Erik Nord is a researcher and health economist who has worked for the Norwegian health authorities for 20 years, and has been one of the most vocal opponents of the anti-smoking law that came in effect last month. That's not saying much. Despite the harshness of the law, the unpopularity of Health Minister Dagfinn Høybråten, (who the media chose instead to nail for his connection to an anti-gay congregation), and the scientific flaws in anti-smoking propaganda, there haven't been many candidates for the job of speaking up for smokers' rights, for pragmatism and scientific honesty. Nord is one of very few.

In Kruttrøyk & fredspipe (Gunsmoke and Peace Pipe), Nord attacks what he sees as the main problem with the government's war on tobacco: its lack of compassion and pragmatism towards smokers.

Nord is not a regular smoker himself, and is glad that smokers no longer feel entitled to smoke anywhere they like, as they did only decades ago. But the wheel has turned. Smokers have learned to show us non-smokers consideration. Now it is time for us to return the favor, to show empathy with the smokers. Empathy with smokers? With smelly, cancer-spewing nicotine addicts? The campaign against smoking has been so successful that the idea is abhorrent. Smokers are selfish, inconsiderate and weak, not regular people deserving of empathy. But consider the lonely and elderly who spend hours every day with other pub or cafe regulars. How will the smoking ban affect their daily life? Did anyone bother to check? These people are real, but they're not very visible, and they're easy to overlook. Nord goes out looking for them, and finds what from his leftist point of view strikes him as a class conflict: Well off middle class people making laws that affect sections of society they're unaware of, and don't care about, in ways they didn't bother to investigate.

Or consider your average occasional smoker who enjoys a cigarette after dinner. A small joy, to be sure, but life is made out of small joys, many of which are no larger than that. But this has been left out of the equation. It is, of course, unlikely that these joys would outweigh the damage the government confidently attributes to passive smoking, but to not even consider it, to not even mention it as a negative side effect of a smoking ban, reveals a disturbing arrogance and a lack of empathy with the faceless masses this law affects.

Nord also objects to the scientific basis for the smoking ban. When I looked into this last month I found that there are many flaws and weaknesses in research on passive smoking: The level of passive smoking employees in pubs are exposed to may not necessarily be dangerous. But this is a gray area of science. The correlation with lung cancer and heart disease is too small to rule out confounding factors, but it is consistent, and is certainly an indication worth doing further research on.

Erik Nord chooses a safer, but just as effective, line of attack. Norway's health authorities assert not only that high levels of passive smoking are unacceptably dangerous, but that small levels of exposure are as well. So don't bother looking for alternatives to zero tolerance – there is no safe limit. Nord looks into this, and discovers that the scientific basis for this assertion is .. nonexistent. Reports refer to other reports, which refer to other reports, and at the end of the chain there are only assumptions: “A linear exposure-response relationship is assumed”, meaning that if x amount of smoke increases cancer risk by y, x/10 increases risk by y/10. Not only is it unscientific to make assumptions like this – it is deceptive to use such results without explaining how they were derived, which the health authorities appears to have done here. Either that or they didn't bother to check, in which case they're not qualified for their job. Nord recounts his attempts to force the health authorities to acknowledge this error, only to be met with silence and diversions.

How is this relevant? Passive smoking at pre-ban levels may be dangerous. It's not proven, all we have is a weak correlation, but people who believe in the precautionary principle will say that we can't take that chance. Others will say, as some supporters of this ban replied when I wrote about this in June, that even if passive smoking is harmless, it's annoying, and they'll be glad to be rid of the smell. So let's just ban it, right? But if small levels of exposure are harmless, then perhaps we don't need to ban all smoking, perhaps we could find a solution that just reduces exposure to a low levels.

This is where people with a sensible concern about passive smoking and a desire not to be annoyed should take a different path from those dishonest activists who use the fight against passive smoking to achieve their real goal: Not a world where people are safe from other people's smoke, but a world where people don't smoke at all. Activists won't settle for anything less than total absence. The rest of us are more flexible. We're more than happy with good enough.

