The war on smokers rages on throughout the fair land, nowhere more so than in California, where the Legislature is considering a measure that would repeal the state's six-week-old ban on smoking in bars.

The repeal bill has already passed in the Assembly, much to the consternation of the state's noisy anti-smoking lobby. "We are appalled," said Alan Henderson, president of the state division of the American Cancer Society, that lawmakers have "kowtowed to the wishes and manipulation of the tobacco industry."

But it is slanderous to suggest that California lawmakers are bending to the wishes of the tobacco industry, especially considering that the industry boasts nowhere near the influence it once enjoyed in Sacramento and other state capitals, not to mention in Washington.

The reality is that California's ban on smoking in bars has met grass-roots resistance from the state's 36,000 bar owners, its 5 million or so smokers and more than a few nonsmokers -- like yours truly -- who assume that people do not go to bars for their health.

Henderson's remarks reveal the dishonesty of the anti-smoking lobby. Indeed, its secret ambition is to outlaw the manufacture, sale and use of tobacco products. But rather than come right out and propose a smoking prohibition, they advocate smaller steps like smoking bans in bars.

And they work hand in hand with sympathetic lawmakers who are only too willing to use the power of government to tax, regulate and litigate tobacco products to make it so costly and inconvenient to smoke and so risky for tobacco companies to sell and promote smoking, that a de facto prohibition is accomplished.

If that is not insidious enough, the anti-smoking lobby also enlists a stable of scientist sympathizers who distort smoking research to provide justification for government crackdowns on smoking. Indeed, that is precisely what occurred when the Environmental Protection Agency ginned up a scientific review of research on secondhand smoke.

In 1993, the agency released a well-publicized report claiming that secondhand smoke is a leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers, accounting for 3,000 deaths a year. But these findings were so unscientific as to border on fraud.

In fact, the EPA reviewed 30 selectively chosen studies of spouses of smokers. In 24 of the studies, researchers actually found no statistically significant increase in cancer. So it was on the basis of six studies out of the total 30 that the agency declared secondhand smoke a "class A" carcinogen, as hazardous to human health as Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons stockpile.

[For further information of the EPS fraud, click on the following numbers : (1), (2) , (3)] If this wasn't unethical enough, the EPA deliberately excluded two major studies that undermined its predetermined "scientific" verdict on secondhand smoke. One of the studies, funded by the National Cancer Institute, found that nonsmokers have no increased risk of lung cancer as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke during childhood, in the workplace or from living with a pack-a-day smoker for 40 years or less.

Yet, despite the uncertainty about the cancer risks of second-hand smoke, Dr. David M. Burns, a specialist in pulmonary medicine at the UC San Diego and lead scientist on the EPA's secondhand smoke study, insisted recently that "there is no longer a debate in the scientific community" about the danger of secondhand smoke.

Of course, there was little debate in the scientific community about the threats to health posed by dioxin (which the EPA also declared a class A carcinogen) or Alar until scientists belatedly found that both chemicals were benign.

Of course, that's after the scientific community had scared the bejeebers out of the American public about both dioxin and Alar. And after the federal government had forced producers of these chemicals to needlessly spend tens of millions of dollars to eliminate any trace of them.

Similarly, Burns and other politically motivated scientists have misled the American public into believing that nonsmokers face a significant risk of dying from secondhand smoke. And they managed to persuade the Legislature to enact a smoking ban in bars, with little regard for how much the ban would cost the state's bar owners in lost business and how much a nuisance would be for bar patrons who smoke.

California's ban on smoking in bars is a textbook example of public policy being driven by fraudulent science. It hardly is appalling that state lawmakers are reconsidering the ban. It is encouraging.

Joseph Perkins,
THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE