Despite the near monolithic success of anti-tobacco whenever and wherever it agitates for a smoking ban there is an under current of contempt for those who push the prohibitionist agenda. Jack Hunter, writer for the Charleston City Paper, doesn’t much like the fanatics who want smoking banned wherever people gather. He likens them to the anti-abortionists who impose their views and values upon every American. He then recites what he calls the facts.
Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona issued a report in 2006 that declared secondhand smoke a hazard. Like Al Gore on anthropogenic climate change, Carmona decreed that the debate is over. Secondhand smoke kills. Hunter musters up a common sense objection to Carmona’s healthist Bull by noting that it defies belief that exposure to secondhand smoke is the same as smoking 20 cigarettes a day. That’s obviously a good point and one needn’t have any scientific background to make it. We note here that Carmona’s report issued in 2006 is merely a rehash of previously issued studies and reports issued over the past decades, none of which have proven that secondhand smoke is hazardous.
The author moves on by noting that secondhand smoke fanatics use their "favorite scientific facts" to run roughshod over freedom of choice in the name of protecting the public health. Quite true except that they have no "scientific facts." All they have is epidemiology, which is not science and never should be considered as such. Former Surgeon General Carmona knows the difference and he knows that his 2006 report is a fraud. Hunter, ignorant though he is about the methods anti-tobacco uses to fool the public, recognizes that something is seriously wrong with an agenda that produces so much turmoil. He also realizes that "health" is not the narrowly defined absolute that anti-tobacco markets in its effort to crush individuality. Hunter’s words are worth remembering:
"The quality of both life and liberty has always been indispensable to the health of our republic, and both suffer when fanatics of any stripe are given carte blanche to do their damage. That certain bad policies remain popular is no justification. And that a certain brand of fanaticism is more fashionable should never make it more acceptable."
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