Secondhand Smoke is Not Dangerous

Or so writes Joe Bast:

Smoking bans are usually justified by concern over the health effects of exposure to secondhand smoke. In 2006, U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona said, “the debate is over. The science is clear: Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance, but a serious health hazard.” He released a massive report — 709 pages — that said “secondhand smoke is a major cause of disease, including lung cancer and coronary heart disease, in healthy nonsmokers.”

But here’s the problem: None of the claims in the Surgeon General’s report would pass muster in a court of law because the studies it relies on have sample sizes that are too small, or the time periods they cover are too brief, or the effects they show on human health are too small to be reliable.

Most of the research cited in this report was rejected by a federal judge in 1993, when EPA first tried to classify secondhand smoke as a human carcinogen. The judge said EPA cherry-picked studies to support its position, misrepresented the findings of the most important studies, and failed to honor scientific standards.

The largest and most credible study ever conducted of spouses of smokers, by James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat, was published in the May 12, 2003 issue of the British Medical Journal. They found “the results do not support a causal relationship between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality. The association between tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.”

The study is mentioned just once in the Surgeon General’s report, on page 673, in an appendix listing studies that were too recent to be included in the report. But it was published three years before the Surgeon General’s report, and the report quotes other more recent studies.