We Are Not Criminals

Tobacco-control research prof rips Parks' proposal

Dr. Michael Siegel is a physician and professor at Boston University who has devoted more than 20 years to research and study of the effects of smoking. He posts comments on tobacco policy on his blog "The Rest of the Story" at TobaccoAnalysis.blogspot.com.

A particularly relevant post was pointed out to me from August 13, 2008, in which Siegal comments on the Bernard Parks motion to ban smoking almost everywhere in Los Angeles. This is an excerpt from a much longer post, but it’s worth reading carefully:

The ordinance would ban smoking in every outdoors location where people "reasonably congregate." Essentially, this means that there would be no outdoors smoking anywhere, with the exception of some dark deserted alleys. If enacted, this would be the most restrictive smoking ban in the nation.

The Rest of the Story

I now understand why anti-smoking advocates and groups are distorting the truth. Because they are promoting such extreme proposals that go far beyond the documented scientific evidence that they need to create their own facts in order to justify these proposals.

You can't credibly argue that smoking needs to be banned everywhere outdoors to protect the health of nonsmokers using the actual truth about the severity of health risk from secondhand smoke exposure. There simply is no evidence that a few wisps of secondhand smoke, as one might encounter from someone smoking on a sidewalk or in a street, parking lot, or park puts people's health at risk and represents a significant public health problem.

The only way to advance these policies, then, is to artificially build up the severity of the harms of secondhand smoke so that you can convince people that any exposure - even a few wisps of smoke - is a severe health hazard.

This, I now realize, is the impetus behind the widespread fallacious claims that are being made by over 100 anti-smoking groups about the cardiovascular effects of brief secondhand smoke exposure.

I no longer believe that this distortion of the science, which goes right up to the level of the Surgeon General (who claimed that brief secondhand smoke exposure was sufficient to cause heart disease and lung cancer), represents a simple, innocent mistake.

It is now clear that this is part of a new agenda (one that I never thought was part of the movement) to extend smoking bans beyond workplaces, restaurants, bars, and other places where there is substantial exposure. The movement is now to virtually ban all smoking outside of the home, so that no nonsmoker ever has to even see a smoker in public.

There simply is no credible alternative explanation for claims - like this one - which are so absurd that they are patently false on their face. You need only think about it for about 3 seconds before you realize that secondhand smoke exposure cannot possibly be more harmful than active smoking.

The epidemiologic evidence obviously does not support such a conclusion. The relative risk of lung cancer associated with chronic active smoking is about 17. The relative risk for lung cancer associated with chronic secondhand smoke exposure is about 1.3. That's a 13-fold difference. It is intuitively clear that smoking is worse than breathing in secondhand smoke. This isn't an example of stretching or exaggerating the facts - it's an example of creating (i.e., fabricating) them.

I should point out that if you take this message seriously, then a rational nonsmoker might actually start smoking. After all, according to the message, it's better to smoke yourself than to be exposed to secondhand smoke. The message truly undermines the severe health effects of active smoking because it states that active smoking is less harmful than secondhand smoke exposure. Thus, the statement is not only fallacious, but it is a dangerous one which undermines years of education of the public about the severe harms of active smoking.

While the main reason why I object to the fabrication of the science is that I view it as unethical, I wish to point out that I also think it undermines our cause of protecting nonsmokers from secondhand smoke. It gives the public the impression (rightly so, apparently) that our goal is not just to save lives and prevent serious medical conditions but instead, that our goal is simply to protect nonsmokers from ever having to breathe in a wisp of secondhand smoke or see a smoker. It makes it appear that we are trying to prohibit smoking through the back door and that de facto prohibition is our real agenda, rather than a legitimate public health interest in protecting nonsmokers from a severe health threat.

To use a half-marathon analogy, I feel like I have been running a half-marathon and I get to the finish line and stop, but everyone else keeps running. I thought the goal was to provide a safe working environment for all employees and to protect nonsmokers from a substantial health hazard in certain outdoors locations where they cannot easily avoid tobacco smoke exposure. Instead, the movement just keeps on going, trying to ban smoking in every possible outdoors location and even starting to infringe upon the private home.

I feel all alone at the finish line, wondering where everyone has gone.

The rest of the story is that I have come to the conclusion that the distortion of the science by anti-smoking groups is not merely an innocent mistake or an uninformed interpretation of scientific evidence. It is, instead, a deliberate attempt to promote an extremist agenda by fabricating scientific evidence that will support an agenda that is simply not supported by the scientific truth.

