Southern Virginia Restaurants React To Smoking Ban

A new law that will all but extinguish smoking in Virginia's bars and restaurants is drawing mixed reviews from business owners in Carroll and Patrick counties now allowing that practice.

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

Scientific Evidence Shows Secondhand Smoke Is No Danger
Written By: Jerome Arnett, Jr., M.D.
Published In: Environment & Climate News
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

Exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) is an unpleasant experience for many nonsmokers, and for decades was considered a nuisance. But the idea that it might actually cause disease in nonsmokers has been around only since the 1970s.

Recent surveys show more than 80 percent of Americans now believe secondhand smoke is harmful to nonsmokers.

Federal Government Reports

A 1972 U.S. surgeon general's report first addressed passive smoking as a possible threat to nonsmokers and called for an anti-smoking movement. The issue was addressed again in surgeon generals' reports in 1979, 1982, and 1984.

A 1986 surgeon general's report concluded involuntary smoking caused lung cancer, but it offered only weak epidemiological evidence to support the claim. In 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was charged with further evaluating the evidence for health effects of SHS.

In 1992 EPA published its report, "Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking," claiming SHS is a serious public health problem, that it kills approximately 3,000 nonsmoking Americans each year from lung cancer, and that it is a Group A carcinogen (like benzene, asbestos, and radon).

The report has been used by the tobacco-control movement and government agencies, including public health departments, to justify the imposition of thousands of indoor smoking bans in public places.

Flawed Assumptions

EPA's 1992 conclusions are not supported by reliable scientific evidence. The report has been largely discredited and, in 1998, was legally vacated by a federal judge.

Even so, the EPA report was cited in the surgeon general's 2006 report on SHS, where then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona made the absurd claim that there is no risk-free level of exposure to SHS.

For its 1992 report, EPA arbitrarily chose to equate SHS with mainstream (or firsthand) smoke. One of the agency's stated assumptions was that because there is an association between active smoking and lung cancer, there also must be a similar association between SHS and lung cancer.

But the problem posed by SHS is entirely different from that found with mainstream smoke. A well-recognized toxicological principle states, "The dose makes the poison."

Accordingly, we physicians record direct exposure to cigarette smoke by smokers in the medical record as "pack-years smoked" (packs smoked per day times the number of years smoked). A smoking history of around 10 pack-years alerts the physician to search for cigarette-caused illness. But even those nonsmokers with the greatest exposure to SHS probably inhale the equivalent of only a small fraction (around 0.03) of one cigarette per day, which is equivalent to smoking around 10 cigarettes per year.

Low Statistical Association

Another major problem is that the epidemiological studies on which the EPA report is based are statistical studies that can show only correlation and cannot prove causation.

One statistical method used to compare the rates of a disease in two populations is relative risk (RR). It is the rate of disease found in the exposed population divided by the rate found in the unexposed population. An RR of 1.0 represents zero increased risk. Because confounding and other factors can obscure a weak association, in order even to suggest causation a very strong association must be found, on the order of at least 300 percent to 400 percent, which is an RR of 3.0 to 4.0.

[John]

To anyone that came to this link to engage in an exchange of ideas on smoking bans, don't waste your time. There are several people that are paid to come out and post articles and links that 2nd hand smoke is not dangerous. Mr. Confederate_1978 is one of them. Free_America, u_can_not_own_me, azmac, Happy_contented_soul - they are all working together to shut down any thread related to smoking by badgering anyone that is not a smoker.
They will first post BS links that 2nd hand smoke is not scientifically proven to cause cancer. Then, they will start posting that you are not a patriot if you support smoking bans because you are taking away the rights of restaurant owners to choose who they want to serve.

Looks like they have already started that here.

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

John wrote:

To anyone that came to this link to engage in an exchange of ideas on smoking bans, don't waste your time. There are several people that are paid to come out and post articles and links that 2nd hand smoke is not dangerous. Mr. Confederate_1978 is one of them. Free_America, u_can_not_own_me, azmac, Happy_contented_soul - they are all working together to shut down any thread related to smoking by badgering anyone that is not a smoker.
They will first post BS links that 2nd hand smoke is not scientifically proven to cause cancer. Then, they will start posting that you are not a patriot if you support smoking bans because you are taking away the rights of restaurant owners to choose who they want to serve.
Looks like they have already started that here.

poor john,I never gave a rats azz about anything until it affected me personally.I get no pay or anything for busting chops on the lying nazis in tobacco control........unlike you. A paid hack by anti-tobacco.Liberty and freedom is what the people want and useless control freaks to go to hell..........you deserve a 1 way ticket.

