WU backs countywide smoking ban bill
Posted August 7, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Updated August 7, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Nearly four months after announcing a tobacco ban for all of its campuses, Washington University backed a St. Louis County Council bill on Tuesday that would put a countywide, public indoor smoking ban on the November ballot.
Robert Blaine, medical public policy specialist at the School of Medicine, said at Tuesday’s council meeting that the University applauded the council “for tackling the important public health issue of clean indoor air.”
“We encourage the council to keep this issue moving forward and to place a smoking ban that is as broad and as comprehensive as possible on the November ballot,” Blaine told the council. “We believe all individuals deserve the right to work in an environment free of secondhand smoke.”
The bill, sponsored by Councilwoman Barbara Fraser, D-University City, would put a smoking ban for all indoor public places in the county except bars and casinos on the November ballot.
The council voted 4-3 on Tuesday to move forward with the bill, and a final vote was to occur on Aug. 18.
But Fraser said Friday that the council will reintroduce the bill next Tuesday due to a procedural problem this past Tuesday that could open the bill to a legal challenge. The decision pushes a potential final vote to Aug. 25, likely causing the council to miss the deadline that same day for putting items on the ballot. In such a case, if County Executive Charles Dooley then signs the measure, the County Council must get a court order to put the measure on the ballot.
Fraser originally wanted a bill with no exemptions for casinos and bars, but that version did not have enough support from the seven-member council.
The University’s support for a countywide ban comes after the school announced a tobacco ban for all of its campuses, effective in July 2010.
While some in the school community praised the ban, others criticized the administration for approving the ban without student input. Student Union Senate passed a resolution late last school year objecting to the lack of student input.
Blaine was one of about 65 people to address the council at the heated three-hour meeting.
Supporters of the bill said a ban would improve public health by reducing patrons and workers’ exposure to secondhand smoke. Supporters maintained that a ban would not harm local businesses but attract some new customers, who avoid those places because they allow smoking.
Opponents, meanwhile, said that a ban would drive business away from the county and force some businesses to close. Opponents also said the ban would violate business owners’ right to choose whether to allow smoking.
Smoking bans have popped up across the region this summer. Clayton approved a public indoor smoking ban in July with no exemptions. Clayton’s ban goes into effect in July 2010.
Other cities considering bans include St. Louis, Kirkwood and Wildwood. St. Louis’ ban would go into effect only if St. Louis County approves its own.
Read Student Life this fall for full details on this story.
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On August 7, 2009 at 12:48 pm Bob said
Be careful of the fine print on the ballot. The tax exempt American Cancer Society paid for lawyers to remove Ohios exemptions AFTER they were voter approved. If they got away with it once, you know they’ll do it again. “Thank you American Cancer Society, we never knew all you do” The private vets clubs of Ohio know what they do. I’m sure they are remembering them with with their donations.and estate plans.
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2007/04/30/smoking.html
On August 8, 2009 at 1:39 pm HARLEYRIDER1978 said
THE AIR ACCORDING TO OSHA
Though repetition has little to do with “the truth,” we’re repeatedly told that there’s “no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.”
OSHA begs to differ.
OSHA has established PELs (Permissible Exposure Levels) for all the measurable chemicals, including the 40 alleged carcinogens, in secondhand smoke. PELs are levels of exposure for an 8-hour workday from which, according to OSHA, no harm will result.
Of course the idea of “thousands of chemicals” can itself sound spooky. Perhaps it would help to note that coffee contains over 1000 chemicals, 19 of which are known to be rat carcinogens.
-”Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities” Gold Et Al., Science, 258: 261-65 (1992)
There. Feel better?
As for secondhand smoke in the air, OSHA has stated outright that:
“Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)…It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded.”
-Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec’y, OSHA, To Leroy J Pletten, PHD, July 8, 1997
Indeed it would.
Independent health researchers have done the chemistry and the math to prove how very very rare that would be.
As you’re about to see in a moment.
In 1999, comments were solicited by the government from an independent Public and Health Policy Research group, Littlewood & Fennel of Austin, Tx, on the subject of secondhand smoke.
Using EPA figures on the emissions per cigarette of everything measurable in secondhand smoke, they compared them to OSHA’s PELs.
The following excerpt and chart are directly from their report and their Washington testimony:
CALCULATING THE NON-EXISTENT RISKS OF ETS
“We have taken the substances for which measurements have actually been obtained–very few, of course, because it’s difficult to even find these chemicals in diffuse and diluted ETS.
