Anti-smoking loonies

The anti-smoking movement jumped the shark years ago. All you can do now is stand and watch, open-mouthed, as this unaccountable, morally bankrupt racket abuses science, reason and common sense.

Here are two examples from this week.

1. Underage smoking is becoming so rare in the USA that the fanatics are having to move the goalposts dramatically to keep the panic going.

98% of smokers start before they’re 26. To prevent them from starting, we're going where many of them are: college campuses. See how our grants are helping reducing smoking — and vaping — at schools across the country. https://t.co/gGH8CxWURU

— Truth Initiative (@truthinitiative) March 5, 2020

Twenty-six years old! Won't somebody think of the relatively young adults?

2. The preposterous notion of thirdhand smoke made one of its occasional reappearances yesterday. Laughing in the face of Paracelsus, some alleged scientists went looking for trace chemicals that they associate with tobacco and found some in cinemas.

CNN's report was typical of the credulous media's coverage:

You can tell the dude sitting next to you in the movie theater is a smoker or vaper; you can smell it on his clothes. But since he's not lighting up and puffing smoke your way, it's OK, right?

Not at all.

 

A new study out of Yale University says thirdhand smoke -- the tobacco contaminants that adhere to walls, bedding, carpet and other surfaces until a room smells like an ashtray -- can actually cling to a smoker's body and clothes as well.

 

Those potentially toxic chemicals, including nicotine, can then be released into environments where smoking has never occurred, like your movie theater, according to the study.

 

Wibble.

 

Even more disturbing: The study found those chemical exposure levels could be the equivalent of between one and 10 cigarettes by the end of the movie.

 

This is a lie and quite an obvious lie at that.

Just in case the reader can't work out the true purpose of this flim flam, a crackpot cardiologist from New York makes it explicit:

"If the findings hold true, the implication is that essentially we are going to need to make everything smoke-free," Narula said. "And the only way that you will be able to do that is nothing short of banning smoking everywhere."

How convenient!

The Guardian put this garbage on the front page. The concept of 'thirdhand smoke' has been around since 2009 but has never really taken off, except in the looniest parts of California, because it is so patently absurd. Perhaps its time will come in the lobotomised 2020s.