"Ridiculous!" you say, "Why would our own government (or the New York Times) want to lie about this?" Let's look. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued warning rivaling a surgeon general's: "Mothers who smoke 10 or more cigarettes a day actually can cause as many 26,000 new cases of asthma among their children each year. The origins of this phantom statistic are tucked away in back sections of the Environmental Protection Agency's unreadable tome on ETS - a near guarantee that no one actually will get to it. From my reading of it, however, I detected postmodern evolution of Darwinian selectivity. The EPA carefully picked a subset of 10 existing studies on childhood asthma and ETS to review. Then, it fished within these studies find the shark bait.

They decided to highlight only four of the 10 to base the assessment of increased risk of childhood asthma from ETS. Then the agency completely dismissed the one study showing absolutely no effect. Next, from the numerous results contained in the remaining three studies, the EPA considered only those they liked. After cherry-picking findings from the cherry-picked subset of their cherry-picked set of studies, the EPA number crunchers pronounced it "reasonable" to use range of 75 percent to 125 percent as their estimated increase risk for developing asthma in children whose mothers smoke 10 or more cigarettes per day. They then creatively projected this increased risk to the entire population.

Suddenly, between 8,000 to 26,000 new cases of childhood asthma could be attributable to mothers smoking 10 or more cigarettes a day, or so reads the government's report. And with another pass of the federal government's magic wand, another 26,000 new cases of childhood asthma could be seen as caused by moms who smoke half a pack.

Moving as if ETS were even more deadly than sarin gas the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, in April 1994 proposed new regulations tantamount to a total ban on workplace smoking in the United States. For employers willing to foot the bill, the proposed rule would permit smoking areas only if "enclosed and exhausted directly to the outside, and maintained under negative pressure sufficient to contain the tobacco smoke." Additionally, no work of any kind is allowed in this smoking area. The only people permitted to enter this area to do any work would be cleaning staff.

How did OSHA come up with a rationale for this sweeping prohibition? First, they looked at all the 13 studies with findings on occupational ETS and lung-cancer risk. From these, OSHA chose only one on which to base its estimate of increased risk from workplace ETS. OSHA's reasoning: This particular study was large and well-designed. But so were others in this group! This was the only study among the 13 with a result to OSHA's liking.

Opposed by a range of individuals and groups, OSHA's proposed rule generated more than 100,000 letters; the required public hearing lasted an unprecedented six months. The prohibition plan still seems alive and stubbornly kicking within the halls of Palace OSHA.

In an amazing feat of federal legerdemain, the Department of Transportation, or DOT, managed to convince the International Civil Aviation Organization (a U.N. agency) to pass a resolution that airliners should absolutely and universally prohibit smoking. DOT created its very own fat research report to reinforce its point.

This ban was scheduled for July 1996, but there's been a lot of foot-dragging. Do the foot-draggers know something others don't? Perhaps they actually read DOT's research report about ETS in airliner cabins, and after they stopped laughing, they tossed it.

The technique used by DOT was to measure the amount of "bad stuff" from tobacco smoke in the cabins' air. They expected to find higher concentrations in planes with smoking sections than in those without. Since smoking bans already were enforced on domestic flight, no-smoking planes readily were available for comparison. Their state-of the-art measurements were surprising: Once past the "boundary rows" (the first three next to the smoking section), average levels of respirable particles and carbon dioxide actually were lower on smoking flights than on no-smoking flights. Average levels of nicotine were low enough to be undetectable past the boundary rows on the majority of flights. On the minority with detectable nicotine levels, the difference, measured in micrograms (1 billionth of 2.2 pounds) per cubic meter (3 I/3 feet) of air was a minuscule 1/20 of 1 microgram. Average carbon-monoxide levels were a rousing 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter higher on smoking flights! There were, however, 200 fewer parts per million of headache-making carbon dioxide on the smoking flights than on the nonsmoking.

