Tobacco Documents Online

WedIIesday, Attgust 11, 1993 i~e~alia~ijporaing~lftLK' I VIEWPOINTS Smokers burn at the stake of prejudice smoke - ing, aaxioua stnff! No Cigaretteilt3 from it so who hsrdships we impose c ers? Not the ad hoc org MuaCHisoN disgust- one bene- ares what on smok-• anization. Smoke-Free Dallas!, which is working on an anti-smoking ordinance it hopes one of the nation's leading free-enterprise cities will pass this fall. The ordinance would ban smoking in restaurants, malls, hotels and workplaces, or else oblige owners to Jim-Crow such theoretically low-life types as go about with cigarettes flapping from their lips. Smokers would have to huddlar together in unpleasant areas where, no doubt, the next step is anti-smoking harangues over the PA system. A computer engineer who formed Smoke-Free Dal- las! freely confesses his hatred of smoke. For unto him a child was born several months ago; this got of the s vironment -I do not believe hi thinki m to ng n that someone should be able to jeopardize someone else's health.' he says. Someone else's liberties - now that's different. A smoker these days has few rights the community feels bound to observe. California cit- ies already are putting the screws to smokers, and at- ies elsewhere, like Dallas, are contemplating similar. steps. Public religion may be out in the America of the '90s, but don't think for one minute that faith has waned. It just moves in other, more worldly channels. The anti-smoking crusade is the nearest approxima- tion to the bust-the•beer, whop-the-whiskey move- ment that gave us Prohibition. Its cigarette-d'ousing Carrie Nations have the revealed truth. Because rhey're offended bgsmoke, we're all supposed to feel the same way. I I fied a kind of behavior they dislike. This pseudo-scieatism, in which we are all expected to join, lends the ctusade an aura of authenticity. 'Scieace says so.' i So Smoke-Free Dallas! says so. And the rush to regulate behavior intensifiest smokers, casting guilty looks over their• shoulders, pour outside for a quick, fran~ I 'tic puff. By the way, the foregoing observations come from a lifelong non-smoker - an asthmatic - who personally finds ciga- rettes about as bracing as coid grits or an Oliver Stone movie. Zd where do they get their surety, the basis of thneering contempt? Often enough from the fed eral Environmental Protection Agency, which the cigarette industry is suing for distortion of the record on smoking. As it happens, the industry has i strong case. The EPA may have cooked the books to make smoking look riskier than it really is. The EPA. like our Dallas computer engineer, hates smoke? Ahem. A congressional investigation into the EPA's most recent and controversial risk assessment called debatable the classification of secondhand smoke as a aoncarcinogen+ Dr. Terry Harvey, direc-r tor of the EPA's environmental criteria and assess. meat office, said he thought the EPA hadn't lived up to its own rules for determining what causes cancer I and what doesn't. "Like it or not.' Dr. Harvey aaid,- 'EPA should live within its own categorization framework.' The EPA staff, further, admitted to Congress that it ignored a study showing no increase in risk for sec- ondhand smoke. How come? Because the study was published after the pre-set cutoff date. Fair enough still? Hardly, because the EPA had a copy of the study, and because, according to the tobacco industry - whose leading lights are not fools or rogues either one - factoring the study into the EPA's analysis would have eliminated the statistical risk attributed' to secondhand smoke. An EPA panel charged with reviewing the second-. i hand smoke study told Congress that the EPA's risk. assessment depended on a different methodology used for the study. Whereas scientific conclusions are supposed to reflect 95 percent certainty, the thresh= old for this particular one, with all its ideological implications, was lowered deliberately to 90 percent - Well, 90, 95 - what's the difference? One differ- ence is, it makes the EPA appear to be gunning for the tobacco industry: and joining thereby in the gen- eralized hne and cry against smoking. The anti- smoking Robespierres don't need facts - opinioas -~; are enough - because they have identi;. William Murc6isaa's colttmw is syadi- cated by Creators Syndicate.