Speaking outside the prison, Hogan said: ”I’m devastated to be sent to jail. The smoking ban has cost me my pub, my job and my liberty.
”I’d like to thank everyone who donated money to get me out of jail, and all the well-wishers who sent me cards and letters while I was behind bars. I can’t thank them enough.
”It’s wonderful to know that so many people feel as strongly as I do about the smoking ban and its impact on ordinary working people.”
Blogger Anna Raccoon said: ”Nick Hogan is free because ordinary, hard-working members of the public, smokers and non-smokers alike, dug deep in their pockets to raise the money to return this man to his wife and home.
”The fact that so many people responded is a powerful message from the voting public that politicians would be well advised to heed.”
Congratulations to Hogan, and hopefully the publicity from this case will help raise the profile of opposition to smoking bans.
The Washington Post reports that DC city councilman Jack Evans has succeeded in obtaining a waiver from the District’s smoking ban for two groups he personally favors:
Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) has asked his council colleagues to keep tradition alive for the all-male Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and another organization, Fight for Children, which hosts an annual smoke-filled professional boxing fundraiser.
Evans, who is a member of the Irish organization, said the measure was narrowly crafted, making an exception for only two nights a year and protecting workers by allowing venue employees to opt out of working the events.
But the bill has proponents of the District’s 2006 workplace smoking ban in a huff.
Angela Bradbery, co-founder of Smokefree DC, urged Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) in a letter Monday to veto the legislation that she said would force workers to choose between their health and a paycheck; open the door for other organizations to request exemptions; and send a message that “it’s okay to break the law if you’re on the council or a buddy of a council member.” [...]
Despite opposition from the smoke-free camp, he succeeded last week in passing a one-year waiver on a 10 to 3 vote. The bill initially failed to get the necessary nine votes, but Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) and Marion Barry (D-Ward 8 ) switched positions on a second try.
It’s a rare day that I agree with groups like Smokefree DC, but they’re right to oppose the exemptions. Jack Evans attempted to pass one for the Sons of St. Patrick last year as well, at which time I wrote:
Evans has discovered the pain of having one’s treasured tradition banned by a bunch of meddling bureaucrats. I’d be sympathetic if not for the fact that Evans is one of those meddling bureaucrats. If he doesn’t like the law, he should introduce changes that open up smoking venues to everyone, not just to clubs that happen to have a city councilman in their membership.
In 2005, Evans voted for the DC smoking ban that took away the rights of business owners, employees, and patrons to determine tobacco policies by voluntary exchange.
In the past year alarmist studies about “thirdhand smoke,” the particles left behind from tobacco combustion, have proliferated. There’s no evidence such residuals are actually causing cancer but that hasn’t stopped anti-smoking activists and journalists from running with the story. Michael Siegel has recently spotted a couple ways this research has been abused to discriminate against smokers. First there’s the “sniff test” policy now in place at Kimball Physics, a technology company in New Hampshire:
No tobacco-residuals emitting person, article of clothing, or other object is allowed inside any Kimball Physics building. This restriction also applies to anyone or anything emitting characteristic tobacco odors. Anyone who has used a tobacco product within the previous two hours is automatically to be turned away, unless measures have been taken such that residuals-sensitive persons are not exposed. The determining factor, regarding allowable residuals levels and/or exposure durations, is whether anyone is either significantly bothered, or even worse, made ill.
This is an absurd policy and it should come as no surprise that the person who created it is a board member of the extremist anti-tobacco group Action on Smoking and Health. Nonetheless it creates a precedent that less fanatical employers might decide to follow.
Speaking of ASH, Siegel also catches them advocating bans on smokers adopting or fostering children. From ASH’s press release:
Midlothian Council in the U.K. is just the latest entity to prohibit smokers from adopting or providing foster care for children, a step Portsmouth, Hants, in England and other jurisdictions took several years ago, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf, Executive Director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH). Anyone wanting to care for a child under the age of five will be required not to have smoked for at least six months, even if they only smoke outdoors. [...]
… thirdhand tobacco smoke, what the New York Times called “the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers’ hair and clothing,” has just been reported by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to combine with a common indoor air pollutant to form very potent cancer causing substances. This, the researchers say, places children at serious risk, even if parents smoke only outside the home, because they carry the residues inside with them.
