Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in! Though living in Portland I can’t completely resist the lure of DC, so I’ve joined the blogging team at the Washington Examiner. It’s good to get back to the policy writing I’ve been neglecting lately and publishing there it will reach a larger audience. I’ll link to most of the things I write for the Examiner on this blog too. If you’d like to subscribe to all Opinion Zone blog posts the RSS feed is here.
My first post takes a look at how anti-smoking researchers spin this chart into proof that England’s smoking ban saves lives:
The best they can come up with is to dubiously attribute a 2.4% decline in heart attacks to the smoking ban in the first year of its implementation. This is in stark contrast to the wild claims of 40, 27, and 18 percent in previous studies, which have been decisively revealed as junk science.
In the wake of this statistical drubbing you might think anti-smoking activists would learn not to attribute too much to secondhand smoke. Well, you would be wrong:
A new study published online ahead of print in the Archives of General Psychiatry concludes that secondhand smoke exposure is a cause of mental illness, including depression, psychoactive substance use, schizophrenia, delirium, and mental and behavioral disorder (see: Hamer M, Stamatakis E, Batty GD. Objectively assessed secondhand smoke exposure and mental health in adults.
Here we go again!
[Image courtesy of the always interesting Christopher Snowdon.]
Previously:
What really happened in Starkville?
An Oregon heart miracle?
Lazy reporting and the Pueblo ban study
Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
Follow me on Twitter
