Tobacco Documents Online

1 -2- Other business people are forced to build partitions to separate smokers and nonsmokers or face fines. An anti--smoking organization causes the expenditure of millions of taxpayer's dollars by forcing the Civil Aeronautics Board to go to court and then hold hearings to consider changes in a system for handling smokers and nonsmokers on airplanes that has already proven effective. A nightime soap opera star appears on television advocatip.g shoving fans in other people's faces. There are many more examples of questionable actions aimed at f smokers, but this list alone clearly shows that things have gone beyond the point of reason. Unlike the children's whispering game, the public smoking game is no fun for anyone except those few who.appear to take some delight in seeing millions of people become the victims of unfair discrimination. As syndicated columnist Lewis Grizzard wrote recently, "now ... smokers and nonsmokers have been partitioned off to the point that two friends, one who smokes and one who doesn't, may very well never be able to meet in public again." While Grizzard may have been exaggerating to make a point about things being carried to extremes, many of those victimized by the public smoking'whispering game may well feel his statement is already accurate in some places.

-7- The conclusion reached was that "A review of the data from the studies which have been carried out or are in progress•which address the effect of passive smoking on the respiratory system suggests that the effect varies from negligible to quite small. From this review, it is not possible to determine whether there is a specific group which is at increased risk or what the mechanism of the effect (if any) might be." Further evidence of the weakness of scientific arguments favoring public smoking restrictions came from an organization no 1 one would`consider a friend of smoking, the American Cancer Society. When Suffolk County, New York, was considering stringent public smoking regulations recently, newspaper reports said that a vice president of the ACS "emphasized that the society takes no position on public smoking bans because there is no scientific proof that nonsmokers are injured by smoking in their presence." Yet another indication of the fragile scientific support for public smoking restrictions can be found in Surgeon General's Reports, documents no one could consider favorable toward smoking. In both the 1979 and 1982 reports, the lack of proof 11 supporting any conclusion that nonsmokers are harmed by smoke was noted. Environmental tobacco smoke was not addressed in the 1983 report`, a representative of the Office of Smoking and Health said this was because there was insufficient evidence to support any conclusion on the matter. ,

-8- Surgeon General C. Everett Koop did have a chapter critical of passive smoking in his 1984 report, but the foundation-ior his statements was difficult to understand because they have been contradicted by several scientific symposiums on the subject in the last year, including those mentioned earlier in this ar cle ti As the Tobacco Institute said in response to the report,~ r. ' ` e by Koop seems to have disqualified himself from objective scien c reciting;the anti-smoking coalition's political objectives by rote. He is now lending his annual report ritual to the I anti-smok'ing lobby." A lack of objectivity on public smoking issues is by no means confined to Dr. Koop, however. In May, Dr. Art Ulene, who makes regular appearances on NBC's Today Show, attacked Reynolds Tobacco's issue advertisements concerning public smoking. The impression created by Dr. Ulene was that there was no doubt public smoking was harmful to nonsmokers. In fact, two weeks later commentator Jane Pauley introduced a debate on Ulene's statements by saying that Dr. Ulene had previously said that the vast majority of the evidence was that passive smoking causes disease. The later debate on the Today Show came about because Reynolds Tobacco challenged Dr. Ulene's statements, and asked environmental toxicologist Anthony V. Colucci, associate director of the division of risk analysis at California State University at Northridge, to present the other side of the environmental smoke issue.

-9- Contrary to the impression created by his earlier performance, when confronted by a scientist Dr. Ulene agreed that .-~_~_ the case against passive smoking was not pro3en:-- Indeed, in .__-_ response to a question he said that he could not scientifical1y---_____ say that smoking caused lung cancer, heart disease, or emphysema. When Pauley said viewers were waiting for someone to use the word cause, Dr. Ulene said he could not do so with a scientist sitting there. , Despite such scientific contradictions, reports and r conclusions, anti-smoking pressure groups continue to push regulatory bodies to enact public smoking restrictions based on protection of the public's health. And some officials continue to listgn as those in the public smoking whispering game continue to provide only one side of the issue. On the one hand, the result has been a growing number of burdensome, unenforceable laws dividing citizens. In San Francisco, for example, an employer may provide air purifiers, build partitions and segregate smokers and nonsmokers in different parts of an office. But if just one nonsmoker is unsatisfied, he or she can demand that smoking be banned no matter what the wishes of other employees may be. In some parts of the country, restaurants are forced to turn away smoking customers because the only available seats are in nonsmoking areas mandated by law. ,

-10- From the standpoint of enforceability, published comments indicate that many law enforcement personnel and legislatots would agree with a city council member in Tennessee who said, "When we can do something about people getting raped and mugged, then we can stop smoking." Or as an assistant police chief in California said, "We are telling our officers to give it the lowest priority. Unless an officer has absolutely nothing to he can't;go out and give someone a citation for smoking in an unauthorized area." 1 But perhaps more important, such laws foster an image of do, smokers as second-class citizens, social outcasts who must live under a different set of rules. It is difficult to believe that Americans would stand by and allow millions of their friends, neighbors and associates to be the targets of such discrimination, but it is happening. One of the most disturbing examples of the situation being faced by smokers is the decision by some employers to discriminate against smokers in hiring practices. An executive of an electronic tool company recently provided the following summary of his company's attitude in a newspaper article: "We simply dop't hire smokers. It may'be discriminatory, but it's a legal form of discrimination." History provides many examples of the results of this kind of thinking, and the fact that it is now being applied to those who choose to smoke should be no less troubling now than it should have been when applied to other groups of people in the past.. o 0 N m .. 0