Improved ventilation systems could achieve this, and so can separate smoking rooms. This would be safe, and it wouldn't be annoying to non-smokers. Erik Nord asks us to be creative, to think about solutions that respect the interests of smokers, while achieving all the stated objectives of our new smoking ban. This isn't difficult. All it requires is concern for the well-being of smokers.

But the health authorities didn't bother to investigate ventilation systems and smoking rooms. They didn't look for creative solutions. They went straight to zero tolerance, the one option that would cause the most inconvenience for smokers.

That zero tolerance is about more than protecting people from passive smoking becomes clear when you look at the way the government has reacted to Erik Nord's search for a way to bypass the smoking ban. After scrutinizing the text of the law, he discovered that if you form a club with restricted membership, and give this club a room of their own in the back of the pub, the law can not prevent club members from smoking in that room. So you can create smoking clubs for people who are against the ban, give them an unserviced room of their own, and let them go in there for a smoke when they want to.

When Nord went public with this discovery, the Ministry of Health first denied (falsely) that this hole existed, and when that didn't work attempted (illegally) to redefine the terms used by the law, to cover the hole, something only Stortinget is authorized to do. They still insist that it would be illegal to do this.

Why do this? Why refuse to allow even the tiniest opportunity for a small number of smokers, under great inconvenience, and without harming anyone but themselves, to enjoy their habit? Because the true goal of the health authorities in Norway is the total end of smoking, and for such a total end only a total ban will do the job. To reach their goal, they're prepared to abuse science and overrun hundreds of thousands of people. They don't care about anything but their vision of a tobacco free future, and if you don't happen to share that vision, that's your problem.

This is not the behavior of decent, sensible people, it's the behavior of authoritarians and puritans. This is not compassion with the plights of waitresses, it's an imposition by force of a narrow set of personal values on an entire society. Even people who dislike the smell of smoke, like I do, or who worry about its unproven second hand effects, (which I no longer do), should be concerned about this.

Kruttrøyk & fredspipe is not a great book, but it's a necessary one. It is not a comprehensive and coherent attack on the anti-smoking law, a history of how it was made, or a full evaluation of the effects it will have on regular smokers. It's a little of all three, fragmented and mixed together in a book-long rant. Never enough to close any issues, but always enough to convince you that there's something there worth investigating. There are so many threads here that deserve to be followed up, but won't be, because no news organization with the power to force a reply out of government officials give a damn about the well-being of smokers. There is still some territory left to take, but the war on smoking is over, and the puritans won.

First they came for smoking cigs - but not dope, now they're coming for food. After that battle, what's next?

They're going to litigate us into how they think we should act, think, eat, because they are our betters and know better than we do.

Someone with a pronounced fear of flying once wrote a quick guide for those who find themselves seated next to a phobic flyer. Some of it was predictable (don't try to assuage one fear in a way that creates more fear later as in "actually take off is much safer than landing") but one point that stuck out at me was (paraphrasing) do not treat the phobia as rational. For some people it's only the thought that their fear has no rational basis that allows them to get on the plane at all.

I take a similar tack toward smokers. I'm polite enough (I think) and I would never buggest that a smoker not smoke in their own home (unless they're pregnant or blowing it in their kids faces) but I refuse to treat smoking as a rational choice that only affects the user. I'm not afraid of the health effects of 2handsmoke but I'm not willing to accept the aesthetic effects. I don't care if the health effects aren't quite as bad as once feared. The problem is that unlike alchohol (and some other mood altering subtances) smoke changes the environment around the user for non-users (for a good long while) and the more non-smokers enjoy a respite from smoker stench, the less tolerance they have for it at all.

That said, if addicts just have to get their fix, then by all means let them create their little segregated ghettos.

Sorry, Bjorn, I only buy part of this.

