Carrying an e-cigarette is forbidden at UCSF

The University of California, San Francisco—the home of anti-smoking über-zealot Stanton Glantz—has banned students from using and carrying e-cigarettes across campus, inside and out.

To provide a smoke-free environment for its faculty, staff, students, patients, and visitors, UCSF shall be a smoke-free campus.

The policy, which has been flagged up by Glantz on his blog, applies to all "University-owned or leased property, buildings, space, and University-owned passenger vehicles and moving equipment" and includes all "smoking tobacco products".

To the scientifically illiterate goons at UCSF, "smoking tobacco products" includes products which are not smoked and do not contain tobacco.

Smoking tobacco products means inhaling, exhaling, burning or carrying any lighted or heated cigar, pipe or cigarette (traditional or e-cigarette).

Just unbelievable.

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Stunning stupidity

In these intellectually retarded times, mistaking correlation for causation is so common that it takes something really special to grab my attention. But every once in a while, someone puts the cart before the horse in a way that is so monumentally bone-headed that it almost becomes a work of art.

For example, it seems obvious that people who have greater willpower will be more likely to give up smoking. Obvious, that is, unless you are the Daily Mirror...

Quitting smoking gives you stronger willpower than current or non-smokers, study finds

Giving up smoking not only improves your health – it raises your willpower, too.

Quitters have the strongest activity in their brain’s frontal lobes, which control behaviour, a study found.

Experts took MRI scans of current, ex and non-smokers as they performed tasks to test skills linked to smoking, such as avoiding distraction by cigarette-related images.

Smokers lost concentration before others, the Trinity College Dublin study said. Prof Hugh Garavan added in NeuroImage that quitting helped “exercise control”.

Wow. Just wow.

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Britain speaks its brains

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We have a winner!

In a highly competitive field, this week's hypochondriac is Shawn, posting at Woman's Day. Shawn gets extra points for gullibility, hysteria and stupefying scientific ignorance.

It's about time this issue is addressed. If you can smell a smoker after they have smoked, there must be harmful nicotine present.

Nicotine is harmful? Really? Because that's not what the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency thinks:

While the risks to health from smoking tobacco are well established, a body of evidence is emerging that suggests that nicotine, while addictive, is actually a very safe drug.

But you were saying...

I'm also worried about fourth hand smoke. 

That doesn't exist either, but carry on.

This happens when a smoker urinates and the nicotine finds its way into the water supply...

Hang on - you just made that up!

...such as this:

AP probe found traces of meds in water supplies of 41 million Americans

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23503485

From that link: "To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe."

Why should my family be exposed to the nicotine from smokers due to something as basic as needing a glass of water?

Why won't someone think of the children? Shawn's invented a whole new health scare here. Alright, it's only a hunch and it's based on a fundamental ignorance of toxicology, but you can't be too careful. This man (woman?) has a family, dammit.  

Look, the government needs to look into this because it's not right to harm others by choosing the filthy weed over common sense. 

Hey, you can't be the centre of the world! I'm the centre of the world! 

As Shawn says, all we need here is a bit of common sense. Like this, for example...

Smokers should have to urinate in a separate system or something so as not to pollute the earth and harm others.

That would only involve designing, financing and building a new sewage network in every city in the world. Is that so much to ask?

Well done, sir (or madam). A true classic of the genre.

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Thirdhand smoke roundup

An extended version of my article about the thirdhand smoke study is on the Free Society website today. Quick summary: they used 14 times as much nitrous acid and 15 times as much nicotine as would be found in a normal home to produce a few nanograms of a substance that isn't a carcinogen. Apart from that, great study.

Meanwhile, it's been interesting to see what the reaction has been to the whole story in the press and on the blogs.

Some fell for it hook, line and sinker. Bro WTF? thinks...

So not only do smokers ruin my ability from wearing [sic] my same “go-to” outfit two nights in a row amongst two separate groups of people because my clothes now smell like an incinerator, smokers are killing me long after they leave a room.

Live Well! is not alone in seizing on thirdhand smoke as another excuse to tax smokers...

I say raise cigarette taxes! Not only is it good for our health, it will be good for the states who will receive more tax revenue that they desperately need for school systems, roads, and other infrastructure projects.

Honors e/e genuinely seems to be worried by the threat and wants to go further than mere taxation... 

