http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/2007%20February.htm


Lest we forget
At a time such as this, when zealotry is victorious and censorship is rife, it is more important than ever that we should record what really happened in the build up to the public smoking ban. The prejudices of PC are wayward and arbitrary: as exemplified by the British Government, who positively encourage the self-evident evils cannabis and gambling while firmly clamping down on the long established tradition of tobacco.

The case against tobacco first arose from the establishment by Sir Austin Bradford Hill of a substantial correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. It is now forgotten how difficult this was to achieve, but the dialogue between Hill and Fisher (perhaps the greatest mathematical statistician ever) eventually led to a prospective study that could not be questioned. Modern wiseacres like to portray Fisher as the man who said that tobacco did not cause lung cancer, which he did not, and that those two were at war, which they were not (Fisher proposed Hill for Fellowship of the Royal Society, which was then still a purely scientific rather than political body). In those days scientific disputes were gentlemanly affairs, untroubled by ad hominem attacks launched by politically motivated intellectual dwarfs. That study was the greatest, and possibly the last, example of scientific epidemiology. In the process Hill established the rigorous principles of that subject. Unfortunately his co-author and assistant was Richard Doll, who betrayed his mentor by reneging on his principles and colluded in writing him out of history. Thus Doll founded the new epidemiology, which was far removed from Hill’s ideal.

Soon after, the New Left began to find its feet and was looking for causes. In retrospect, tobacco was an obvious choice. It was widely established as a social norm and a valued commodity, yet here was adverse evidence against it. Political Correctness, however, was no respecter of the scientific niceties and once it had chosen tobacco as its evil icon, facts would take a back seat. The defeat of tobacco would be the required demonstration of its power. The new movement adopted the old Trotskyite method of entryism. A few of them would penetrate an influential organisation, such as the BBC, and then set about recruiting their own kind. This was a particularly successful manoeuvre in American Governmental organisations, such as the CDC and the EPA.

The CDC became famous for its virtual body counts. Obesity, for example, which is the newest fashionable bugbear, is now claimed to kill 300,000 a year. Naturally tobacco was in for it and its body count was announced to be 400,000 a year. This number is a total fabrication – see, for example, the article Lies, damned lies and 400,000 smoking-related deaths by Levy and Marimont, Regulation, Vol 21 No 4 1988. The calculation involves almost every fiddle in the book. These include unacceptable risk ratios, substantial confounding factors, self-reporting, unrepresentative sample populations and many others. Most startling of all is that 60% of the "premature" deaths occurred at ages over seventy and 17% of them at eighty-five and above. It has been pointed out that the same data can be used to "prove" that tobacco saves 200,000 lives a year.

The statistical legerdemain performed by the CDC and the American Surgeon General can only be fully appreciated by a careful reading of the Levy and Marimont article, but it is glaring in tables such as this:


Note that only the cadavers in the last three rows actually have names attached to them.

At least the CDC has an honourable past, not so the EPA. It was founded on a lie (that the majority of cancers are environmental in origin) and it continued in that vein. It was largely responsible for the many millions of deaths resulting from the DDT ban. Under director Carol Browner it became a ruthless political propaganda agency. The scientific and social crimes of the EPA have been covered many times in this web site and the associated books. Here, for example is a paragraph from The Epidemiologists:

The greatest scientific fraud ever
In 1988 the EPA had begun to formulate legislation banning smoking in public places. This was being done out of pure politically correct zeal, but the realisation dawned that some “scientific evidence” was going to be needed to justify it. The organisation therefore began to produce the evidence of a link between passive smoking and lung cancer, in what they called a metastudy (as observed in Chapter 7, grouping together a number of disparate findings to produce one result, i.e. forging a strong chain out of a number of weak links). Unfortunately, this did not work, as the required association was not at all evident. They then omitted a major contribution that had produced a negative result; still no joy. Getting desperate, they then took the outrageous decision to change the standards of significance by abandoning the already dubious epidemiological standard of P<0.05 in favour of an unheard of P<0.1, i.e. a one in ten chance of the result being a pure statistical accident. The truly amazing thing is that, even after all these shenanigans, they only managed to produce a relative risk of a pathetic 1.19, but they published it anyway in 1992.