The entire post goes on for a while, but it’s worth reviewing as it rips the cover off of the anti-tobacco movement now at work in Los Angeles.

Prohibition never works, but the antis are trying hard

The Royal College of Physicians in London, England issued a report last week that suggested ways in which tobacco smoking could be eliminated in Great Britain in20 years. The usual mix of extremely-heightened taxes and limiting exposure was suggested, along with the formation of a new governmental agency (of course) to regulate products with nicotine in them.

Our comment on CigarCyclopedia.com for September 11 included this historical perspective:

The Royal College of Physicians missile nowhere mentions making smoking illegal, but making it anti-social, hard to find and prohibitively expensive. Alcoholic-beverage Prohibition in the U.S. didn’t make drinking illegal either, but prohibited its manufacture, transport or sale.

When Prohibition came to America in 1920, 33 of the then-48 states were already dry. While not quite at the same level, Pennsylvania became the 25th state to adopt indoor smoking bans which became effective today. But national (alcoholic beverage) Prohibition failed in just 13 years because people wanted to drink. Tobacco prohibition will fail – as it has before – because there are plenty of people who want to smoke.

It’s not widely remembered that tobacco prohibition was also tried in the U.S. less than a century ago. In Gordon Dillow’s excellent article called "Thank You For Not Smoking" for American Heritage in 1981, he noted that cigarette sales were banned by state law in Oklahoma in 1901, followed in later years by Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin. Of these 13 states with cigarette prohibitions, six had repealed their laws by 1917 and ten had dropped the subject by 1921. Utah was the last to give up the fight in 1923.

The chief campaigner against tobacco was an Illinois woman named Lucy Paige Gaston, whose efforts were similar to those of the more-famous Carrie Nation against alcoholic beverages. But having failed, as Nation did, in her try at prohibition, Gaston ironically died of throat cancer in 1924.

The Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote in Reason in Common Sense (1905), "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It appears the anti-tobacco activists are ready to relive another failure over the succeeding 20 years.

Op-Ed submitted to the Los Angeles Downtown News

The following editorial was submitted to the Los Angeles Downtown News on August 19; there is no guarantee of publication, of course, but it notes the practical impact of the August 8 Motion introduced by Councilman Parks.

"THIS IS THE POLICE; WE’D LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU"

Imagine a knock on your door on a weekday evening, or a weekend afternoon. A Los Angeles Police officer wants to speak with you, to find out if you were smoking a cigarette or a cigar or a pipe in the hallway of your apartment building.

Or on a street corner. Or in a parking lot. Or in back of your office building, in the open air.

If City Councilman Bernard Parks has his way, the officer will cite you, or perhaps arrest you for using a legal product: tobacco. On August 8, Parks introduced a motion asking the City Attorney to draft an ordinance to ban smoking essentially everywhere in the City of Los Angeles, and a Resolution asking the County to do the same.

My research shows that there about 384,000 adult smokers resident in the City and about 998,000 in the County. Compared to the City’s police force of 9,600, that’s at least a 40-1 ratio of smokers to officers in the City and the ratio gets even larger in the County. Parks has stated in an online editorial that his no-smoking ordinance should not impose any significant burden on the police. Huh? Is that because he expects the police to just ignore smokers, or will enforcement be on a "sometimes" basis?

What’s worse, criminalizing smoking will have the horrifying effect of creating an entirely new reason why police can stop and question someone. Even if you’re not a smoker, are the police simply allowed to ignore a call from a trouble-making neighbor who accuses you – living in the apartment across the hall – of smoking in the hallway . . . even if you don’t smoke?

This is a dangerous aspect of Parks’s proposal, not to mention the drain on not just the police, but also the City Attorney’s Office, who must prosecute these cases. Will tourists also be cited or arrested? What about the homeless who smoke?

Parks says he wants to eliminate outdoor smoking because of the threat from secondhand smoke. In fact, there is no health threat from passing exposure to secondhand smoke and the 2006 Surgeon General’s report on the subject never even mentions such a threat.

Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor in the Boston University School of Public Health and a long-time supporter of indoor smoking bans, is dead-set against outdoor bans and he explains why in a recent blog entry about a similar ban in tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com:

"There is clearly no need to ban smoking in every outdoor location in a city in order to protect nonsmokers from the hazards of tobacco smoke exposure. Banning smoking on every street and in every sidewalk, alley and parking lot is simply not justified by any science which demonstrates that exposure to secondhand smoke in these locations represents a significant public health problem."

