I didn'twrite this but it one of the over 200 studies and articles I have on hand to firht smoking bans. This guy has got it right. It's long but worth reading.

Dangers Of Smoking
Joe Jackson

Two or three years ago I considered giving up my own moderate
enjoyment of Tobacco because of the constant barrage of horrific
statistics. But antismoking propaganda in the USA (I was living
mostly in New York) seemed so overblown, so hysterical, that I became
skeptical. So instead of giving up smoking, I started doing research.

At first my mind was pretty open; I half expected to find that
smoking was even worse than I thought, and I decided that, since I
wasn't a hardcore nicotine junkie, I could live without it. Instead,
I've been astonished, again and again, by how flimsy much of the
antismoking evidence really is. By now I'm absolutely convinced that
the dangers of smoking (and `secondhand smoke ' in particular) are
being greatly exaggerated, for a number of reasons, many of which
have less to do with health than with politics, money and fashion.

People used to be guided by intuition, experience, observation,
moderation, pleasure, folklore, the testimony of friends and
acquaintances, and their family history. Increasingly , though, we're
expected to be guided by Government Statistics. The problem is that
so much of what we're told is politicised, out of context, out of
proportion, or just plain false. The bald statement `Smoking Kills!'
makes us skeptical right away, since we can see for ourselves that in
most cases, it doesn 't.

One good example of this lack of balance and perspective is the way
we 're told that smokers have a higher risk of lung cancer, without
being told what the overall `baseline ' risk is in the first place.
The statistics always sound alarming; we're told that smokers have
a `600% increased risk', for instance, because this sounds worse than
six. Other sources (the majority, it seems) insist that smokers are
actually ten (1000%) times more likely to get lung cancer. Others
quote the pioneering studies of Sir Richard Doll, who reckoned that
166 in 100,000 smokers die from lung cancer, as opposed to 7 in
100,000 nonsmokers, so you have a 24 times higher risk of getting
lung cancer if you smoke.

Antismokers aren't lying when they tell you that smokers are,
statistically, more likely to die of lung cancer. But they don't tell
you, for instance, that only a minority of those deaths could be
considered `premature.' They also don't point out a basic statistical
fact: that a large increase on a very small number can still be a
very small number. (Think of it this way: if you buy twenty Lottery
tickets instead of one, your chances of winning would go up by 2000%
but could still be infinitesimal). So, if you're good at maths you
can figure this out for yourself: even if you accept Prof. Doll's
numbers, your chances of NOT getting lung cancer are still more than
99%! Besides, we still don't actually know what causes cancer or how
to cure it, and lung cancer (with, incidentally, about 40 risk
factors in addition to smoking) is particularly hard to treat. This
understandably drives doctors and scientists crazy, and they are
anxious to bring down lung cancer rates in any way they can.
Targeting smoking - something quite a few people viscerally dislike
anyway - seems like a good bet, especially when smokers are a
minority. And the more smoking is targeted, the fewer resources are
allocated to lung cancer research. Health professionals have `closed
ranks' on this issue, and like Nancy Reagan, they're trying to make a
problem go away by telling us to `just say no.' As for nonsmoking
lung cancer victims ...well, too bad.

We are also told `Smoking Causes Heart Disease' even though there are
something like 300 risk factors for that, and some very large studies
(for instance, the well-known study of the citizens of Framingham,
Massachussets, which has been going on since 1948) have shown the
link with smoking to be rather weak. Still, such is the imperative to
demonise smoking, these and other diseases are labeled `smoking-
related' and every death from them just added to the `smoking-
related' tally - whether or not the sufferers smoked! At the same
time, the large number of smokers (more than half) who die of these
diseases at normal (i.e.,old) ages have their deaths attributed to
smoking even when this cannot be proven. Still no one puts this all
into perspective and points out that a majority of us will live into
our 70s and die of either some sort of cancer, some sort of heart
trouble, or some other `smoking-related' disease whether we smoke or
not. Cancer, especially, is mostly a disease of the old, and the main
reason it looms so large these days is that we're living longer.

We are told that an `estimated' third of all smokers will die of the
habit, and then this mysteriously goes up to a half, and then
the `estimated' starts to be dropped in favour of just a statement
of `fact'. Still we're never told what exactly is meant by
a `smoker'. In many cases it's only people who've smoked over 20
cigarettes a day for decades - more moderate cigarette smokers or
cigar or pipe smokers don't count. In other studies a `smoker' is
anyone who has smoked 100 cigarettes in their lifetime; in others,
someone who quit 5 months ago is a `nonsmoker,' while in others
someone is called a `smoker' when they quit 20 years ago! Estimates
of deaths from smoking are based mostly on speculative mathematical
projections and should be treated with much more skepticism than is
currently the case. For instance, until very recently, a completely
arbitrary 13% of cervical cancer deaths were attributed to smoking,
but it has now been proven that almost 100% are caused by a virus.

