly polluting the body with tobacco smoke before someone becomes seriously ill because of it. The idea that a whiff of smoke in the air, or a thin coat of smoky tar on the walls, can put us in mortal danger is just laughable. Or, at least, it would be if the health authorities weren’t so keen to pounce upon each new study as a justification for ever-greater restrictions on lighting up.

All advocacy "science" posits a bogey-man, a monster hiding in the cupboard about to spring out and devour. It dovetails nicely with the prevailing pessimistic world-view which sees demons everywhere, threatening to overpower and destroy us all. But junk science it is--and junk science it will remain. As Lyons puts it, junk science is nothing more nor less than institutional hypochondria. When junk science teams up with nannying bureaucrats we really do have a demon from the ancient world.

Anti-smoking is hypochondria-by-proxy, an obsessive compulsive disorder whose sufferers demand that the normal pastimes of others leave them under attack. Contrary to what Winickoff says, it is anti-smoking campaigners and our health guardians who need help - to quit their disgusting, illiberal, interfering, busybody habit once and for all.