“We posit a sealed, unventilated enclosure that is 20 feet square with a 9 foot ceiling clearance.
“Taking the figures for ETS yields per cigarette directly from the EPA, we calculated the number of cigarettes that would be required to reach the lowest published “danger” threshold for each of these substances. The results are actually quite amusing. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a situation where these threshold limits could be realized.
“Our chart (Table 1) illustrates each of these substances, but let me report some notable examples.
“For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes would be required to reach the lowest published “danger” threshold.
“For Acetone, 118,000 cigarettes would be required.
“Toluene would require 50,000 packs of simultaneously smoldering cigarettes.
“At the lower end of the scale– in the case of Acetaldehyde or Hydrazine, more than 14,000 smokers would need to light up simultaneously in our little room to reach the threshold at which they might begin to pose a danger.
“For Hydroquinone, “only” 1250 cigarettes are required. Perhaps we could post a notice limiting this 20-foot square room to 300 rather tightly-packed people smoking no more than 62 packs per hour?
“Of course the moment we introduce real world factors to the room — a door, an open window or two, or a healthy level of mechanical air exchange (remember, the room we’ve been talking about is sealed) achieving these levels becomes even more implausible.
“It becomes increasingly clear to us that ETS is a political, rather than scientific, scapegoat.”
Chart (Table 1)
-”Toxic Toxicology” Littlewood & Fennel
Coming at OSHA from quite a different angle is litigator (and how!) John Banzhaf, founder and president of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).
Banzhaf is on record as wanting to remove healthy children from intact homes if one of their family smokes. He also favors national smoking bans both indoors and out throughout America, and has litigation kits for sale on how to get your landlord to evict your smoking neighbors.
Banzhaf originally wanted OSHA to ban smoking in all American workplaces.
It’s not even that OSHA wasn’t happy to play along; it’s just that–darn it — they couldn’t find the real-world science to make it credible.
So Banzhaf sued them. Suing federal agencies to get them to do what you want is, alas, a new trick in the political deck of cards. But OSHA, at least apparently, hung tough.
In response to Banzhaf’s law suit they said the best they could do would be to set some official standards for permissible levels of smoking in the workplace.
Scaring Banzhaf, and Glantz and the rest of them to death.
Permissible levels? No, no. That would mean that OSHA, officially, said that smoking was permitted. That in fact, there were levels (hard to exceed, as we hope we’ve already shown) that were generally safe.
This so frightened Banzhaf that he dropped the case. Here are excerpts from his press release:
“ASH has agreed to dismiss its lawsuit against OSHA…to avoid serious harm to the non-smokers rights movement from adverse action OSHA had threatened to take if forced by the suit to do it….developing some hypothetical [ASH's characterization] measurement of smoke pollution that might be a better remedy than prohibiting smoking….[T]his could seriously hurt efforts to pass non-smokers’ rights legislation at the state and local level…
Another major threat was that, if the agency were forced by ASH’s suit to promulgate a rule regulating workplace smoking, [it] would be likely to pass a weak one…. This weak rule in turn could preempt future and possibly even existing non-smokers rights laws– a risk no one was willing to take.
As a result of ASH’s dismissal of the suit, OSHA will now withdraw its rule-making proceedings but will do so without using any of the damaging [to Anti activists] language they had threatened to include.”
-ASH Nixes OSHA Suit To Prevent Harm To Movement
Looking on the bright side, Banzhaf concludes:
“We might now be even more successful in persuading states and localities to ban smoking on their own, once they no longer have OSHA rule-making to hide behind.”
Once again, the Anti-Smoking Movement reveals that it’s true motive is basically Prohibition (stopping smokers from smoking; making them “social outcasts”) –not “safe air.”
And the attitude seems to be, as Stanton Glantz says, if the science doesn’t “help” you, don’t do the science.
On August 8, 2009 at 1:39 pm HARLEYRIDER1978 said
Mississippi Legislature
2008 Regular Session
House Bill 282
House Calendar | Senate Calendar | Main Menu
Additional Information | All Versions
Current Bill Text: |
Description: Food establishments; prohibit from serving food to any person who is obese.