., -4- There There is no better example of the publik receiving less than complete or distorted information on a smoking issue than-the controversy that has surrounded smoking in public places in si recent years~3 Since 1973, when the Arizona legislature passed the first law to limit public smoking based on reasons of health rather than fire protection, local, state and federal legislative and regulatory-bodies have faced a constant stream of proposed smoking restrictions. These restrictions are often passed f because anti-smoking activists are successful in convincing lawmakers that cigarette smoke in some way harms the nonsmoker.. I believe many people who have taken the time to study all sides of the issue must find enactment of public smoking % regulations for such reasons somewhat curio s~ i. c~e_even some of smoking's harshest critics have voiced doubts about any possible health effects on nonsmokers. An examination of some of the scientific "proof" that smoke harms nonsmokers provides ample evidence of why such skepticism exists. Two highly publicized 1981 studies have been frequently cited to support-claims that environmental cigarette smok,e increases the risk of lung cancer in nonsmokers. A Japanese study and a Greek study both suggested that nonsmoking wives of smokers have a higher risk of lung cancer than wives of nonsmokers. ,

-5- When these studies are used in attempts to demonstrate a need for restriction of public smoking, the fact that both have• received extensive scientific criticism is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Also largely ignored is the fact that Lawrence Garfinkel, the American Cancer Society's vice president for epidemiology and statistics, reported very different results in an ACS study. In research covering 180,000 American wives, a group larger than the Japanese and Greek studies combined, Garfinkel reported finding no significant increase in lung cancer r death rates among nonsmoking women married to smokers. In an interview on his study, Garfinkel said, "Passive smoking may be a political matter but it is not a main issue in terms of health policy." Another often cited study was reported in 1980 by a physical education instructor at the University of California at San Diego and a physician. They claimed that chronic exposure to tobacco smoke in the work environment significantly affected lung function in nonsmokers. Again, those who cite that study generally ignore the fact that it too has been criticized by a number of scientists. Perhaps the strongest criticism has come from Michael Lebowitz, a University of Arizona epidemiologist who was the co-author of the passive smoking chapter in the 1982 Surgeon General's report. r

-6- In 1984, in a statement filed with the Los Angeles County Public Health Commission, Lebowitz wrote: "Even with a•biased population, poor study design, and incorrect statistical evaluation," he wrote, "there were no clear-cut, consistent, medically meaningful (or believable) differences between passive smokers and nonsmokers." Perhaps the best summaries of the scientific findings on environmental tobacco smoke can be found in the reports of two scientific workshops held on the subject in'1983. Both meetings 1 included participants who have published strong anti-smoking views. The first workshop, held i Sweden t the University of Geneva,, heard new data and reviewed existing studies. Summing up the results of the meeting, the organizer said, "An overall evaluation based upon available scientific data leads to the conclusion that an increased risk (in lung cancer) for nonsmokers from environmental tobacco smoke exposure has not been established." The second workshop, sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service Division of Lung Diseases of the National Heart, Lung and B19od Institute, included 21 investigators from such fields as epidemiology, statistics and adult and pediatric pulmonary medicine. :

I . AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT G.H. LONG When we were children, most of us played the whispering game. We sat or stood in a line or circle while the first child turned to the next and whispered some message. That child in turn whispered the message to the next and so on until the last child in line shouted out the message the way he or she understoop it. The fun came in hearing just how garbled and twisted the message became, as it always did, as it passed from one kid to another. In-many ways the millions of people who today choose to smoke are not players, but victims, of a whispering game about public smoking. Anti-smokinP activists themselves admit that, ~/ln,~nRr`~ having fai.led to ' _ smoking with decades ~(~PS)r"Dn4/~t`f' of scare tactics, they are attempting to make smoking socially unacceptable and smokers appear to be second-class citizens. The difference between the situation faced by smokers and the children's game is that anti-smoking activists are in many cases starting the message, then running to the other end of the line to shout the garbled results loud and long to anyone who will listen. Questionable scientific studies are cited as "proof" that exposure to smoke harms the nonsmoker. Largely refuted statistics that are claimed to show that smoking workers cost businesses more than nonsmokers are misleading some employers into discriminating against smokers in hiring practices and spendli5, unnecessary dollars on smoking-related programs.

I The smoking worker controversy appears to have become an issue primarily because of a series of articles prepared by William L. Weis, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Seattle. In his articles, Weis concluded that total costs per smoker per year to an employer from absenteeism, insurance costs, disability payments and other factors are either $4,611 or $4,689, depending upon which of.his stories one reads. As is true in so many areas in the so-called case against smoking, a close examination of Weis' f claims re'veals that the whispering game is at work. Lewis C. Solmon, professor in the graduate school of education at UCLA said the'following of Weis's conclusions in an article in Personnel Administrator magazine. "Closer scrutiny of Weis' material reveals that his analysis is faulty and his conclusions are without merit. As Weis himself allows:. 'Skeptics might argue that these numbers are as soft as the underside of a porcupine, and that may be true.' Indeed, virtually every part of his estimate is unfounded and he compounds his errors by surveying those persons most against smoking." To support his conclusions, Solmon cites many questions about ~ Weis' methodology and contrary data that he apparently ignored. So as in the case of some officials and public smoking bans, it appears that some employers are willing to practice "legal discrimination" based on evidence that is highly questionable at best. ,