I criticized that Times article when it came out last year for taking such a credulous approach to the “thirdhand smoke” study it covered, buying into the researchers’ hype despite the fact that the study consisted of nothing but a phone survey. At the time the author couldn’t have known that her words and the reputation of the paper would be used to deny children foster care, but that’s how low the anti-smoking movement has sunk. Reporters need to realize that today’s anti-tobacco researchers should be treated with just as much skepticism as the Big Tobacco-funded scientists of the pre-Master Settlement days.
Having recently banned smoking in its restaurants, North Carolina is now considering a rule change to allow pets on restaurant patios:
North Carolina health officials are proposing a rule change that would let pets come to the table at outdoor restaurants as long as they don’t go inside or do anything else that might contaminate people’s food. [...]
On the other hand, some people don’t think restaurants should open their al fresco seating to patrons who scratch, pant, lick themselves and eat indiscriminately off the ground.
Dyrl Wood of Smithfield, an empty nester now, wrote the state to support Wake’s dog ban, though he had a Brittany spaniel for years.
“But we didn’t take the Brittany spaniel out to eat,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “My view is that you can have them and love them and care for them, and when you go out to eat you can bring them some scraps to have when you come home.
“But don’t require other people to dine with them. It’s unappetizing.”
If the rule change is approved, restaurant owners will be allowed to decide for themselves whether or not to allow pets on their patios. What a concept! It’s amazing how foreign the idea of having diverse policies is to some people. If they don’t like pets, pets shouldn’t be allowed at a single restaurant in the entire state. If they don’t like smoking, smoking needs to be banned. That’s the problem with deciding these matters politically: The “right” decision is forced onto everyone, leaving people who have different preferences with no venues in which to act on them.
For the record, this blog is pro-pooches on patios.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading related to tobacco policy in preparation for some upcoming writing projects…
Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking, Christopher Snowdon — I link to Chris’ blog of the same name frequently here. He’s one of the best critics of paternalist excesses writing today and one of the few journalists exposing the shoddy science put out by many anti-tobacco researchers. His book-length review of the anti-smoking movement goes back all the way to Columbus and is essential for putting the current movement in historical context. His coverage of secondhand smoke and bibliography of ETS papers is also very valuable. Highly recommended and lively written.
Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, Richard Kluger — A 700+ page doorstop of a book chronicling the history of the American cigarette business. Though a little dated by its publication prior to the Master Settlement Agreement, the book presents a remarkably balanced view of the players involved. Though by no means a tobacco apologist, Kluger manages to portray Big Tobacco executives with enough sympathy to make them human and sometimes admirable businessmen working in an embattled industry. Reformers, too, are shown in a balanced light. (Only John Banzhaf appears completely without redeeming qualities; he manages to come off as an ass no matter who is profiling him.)
Kluger fairly describes the progress of science, from when tobacco companies could legitimately claim skepticism of cigarettes’ health effects to when their denials became absurd. Similar scrutiny is given to the overblown claims of secondhand smoke by their opposition. In the final pages he even comes close to predicting the MSA, though in the details he fails to guess how the tobacco companies would use it to raise prices and create a legally protected cartel.
Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene M. Heyman — The title is a bit off-putting, suggesting that the book accuses addicts of choosing to have their disorder. That’s inaccurate. Heyman, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, is actually offering an economic model of addiction, explaining substance abuse in terms of individual decisions and the way they can be distorted by addictive substances. Specifically, addictive substances tend to offer immediate benefits and long-term costs (exacerbated by withdrawal symptoms), to induce intoxication, and to undermine the value of more productive activities, all making habitual use hard to break.
Heyman is primarily concerned with illegal drugs but cigarettes do get a mention as a partial exception to the pattern. They don’t intoxicate the user and don’t interfere too much with other valuable activities, making the choice to smoke in any given situation very easy. This suggests that a useful approach to treating cigarette addiction would be to develop safer products that fill the same niche. This perspective is of special interest now given the development of e-cigarettes and research suggesting that nicotine alone can only partially explain cigarette addiction.
Though bans just get worse here in the US and UK, they’re still meeting resistance elsewhere. Bulgaria is having second thoughts:
Bulgaria’s ruling party has proposed watering down a new smoking ban in the country with the second highest percentage of smokers in the European Union.