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

Scientific Principles Ignored

An even greater problem is the agency's lowering of the confidence interval (CI) used in its report. Epidemiologists calculate confidence intervals to express the likelihood a result could happen just by chance. A CI of 95 percent allows a 5 percent possibility that the results occurred only by chance.

Before its 1992 report, EPA had always used epidemiology's gold standard CI of 95 percent to measure statistical significance. But because the U.S. studies chosen for the report were not statistically significant within a 95 percent CI, for the first time in its history EPA changed the rules and used a 90 percent CI, which doubled the chance of being wrong.

This allowed it to report a statistically significant 19 percent increase of lung cancer cases in the nonsmoking spouses of smokers over those cases found in nonsmoking spouses of nonsmokers. Even though the RR was only 1.19--an amount far short of what is normally required to demonstrate correlation or causality--the agency concluded this was proof SHS increased the risk of U.S. nonsmokers developing lung cancer by 19 percent.

EPA Study Soundly Rejected

In November 1995 after a 20-month study, the Congressional Research Service released a detailed analysis of the EPA report that was highly critical of EPA's methods and conclusions. In 1998, in a devastating 92-page opinion, Federal Judge William Osteen vacated the EPA study, declaring it null and void. He found a culture of arrogance, deception, and cover-up at the agency.

Osteen noted, "First, there is evidence in the record supporting the accusation that EPA 'cherry picked' its data.... In order to confirm its hypothesis, EPA maintained its standard significance level but lowered the confidence interval to 90 percent. This allowed EPA to confirm its hypothesis by finding a relative risk of 1.19, albeit a very weak association.... EPA cannot show a statistically significant association between [SHS] and lung cancer."

In 2003 a definitive paper on SHS and lung cancer mortality was published in the British Medical Journal. It is the largest and most detailed study ever reported. The authors studied more than 35,000 California never-smokers over a 39-year period and found no statistically significant association between exposure to SHS and lung cancer mortality.

Propaganda Trumps Science

The 1992 EPA report is an example of the use of epidemiology to promote belief in an epidemic instead of to investigate one. It has damaged the credibility of EPA and has tainted the fields of epidemiology and public health.

In addition, influential anti-tobacco activists, including prominent academics, have unethically attacked the research of eminent scientists in order to further their ideological and political agendas.

The abuse of scientific integrity and the generation of faulty "scientific" outcomes (through the use of pseudoscience) have led to the deception of the American public on a grand scale and to draconian government overregulation and the squandering of public money.

Millions of dollars have been spent promoting belief in SHS as a killer, and more millions of dollars have been spent by businesses in order to comply with thousands of highly restrictive bans, while personal choice and freedom have been denied to millions of smokers. Finally, and perhaps most tragically, all this has diverted resources away from discovering the true cause(s) of lung cancer in nonsmokers.

Dr. Jerome Arnett Jr.([e-mail]) is a pulmonologist who lives in Helvetia, West Virginia.

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

In 1994, a Congressional inquiry into the EPA and its methods, specifically as these related to the Agency's dealings with secondhand smoke, concluded:

"The process at every turn has been characterized by both scientific and procedural irregularities. Those irregularities include conflicts of interest by both Agency staff involved in the preparation of the risk assessment and members of the Science Advisory Board panel selected to provide a supposedly independent evaluation of the document."

The EPA, by this method (and others to be explored) had concluded ETS was a Class A Carcinogen. But when the matter got to court, an anti-tobacco federal judge, after interviewing a range of scientists for 4 years, called the EPA report that had reached this conclusion an outright "fraud" and overturned (invalidated, vacated) that conclusion and the report it rode in on.

Among things he said in his final judgment:

"The Agency disregarded information and made findings based on selective information... deviated from its own risk assessment guidelines; failed to disclose important (opposing) findings and reasoning; and left significant questions without answers."

Further, he added:

"Gathering all relevant information, researching and disseminating findings were subordinate to EPA's demonstrating ETS was a Group A carcinogen... In this case, EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun; adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the Agency's public conclusion, and aggressively utilized the Act's authority to disseminate findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme... and to influence public opinion... While so doing,[it] produced limited evidence, then claimed the weight of the Agency's research evidence demonstrated ETS causes cancer."
- US Fed Court Decision #6:93CV00307, July

And boy did it ever "influence public opinion" and lead to "regulation" --neither of which are synonymous with sound science.

