Data that secondary smoking is harmless suppressed: claim
The Japan Times, Nov 12 2006
By Michael Hoffman

Sometimes a headline just stops you cold. Like this one in Shukan Post: "Secondary smoke lowers children's cancer susceptibility!"

Now there's a bold challenge to conventional wisdom. Little enough is certain these days, but one thing that did seem relatively unassailable was the growing consensus on the lethal impact of secondary tobacco smoke. Even governments, notorious foot-draggers where special interests are involved, were slowly climbing onto the bandwagon, the Japanese administration more grudgingly than most. In 2003 a law went into effect calling on hospitals, stores, restaurants and other facilities open to the general public to "make efforts to prevent secondary smoke."

Shukan Post's primary source is Ken Takaoka, assistant professor of psychiatry at Gifu University's medical school. Takaoka is not (though the headline may be construed as implying he is) suggesting that secondary smoke is good for children. But he cites a surprising study conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an affiliate of the World Health Organization (WHO). The study was never made public, Takaoka suggests, because of its shocking conclusion. IARC researchers monitored 2,192 individuals in seven European countries over seven years (1988-94). What they found was that secondary smoke seems to have no significant bearing on the health of nonsmokers.

More astonishing yet is the finding that children exposed to secondary smoke are less likely to develop lung cancer than children not exposed to it.

Sherlock Holmes aficionados will be reminded of the dog that didn't bark in the night. Where was the inferno of controversy you'd naturally expect such a conclusion to spark? Why are we reading of it for the first time 12 years later in Shukan Post?

"I would guess," says Takaoka, "the study was initiated in order to prove the danger of secondary smoke. As it turned out, the results were the exact opposite of what they'd been expecting. It seems reasonable to suppose they were not made public because WHO found the data highly inconvenient."

Takaoka himself first learned of the study while collecting material as a member of his university's "nonsmoking working group" research team.

"As far as I was concerned," he says, "there was only one opinion on the subject, and that was that secondary smoke is bad for health. The existence of the [IARC] data was a big surprise."

More surprises lay ahead. Takaoka uncovered other, similar studies, including one by the University of California which surveyed more than 35,000 people over a 29-year period (1960-1988) and, though not touching on the question of children, essentially agrees with the IARC study otherwise.

"Maybe data of that sort does exist," says gastroenterologist Katsuhide Ohashi, chairman of the Japan Non-Smoking Society, "but there's a lot more data proving that secondary smoke is harmful."

Takaoka does not dispute that; he only objects to what he calls a coverup of research that doesn't tell its sponsors what they want to hear.

"I am not saying that just because some data has turned up suggesting secondary smoke is harmless, go ahead and smoke in front of non-smokers," he says. "I do think, though, that the [IARC and University of California] studies should be part of the debate."

But would governments be enacting smoking controls if they were?
The Japan Times: Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006
(C) All rights reserved

Interesting discussion has developed on this article in Liberty Forum (where I posted this article).

I linked to your discussion, Nightlight, and I have to give you credit for being a tenacious and informed proponent of your views.

I also have to credit you for your civility. Those antis really come after you (as they tend to do) and you never engage that, but just come back at them with facts, as if you're trying to conduct a civil discussion with a maniac and having enough respect for them to disregard their insanity for what it is.

I found their responses very enlightening also. The whole thing brings to mind two different things I've read from Michael Chrichton.

First, in one of Chrichton's lesser known books called "Four Patients" he relates the story of how a young man's condition kept getting worse and how the young man kept insisting that he was under a curse. When the doctors fooled the young man into thinking the curse was removed, his condition immediately improved. I believe this reinforces the "Witch Doctor Effect" you speak of.

Second, In Chrichton's essay "Aliens Cause Global Warming", Chrichton attributes the belief that secondhand smoke is deadly to a flaw he calls "Consensus vs. Data" which all of the antis who dispute you seem to use.

http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speeches/speeches_quote04.html

One of them even provides a link to About.com as if that settles the whole thing. That's almost as bad as saying "I'm right because I saw it on a television commercial".