Let's start with a couple of facts about smoking:

- It has no redeeming value. There are no known or suspected health benefits of smoking, the sensory pleasure is dubious at best, etc.

- Smokers aren't morally inferior to non-smokers. I can only attribute my non-smoking status to dumb luck.

- Because nicotine is so addictive, smoking is not simply a matter of choice.

- Just because we haven't established a threshold condition for health hazard doesn't mean it has to be high. Factor in individual differences, and it's simply impossible to know whether even a small amount of smoke is damaging to some people.

- Smoker's rights about the right to indulge in a bad habit. We don't automatically grant that right to others with bad habits.

Having said all this, Nord and you are right to point out the social damage done by these bans. In other words, do all the arguments against smoking outweigh smokers' needs? I don't know the extent to which the division between smokers and non-smokers amounts to class segregation (seems other mechanisms take care of that), but it is fair to ask whether throwing out smokers from places they would like to be hurts them in ways we wouldn't find acceptable. To put it bluntly, we non-smokers really don't give a shit about the smokers who huddle outside in the cold because they feel like they're dying for a cigarette. Is that nice?

Maybe more creativity is needed, but more importantly I think we need a candid discussion about the reality of nicotine addiction and the social function of smoking.

Leif: “- It has no redeeming value. There are no known or suspected health benefits of smoking, the sensory pleasure is dubious at best, etc.”

By dubious do you mean that we don't know if smoking actually is pleasurable? What an odd thing to say. I've never smoked, so others will have to reply to that, but I hope you don't base your views on the belief that smokers don't actually enjoy their habit. Regular smokers are addicts, certainly, but what about occasional smokers?

“Just because we haven't established a threshold condition for health hazard doesn't mean it has to be high. Factor in individual differences, and it's simply impossible to know whether even a small amount of smoke is damaging to some people.”

That's right, it is impossible. That's what I said. Remember what we're talking about here. For high levels of passive smoking, we have weak but consistent indications of danger. For low levels we have only speculation. Do you believe so strongly in the precautionary principle that you're willing to apply it to unproven, untested speculation? And do you apply it consistently, or just to smoking? Speculation is cheap, and the tabloids are full of speculations about health hazards no better founded in science than this.

“Smoker's rights about the right to indulge in a bad habit. We don't automatically grant that right to others with bad habits.”

Yes we do. Many eat too much, or don't work out, or drink too much, waste their lives doing really stupid things. Which is more dangerous, smoking or living like a lazy slob? And in the case of someone doing both, which habit is it better to correct first?

And yet we don't – or at least most of us don't – believe the government has a right to force anyone out of these bad habits. I don't believe in a nanny state that protects us from ourselves. I thought you didn't either, but perhaps I was wrong.

Bjorn

1) Sensory pleasure - I have no firsthand knowledge, since I've never smoked. But from what I've read, cigarette smoke significantly dulls the olfactory senses. People who try to smoke the first time usually cough and sometimes vomit. You never hear about cigarette afficianados, though I suppose they exist in the cigar world. From what I can tell, occasional smokers indulge entirely for social reasons, whether it's to look cool, share in an experience, or dull the offensive nature of second-hand smoke.

2) I don't know if this all comes down to a question of "faith" in the precautionary principle. It really is a matter of individual preference. I was exposed to cigarette smoke in utero and until I left home, since my mother smoked (and has since quit). Yet I am actively working to minimize my children's exposure to any amount of cigarette smoke. Some are more or less cautious than I am. For precisely that reason, it's hard to fault public health officials for applying the principle rigorously - this isn't Vitamin A we're talking about, which you need in small doses but is dangerous in high doses. Cigarette smoke is at best harmless in small doses and is dangerous at high doses. It is simply impossible to prove (or disprove) the harmful effects of small amounts of cigarette smoke. We used to think lead in small doses was harmless and put it in gas - now we know different.