The Wall Street Journal called the judgment "scathing."

Nor was Judge Osteen the first or only objective source to scathe the EPA

The US Congressional Research Service, after analyzing the EPA's report concluded that:

"The statistical evidence does not appear to support a conclusion that there are substantial health effects of passive smoking.... Even at the greatest exposure levels....very few or even no deaths can be attributed to ETS."
-Environmental Tobacco Smoke And Lung Cancer Risk," CRS, Nov. 14, 1995

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

A US Department of Energy Report, not only found serious and telling flaws in EPA's methodology, but went on to demolish the underlying studies, additionally quoting EPA's prior critiques (prior to the EPA's finding them useful) of these very same studies! According to this report, the vast majority of the studies EPA later used as part of "proof" that ETS was carcinogenic had been earlier dismissed, by the same EPA, as being either statistically or methodolog-ically flawed.
- "Choices In Risk Assessment," US DOE, Sundia Nat'l Labs, 1994
The Australian Supreme Court reached the same conclusion, officially rejecting the EPA report because:
"The [study] results set out in tabular and statistical form did not support the claim of risk."
- Federal Focus, Vol VIII, NO. 11, 1993
There are (literally) volumes of material we could offer that would minutely dissect and contradict EPAs findings and put their stats into perspective.
We can only point out here (as we will again later) that among what Osteen called "the important (opposing) findings" that EPA "failed to disclose" were the findings of the largest extant study ever done up to that point (Brownson et al, 1992) funded by the National Cancer Institute. Had these findings been included in their final analysis, EPA's entire premise would have sunk.
The questions may arise as to why the Osteen decision had so little public influence. The answers may lie in two (perhaps not unrelated) things.
It got little publicity.(The NY TIMES buried it on page 23. Bottom.)
By 1998, when the decision came down, the "influence on public opinion" was a fait accompli. Everyone already "knew" that ETS killed. Already-on-the-books laws had been based on it. Careers had been built on it. Mortgages were paid with it. Money was rolling in to scientists and many others via taxpayer grants. And the media, as well as the pundits of every stripe, were already out on the limb.
And nobody, ever, likes to have to say "Ooops!"
Another little-publicized study was conducted by the International Agency on Research on Cancer (IARC) part of the World Health Organization (WHO). The research ran for 10 years and covered 7 European countries. No matter how it's spun (and it has been) the study concluded there was no statistically significant risk for non-smokers who either lived with or worked with smokers. In fact, the only numbers it arrived at that had actual statistical significance, showed a slightly decreased lung cancer risk in later life among the children of smokers.
-"Multicenter Case-Control Study Of Exposure To Environmental Tobacco Smoke And Lung Cancer In Europe," Bofetta Et Al, Journal Of The NCI, Vol 90, NO.19, October 7, 1998
The Wall Street Journal covered the release of the WHO report thus:(3/19/9

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

SMOKING OUT BAD SCIENCE:

"For the past 15 years the antismoking lobby has pushed the view that secondhand cigarette smoke is a public health hazard. This was a shrewd tactic. For, having failed to persuade most committed smokers to save themselves, they could use proof that passive smoking harms wives, children and co-workers to make the case for criminalizing smoking.

But the science fell off the campaign wagon two weeks ago when the definitive study on passive smoking, sponsored by the World Health Organization, reported no cancer risk at all. Don't bet that will change the crusaders' minds. The anti-smoking movement, after all, has slipped from a health crusade to a moral one.

It is now obvious that antismoking activists have knowingly overstated the risks of secondhand smoke."

[youou]

About conf 78....

All that blah, blah, blah by the low income, uneducated hillbilly from my good state of TN...conf 78.

Good thing someone taught the knuckle dragger how to cut and paste other peoples thoughts.
We in TN are not proud of his type.

People like conf 78 give TN a bad name. When people drive by their trailers they see the grass in the front lawn almost covers all the tires and sofas on the lawn.
conf 78, US Army gate guard with butt in mouth....how unprofessional...

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

youou wrote:

About conf 78....
All that blah, blah, blah by the low income, uneducated hillbilly from my good state of TN...conf 78.
Good thing someone taught the knuckle dragger how to cut and paste other peoples thoughts.
We in TN are not proud of his type.
People like conf 78 give TN a bad name. When people drive by their trailers they see the grass in the front lawn almost covers all the tires and sofas on the lawn.
conf 78, US Army gate guard with butt in mouth....how unprofessional...

poor uuseless still trying to be mr psycho macho man.....anytime brother come on up to portland.