Also, since our earlier exchange, I came across a very short essay by Gunther Grass in the bookstore on the merits of rolling your own, but it wasn't particularly detailed or enlightening.

I won't buy, but I'll bite. In a "go here. do this" kind of way, what tobacco should I use and what papers should I buy to try out the smoking you advocate?

quote:

Originally posted by nightlight:
Data that secondary smoking is harmless suppressed: claim
The Japan Times, Nov 12 2006
By Michael Hoffman

But he cites a surprising study conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an affiliate of the World Health Organization (WHO). The study was never made public, Takaoka suggests, because of its shocking conclusion. IARC researchers monitored 2,192 individuals in seven European countries over seven years (1988-94). What they found was that secondary smoke seems to have no significant bearing on the health of nonsmokers.

The WHO study was withheld for some time until the British press applied some pressure. It is publicly available here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retri...776409&dopt=Abstract

Nightlight, your discussion on the Liberty Forum was breathtakingly beautiful.

You should write it up into an article and get it published. Or post it any place that'll take it, to get the real truth out. (Just clean up the questions/comments from that idiot, who I don't think actually read anything that you posted and certainly didn't read any of the info at any of the links you provided.) I'll be happy to proofread it for you--saw a few typos, spelling, punctuation, but nothing major--if you decide to do so.

Bravo! Well done!

Most of us who have been on these forums for a while are aware of these studies, but no one will read them. How many studies are actually available for us to read and how many of us have the time to read them?

I am about 60 years old, my mother smoked, all of my grandparents smoked, I smoke, and my son smokes. I was raised in a period where smoking was prevalent. I live in a relatively large metropolitan area and have never met a person with lung cancer. I have known people with heart disease and unlike a doctor or reseacher I know of their habits and lifestyle. I know that in most cases they ate what they wanted and as much as their ancestors did when they worked in the fields, even though they worked at a desk. They were not necessarily fat, but enjoyed red meat and fried foods. Many were raised on a diet of pork raised on the remains from their table.

I do not believe any of the available studies on smoking or second hand smoke based on my life and those I have been exposed to. Every sited study could replace smoke with water and have the same results. Results that show that second hand smoke is about as lethal as the ambient air where I live.

quote:

Originally posted by WinstonSmith:
First, in one of Chrichton's lesser known books called "Four Patients" he relates the story of how a young man's condition kept getting worse and how the young man kept insisting that he was under a curse. When the doctors fooled the young man into thinking the curse was removed, his condition immediately improved. I believe this reinforces the "Witch Doctor Effect" you speak of. ...

Thanks for the Crichton site link. Interesting material, lots of good examples with a crisp presentation, quite relevant and useful in our "tobacco war". His underlying theory on complex systems, which suddenly entered public consciousness in mid-1980s (as Chaos Theory) is a bit dated, though. Namely, that feld has developed into Complexity Science and finally a science of adaptable/intelligent networks. It turns out the "unpredictability" of complex systems is one of their lesser traits (albeit a revelation in comparison to the simple-minded deterministic clockwork models). These complex systems, which range from biochemical networks in our cells through immune systems, brains and organisms, to populations and social/economic/cultural networks, are not only unpredictable, but they are also intelligent systems with mind of their own, each in a pursuit of its own happiness, as it were. I posted a brief review of the these inteligent networks in a recent usenet thread on 'Intelligent Design vs Darwinian Evolution' (see also the summary with links to other posts by topic).

quote:

I won't buy, but I'll bite. In a "go here. do this" kind of way, what tobacco should I use and what papers should I buy to try out the smoking you advocate?

Until 3-4 years ago, the only organic, additive free tobacco choice was Natural American Spirit (sold as rolling tobacco and as premade cigarettes, filtered & non-filtered). Several new brands of additive free rolling/stuffing tobacco have come along for the SYO market (which suddenly started a rapid USA growth after the 2000, when MSA scam increased the prices of cigarettes). Virtually every major manufacturer has nowdays a 'natural' variant. The best place to get the straight info from the users themselves on the variety of tobaccos is the SYO site. I tried several brands labeling themselves as 'additive free' or 'natural', but having smoked NAS for over twelve years (first as premades, then rolled into paper and now stuffed into tubes using Topomatic injector), I still find them the nicest smoke for my taste (I smoked non-filtered Players before that). Sagamore Natural is also pretty good.