The centre-right GERB party, which won general elections last July, said its proposed relaxation of a ban on smoking in all public places would avoid hurting the tourist industry during tough economic times. [...]
According to a draft submitted to parliament, restaurants and cafes smaller than 100 square metres (1,000 sq ft) in size will decide whether to allow smoking while larger establishments would be required to designate separate non-smoking halls.
Old tobacco smoke does more than simply make a room smell stale — it can leave cancer-causing toxins behind, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.
They 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, available here.
Of course there are policy implications:
James Pankow, who also worked on the study, said it may raise questions about the safety of electronic cigarettes, or “e-cigarettes.” which produce a nicotine vapor but not smoke.
The researchers said regulators who have cracked down on second-hand smoke with smoking bans may decide to consider policies on third-hand smoke.
That nicotine works on surfaces in this way is interesting from an abstract, scientific point of view. What the article fails to mention is that there is essentially no evidence that anyone, anywhere, has ever suffered from exposure to so-called “thirdhand smoke.” The reason these carcinogens are so deadly to cigarette smokers is that smokers inhale them deeply through their mouths directly into sensitive lung tissues dozens of times per day. Exposure from surfaces or from dust inhalation through the nose is going to be far less substantial.
Nonetheless, you probably shouldn’t wrap your infant in smoky blankets. Fair enough. But spreading paranoia about thirdhand smoke has significant negative consequences. We’ve already seen employers discriminate against smokers using these fears as justification. And if this research is used to back legislation against e-cigarettes — devices that are unequivocally safer to smoke than actual tobacco — that will be a blow to public health.
Unfortunately journalists tend to be extremely credulous of any research that condemns tobacco and its related products. Last year The New York Timesgave significant coverage to a thirdhand smoke study that consisted entirely of conducting a telephone poll of random people. Soon after Scientific American published an uncritical interview with the study’s author, Jonathan Winickoff, who said in an unmeasured words, “Smokers themselves are also contaminated…smokers actually emit toxins.”
If reporters are going to cover these sorts of stories, they owe it to readers to put the actual risks in proper perspective.
Update: Since writing this some debate has gone back and forth on Twitter among science writer Lene Johansen, Jeff Stier at the American Counsel on Science and Health, and Reuters health editor Ivan Oransky. Since Twitter isn’t the most conducive format for extended comments I thought I’d clarify here why I object to the article.
The problem is not that this is junk science or that it shouldn’t be covered. The problem is that people reading the article aren’t interested in the abstract question of how nicotine reacts with other chemicals on a household surface. What they want to know is whether tobacco residue presents a real health hazard to them and whether there are policy implications stemming from the research.
A layman reading about all the carcinogens mentioned in the article would conclude that the health hazard is real. Given the dosages involved this belief is likely false and is certainly unproven. As science journalism, the article fails to give readers the context they need to make sense of the research.
As for policy, the article itself notes that the research is bound up with political goals. The findings may be used to justify such measures as employment discrimination, bans on e-cigarettes, and further restrictions on smokers. This makes providing the proper context doubly important. There are plenty of reputable skeptics of these measures and at the very least the article could have quoted one.
It would also increase taxes on smokeless tobacco and cigars, generating $15 million for the state. (Administration officials said a $2 cigar that now costs $2.76 would jump to $4.46.)
As cigarette taxes hit their maximum and states lose revenue to SCHIP, they’re going to turn to other forms of tobacco. This will leave cigars especially vulnerable. They can’t be smoked quickly like cigarettes, making them much harder to consume under smoking bans. Nor do they enjoy the cartel protections of the Master Settlement Agreement.
The Stogie Guys have the scoop on a private cigar club opening soon in Alexandria, VA, in the wake of the state’s smoking ban:
[...] CXIII Rex will have all the amenities of traditional cigar lounges, including a well-stocked walk-in humidor, a selection of top libations and small-batch wines, ample seating, wireless internet, private humidor lockers, and the like. But this club, slated to open in late March, will also feature more luxurious accommodations. Included will be a state-of-the-art air ventilation system, an access-only elevator, an all-female wait staff, and a private cigar blend crafted by none other than Rocky Patel. [...]
Individual memberships, as you might expect from a club of this caliber, are not inexpensive. The cost is $5,000 to join CXIII Rex and $100 each month thereafter. Franco and Noe tell me that 200 slots are available, with 160 already claimed for. If, like me, this is above your price range, or if you reside outside the Washington metro area, you still have to appreciate the high attention to detail and passion that’s going in to creating a premier cigar lounge. I haven’t seen anything like it before.