Background Information:
Disposition: Active
Deadline: General Bill/Constitutional Amendment
Revenue: No
Vote type required: Majority
Effective date: July 1, 2008
History of Actions:
1 01/25 (H) Referred To Public Health and Human Services;Judiciary B
—– Additional Information —–
House Committee: Public Health and Human Services*, Judiciary B
Principal Author: Mayhall
Additional Authors: Read, Shows
Title: AN ACT TO PROHIBIT CERTAIN FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FROM SERVING FOOD TO ANY PERSON WHO IS OBESE, BASED ON CRITERIA PRESCRIBED BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO PREPARE WRITTEN MATERIALS THAT DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN THE CRITERIA FOR DETERMINING WHETHER A PERSON IS OBESE AND TO PROVIDE THOSE MATERIALS TO THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO MONITOR THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FOR COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THIS ACT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.
—– Bill Text for All Versions —-
| As Introduced (Current)
Information pertaining to this measure was last updated on 01/29/2008 at 11:24
End Of Document
On August 8, 2009 at 1:40 pm HARLEYRIDER1978 said
FOX NEWS ARTICLE
March 8, 1998
Passive smoking doesn’t cause cancer – official By Victoria Macdonald Health Correspondent
THE world’s leading health organization has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect.
The astounding results are set to throw wide open the debate on passive smoking health risks. The World Health Organization, which commissioned the 12-centre, seven-country European study has failed to make the findings public, and has instead produced only a summary of the results in an internal report.
Despite repeated approaches, nobody at the WHO headquarters in Geneva would comment on the findings last week. At its International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon , France , which coordinated the study, a spokesman would say only that the full report had been submitted to a science journal and no publication date had been set.
The findings are certain to be an embarrassment to the WHO, which has spent years and vast sums on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns. The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking – or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) – and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups.
Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer. The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers.
The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: “There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood.”
A spokesman for Action on Smoking and Health said the findings “seem rather surprising given the evidence from other major reviews on the subject which have shown a clear association between passive smoking and a number of diseases.” Roy Castle, the jazz musician and television presenter who died from lung cancer in 1994, claimed that he contracted the disease from years of inhaling smoke while performing in pubs and clubs.
A report published in the British Medical Journal last October was hailed by the anti-tobacco lobby as definitive proof when it claimed that non-smokers living with smokers had a 25 per cent risk of developing lung cancer. But yesterday, Dr Chris Proctor, head of science for BAT Industries, the tobacco group, said the findings had to be taken seriously. “If this study cannot find any statistically valid risk you have to ask if there can be any risk at all.
“It confirms what we and many other scientists have long believed, that while smoking in public may be annoying to some non-smokers, the science does not show that being around a smoker is a lung-cancer risk.” The WHO study results come at a time when the British Government has made clear its intention to crack down on smoking in thousands of public places, including bars and restaurants.
On August 8, 2009 at 1:41 pm HARLEYRIDER1978 said
Scientific Evidence Shows Secondhand Smoke Is No Danger
Written By: Jerome Arnett, Jr., M.D.
Published In: Environment & Climate News
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
Exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) is an unpleasant experience for many nonsmokers, and for decades was considered a nuisance. But the idea that it might actually cause disease in nonsmokers has been around only since the 1970s.
Recent surveys show more than 80 percent of Americans now believe secondhand smoke is harmful to nonsmokers.
Federal Government Reports
A 1972 U.S. surgeon general’s report first addressed passive smoking as a possible threat to nonsmokers and called for an anti-smoking movement. The issue was addressed again in surgeon generals’ reports in 1979, 1982, and 1984.
A 1986 surgeon general’s report concluded involuntary smoking caused lung cancer, but it offered only weak epidemiological evidence to support the claim. In 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was charged with further evaluating the evidence for health effects of SHS.
In 1992 EPA published its report, “Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking,” claiming SHS is a serious public health problem, that it kills approximately 3,000 nonsmoking Americans each year from lung cancer, and that it is a Group A carcinogen (like benzene, asbestos, and radon).
The report has been used by the tobacco-control movement and government agencies, including public health departments, to justify the imposition of thousands of indoor smoking bans in public places.
Flawed Assumptions
EPA’s 1992 conclusions are not supported by reliable scientific evidence. The report has been largely discredited and, in 1998, was legally vacated by a federal judge.
Even so, the EPA report was cited in the surgeon general’s 2006 report on SHS, where then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona made the absurd claim that there is no risk-free level of exposure to SHS.
For its 1992 report, EPA arbitrarily chose to equate SHS with mainstream (or firsthand) smoke. One of the agency’s stated assumptions was that because there is an association between active smoking and lung cancer, there also must be a similar association between SHS and lung cancer.
But the problem posed by SHS is entirely different from that found with mainstream smoke. A well-recognized toxicological principle states, “The dose makes the poison.”