Regarding tubes and filters issue, my conclusion (initially only an hunch, now backed up by research) is that the healthiest way is the traditional way our (grand-)grandfathers smoked -- no filters, plain additive free hand made cigarettes. The filters, in addition to increasing the proportion of carbon monoxide in the smoke while keeping the tar/nicotine ratio fixed, also shed non-biodegradable fibers which, whatever anyone says on their effects, I would rather not accumulate in my lungs. The regular tobacco smoke is fully biodegradable (the black "smokers" lungs hoax notwithstanding) and biochemical networks of human and animal cells have been processing that kind of material for hundreds of millions of years, hence, as traditions go, it's a pretty long one.

The paper smoke is a bit a different matter due to additional compunds from paper processing (especially chlorine used for bleaching). There was only one non-filtered brand of tubes in USA, the Excel tubes which were fine (thin paper, no detectable extraneous taste). Unfortunately, due to recent corporate ownership shuffles, this tube was discontinued and has vanished from the USA market (I have stocked up for about 5-6 years; it's only about 60 cents per carton for tubes). A new tube brand appeared just in time, though. It is called "Athey" and I reviewed it at SYO recently.

The stuffing your own instead of smoking premades is a similar issue as preparing your food vs buying premade foods. At the very least, the premade cigarettes generally have to have some additives, otherwise the tobacco goes dry and becomes very harsh. When you make you own, you use tobacco from an air tight can or a plactic container which can naturally remain moist without additives. Further, when stuffing on your own, you control what goes in (pure leaf) and what gets thrown out (stems, birdeyes, shake). You also control how tight you pack the sticks. I prefer a loose packing, which flows more oxygen through the burning tip, reducing carbon monoxide and making smoke stronger (due to hotter burning). For cooling the smoke I use old-style plain cigarette holders (4 inches or longer), which require cleanup (with alcohol soaked pipe cleaners) every couple days.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: nightlight,

quote:

Originally posted by tnsmoker:
Nightlight, your discussion on the Liberty Forum was breathtakingly beautiful.

You should write it up into an article and get it published. Or post it any place that'll take it, to get the real truth out. (Just clean up the questions/comments from that idiot, who I don't think actually read anything that you posted and certainly didn't read any of the info at any of the links you provided.) I'll be happy to proofread it for you--saw a few typos, spelling, punctuation, but nothing major--if you decide to do so.

Bravo! Well done!

Thanks for the encouragement. I keep links to my older posts, to use some day for a more in depth presentation. The stuff in the posts there is done without spelling checker, typed quickly (in little breaks while working my regular job, programming), without time to read it over. It would need a thorough cleanup for typos, spelling, style... before it goes anywhere. English is also chronologically only my fifth language, learned in my early twenties, when I came to physics graduate school (Brown University) in USA, after Serbo-Croatian (native tongue), Italian (street kids & sports slang, songs, opera), Latin (four years in high school) and Russian (from books, science and literature, in my father's library).

As to where this kind of material would go, as suggested here in another thread, I think the most vital first step is to educate smokers and help them shake off the 'death curse' (injected into their minds by the "experts" and mass media) most of them live under. Only then there will be a group of people, a fellowship of smokers, with a good cause, hence willing to stand up to the rapidly intensifying abuse, financial, physical and psychological, we are taking now from the anti-tobacco extrotion racket and the common hysterics the schemers had whipped up into a frenzy. While sites of Johnston, Colby, clearing the air, FORCES, Smokers Choice, ... are all useful, done by honest, good folks, they do not have, in my view, quite the strategy that will work (as sketched in an earlier thread here).

