There is nothing more powerful than a lie
whose time has come. Throughout history,
tyrants understood this, and so worked up the
populace. In this bloodiest of centuries,
we've seen it all from Hitler to McCarthyism.
And now we have the truth about the
anti-smoke fascists. Last week, a federal
judge wiped out the entire basis of all this
business about the danger of secondhand
smoke, a lie that has transformed our
culture, from saloons to our homes.
In a devastating 94-page opinion, Judge
William Osteen put the cat to the
Environmental Protection Agency. These
ideological hustlers are responsible for all
the madness we've experienced since 1993,
when, without a scintilla of evidence, they
declared that secondhand smoke causes cancer.
This "finding" created civil war
in America. Suddenly, it wasn't just the
smoker who was endangered it was the person
at the next table, even the tenant in the
next apartment and the guy sitting next to
you at Yankee Stadium.
Common sense should have put this into the
garbage pail. If secondhand smoke killed,
we'd all be dead, especially everybody who
worked in newspapers a veritable smoke screen
in the old days.
But the media mavens, who knew better,
bought the lie and sold it to the public. The
audience was there, and the hit men in the
Environmental Protection Agency knew it.
They had no proof, but what they had was a
new America, a people that made health the
be-all. Gyms instead of saloons, diets
against burgers.
And, of course, the tobacco industry
becomes the pariah, a criminal element,
against which everything is possible.
But it was not enough to get the smokers.
To change the world, the culture, you had to
hit their "innocent" victims the
receivers of secondhand smoke.
The EPA was at the ready, helped by
Hillary Clinton, whose first edict as First
Lady was a no-smoking rule in the White
House.
The EPA announced that 3,000 people died
every year from secondhand smoke. More people
by far die from milk, not to mention bird
droppings in national forests.
But the yuppie audience was ready to buy,
and the market went through the roof.
In New York, Peter Vallone and Rudy
Giuliani banned smoking everywhere but in
bars. Yankee Stadium and Shea were out
although even the EPA never went beyond
indoor smoking.
"Secondary smoke is one of the
leading causes of death," Giuliani
announced, as he lit up his cigar. At the
moment that the Congressional Research
Service, an independent arm of Congress, said
that there was no scientific basis for the
EPA's report.
In March, the World Health Organization
was caught with the lie. It is the SS of the
Nicotine Nazis. The WHO ran a
multi-million-dollar study dedicated to
proving that passive smoke causes cancer. It
came up empty.
The media censored that story. If you
didn't read it in my column, you don't know
it. And now the media do virtually the same
with Judge Osteen's opinion.
Osteen found as follows: "EPA
publicly committed to a conclusion before the
research had begun; adjusted established
procedure and scientific norms to validate
its conclusion, and aggressively utilized its
authority to disseminate findings to
establish a de facto regulatory scheme to
influence public opinion."
In other words, the government lied. And
in response, the government says:
"People should understand that
secondhand smoke is a real health risk."
It's as if Ted Turner announced about the
discredited CNN report on nerve gas, "We
stand by our story." The difference here
is, the media stand with the lie, whose time,
alas, remains.
Copyright © 1998 Steven
J. Milloy.
All rights reserved on original material.
Material copyrighted by others is used either
with permission or under a claim of
"fair use." Site developed and
hosted by WestLake Solutions, Inc.
Found on the Web March
2005 at: http://www.junkscience.com/news2/zion.htm