Some of this sounds great, some of it a little gauche. (Is touting an all-female wait staff really necessary? It doesn’t exactly challenge the stereotype of the rich, male, self-important cigar smoker.) But what’s significant is that this business can exist at all. The Virginia smoking ban, as misguided as it is, at least allows for a market response. Dedicated lounges where smokers can congregate without offending others are free to open. This is in stark contrast to states like Oregon where the right to allow smoking in one’s bar is limited only to the favored few who happened to do so when a ban was passed.
Salem cigar shop owner Saadeh Hadeed was confronted in February by the Marion County Department of Human Services for the simple purpose of needing to file for an exemption to the smoking ban put into effect in January 2009. Soon after filing his application with the department, he received a letter from DHS telling him that his request for an exemption was denied. This questionable decision was because the business, Aava Cigar and Wine, was not seen as “stand alone,” meaning that it is connected to other businesses in the area.
Yet, the smoke shop was originally built as a “stand alone” store and encompassed later by Lancaster Mall with only a single entrance opening to one of the mall’s courtyards and the remaining entrances opening to the outside area. The business also has a three-fan ventilation system to redirect smoke from the store to be released outside, above the roof of the shop. Since finding out that an exemption was needed for Aava’s, the shop has not allowed smoking on its premises, bringing sales down by $1,200 to $1,400 a week.
I have an op/ed in today’s Oregonianarguing for amendments to the state smoking ban. The law is supposed to exempt cigar bars, but as written the requirements are so pointlessly strict that very few places qualify.
Previously: Semi-coincidentally, I had another anti-ban op/ed in the Oregonian exactly one year ago. Here’s a piece from a month later describing the last night of legal smoking at the Horse Brass. And if you think Oregon’s smoking ban is preventing thousands of heart attacks, read this.
(Also, why the hell does the O insist on cropping columnist photos so close? I intentionally sent in a correctly proportioned photo so they wouldn’t have to mess with it, but mess with it they do.)
A few months ago newspapers eagerly picked up news of a meta-analysis of smoking ban studies finding that bans were associated with a 17% decline in heart attack rates in their first year. Will any of them report this whopper of a correction?
As it turns out, the study findings were due to a careless error. In the original study, the authors had inadvertently reported the Pueblo study has having reported a 70% reduction in heart attacks (a result that is completely implausible and clearly should have been noticed as having been in error). Instead, that study actually reported a 34% reduction in heart attacks. The meta-analysis authors published a correction in which they re-analyzed the correct data.
It turns out that the 11 studies did not find a 17% reduction in heart attacks, but only found an 8% reduction in heart attacks.
This level of decline in admissions for heart attacks is obviously not significantly different from the levels of decline in heart attacks that are being observed in the absence of smoking bans, which have varied between 5% and 10% per year in many communities.
That’s from Michael Siegel, of course, one of the few anti-smoking researchers defending scientific accuracy.
The shoddiness of the science behind the claims of rapid drops in AMI rates following smoking bans never ceases to amaze, nor does journalists’ willingness to report on it uncritically.
For more on the extremely flawed Pueblo study, see here.
That’s the bad news coming out of Detroit Lansing. The legislature has been wanting to ban smoking for years, the roadblock being debate about which lucky few should be fortunate enough to remain free to set their own smoking policies:
Michigan has moved one step closer to having a statewide, workplace smoking ban with the news that a leading Republican lawmaker has the votes to approve such a bill, the Detroit News reports. The bill would exempt Detroit casinos, cigar bars and tobacco stores from the smoking ban.
The fight that ensued over this issue in Washington is a telling example. Before our ban was passed, City Councilwoman Carol Schwartz introduced a compromise that would have provided tax breaks to smoke-free businesses, increased fees for those that allow smoking and required smoke-friendly establishments to install expensive ventilation systems.
If the council’s goal had truly been to provide workers with more options, the Schwartz proposal would have done that. But predictably, her sensible compromise was roundly ignored in favor of a citywide ban. The lawmakers in Lansing are taking a similarly excessive approach.
