With the tobacco debate continuing unabated and smoking bans now being proposed in the state of Minnesota the question of justification becomes paramount and censorship of the opposing view detrimental to a public which needs to be informed. A recent television spot claimed, “Tobacco is the only product that kills one third of its customers every year.” True? Well, not exactly. There are an estimated 50,000,000 smokers in the United States today. One third of that number is 16,666,666. This is almost 41 times 400,000 which is the number of deaths due to smoking currently being touted by the CDC. If tobacco actually did kill one third of its customers every year their number would obviously be decimated in just a few years the anti-tobacco industry could just sit back and watch their opposition disappear without having to do anything with its multi-billion dollar budget. Let’s take another look at that figure of 400,000 (now magically 434,000) annual deaths due to smoking. In a recent column Ann Landers offered the following chart with figures supplied by Smokefree Education Services, Inc.:
Approx. number of deaths per year: At the moment consider the first of these numbers. It comes not from some official tracking but is derived by CDC and attributed to something called SAMMEC which stands for Smoking-Attributable Mortality, Morbidity, and Economic Cost. It is nothing more than a computer program. Its working is a carefully guarded secret and no one outside of CDC seems to know exactly how it operates, but basically it takes data input to its various components, crunches them together in some enigmatic process and out pops a result. Apparently by varying the input you can get almost any desired result. According to CDC, SAMMEC uses what are called “SAF’s” or “smoking attributable fractions for each disease or group of people studied,” i.e., “attributable risk formulas to estimate the number of deaths from neoplastic, cardiovascular, respiratory and pediatric diseases associated with smoking.” Notice the use of the terms “attributable” and “estimate.” Forget about the real world or actual people; it’s all about juggling numbers. No death certificates or medical records are consulted. In other words, nothing specific and pinned down but amorphous and flexible data that can be played with. For instance, it works with a list of supposedly “smoking related” diseases and all deaths due to these diseases are considered as such even if the diseased didn’t smoke. As they say in computing, “Garbage in, garbage out.” So the 400,000 figure is a bogus count manufactured to order. SAMMEC is a dream machine created by anti-smoking addicts hungry for propaganda fodder which is precisely what SAMMEC provides. The deception is compounded when smoking mortality figures are referred to as “premature deaths.” Fact is, fewer than 0.5% of these “premature” deaths occur at ages less than 35 while 8% of non-smokers die younger than 35 and 17% of these “premature” deaths occur at age of 85 or older. But according to the definition used by anti-smoking zealots any “smoking related” death is termed “premature. All this during the same period when smoking prevalence was sharply declining, yet the deaths it supposedly caused was sharply on the rise. It defies logic. But then, so does much of the anti-tobacco catechism. The antis are addicted to overkill in their literature. Then there are the deaths attributed to secondhand smoke (Environmental Tobacco Smoke or ETS) Some of the figures given for this are:
30,000 -- per the EPA ETS Report Again, figures all over the map, and typically exaggerated. Especially considering that ETS is so many times more dilute than mainstream smoke: “ETS is not dense at all; it is highly diluted. In fact, the residual constituents of mainstream and sidestream smoke that find their way into the air as ETS are so highly diluted that it is a misnomer to refer to them as smoke per se. The residual constituents present are diluted by a factor of thousands. But the EPA elected to equate ETS with mainstream and sidestream smoke as if they were all one and the same. The EPA simply chose not to address the fact that ETS has not been well characterized qualitatively or quantitatively; we do not even know exactly what is included in ETS.” (From “Smoke and Mirrors: The EPA's Flawed Study of Environmental Tobacco Smoke and Lung Cancer” by Gary L. Huber, Robert E. Brockie, and Vijay K. Mahajan) Add to this that study after independent study has failed to find any significant danger from ETS plus the fact that the infamous 1993 EPA study which termed secondhand smoke a “Class A carcinogen” was disallowed by a federal district court judge who characterized the study as biased and said it failed to follow the proper legal or scientific procedures for reaching its findings and the whole topic is seen as the hoax it is. All in all, when real figures from the real world are used rather than deceptive propaganda claims, it appears that smoking is nowhere near as deadly as the anti-tobacco zealots would have us believe. But God forbid the public should ever finding that out!
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