He also notes that the same justifications used "to ban smoking in virtually all outdoors locations could also be used to ban the consumption of fatty foods in public, or even to ban obese people from public places."

Councilman Parks, in a tight race for a Supervisor post against former City Councilman and current State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas, has gone too far. Please withdraw your motion; I am a smoker, but I am not a criminal.

(Mr. Perelman, a life-long resident of Los Angeles, works in the Wilshire Center area and is the editor-in-chief of CigarCyclopedia.com. A Web site on this issue has been created entitled WeAreNotCriminals.com.)

Op-Ed submitted to the Los Angeles Business Journal

The following editorial was submitted to the L.A. Business Journal on August 19; there is no guarantee of publication, of course, but it notes how Councilman Bernard Parks’ request for a ban on outdoor smoking follows a past, failed course of action:

PROHIBITION FAILED ONCE, IT WILL FAIL AGAIN

American philosopher George Santayana’s famed observation in Reason in Common Sense that "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" was penned more than 100 years ago. Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks has shown that he has either forgotten it or prefers to ignore it.

On August 8, Parks introduced a motion in the City Council asking the City Attorney to draw up an ordinance that would ban smoking in all public places where people would gather, including the common areas of apartment buildings. He says his proposal wouldn’t ban smoking per se, but would eliminate most of the negative effects of smoking on the public.

In other words, he’s in favor of Prohibition, but this time of tobacco.

It didn’t work with alcohol and it won’t work with smoking, either.

The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1920, didn’t ban the consumption or possession of alcoholic beverages. Instead, it stated that "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited."

Instead of eliminating drinking, it sent it underground, fostered the manufacture of "bathtub gin" and other substitutes that were often much more dangerous than the liquors it replaced, and jump-started the formation of organized crime on a national basis. Prohibition was such a failure that it is the only amendment to the Constitution to be repealed, in 1933.

Parks claimed in an editorial on the CityWatchLA.com Web site that his proposal wouldn’t impact the police, but who’s going to hand out tickets or make arrests of smokers who light up on the street, in a parking lot or walking into their own apartment? At the current level of 9,600 sworn officers and an estimated 384,000 City residents who smoke – not even counting an additional several hundred thousand who work in the City – there would be an average of one officer for every 40 smokers. Tracking smokes down should keep our police pretty busy and eliminate the time spent on less-important efforts such as gang intervention, traffic control, drug interdiction, burglary, robbery, rape and murder.

Prohibition is bad policy and the criminalization – if Parks has his way – of up to 998,000 people in Los Angeles County is bad politics. If Parks wants to eliminate smokers from hanging around in front of buildings or on street corners, smoking lounges should be authorized – with blacked-out windows – where those who smoke can go to consume a legal product, hidden away from the non-smoking majority.

But then, we would have learned from history instead of trying Prohibition again, a century after the first try failed.

My op-ed submission to the Los Angeles Times

I sent the following commentary to the Los Angeles Times Op-Ed section on Tuesday, August 12; it is unknown if they will use it:

I’M A SMOKER, NOT A CRIMINAL

by Rich Perelman

Who does Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks think he’s kidding?

Trailing State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas in the November race for County Supervisor, Parks has decided to garner public attention by making criminals out of about 384,000 citizens of the City of Los Angeles and 989,000 in the County of Los Angeles.

He wants to ban smoking essentially anywhere. On street corners, on the sidewalk, anywhere you can think of on public property.

In an August 12 editorial on the CityWatchLA.com Web site, Parks demonstrated his complete disregard for anything close to the truth about smoking in his very first sentence:

"Secondhand smoke is the number one cause of preventable health disease in America. There are no questions regarding the negative health effects. Research has shown that inhaling secondhand smoke is more harmful than actually smoking, primarily due to the unfiltered nature of the smoke and its having been cooled by the air."

Let’s give Parks the benefit of the doubt and simply assume he hasn’t read the research. As the editor of CigarCyclopedia.com, a site about cigars that drew 1.6 million visits in 2007, I follow smoking legislation and research closely. There is no research anywhere that cites secondhand smoke – especially in outdoor settings – as anything close to the health risk of direct smoking. In fact, the chemical nature of so-called environmental tobacco smoke is considerably diluted with exposure to outdoor air and wind. Perhaps Mr. Parks just made this up for effect.

He can color this any way he wants, but simple mathematics show that his proposal tells almost a million people in Los Angeles County that they are subject to criminal penalties because they enjoy a legal product: tobacco.