[youou]

CONFEDERATE_1978 wrote:

<quoted text>poor uuseless still trying to be mr psycho macho man.....anytime brother come on up to portland.

and what?

Be careful now....sometimes it hurts when I laugh hard....

[Tony]

John wrote:

To anyone that came to this link to engage in an exchange of ideas on smoking bans, don't waste your time. There are several people that are paid to come out and post articles and links that 2nd hand smoke is not dangerous. Mr. Confederate_1978 is one of them. Free_America, u_can_not_own_me, azmac, Happy_contented_soul - they are all working together to shut down any thread related to smoking by badgering anyone that is not a smoker.
They will first post BS links that 2nd hand smoke is not scientifically proven to cause cancer. Then, they will start posting that you are not a patriot if you support smoking bans because you are taking away the rights of restaurant owners to choose who they want to serve.
Looks like they have already started that here.

If we are payed tobacco company employees then where is my pay check damnit! Running out of responses I see John. Great counter point.

[Tony]

youou wrote:

About conf 78....
All that blah, blah, blah by the low income, uneducated hillbilly from my good state of TN...conf 78.
Good thing someone taught the knuckle dragger how to cut and paste other peoples thoughts.
We in TN are not proud of his type.
People like conf 78 give TN a bad name. When people drive by their trailers they see the grass in the front lawn almost covers all the tires and sofas on the lawn.
conf 78, US Army gate guard with butt in mouth....how unprofessional...

You are a hypocrite. All you do is insult people time and time again then when someone attacks you back, you play as if you are the victim.My god grow up.

How does smoking while in uniform equate to being unprofessional? Tell and soldier that and they'd just laugh at you and walk off.

[Happy Contented Soul]

John wrote:

To anyone that came to this link to engage in an exchange of ideas on smoking bans, don't waste your time. There are several people that are paid to come out and post articles and links that 2nd hand smoke is not dangerous. Mr. Confederate_1978 is one of them. Free_America, u_can_not_own_me, azmac, Happy_contented_soul - they are all working together to shut down any thread related to smoking by badgering anyone that is not a smoker.
They will first post BS links that 2nd hand smoke is not scientifically proven to cause cancer. Then, they will start posting that you are not a patriot if you support smoking bans because you are taking away the rights of restaurant owners to choose who they want to serve.
Looks like they have already started that here.

Hey youou's John, why don't you just hop back in your http://tinyurl.com/cujgjz and leave as you arrived!

[Happy Contented Soul]

youou wrote:

About conf 78....
All that blah, blah, blah by the low income, uneducated hillbilly from my good state of TN...conf 78.
Good thing someone taught the knuckle dragger how to cut and paste other peoples thoughts.
We in TN are not proud of his type.
People like conf 78 give TN a bad name. When people drive by their trailers they see the grass in the front lawn almost covers all the tires and sofas on the lawn.
conf 78, US Army gate guard with butt in mouth....how unprofessional...

about youou... http://tinyurl.com/atrbqt

[Happy Contented Soul]

youou wrote:

<quoted text>
and what?
Be careful now....sometimes it hurts when I laugh hard....

Yeah, like this.... http://tinyurl.com/coqkvb

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

youou wrote:

<quoted text>
and what?
Be careful now....sometimes it hurts when I laugh hard....

like I said lil boy...anytime come on up. email me at [e-mail]. I will be expecting your challenge.

[u cannot own me]

http://www.wmdt.com/wires/displaystory.asp...


UNINSURED GRANT Va gets $1M grant for uninsured children

NORFOLK, Va.(AP)-
A national foundation has awarded a $1 million grant to Virginia to increase enrollment of eligible kids in the state's health insurance program for children.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced the four-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on Wednesday.

Kaine says Virginia is one of eight states awarded grants.

[CONFEDERATE_1978]

u cannot own me wrote:

http://www.wmdt.com/wires/disp laystory.asp?id=85112612
UNINSURED GRANT Va gets $1M grant for uninsured children
NORFOLK, Va.(AP)-
A national foundation has awarded a $1 million grant to Virginia to increase enrollment of eligible kids in the state's health insurance program for children.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced the four-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on Wednesday.
Kaine says Virginia is one of eight states awarded grants.

sounds like the bribes are forth comming..........