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Common Sense Gets Lost In the Smoke of Hysteria
Carolyn Lochhead |
Sunday, June 7, 1998
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HYSTERIA MAKES great headlines, excites the public, keeps bureaucrats busy and gets politicians elected. Naturally it drives much of Washington policymaking, particularly if the hysteria can be linked in any way to children.
Policy hysteria follows a time- worn pattern: advocacy groups make up or distort statistics; incomplete science is interpreted in the most alarmist way; bureaucrats magnify the risk; politicians step in to rescue us from danger; trial lawyers file multimillion-dollar lawsuits; the media sensationalizes the story; and the public gets the thrills and extremism that it clearly prefers to nuance and tedium.
Ten years and tens of billions of dollars after the asbestos hysteria, it turns out that the government grossly overestimated the hazard. The New England Journal of Medicine now reports that there is ``no measurable excess risk of death due to lung cancer'' from moderate exposure -- not to mention nonexposure to asbestos buried inside walls.
How many schools were torn up at a cost of how many billions of dollars to save schoolchildren from asbestos? Add in the cost of removing asbestos from countless other buildings, the increased exposure to workers engaged in its needless removal, and the loss of a remarkable fireproof insulation that actually did reduce serious hazards.
Even during height of the asbestos panic there was evidence that the risk was overblown, but nobody listened. The Environmental Protection Agency's risk estimates were wild extrapolations of data from shipyard workers and miners who were virtually bathing in asbestos every day -- and nearly all of those who developed lung cancer also smoked. There was virtually no direct evidence that most people's extremely limited exposure, especially if they didn't smoke, carried any risk at all. Similar patterns are evident on many other issues -- from widely repeated claims of 1 million homeless persons, including many children (later credible counts put the figure at a quarter of that and very few were children) to prosecutorial witch-hunts alleging the most bizarre acts of child abuse at day-care centers that put innocent people in prison for years.
The Wall Street Journal now reports that teachers no longer hug their students for fear of child molestation allegations.
The current rage is over children and smoking. Congress is considering a tobacco bill that would cost half-a-trillion dollars. (A handful of trial lawyers will get several billion of that.) Politicians claim the legislation would stop ``3,000 children a day'' from smoking. The American Cancer Society has issued estimates that an earlier and less expensive tobacco settlement between the companies and the states would cut teen smoking by 60 percent and save 1 million children from early death.
But the 60 percent figure was actually only a target used in the settlement to impose further penalties on the tobacco companies. The cancer society conducted no analysis to support the number. A Cornell University study actually found that higher cigarette prices have little effect on teen smoking.
If that's true, half-a-trillion dollars -- a mind-boggling figure
that exceeds the gross domestic product of many nations -- might be
better spent elsewhere.
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