Even some anti-tobacco advocates sees this kind of legislation as counter-productive and silly. Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor in the Boston University School of Public Health and a long-time supporter of indoor smoking bans, is dead-set against outdoor bans and he explains why in a recent blog entry about a similar ban in tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com:

"There is clearly no need to ban smoking in every outdoor location in a city in order to protect nonsmokers from the hazards of tobacco smoke exposure. Banning smoking on every street and in every sidewalk, alley and parking lot is simply not justified by any science which demonstrates that exposure to secondhand smoke in these locations represents a significant public health problem."

He also notes that the same justifications used "to ban smoking in virtually all outdoors locations could also be used to ban the consumption of fatty foods in public, or even to ban obese people from public places."

Perhaps the svelte Mr. Parks has these in mind as well.

Parks claims in his editorial, "This is not a request that will drain law enforcement resources but primarily would be a code enforcement activity via either an infraction or misdemeanor." This is, in my view, simply a lie, since Parks – for 36 years a member of the Los Angeles Police Department and chief from 1997-2002 – knows that enforcement of infractions and misdemeanors is done by the Los Angeles Police Department and then prosecuted by the already-overloaded City Attorney’s Office. Isn’t their time better spent continuing their efforts to fight violent crime, gang activities and enforcing existing Municipal Code prohibitions against graffiti and drug use?

If this ordinance passes, how can police patrols even consider doing anything else than make arrests or issue citations any time they see two or more people smoking on the street? Or will they simply ignore it and leave this law either unenforced or enforced only on a random basis?

Parks is wrong when he says that outdoor secondhand smoke is a serious health threat. It is not.

If he wants to help smokers quit, the city can provide free counseling and anti-tobacco education. If he wants to take smoking off of the streets, then the establishment of specific, adults-only facilities – with blackened windows – for tobacco smoking should be licensed where those who wish to indulge are welcome and those who do not want to be around tobacco smoke can stay away.

But to pander to the non-smoking population and say that people who consume a legal product are criminals smacks of a return to widespread, government-enforced discrimination that should never even be contemplated in a society supposedly built on individual freedoms and tolerance.

Councilman Parks, please withdraw your motion, now.

Daily Breeze rips Parks' proposals

In the wake of the August 8 request by Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks to ban all outdoor smoking in both the City and County of Los Angeles, the South Bay Daily Breeze, which covers the Torrance, Long Beach and San Pedro areas fired back with this editorial entitled "Cut smokers some slack" on Sunday, August 10:

"Someone tell Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks that it's time for a cease-fire in the War on Smoking.

"Yes, smoking is a terrible, costly, self-destructive habit. And yes, society should do whatever it reasonably can to dissuade people from lighting up. But the smoking ban that Parks is calling for in the city of Los Angeles steps clear into the realm of the unreasonable.

"Parks, who is vying in a fall runoff campaign to succeed retiring Second District Supervisor Yvonne Burke, also wants the county Board of Supervisors to adopt a similar anti-smoking plan. Parks would like to see the policy enacted by all the cities in the county.

"In the wake of the comprehensive ban on public smoking that Calabasas enacted in 2006, Parks now wants L.A. to ban smoking pretty much anywhere non-smokers may be present - which is to say, everywhere.

"‘Smoke has no boundaries,’ Parks says. ‘You should smoke only where you are hurting only yourself.’ He adds, ‘We're not trying to get into people's bedrooms and homes.’

"The problem is, those two comments are contradictory.

"Parks is right: Smoke does have no boundaries. That's true even for cigarette smoke that wafts from one's front porch into a neighbor's yard. Once the law protects non-smokers from ever having to sniff even a microscopic trace of smoke, it must necessarily intrude into people's homes - or bedrooms, should the window be open.

"That's legal overkill.

"While secondhand smoke can be dangerous, especially in large amounts, that's simply not the case with the fumes from a smoker who just so happens to be walking by outdoors. In L.A., a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk has far more to fear from the exhaust of passing cars than from the lingering residue of a fellow pedestrian's cigarette.

"L.A. is a city that prides itself on its tolerance. City residents could do a little more to be tolerant of the smokers among them - friends and loved ones, all.

"We can protect Angelenos from the real dangers of secondhand smoke - and enact policies to dissuade smoking - without getting into the business of making life needlessly difficult for people just because they are saddled with an unpopular addiction.

"When the War on Smoking turns into the War on Smokers, it's time to call it quits."