September 10, 2003 - The anti-smoking zealots are now converging upon Louisville's Metro Council and declaring an all-out war against smoking in the workplace. As with any war, the first casualty will be the truth. We will be bombarded with "facts" and "statistics" tending to turn this attack upon liberty into a moral crusade to save the lives of bartenders, waitresses and office workers. Sadly this propaganda will not be challenged by our local media. When one is on a moral crusade, there is no need for fairness and balance. It will be stated as uncontroverted fact that 40,000 people are killed each year in the United States by second-hand smoke. Who are these poor souls? Do we know any of them? What are their names? Where did this round number of victims come from? Remember the EPA's 1992 report on secondhand smoke? In 1999, a federal court invalidated the flawed report and cited "...the ugly possibility that EPA adopted a methodology...based on the outcome sought." The court found that the EPA had "cherry-picked" its data and choice of epidemiological studies, and concluded that EPA could not show a statistically significant association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. If reasonable citizens and their legislators could just have an opportunity to hear evidence from both sides in this controversy, it is predictable that the Secondhand Smoke Scare of 2003 will go the way of the great cranberry cancer scare of 1959, the Alar apple scare of 1989, the swine flue scare of the late '60s, the radon-in-your-basement scare of the late '90s, ozone depletion, global warming and all the other Henny-Penny/Chicken Little bogeymen the leftists have come up with to support the expansion of government control over our lives and the destructions of our freedoms. Thomas A. McAdam As published in the Louisville Courier Journal, 8/26/03 FORCES International |