But DOT had a mission. So their crystal ball predicted over a span of 20 years, four excess lung-cancer deaths among the entire U.S. cabin-crew population. Shazam! Then DOT declared that smoking should be extinguished from the skies, since it would be too expensive sufficiently to improve the ventilation and filtration of airline-cabin air. The expense? Twenty dollars per flight, max, or a big 36 cents per smoker on a full Boeing 747, or 93 cents on a 727. Incidentally, smoking isn't the only reason to improve airline ventilation.

Publicity about a recent study on ETS and acute or chronic respiratory illnesses in children admonishes, "Children exposed to tobacco smoke ... suffer over 10 million days of restricted activities ... 21 percent more than unexposed kids" Ten million is a catchy, scary number, but where does it come from? The study appeared in the May 13-181996 issue of the "scientific"journal, Tobacco Control, the very title of which should raise questions about scientific objectivity The authors show right up front that they failed to find a "statistically significant" relationship between the children's exposure to tobacco smoke and any respiratory illnesses.

But then they reported that the parents in their sample were asked how many days the children missed school or had their activities restricted. Somehow the researchers "found" here the relationship they wanted - albeit small. No attempt was made to determine if other factors could account for this, nor was there any attempt to account for the contradiction.

The authors took their preferred finding, extrapolated it to the whole U.S. population and, eureka!, 10 million. Note: This number signifies only that, for unknown reasons, parents who smoked recalled keeping their kids home slightly more than parents who didn't, but it doesn't mean that the smokers' offspring were sicker The researchers did not publicize the fact that the number of childhood illnesses linked to ETS exposure was negligible. This is misleading reporting.

If the prohibitionists could make a convincing case that ETS causes heart disease (the leading killer in the United States) in nonsmokers, they'd be in clover. Even with a small excess risk from ETS, really big death estimates could balloon. The lack of hard evidence doesn't stop tobacco prohibitionists and their scientific allies from trying. Witness a front-page story in the New York Times on May 20: A team of Harvard researchers released the results of a 10-year study which claimed that regular exposure to other people's smoke at home or at work almost doubled the risk of heart disease. Case closed? Not according to Steve Milloy, executive director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, who called the study another case of "epidemiologists trying to pass junk science as Nobel prize work."

A day after the Harvard report was issued Milloy issued the following statement: "The new study uses statistics - not science - to claim that secondhand smoke increases the risk of heart attack by 91 percent. This abuse of statistics is such a problem that the National Cancer Institute issued a press release in 1994 advising that increases in risk of less than 100 percent were not to be trusted. And for good reason. In the new study, there was no measurement of even one person's exposure to secondhand smoke. The researchers relied on unverified questionnaires. Also, it is likely the researchers did not adequately consider other competing causes for heart disease such as smoking, lack of exercise, poor diet and so forth."

Is there a pattern here? An Aug.15,1996, Associated Press bulletin claimed that the results of a huge study showed that never-smokers married to smokers had about a 20 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease than with nonsmoking mates. Actually, this result only applied to the never-smoking men married to current smokers. No excess risk was found for never-smoking women married to current smokers. Oops! They forgot to mention that part of it. And wouldn't there be more heart disease in the husbands of heavy smokers than of light smokers if, in fact, ETS exposure had something to do with it? But in this study, the finding was upside-down; the more the wife smoked, the lower the husbands' risk. Hmmm! This piece of information also failed to appear in the AP story.

Since the 1960s, our government, aided by an assortment of do-gooders, has been trying to get everyone to quit smoking. It started out reasonably by disseminating information that smoking was linked to some nasty diseases. Having our best interests at heart, concerned professionals and government officials apparently felt compelled to devise stronger arguments to make us do the right thing. The government funded research in order to confirm the idea that ETS is harmful. But, the research results came in mostly indeterminate and, in some cases, negative. What to do? Well, since it's for a good cause, ignore the reality. Claim lots of dire findings. Divide, scare and hector.