It's Not Just Me

Elsewhere on the web I am still under bombardment for daring to suggest that the evidence that passive smoking is a serious health threat is 'very thin'. A (small) wave of rage has broken over my head, simply because I voiced this doubt.

Is this because of the message, or because of the messenger?  During my researches on the second-hand smoking controversy, I came across an article by Tim Luckhurst in the Independent. (Tuesday May 2nd 2006). Mr Luckhurst, an ornament to my trade,  is now Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent, and the Independent is the sort of unpopular newspaper my critics normally revere.

Yet it seems to me that he expressed a view almost identical to mine. I don't recall, and cannot find, any equivalent complaints about this on the web at the time. Could it be that my detractors are more motivated by dislike of me and of my newspaper, than they are by the actual subject of the debate?

I can't reproduce the whole article, though it's easily found on the web here - here

But I will give a flavour of it.

Referring to what he calls the 'sanctimonious superstition that there can be no smoke without death' Mr Luckhurst recalls that 'On Desert Island Discs in 2001, Sir Richard Doll, the man who proved the incontrovertible causal link between active smoking and lung cancer, said: 'The effect of other people smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me." He was right not to fret.'

Like me, he refers to the huge and important American survey published in the BMJ that has been so furiously attacked.

'Publication provoked a barrage of condemnation in which the then BMJ editor Dr Richard Smith was accused of every failing from naivety to active promotion of evil. His accusers demanded that he withdraw the article. To his credit, Smith refused, pointing out that the BMJ exists to publish science not polemic, and that the American study was proper, peer-reviewed science. A robust and persuasive anti-smoker, he replied that although the BMJ was "passionately anti-tobacco" it was not "anti-science". He went on to explain that "the question [of whether passive smoking kills] has not been definitively answered."'

Mr Luckhurst added 'Doctors and scientists who make such statements come under extraordinary pressure to withdraw them. Three years later, Dr Smith appeared to be satisfied that passive smoking does kill. Doll was persuaded to emphasise that his lack of concern about secondary smoking was a purely personal perspective. The tragedy, for those who care about truth, reason and scientific method, is that it was not. Profound scepticism about the claim that secondary smoking kills is the only rationally tenable position.'

It is worth going to the original article to read the quotation from Amanda Sandford of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) the principal anti-smoking pressure group.

 Mr Luckhurst concluded :'The logic is that distortions paraded in a good cause are virtuous. But, a non-smoker myself, I find it alarming that the Government is prepared to base legislation on what is barely more than superstition. Smoking only kills you if you stick the cigarette in your own mouth. To pretend otherwise is mumbo-jumbo.

'Those who disagree should remember a lesson from the history of anti-smoking. Doll's post-war study was not the first to prove that smoking caused lung cancer: Nazi scientists had reached the same conclusion 20 years earlier. The resulting evidence was ignored in this country because it came from a tainted source. It was assumed that good science could not come from an evil regime. In the modern-day debate over secondary smoking, campaigners who pretend there is proof that it kills are repeating that historic error in reverse. Excellent motives are producing grotesquely distorted science'.

I never intended to get into a scuffle on this subject. My reference to the passive smoking topic was not even a central part of the article I wrote, just a passing nod to the truth that I thought I ought to acknowledge - even though it had no impact on my support for smoking bans. But if I'm going to be assaulted in this way then I will defend myself as a matter of duty.  The abuse of science to assert certainty on contentious issues,  and to shut down important discussions, is an increasing problem in public debate.