Accordingly, we physicians record direct exposure to cigarette smoke by smokers in the medical record as “pack-years smoked” (packs smoked per day times the number of years smoked). A smoking history of around 10 pack-years alerts the physician to search for cigarette-caused illness. But even those nonsmokers with the greatest exposure to SHS probably inhale the equivalent of only a small fraction (around 0.03) of one cigarette per day, which is equivalent to smoking around 10 cigarettes per year.
Low Statistical Association
Another major problem is that the epidemiological studies on which the EPA report is based are statistical studies that can show only correlation and cannot prove causation.
One statistical method used to compare the rates of a disease in two populations is relative risk (RR). It is the rate of disease found in the exposed population divided by the rate found in the unexposed population. An RR of 1.0 represents zero increased risk. Because confounding and other factors can obscure a weak association, in order even to suggest causation a very strong association must be found, on the order of at least 300 percent to 400 percent, which is an RR of 3.0 to 4.0.
For example, the studies linking direct cigarette smoking with lung cancer found an incidence in smokers of 20 to around 40 times that in nonsmokers, an association of 2000 percent to 4000 percent, or an RR of 20.0 to 40.0.
Scientific Principles Ignored
An even greater problem is the agency’s lowering of the confidence interval (CI) used in its report. Epidemiologists calculate confidence intervals to express the likelihood a result could happen just by chance. A CI of 95 percent allows a 5 percent possibility that the results occurred only by chance.
Before its 1992 report, EPA had always used epidemiology’s gold standard CI of 95 percent to measure statistical significance. But because the U.S. studies chosen for the report were not statistically significant within a 95 percent CI, for the first time in its history EPA changed the rules and used a 90 percent CI, which doubled the chance of being wrong.
This allowed it to report a statistically significant 19 percent increase of lung cancer cases in the nonsmoking spouses of smokers over those cases found in nonsmoking spouses of nonsmokers. Even though the RR was only 1.19–an amount far short of what is normally required to demonstrate correlation or causality–the agency concluded this was proof SHS increased the risk of U.S. nonsmokers developing lung cancer by 19 percent.
EPA Study Soundly Rejected
In November 1995 after a 20-month study, the Congressional Research Service released a detailed analysis of the EPA report that was highly critical of EPA’s methods and conclusions. In 1998, in a devastating 92-page opinion, Federal Judge William Osteen vacated the EPA study, declaring it null and void. He found a culture of arrogance, deception, and cover-up at the agency.
Osteen noted, “First, there is evidence in the record supporting the accusation that EPA ‘cherry picked’ its data. … In order to confirm its hypothesis, EPA maintained its standard significance level but lowered the confidence interval to 90 percent. This allowed EPA to confirm its hypothesis by finding a relative risk of 1.19, albeit a very weak association. … EPA cannot show a statistically significant association between [SHS] and lung cancer.”
In 2003 a definitive paper on SHS and lung cancer mortality was published in the British Medical Journal. It is the largest and most detailed study ever reported. The authors studied more than 35,000 California never-smokers over a 39-year period and found no statistically significant association between exposure to SHS and lung cancer mortality.
Propaganda Trumps Science
The 1992 EPA report is an example of the use of epidemiology to promote belief in an epidemic instead of to investigate one. It has damaged the credibility of EPA and has tainted the fields of epidemiology and public health.
In addition, influential anti-tobacco activists, including prominent academics, have unethically attacked the research of eminent scientists in order to further their ideological and political agendas.
The abuse of scientific integrity and the generation of faulty “scientific” outcomes (through the use of pseudoscience) have led to the deception of the American public on a grand scale and to draconian government overregulation and the squandering of public money.
Millions of dollars have been spent promoting belief in SHS as a killer, and more millions of dollars have been spent by businesses in order to comply with thousands of highly restrictive bans, while personal choice and freedom have been denied to millions of smokers. Finally, and perhaps most tragically, all this has diverted resources away from discovering the true cause(s) of lung cancer in nonsmokers.
Dr. Jerome Arnett Jr. (jerry.arnett@gmail.com) is a pulmonologist who lives in Helvetia,
On August 16, 2009 at 1:14 am 2009 said
WashU students – as a recent grad who moved to a city with a smoking ban, let me tell you: you will love this law. No longer will your clothes smell awful after a night at Blue Hill, Morgan Street, or any other bar in St. Louis.
On August 19, 2009 at 1:51 pm David said
@2009 , did you miss the part where it says bars would be exempt? And that St. Louis City (where Morgan Street is located) isn’t even part of St. Louis County?