[Mpls] Those damned statistics

[mplsgordon2 at aol.com]

First, my apologies on how my posts show up on the list. I've tried  
formatting as plain text, but all the paragraphs get squeezed together and the  links 
sometimes duplicate.
I read with interest Mark Snyder's response to my post on how the smoke  
banners' two pet studies didn't support the idea that secondhand smoke causes  
lung cancer. He was a little more scatalogically emphatic in his personal reply  
to me, but I don't hold that against anyone.
I'm not a chemist nor an environmental scientist, nor do I play one on TV.  
But I can read, and if I take off my shoes and socks I can do higher math.  
Growing up in a family that had two businesses, newspapers and polling, I got a  
fairly good practical education in how news can be manipulated as thoroughly 
as  statistics. And for the record, I'm not a shill for Big Tobacco, the liquor 
 industry, or anyone else--but I may be a whack job. That's for others to 
decide. 
The problem I have with Mark's response is that he didn't address my  
arguement, which was:
There is no hard evidence that secondhand smoke is killing people. In it, I  
cited the 1998 WHO report and the 1993 EPA report. I had a link to the WHO  
report, but I couldn't find the EPA report online, so I included a link to a  
Cato Institute article that referenced it.
Mark first made an ad hominem attack on the authors of the Cato article.  
This is fine--it's always wise to know the background of someone being cited as  
an authority. But ad hominem attacks don't invalidate data. 
Mark then referenced an ACSH article that criticized the Cato article. ACSH  
is a reputable organization, and their critique may well be valid--*as far as 
it  goes.* The problem is, I couldn't find anything in the ACSH article that  
referenced the issue at hand here, which is whether or not secondhand smoke 
has  been proven to cause fatal disease.
I'm not argueing that direct cigarette smoking isn't linked to fatal  
diseases. The point is that secondhand smoke isn't linked. There's been a ton of  
publicity and noise, but none of it alters the fact that the WHO report failed  
to find the link, and that the EPA report was politicized crap.
Our Rosevillian, David Shove, is refreshingly honest--he wants to ban the  
smoking because he just doesn't like it. Ed Felien asks why bartenders have more 
 lung problems than quarry workers or firefighters. I don't know if they do 
or  not, but there can be very good reasons for this other than smoking. That's 
why  studies must be carefully done to screen out cofactors and other noise 
that can  hide the true facts. There is indeed reasonable doubt, Ed--and even 
if there  weren't, the mayor and council could save a lot more lives and 
protect the  public welfare better by banning drinking instead.
Chris Johnson guarantees to us that research will show more deaths due to  
secondhand smoke. But that's the problem with the EPA report--they drew their  
conclusions, then fudged the numbers to support them. It may well be that ETS 
is  proven to cause serious harm--but so far, it ain't been done.
Finally, a nitpick to Matt Brower: It may be counterintuitive, but the  
research shows that smoking seems to be a net benefit to the health care system.  
Not only do smokers pay a lot of taxes, but they do tend to die younger--and  
more quickly--than nonsmokers. They (smokers) don't have the long lingering  
illnesses that cost megabucks to mitigate. Plus, the nonsmokers are a much more  
heavy drain on the various retirement systems as they draw their less-taxed  
benefits for more years.