Most of us can't think of more than one person we've known who has
died from smoking - and even then, the chances are that they died in
their 70s, and that if we think about it, we can't be absolutely sure
they didn't die from a combination of factors, some unknowable. It
simply cannot possibly be true that anywhere near a half of everyone
who ever smokes is doomed to a premature death. If that were true we
would have worked it out long ago from our own experience, and hardly
anyone would smoke, and tobacco would be illegal. But still the
statistics grind on. We are told that 120,000 people a year in the UK
are `estimated ' to die from `smoking-related diseases.' Yet the
number of death certificates which declare `cause of death: smoking'
is actually only a few hundred. It's much harder to establish smoking
as the cause of death than we are led to believe.

No one suggests, either, that diet, lifestyle or genetics may be
factors. Native Americans smoke much more than white Americans, yet
have half the rate of lung cancer. The Greeks, Japanese, Italians and
Spaniards are the world's heaviest smokers , but are all right at the
top of the life expectancy charts, with lower rates of `smoking-
related' disease than Americans or Northern Europeans. The Japanese
have especially low rates of lung cancer - though these have risen
over the last couple of decades at the same time as smoking has
declined. Meanwhile, Chinese women have one of the highest in the
world even though only 2% of them smoke. Such facts are rarely
mentioned, since in an antismoking climate they are inconvenient - as
is any suggestion that air pollution from cars, etc, might be a
factor in `smoking-related' diseases. Much easier just to keep
bashing smoking!

In the UK, at least, Class is (perhaps predictably) invoked in the
smoking debate. We are now being told that the working class has much
more disease and premature death than the middle class, and that the
biggest reason is that they smoke more. But poorer and less-educated
people are also much more likely to have bad diets, drink too much,
have higher cholestorol, exercise too little, work too hard, and have
higher exposure to stress, pollution, and all kinds of other things
which are factors in `smoking-related' disease, and which are
impossible to separate from smoking itself. You can always find
something to single out as the `curse of the working classes'. In
1920s America it was booze; now it's tobacco.

Dr Ken Denson of the Thame Thrombosis and Haemostasis Research
Foundation (one of the few British doctors currently willing to speak
out against what he calls the antismoking `witch hunt') has argued
persuasively, in many medical journal articles and letters, that
rates of `smoking-related' disease could be brought way down just by
encouraging smokers to eat more fruit and vegetables and less fat,
and/or exercise more. (One recent study has shown that one-pack-a-day
smokers who exercise live longer than sedentary nonsmokers). In Dr
Denson's view, the medical community is failing to offer smokers
protection by not educating them about all their options, and by
instead relentlessly pushing a kind of zero-tolerance Prohibitionism
which will inevitably backfire.

There are other ways in which antismoking zeal doesn't actually help
smokers or anyone else. For instance, tremendous progress has been
made in research and development of safer cigarettes; but this has
been systematically crushed by the `antis', since it could undermine
their efforts towards total prohibition. Even today's regular
cigarettes are safer than the unfiltered, high-tar cigarettes which
were the norm in the 1950s, when much of the scientific antismoking
evidence was first established. But for antismokers, the only good
news is bad news - an attitude we shall see again in this essay's
sections on secondhand smoke and on air filtration/ventilation.

Likewise,there is a huge difference in risk between smoking 5 or 10
cigarettes a day and smoking 40 or 60; and although this seems
glaringly obvious, it is currently taboo, in medical circles, to even
suggest it. Instead we are told that there is `no safe level' of
smoking - when there are safe levels of every imaginable kind of
poison, pollution, radiation, carcinogens, etc. In fact, tobacco is
the only `recreational drug' which does not impair brain function or
alter behaviour, and it actually has a beneficial effect on certain
diseases, notably Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. There is quite a bit
of evidence that a normal healthy person can smoke up to ten or so
cigarettes a day with no ill-effects whatsoever, and even some
benefits, e.g. stress reduction, weight control, and improved
concentration and memory. (The Framingham study has shown that
smokers of up to 10 cigarettes a day have less heart disease than
nonsmokers).

We are told that smoking is nothing but a joyless addiction,even
though we can see that for millions of people it's a great pleasure,
and that more and more people are smoking moderately. It is in any
case hard to draw clear lines between `addictions',habits , and
favourite pastimes or rituals. Many people are indeed addictive when
it comes to smoking, but then again, many people are addictive with
alcohol, coffee, many drugs (including prescription ones), sugar,
sex, dieting, the gym, or TV soap operas. The term `addiction', like
many other things in the smoking debate, is politicised, and overused
in a further attempt to make smokers look bad and feel guilty.