3) The right to indulge in bad habits. You're right, but here's what I meant. We should grant people the right to harm themselves, but this should also be weighed against their right to harm others in the process. And "harm" will include but isn't limited to harm to your health. This always involves trade-offs. For example, can you insist that a co-worker not wear perfume (deodorant?) if the smell gives you migraines? How loud can you turn up the volume on your stereo before your neighbor complains that the sound is interfering with his/her sleep? My point is that smokers do not have a right to smoke at the expense of other people's comfort.

This gets even more complicated when you talk about the social costs of smoking. Smokers pay higher life insurance premiums to reflect their mortality rate, but they don't pay more income taxes in a public health system to reflect their higher morbidity rates, which affects their rate of absence from work, direct health costs, etc. Add to that the moral hazard taxation creates for governments who actually depend on tobacco consumption to fund public expenditures.

I am in favor og legalizing drugs, and I think banning the buying, selling, and consumption of tobacco would be a bad mistake. But this position doesn't mean there aren't problems to solve.

Bjørn: I admire your zeal in scrutinizing the smoking ban and the research that's supposed to back it up, but it seems that in the process, you've adopted the stance and rhetoric of the whingeing smokers who decry the "puritans" and the "nanny-state" for limiting their god-given right to smoke. Smoking in public is no right, and no matter how (in)conclusive the research on passive smoking is, second hand smoke is still very annoying, especially to those who suffer allergies or asthma.

Granted, the smoking ban have been implemented in a somewhat heavy-handed manner, and landlords willing to make the investment should definitely have been able to maintain indoor smoking zones with proper ventilation, but I don't see how you arrive at the conclusion that this is all part of some sinister plan to outlaw smoking entirely.

For the record, I used to be a smoker, and even then I supported the ban. And as for the "small pleasure" of a cigarette, smoking only becomes a pleasure after your body learns to supress its natural initial reaction of coughing and sickness.

Redbull: "Smoking in public is no right, and no matter how (in)conclusive the research on passive smoking is, second hand smoke is still very annoying, especially to those who suffer allergies or asthma."

But that's just my point - there most likely is a way to avoid that annoyance, and the health authorities didn't pursue it: Better ventilation and enclosed, self-served smoking rooms. And that's also how we can be reasonably sure that there is a larger motive behind this. If the intention of this law was to protect people against death and annoyance, why go to the trouble of a total ban - a solution without any precedent in working environment law? Okay, maybe they just didn't think that far, perhaps they were so used to thinking that smoking is bad that they never considered the possibility that they could reach their goals in a less intrusive way. But when people like Erik Nord went public with the hole in the law that allowed members of smoking clubs to use such smoking rooms, why did they try to close it? No harm done to employees. So why didn't anyone reply "hm, that's interesting, okay we'll try that for a while and see if this really works"?

Nobody ever beat up their wife, or molested children, because of the evil influendce of nick o'teen.

Born:I don't go around pissing on you. So why should I be forced to breath in the by-product of your addiction. I don't care what people do to themselves, its when their own self-destructive idiocy harms others that I get annoyed.

Small amounts of passive smoking may not lead to the rapid development of cancer, but it certainly has a dangerous effect on those people afflicted with Athsma (an extremely common disease in the first world), and other respiratory illnesses.

Besides there's new evidence that suggests that passive smoking reduces intelligence in those with developing minds, like children and young adults.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992251

People have the freedom to do what they like, to the extent that their freedoms do not infringe on the freedoms of others, ie; the freedom to be free from disease and to raise youngters not afflicted with a lower than normal IQ.

David Elson.

David Elson: "I don't go around pissing on you. So why should I be forced to breath in the by-product of your addiction. I don't care what people do to themselves, its when their own self-destructive idiocy harms others that I get annoyed."

I never said that anyone had that right. The question is whether passive smoking, at high or low levels, is dangerous enough to be concerned. I'm not convinced that it is. Everything else follows from that: What to do or not do about it, and how to feel about anti-smoking activists.

"Besides there's new evidence that suggests that passive smoking reduces intelligence in those with developing minds, like children and young adults."

