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QUOTES FROM THE PAPER:

"There is no compelling evidence to support our claim, the authors all but admit, but it is important, in the interests of health promotion that the public be made to think that there is scientific evidence of harm."

"Given that the right conclusion must be reached and the data do not support that conclusion, one must manipulate the data and revise the guidelines governing the process and the conclusion."

"One member of the group working on the ETS issue at the EPA is an active member of U.S. anti-smoking organizations the EPA contracted some of the work on certain documents related to the ETS risk assessment to one of the founds of a leading anti- smoking group."

"The EPA changed the accepted scientific standard with respect to confidence intervals, without offering any compelling justification, in order to make its substantive findings statistically significant."

"The EPA's Workplace Policy Guide which as a policy document would, in the course of normal scientific process, be developed only after the scientific evidence was in, was actually written before the scientific risk assessment was even completed, let alone reviewed and finalized."

"There are no annual lung cancer deaths from ETS."

"For a person exposed only to background ETS, the [probability of dying from lung cancer] drops to about 7/100 of one percent "

' "The claim that "the only way to eliminate the risk of exposure to second-hand smoke is to provide contained, separately ventilated smoking rooms." (p. 7, Paper) is untrue because there is no statistically significant risk from ETS. '

"The frightening thing about deceit - whether in the allegedly righteous cause of eliminating smoking or in the service of any number of other worthy ends - is both that it is so easy to justify and so difficult to restrict its use to the ends that originally justified its employment."

"The imperatives of health promotion are such that the ambiguities and uncertainties that form a legitimate part of science and most importantly the questions about the quality of the evidence and whether it justifies the proposed public policy measures cannot be tolerated...Thus, despite the vital role of questions, argument and dissent in science as well as in democratic life, the process of corrupted science seeks to silence dissent in the interests of protecting not the truth, but is misrepresentation of the truth."

"Once the corrupted science is stripped away, there simply are no harms, and without those harms, smoking becomes a self -regarding behaviour, interventions against which can only be advanced on patently paternalistic grounds."

"What is so morally offensive here is that truly morally blameless people - not the alleged victims of smokers - but smokers themselves, are to be harmed in significant ways on the basis of bogus science and for no good reason."

"Surely there is nothing more morally loathsome than to attempt to manipulate public policy to create a class of citizens who, on the basis of bad science, come to despise themselves for what they mistakenly believe they do to others and who in turn are despised by their fellow citizens for allegedly threatening their well-being."

A Response to

"Towards Healthier Communities In Nova Scotia: A Discussion Paper"

INTRODUCTION

FORCES Canada is proud to present one of the most powerful critiques of the ETS scam ever written. In this paper, John Luik destroys one by one all the false statements and junk science pertinent to ETS.

He demonstrates his points with simple, easy-to-understand graphics and tables, and exposes the fraud perpetrated on the population by the public health policy makers, keen only to the voice of tax-funded special interest groups.

In plain English, devoid of the technicalities that can confuse the layperson, Luik shows how the corrupted junk scientists, the antismokers, and the public health authorities have betrayed the trust of the taxpaying citizens in ways that are, in our opinion, morally, politically and even legally nothing short of criminal, and as such they should be legally prosecuted, and punished accordingly.

The public hysteria about second hand smoke has been created out of sheer falsification, data manipulation, and distortion of scientific procedure. While the layperson cannot be blamed for reacting to perceived danger, the architect of that perception has the grave responsibility of portraying the danger in question with equitable, level-headed balance that cannot, under any circumstance and for whatever reason, be affected by moral, political, or financial agendas.

The authority granted by that responsibility has been misused and abused for many years, and it is time for the perpetrators to pay for their wrongdoing.

John Luik was educated at the University of Oxford where he obtained degrees in Philosophy and Politics (BA, MA, D. Phil.). He has taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba, and Brock University. He has been an Associate of the Niagara Institute in its Values and Ethics programmes and served as an ethics consultant to a number of government institutions, professional organizations and corporations. He has frequently spoken on philosophical issues to community, government and professional groups.

Aside from the ethics of advertising, his academic interests include business ethics, medical ethics, environmental ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion and the philosophy of Kant. He has written on a number of philosophical problems including the ethics of euthanasia, Marxism and Christianity, Kant's philosophy of religion, humanism, and Romanticism. His most recent works include Reflections on the Closing of the American Mind (1991) and The Question of Humanism (with David Goicoechea and Tim Madigan, 1991)