Were I in the habit of hiding behind anonymous postings, I might have responded using the name CheckYourLogic. I appreciate your concern about my ignorance, but I feel like some reference to that ol’ verse about the speck and the plank is appropriate here.

I hate to burst your bubble, but all that your posts demonstrate is that 1) you can read a single article and pick out money quotes without understanding what you can really conclude from the data, and 2) you can make several unfounded logical leaps in a 500-word span.

First, the method used in the paper you cite relied on self-reports of exposure to secondhand smoke. This is not an objective measure and can be subject to many different kinds of bias and other sources of inaccuracy, particularly when you’re asking participants things like how many hours, on average, they were exposed to secondhand smoke over a period of years. You need only glance at the memory literature to know that people really can’t do this sort of thing with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Second, the paper only attempts to examine the association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. It does not examine the association between secondhand smoke and other types of cancer, other lung disease, such as asthma or respiratory tract infections, or other disease, such as heart disease, all of which have been linked to secondhand smoke. Even if this paper made a strong case that secondhand smoke poses no additional risk for lung cancer, which it doesn’t, it does not follow that it poses no significant health risk.

A bit of advice on reading scientific papers: everybody frames their introduction and discussion to make it sound like their conclusions are solid, everyone agrees with them, and they have made some important contribution to the field. The meat is in the method and the results, and what’s written here is a bit wanting. The fact that this paper devotes quite a bit of text to discussing its own methodological problems and limitations should raise a red flag.

If this is the best paper you can throw at me, that speaks to the weakness of your case more than anything else. You’re welcome to come back and try again if you can find anything resembling consensus on your point.

And finally, you reveal yourself to be more of an idealogue than a serious person when you leap from smoking bans to Nazism. I thought everybody would know Godwin’s Law by now, but I guess not.

The evidence from the available European studies of an association
between ETS exposure during childhood and lung cancer
risk is inconsistent (8,9). Among the non-European studies,
Janerich et al. (33) provided evidence of an increased risk related
to exposure in childhood or adolescence. The remaining studies
[see (34) for a review], however, failed to confirm this finding.
In the light of the inconsistent findings of other studies, our
results on childhood ETS exposure can be plausibly interpreted
as sampling fluctuation around a relative risk of 1 (no effect) and
do not allow us to conclude that ETS exposure during childhood
is protective against lung cancer.

So do me a favor read the studies change your previous statements and learn to think for yourself.

Unfortunately people in this country no longer think for themselves or do their own homework, if you’d like to make an informed statement and sound like you actually understand the data behind your own statement about second hand smoke being harmful then read one of the WHO reports on second hand smoking, what you’ll notice is that the increase in rates of lung cancer for nonsmokers living in a home with smokers is that the increased risk of lung cancer actually falls inside of the margain of error for the study. A really interesting fact is that children in smoking households actually have lower rates of lung cancer than the control group for children.

If you don’t believe me you can read the report here http://www.obscurious.co.uk/componants/smoking1440.pdf

This is a question of civil liberties and the government infringing upon individual rights. Restaurants and bars are not owned by the governement they are owned by private citizens. It should fall upon the owner of the restaurant to allow smoking or not, after all if they felt business would improve by keeping the restaurant non-smoking than it would be a non-smoking establishment. Finally you don’t have to go to smoking restaurants or places, plain and simple if you don’t like the smoke don’t go.

Before you tell me again how bad smoking is for you I already no and am an ex-smoker. I do believe that smoking will kill you but I don’t believe that this second hand smoke issue is actually statistically backed. The anti-smoking lobby is much louder than actual smokers, I’m glad that your city stood up for the rights of the individual and grabbed something back that the government is trying to steal.

Whether you like the smoke or not is your own issue, I ask that you and others like you actually read the data and gain a better understanding of what it actually says or means. You should also be afraid of people like yourself that are all to happy to watch the government outlaw as many things as they can, before you know it one of your favorite things will be outlawed as well.

The choice of the individual, in regards to that individuals own health or safety should be left to the individual. The government should not have the availability to control every aspect of our lives.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Be careful what you wish for.

The total ban on smoking in public places is like the only thing I consistently miss about living in New York. DC has one, too, but the surrounding MD and VA counties usually don’t (the smoking rights people all took refuge in the suburbs, I think), so it’s not all that unusual to be subjected to somebody else’s fumes.

(In spite of this, Pgh does hold a special place in my heart!)

I’m all for minimal govt meddling, except when it comes to endangering my health against my will.