The good news for nonsmoking Michiganders is that business owners are already curtailing smoking in response to consumer preferences, just as they were in Washington before our ban took effect. A glance at the Web site of Michigan Citizens for Smokefree Air reveals 3,500 restaurants in Michigan are smoke-free. As tolerance for tobacco smoke continues to wane, more and more managers will see the benefits of joining them.
The Daily Postreports that new figures soon to be released by Wales’ Chief Medical Officer will show that heart rates have dropped in the region during the second year of its smoking ban. I look forward to seeing those figures, but the close of the article is particularly striking:
There was a 12.5% fall in the number of patients admitted to hospital with a heart attack between October and December last year, compared to the same period in 2006, before the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces was introduced in Wales: some NHS trusts have seen the number of heart attacks fall by up to 40% in the same period.
See anything suspicious there? To my knowledge there isn’t anyone promoting the theory that smoking bans only reduce heart attacks in the final three months of the year. So why focus on just that time period?
The answer is that cherry-picking those 3 months supports ban proponents’ predetermined conclusion. As Christopher Snowdon has shown with the government’s own data, the rate of AMI actually rose slightly during the year the ban took effect and there were more heart attacks in the 5 months immediately following the ban than there were in those same months the year before. Overall there was practically no difference in the AMI rate between the two years, which is surprising since Wales’ rate of heart attacks had been on a downward trend. A fair reading of all the data is that the ban had no discernible effect, yet the story told by activists and mindlessly repeated by reporters is that the ban caused a reduction in heart attacks.
Such a weird statistic should have immediately raised flags for a journalist. A quick search on Google for the words “Wales,” “smoking ban,” and “heart attacks” would have revealed why the figure was selected. Unfortunately Post reporter Tom Bodden took it at face value, so readers don’t get the full story and the misleading statistic is propagated even more widely.
As Snowdon notes, the Welsh rate of AMI has been falling in recent years by as much as 10% per year. The fact that it didn’t fall in the year smoking was banned is an anomaly. My guess is that in the report about to be issued the rate will have resumed its previous decline and, in a classic case of conflating correlation with causation, researchers will credit the drop solely to the smoking ban.
It will be up the to journalists covering the report to treat it with skepticism, ask tough questions, and at the very least seek out a critical source before phoning in their stories. I’m not optimistic that they will.
Update 12/7/09: My prediction seems to be too optimistic. Chris decided to check the data again today and it turns out that the heart attack rate in Wales actually increased last year. So how will the upcoming report show that it declined? Well, that will be interesting to find out!
The ban, which affected all workplaces, including restaurants but excluding bars, went into effect on March 1, 2006. Had the smoking ban resulted in an immediate decline in heart attacks, as claimed by a number of anti-smoking groups and researchers and by a special Institute of Medicine committee, one would have expected the heart disease death rate in Marion County to have decreased in 2006, compared to 2005.
Data from the Marion County Health Department, however, show that the age-adjusted heart disease death rate for Marion County actually increased by 16% from 2005 to 2006, going from 171.0 to 197.6 deaths per 100,000 population.
This reversed a trend of declining heart disease death rates prior to the smoking ban. The rate had declined by 4.4% from 2002 to 2003, by 6.0% from 2003 to 2004, and by 5.8% from 2004 to 2005. Thus, the increase of 16% observed from 2005 to 2006 was a striking increase that coincided precisely with the implementation of the workplace and restaurant smoking ban.
Of course the ban didn’t actually cause the increase any more than bans in other cities caused the decreases so often hyped by anti-smoking advocates. And if the death rate can fluctuate this much in Indianapolis, a city of nearly 800,000, then the odds of getting meaningful data out of towns like Starkville, MS, Pueblo, CO, and Helena, MT are pretty damn low.* The fact that ban advocates cling so tightly to those success stories is an indication of just how the weak the association between bans and decreases in AMI really is.
*Those studies used overall rates of AMI rather than the rate of AMI deaths, but the two rates should move in tandem.
Tonight is the last night to smoke legally in most Virginia bars and restaurants before the ban takes effect tomorrow. A round-up of previous coverage:
Should Ohio’s smoking ban ever have been put on the ballot? Opponents of Ohio Bans’ Pam Parker says no:
See more in the Columbus Dispatch. It’s unlikely that the investigation alone will result in a reversal of the ban, but it’s good to see opponents publicizing their work.
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.
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.
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