FORCES, which comes closest to the effective approach, especially in their recent editorials, acts like a black hole. For example, multiple attempts to inform them (via email) on broken links in their evidence archive, which makes it look bad (like someones abandoned project) to outsiders, yielded only 'invalid email' response from mail servers. That surely doesn't help motivate smokers to join and send money, if one can't even get a webmaster's email there, let alone see the broken links fixed. 'Send us money so we can create pro-smoker multimedia' is not a message that instills confidence, especially when all contacts are black-holed.

Educating non-smokers is a step far downstream. Until there is a fellowship of smokers who believe their cause is good, not just for their pocket, but good, as in beautiful, healthy and wholesome for them and those around them, like having oak trees in the backyard and pretty live flowers growing throughout the home and lush rose bushes all around the front porch, with half a dozen kids playing hockey or kicking the ball in the front yard,.... there is no foundation for standing up. If you're duped into feeling you are worse than a heroin addict or a leper by the poisonous omnipresent propaganda, how do you stand up and fight for anything. Good people need a cause which is good to fight for.

Pro-smoker multimedia is merely one of the possible means to something worthy, not something good by itself. Are we supposed to support and fight for one of the means to make something public sees as bad look less bad, so we can some day buy cheaper cigarettes and smoke wherever we want? The pro-smoker multimedia project doesn't cut it as the 'vision thing'. The vision I am looking for to support is that of smoking as wholesome, beautiful and healthy (e.g. the aerobics and stimulant of immune system and neurons, good for smoker and those around him), the ancient and sacred tradition, the stuff I believe in. That is the image worth fighting for.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: nightlight,

Golly, Nightlite. Some heady stuff there in response to the Chrichton link. I perused it briefly. I'm familiar with the quantum "observer effect" and I've read Francis Collins' "The Language of God" and a bit of Gleick's "Chaos", but I think I'd really have to get my thinking cap on and put some serious time in to get a firm grasp on the stuff in those links. I have to say, though, it's funny how info relevant to the courses of learning I've chosen lately keep popping up everywhere. It may all just be context.

Thank you for the specific information on organic tobacco. I will try it in the near future and report back.

quote:

Originally posted by tnsmoker:
Nightlight, your discussion on the Liberty Forum...

Professor Ray Johnstone has joined in, adding his analysis of another paper which showed significant protective effect (risk ratio 0.4-0.7) of secondary smoke against spousal lung cancer.

An odd passive smoking result
by J. R. Johnstone

Epidemiology has become increasingly suspect as the results of this discipline are used more and more as tools for social engineering. Smoking, drinking and diet are but a few of many aspects of daily life which are subject to government intervention and private castigation as a consequence of the results of trials to determine the effects of lifestyle on health and mortality. I have shown elsewhere that many such trials have had their results misinterpreted both by their authors and by others (1).

Here is another example R.C. Brownson et al. in the abstract to their paper "Passive smoking and lung cancer in non smoking women"(2) state "Ours and other recent studies suggest a small but consistent increased risk of lung cancer from passive smoking". That is not the case. Whatever other studies may have suggested, theirs shows nothing of the sort. On the contrary, their study suggests that passive smoking prevents lung cancer.

Their results are summarised in their Tables 1 to 3 which list a total of 76 odds ratios. These compare different exposure situations and also different types of lung cancer in different situations. Of the 76, 67 are non-significant. Their 9 significant odds ratios range from 0.4 to 0.7, all showing a reduction in lung cancer with passive smoke exposure.

These, the only significant results in their tables, are not mentioned in their abstract or any other part of their text . Instead they say, for example, "There was little evidence of increased lung cancer risk associated with passive smoke exposure in childhood (Table 1)". Table 1 lists 16 odds ratios, all of them less than one and 7 of them significantly so. This is not "little evidence of increased lung cancer risk" but good evidence of decreased lung cancer risk.

This odd result appears to have gone unnoticed.

1. Johnstone, J.R. Health Scare : The Misuse of Science in Public Health Policy (Australian Institute for Public Policy , [now the Institute of Public Affairs] Perth ,1991)

2. Brownson, R.C., Alavanja, M.C.R., Hock, E.T. & Loy,T. S. American Journal of Public Health 82, 1525-1530 (1992)