Yes, and the keyword is suggests:

"But Jo Nanson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon says the results should be interpreted cautiously because of possible confounding factors. She says mothers who smoke during pregnancy are known to reduce their child's IQ, for instance, and if the parents are smoking now, they were probably smoking then. "It needs some careful statistical analysis," Nanson warns.

But Yolton says that when they allowed for this in the subset of kids for whom data on prenatal exposure was available, it made no difference."

This is an interesting result, (though irrelevant to the smoking ban in question). But it's still just a weak correlation possibly created by confounding factors. And that is the problem with all this research. We _know_ that nicotine is very dangerous to yourself. That is rock solid science. The evidence for danger to other people is not, it is weak and inconclusive.

So we have two choices: Wait for science, or act on faith. Yes there's a risk that waiting is the wrong choice, that a causative relationship will be proven in the future. But to act on what might be proven in the future is irrational - imagine that principle applied to other issues. It's tempting to act on inconclusive research because the numbers are easy to visualize. And it's just as easy to forget that unless there's solid science behind them they're no more than just that, numbers.

I'm a great believer in civil liberties, but I don't belive anyone has the right to poison someone else. A cigarette is a little toxic waste dump on fire.
Stan Glantz (The Independent, 2001)

Bjorn: Just to let you know, I understand where you coming from, but I still think that future studies will bear up my beliefs in regards to this. Future research is most definitely needed, to understand the risks involved more fully.

Some pertinent links are:

http://www.cancersa.org.au/i-cms?page=1.6.36.368.188

Smoky workplaces killing 70 NSW bar workers a year (http://www.ashaust.org.au/SF%2703/health.htm)

Passive smoke twice the heartbreaker
we thought(http://www.ashaust.org.au/mediareleases/mr_20040701.htm)

I don't know the extent to which the division between smokers and non-smokers amounts to class segregation (seems other mechanisms take care of that), but it is fair to ask whether throwing out smokers from places they would like to be hurts them in ways we wouldn't find acceptable.

Skrev et svar til deg i dagbla-loggen før jeg la meg i går, men det dukket aldri opp. Begrensing på lengden? Bare til opplysning dette, så du ikke tror jeg syntes spørsmålene dine var for vanskelig... Jeg tror jeg har det som tekstdokument hjemme, og prøver igjen etter jobb. Nå kan du slette denna.

Good news! A huge new secondhand smoke study indicates that smoking bans are not necessary to protect public health after all!

Press Release

For Immediate Release: December 5 , 2005

Do Smoking Bans cause a 27 to 40% drop in admissions for myocardial infarction in hospitals?
December 5, 2005

Antismokers claim that studies have shown that bans bring about an immediate and drastic decrease in heart attacks among nonsmokers exposed to smoke at work.

This claim was never true to begin with - the cited studies never separated and analyzed nonsmokers as a separate group - and it has now been pointed out in the pages of the BMJ that even the claim of saving lives among the combined population of smokers and nonsmokers might be worthless.

While many making that claim may have believed their information to be accurate, it is now obvious that its basis has been thrown strongly into question. As Jacob Sullum noted in a December 1st reaction to the announcement, "An effect this dramatic (i.e. an immediate and pronounced drop of hospital admissions for heart attacks) should have been noticed all over the country..."

Just a week before the Chicago Aldermen were due to vote on a citywide smoking ban, two independent researchers working together, David W. Kuneman and Michael J. McFadden, unveiled a new study covering a population base roughly 1,000 times as large as the previous town-based studies. The new study indicates strongly that rather than a 30% decrease in heart attacks, statewide smoking bans seem to have literally NO EFFECT AT ALL on heart attack rates. Incredibly the data even indicates that California's statewide heart attack rate went UP by 6% in the first full year of their total smoking ban!