We are also told that cigars and pipes are no safer than cigarettes;
yet even if you don't know that cigar smoke is chemically different
to and less carcinogenic than cigarette smoke, and almost never
fatal, isn 't it obvious that you're safer when the smoke is not
inhaled?

In recent years, claims for the evils of smoking have become so
hysterical that ordinary people are ceasing to believe them, and
this, surely, has worrying implications for the credibility of health
authorities. A recent report showed that the sperm count of British
men seems to have declined over the last couple of decades. The
researchers had no idea why, but doctors and journalists immediately
rushed to blame it on smoking. No one pointed out that over the last
couple of decades, people have smoked much less. Similarly, another
recent scare tried to blame infertility and impotence on smoking and
perhaps even passive smoking. No one pointed out that people smoked
more in the period of the two world wars and just after, than at any
other time in history. And what did we have in the 1950s? A baby
boom! It's questionable what purpose is served by these kinds of
reports except to create a climate of paranoia.

Then there was the recent gruesome ad campaign on UK TV showing that
smoking `clogs up your arteries' with disgusting goo. This ad was so
phoney it was sent up by the satirical magazine Private Eye, which
rightly pointed out that nonsmokers' arteries clog up too, that there
are many causes, and that the link to smoking is tenuous.
Anecdotally, too, we know that smokers are now castigated at every
opportunity as though tobacco were responsible for every possible
human ill. A friend of mine recently broke her wrist, and her doctor
told her it might not heal as quickly as normal because she smoked.
It actually healed more quickly than expected, but you can bet no one
attributed that to her smoking.

I'm quite sure that heavy long-term smoking has an adverse effect on
the health of quite a few people, sometimes to the point of being a,
or even the, decisive factor in their deaths. If you perceive the
risk of even moderate smoking to be unacceptable, then don't smoke,
and good luck to you. Nonsmokers often simply cannot understand why
anyone would persist in doing something which is commonly reckoned to
take about 5 years off of their lives. But apart from the fact that
this is just a guess, and can't apply to everyone, I wish that
nonsmokers would stop for a minute and imagine how they would feel if
something they loved were being similarly targeted. Many good
arguments can be made against eating meat or drinking alcohol. But if
you love steaks, or wine, how would it feel to be constantly nagged
by doctors and politicians into becoming a vegetarian or a
teetotaller? You might well prefer to keep on enjoying your favourite
pleasures and take your chances. You might feel that five extra years
without them is not such a great prospect. You might even feel
like rebelling by eating or drinking more than ever.

The question of one's own philosophy of how to live comes into play
here, of course. Mine, just for the record, is to enjoy life as much
as possible whilst also applying as much moderation, common sense,
and consideration for others as I can manage. I also believe that
pleasure is extremely important to human beings, that our pleasures
should be given up only as an absolute last resort, and that if the
medical establishment were to see things more in that way -i.e., as
human beings - we would be hearing very different statistics and
different advice. Finally I believe that what I choose to do to my
own body is entirely my own business..

There's another philosophy, though, which feeds into Antismoking, and
goes something like: work hard to avoid absolutely everything which
current opinion holds to be bad for you, and do as much as possible
of what current opinion holds to be good for you, and maybe you can
attain perfection or invulnerability. Often, this mindset is
accompanied by a zealous desire to whip others into shape, and/or a
feeling that if anything goes wrong, it must be someone else's fault,
so let's find someone to blame - or sue. This is all very American,
and I don't think it's an accident that antismoking mania has spread
primarily through the countries most influenced by America: Canada,
Australia, and the British Isles. But in my opinion it's not only a
dreary way to live, but not ultimately guaranteed to work any better
anyway.

So, I concede that smoking isn't exactly `good for you' in the same
way that eating an apple or going for a swim might be good for you.
But I've also become firmly convinced that it's nowhere near as
harmful as we're currently led to believe, and that the statistical
books are being routinely cooked in order to frighten and bully us
into conforming to some ideal, standardised, manageable, and
fashionable norm of `health' which cannot suit everyone. A more
realistic approach would be something more like that generally taken
with alcohol: keep it away from children, educate us about the risks,
counsel moderation, offer help to those who become dangerously
addicted or sick - and then, let us take responsibility for ourselves
and leave us alone.

Instead, smoking has become the scapegoat du jour; fashionable to
blame for a whole range of problems we don't really know what to do
about, a distraction from more serious and intractable problems, and
convenient to cover up all sorts of incompetence and corruption in
health institutions. And nowhere is this more evident than in the
junk science bonanza that is `secondhand smoke'.