From the fact that an enormous amount of “scientific” study has produced no serious evidence, we may infer that passive smoking is harmless, but the solid PC censorship ensures that the public never get to hear of it.

Give the American zealots their due; at least they went to the trouble of committing serious scientific fraud to generate their propaganda. Their British equivalents simply invented the numbers and then kept increasing them .The British zealots took the number 400,000 American smoking deaths, added fifty percent and adjusted pro rata for population and came up with 120,000, a statistic that was repeated ad nauseam without any attempt at justification. For passive smoking ASH UK is currently claiming about 11,000 deaths a year. Pro rata for population that is about twenty times the EPA claim, even after all those frauds. No challenge to these figures is ever published in the British media and the British Parliament heard no evidence other than that provided by the zealots before it enacted its draconian legislation.

How, it is fair to ask, when there is such a strong link to lung cancer, can you claim that the effect of smoking on life expectancy is exaggerated? Here is an extract from an article by the late Woodrow Wyatt (The Voice of Reason) long before the success of the current campaign:

In February, the Australian Bureau of Statistics published a national health survey taken in 1989-90. To much surprise, it revealed that, generally, the health of smokers is better than that of many former or non-smokers. Unsurprisingly, the worst sufferers from hypertension caused by stress were the ex-smokers (16.1 per cent) and the “never smoked” (13.4 per cent); the steady smokers registered 7.4 per cent.

It is well known that smoking , particularly at work, relieves stress, and to outlaw it increases demands on hospital beds. Even the US Surgeon General, in 1964, recognised that Parkinson’s disease (a degenerative disorder of the nervous system) occurred at around half the rate among smokers. In the International Journal of Epidemiology , in 1991, a review of 11 studies showed that non-smokers suffered 50 per cent more Alzheimer’s disease than smokers. And researchers at Erasmus University Medical School , Rotterdam , found that more non-smokers had early-onset dementia than smokers.

In Daily Telegraph, Dr. James Le Fanu wrote: “Smokers have a 50 per cent reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s and the more smoked, the greater the protection.” The New England Journal of Medicine. in 1985, reported that endometrial cancer of the womb occurs at around 50 per cent the rate among smokers as non-smokers. Colon cancer and ulcerative colitis also seem to be about 30 and 50 per cent respectively less frequent among smokers according to articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association and in the New England Journal of Medicine, in 1981 and 1983. The American government’s first Health and Nutrition Examination Survey has found that osteo-arthritis is five times less likely to occur among heavy smokers than non-smokers.

I do not claim that smoking by those with unhealthy diets cannot activate illness (that passive smoking may be dangerous is a preposterous joke). But we urgently need a serious, objective, unbiased study of the causes of ill health, including the advantages and disadvantages of smoking, the impact of faulty diet and of inherited genes. It requires open minds, not the blinkered political correctness of the Department of Health. Telling the truth would unmask the futility of the many millions of pounds of public money wasted on ill thought-out and unscientifically based attacks on smoking. The campaign against smoking has certainly caused more crippling illness and premature death than if it had never begun.

Only recently, and for the second time, a senior NHS consultant had confirmed to your bending author the observation that, on visits to old people’s homes, the cognitive ability of smokers is glaringly superior to that of non-smokers. Presumably the new legislation will condemn many of the elderly to earlier dementia, as well as a miserable life’s end. Many of those studies quoted by Wyatt would not be allowed to take place under current censorship rules and, indeed, many of the older ones have disappeared from public view. That tobacco is an aid to cerebration is a truism (Sherlock Holmes’ three pipe problem). It is evident that virtually every great physicist or philosopher of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a pipe smoker (there were a few exceptions, such as Richard Feynman, who was permanently wreathed in cigarette smoke). Now we have no great physicists or philosophers and are deemed not to need them.

Examples of collateral damage to science and medicine are rife. Anyone calling for a return to the rigour of Fisher and Hill is subject to routine ad hominem attacks by the self-appointed guardians of PC. Drugs are either abandoned or endorsed on the flimsiest of statistical evidence. Only this month the IPCC has promoted a probability of 90% as meaning “very likely” and has invited countries to wreck their economies on this basis.

Welcome to the brave new world!