No more smoking around the barbie?
Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 9:00 A Melbourne city councillor wants to ban smoking in all outdoor areas.
Newly elected Richard Foster says lighting up outside should be prohibited or restricted to designated smoking areas.
This morning I went head-to-head with Foster on Monocle Radio. (No, I'd never heard of it either but it sounded rather good.)
Foster was quite different to the usual anti-smoking zealot. He sounded young, engaging, energetic, the sort of Aussie you'd be happy to have a drink with.
Oh, but the nonsense he came out with. Speaking of the dangers of passive smoking, for example, he referred to evidence provided by the World Health Organisation circa 1999.
When I challenged him to name a single study that demonstrated the ill effects of breathing other people's smoke in the open air he side-stepped the question and referred again to the WHO report which (correct me if I'm wrong) relates to smoking indoors.
This wasn't the moment to get involved in an argument about that (or the discredited WHO report) but I did suggest that if smoking outside is so troubling to people then bar owners, for example, should be allowed to provide well-ventilated smoking rooms so people can smoke inside.
He acknowledged I had a point about banning cars in cities (if you really want to improve air quality) but seemed to suggest that this is impractical. He's right but it's no more impractical or illiberal than banning smoking in all outdoor spaces!
Finally, in what was a very even-handed discussion, one of the two presenters suggested that if smoking outside presents even a "tiny, tiny risk" to other people then a ban should be supported.
To which I replied that life is full of risks and if we want to avoid every "tiny, tiny risk" there's only one solution - stay in bed.
PS. According to one report, Foster "says the message is you can smoke outside the city's boundaries and in private spaces as long as they are not dining areas".
Does that mean no more smoking around the barbie?!
Reader Comments (3)
Isn't that 1998 report the one that gave the wrong result?
"...In 1998 and 2003 came the results of by far the biggest studies of passive smoking ever carried out. One was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation. The other, run by Prof James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat for the American Cancer Society, was a mammoth 40-year-long study of 35,000 non-smokers living with smokers. In each case, when the sponsors saw the results they were horrified. The evidence inescapably showed that passive smoking posed no significant risk. This confirmed Sir Richard Doll's own comment in 2001: "The effects of other people's smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1556118/Christopher-Bookers-notebook.html
I don't know about no more smoking around the barbie Simon - maybe it should be no more barbies near anyone who has been forced outside to have a smoke.
For a BBC report a few year back shows that barbecues poison the air with toxins and could cause cancer, research suggests.
A study by the French environmental campaigning group Robin des Bois found that a typical two-hour barbecue can release the same level of dioxins as up to 220,000 cigarettes.
Read the report here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3106039.stm
Ah yes, the infamous 1998, Boffetta et al "Multicenter Case–Control Study of Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke and Lung Cancer in Europe".
- The one that showed no significant increase in lung cancer risk in adults exposed to ETS.
- The one that showed a statistically significant protective effect of ETS exposure in Children against future lung cancer.
- The one that the WHO are now too embarrassed to discuss - they now argue that the samples were too small, yet they say in the paper...
"our study provides the most precise available estimate of the effect of ETS on lung cancer risk in western European populations." (my emphasis).
- Oh, and the one that led to ASH reporting the Sunday Telegraph to the Press Complaints Commission for daring to report truthfully on its outcomes. And...
- The one that led to ASH getting its bottom smacked by said PCC!
Yes, that study - still available on-line at...
http://www.data-yard.net/2/12/1440.pdf
- The one that we must never, ever allow the WHO and the whole cadre anti-tobacco fascists to forget.
Never!