The data for the study and the basis of its design have been backed up and expanded by well-known antismoking researcher Michael Siegel who has come out in support of the researchers' approach as providing "compelling evidence that brings into question the conclusion that smoking bans have an immediate and drastic effect on heart attack incidence." His observation is echoed by researcher Kuneman who asks, "Ever wonder why you didn't hear about post ban heart attack declines in New York City? Or in Minneapolis or Los Angeles? Now you know!"

On December 4th the British Medical Journal entered the fray with the online publication of a Rapid Response by Mr. McFadden outlining the new research and posing sharp criticisms of the earlier studies and of the refusal of the authors of those studies to respond to previous criticisms and questions. McFadden points out that the data in the Kuneman/McFadden study are fully open for public examination and far less selective than the data in the earlier studies and notes with pride that he and his co-researcher have been quick to respond to all queries posted about their methodology on Dr. Siegel's web blog.

He also poses the wider ranging question of whether studies commissioned by the "Antismoking Industry" should begin to receive the same cautious reception accorded those commissioned by "Big Tobacco." The current study, as well as an earlier one by the duo, were unfunded and neither researcher receives grants for their work from either interest group. Kuneman sharply asks the question, "Why the difference between the studies? For one thing we weren't dependent on antismoking-targeted grants!"

At this point there appears to be very little, if any, real scientific support for the claim that protecting nonsmokers from normal levels of exposure to secondary smoke prevents any heart attacks. And it is this claim that has always provided the impressive numbers upon which ban advocates have pressed legislators to pass smoking bans.

Without those numbers proponents of extreme bans are left with little other than the widely discredited EPA figures relating ETS to lung cancer and a few isolated instances of hospitality workers who have come to believe that their own cancers were caused by working in smoking establishments. Samantha Phillipe, editor of the longstanding smokersclubinc.com newsletter, notes that while it's always a cause for sadness when someone becomes ill that it's even more sad when they are misguidedly advised to blame family and friends for their illness.

Without a compelling body of scientific evidence backing them up, smoking bans are an unnecessary and overbearing intrusion of government into the spheres of free choice, private property and free enterprise. And the Kuneman/McFadden study points up just how uncompelling even some of the strongest and most publicised evidence actually is.

References:

1) Article: A Preliminary Study

2) Mike Siegel's blog analysis and follow up comments:

3) BMJ Response: Helena 1000 Days

4) Jacob Sullum's REASON column: Hit and Run

Michael J. McFadden
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"
Mid-Atlantic Regional Director of SmokersClubInc.com
web page: http://pasan.thetruthisalie.com/
Email: Cantiloper@aol.com

Check this one out:

'Smoking Is "Legal Again" -- Only If You're Muslim
The camel's nose in under the tent in the Astoria section of NYC where patrons cluster around tables and puff on fruit-flavored tobacco through pipes called hookahs. "The hookahs allow us to come together and unwind," Beirut-born Mahamoud Abraham, co-owner of the cafe said. "It's an important part of our culture."

Gee. Non-Muslims in America for centuries make tobacco smoking "an important part" of their culture and are forbidden to do so in public, and in some cases at home where young children are present. It's the law. Do Muslims think that Muslim culture trumps the law of the land? '

click on link below for more. Also check out link 'gates of vienna' within article

http://sixthcolumn.blogspot.com/2006/01/smoking-is-legal-again-only-if-youre.html

shukran
Fatimah Kim
anti-smoking jihadist

my motto is : smoking is haram, killing is halaal :)

AAAACH - Mein Gott ! My prior 'satirical' post on smoking has disappeared !...pooof - it has vanished from this blog like a puff of SMOKE.

Allahuma! Allahuma! could it be that the norwegian secret police and their Jinnies have been monitoring us and I have become the first casualty of the new norwegian dhimmi laws?

May Allah put a pox on them for their zealotry in censorship! Such zeal at stifling dissent and variant expressions is unheard of in the islamikkk society from which i hail. Truly Allah is the author of all dissent..He freely giveth and He freely taketh .

Ayesha Kim
traumatized muhajirrah
and martyr for free expressions

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