Until I read this I always felt like if people want to smoke they should be able to it was not hurting me and if I did not want to be around it I could walk away, but now I am not so sure. This study shows that not only are smokers hurting themselves but they are also hurting people who come into a building, get in a car, or visit there [sic] house after they have been smoking. If tobacco is so harmful to everyone maybe it should be ban [sic].

Woman's Day says smokers should take a few precautions...

If you still insist on smoking, smoke outdoors only. Just make sure you take a shower and wash your clothes afterwards—at least you can help protect someone else’s health.

See? Is that so much to ask?

A member of an Indiana anti-smoking group can't separate cause from effect but she has her own story to tell at the Star Press...

Then, last year, I became a victim of third-hand smoke -- the residual toxins that linger on the hair, skin and clothing of smokers. I had come into contact with a couple who smoked and their clothing had the strongest stench of tobacco I had ever experienced. Being a previous smoker myself, I know that smokers don't realize how awful they smell and many times try to cover up the signs of smoking by using sprays and colognes (which) only make it worse.

The result of my contact with third-hand smoke was initially a sinus headache, then coughing. I ended up using a week's worth of vacation time because I developed what is called community acquired pneumonia.

John Banzhaf of ASH (for it is he) takes some dodgy science and exaggerates it still further:

Interestingly, another very recent study shows that nicotine exhaled into the air is converted by other common indoor air pollutants into cancer-causing chemicals which can linger on clothing, furniture, draperies, etc. -- a new risk being termed "thirdhand smoke."

The risk could be comparable to that of smoking.

Check that last line. Good grief.

Back on planet Earth, and on Spiked, Rob Lyons thinks differently:

Yet even the junk science of secondhand smoke seems like the stuff of Nobel Prizes next to the new kid on the block: ‘third-hand smoke’. Now, claim researchers, you don’t even need to breathe smoke in, you simply need to be in contact with smokers or touch surfaces that have been in contact with their smoke to be at risk. If the dodgy research that produced the smoking ban was bullshit, the claims made for third-hand smoking are in a whole new category: ‘beyond bullshit’.

At The Examiner, Thomas McAdam was showing signs of - shock, horror - having actually read the study:

His “study” did not involve any clinical trials with actual human beings (or even actual mice or rats). He and his student assistants simply applied tobacco smoke to sheets of cellulose as a model indoor material, and determined that TSNAs detected on cellulose surfaces were 10 times higher than those originally present in the sample. That is, after spraying the cellulose sheets with nitrous acid.

And he has some information about the study's funding source:

Before you jump to the conclusion that Dr. Hugo is some sort of moron, you need to know about California’s Proposition 99. In November 1988, California voters approved Prop. 99, “The Tobacco Tax and Health Protection Act”, which instituted a 25¢-per-pack cigarette surtax. Part of this tax revenue is deposited into a Research Account, to be appropriated for research on tobacco-related disease, by the TRDRP. For the bizarre little study we have outlined above, Dr. Hugo Destaillats was awarded $704,901.00 by TRDRP and the taxpaying smokers of California. Maybe Dr. Hugo’s not such a moron after all.

And, finally, he points out that not only are people prepared to believe anything they're told, they're already hunting out fresh scares for themselves:

Within months, the neologism “third-hand smoke” was getting more than 3 million references in a Google search. (Interestingly, the term “fourth-hand smoke”—the theory that you can get cancer from simply watching a movie in which Humphrey Bogart is smoking—is now getting 56,600 Google references.) Stay tuned.

We'll leave the last word to Andrew Button at The Muse:

The point at which your activism goes from being an attempt to protect people from harm to a plot to make life harder for people with a weakness, is the point you should probably call it quits.

The thing is, big anti-tobacco is a thriving business, and they’re not going to stop on their own...

The anti-smoking movement of today is less about health, and more about discriminating against and controlling people.
Anti-smoking activists want a nanny state that protects people from themselves, and punishes behavior some people find aesthetically unappealing.

The state should not have the power to regulate what it doesn’t like arbitrarily, unless that behavior poses a real risk to other people.

Until people realize this, anti-smoking legislation is only going to get more restricting and oppressive

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Unbelievable ignorance

For my sins, I'm currently reading a book called All Consuming by one of Gordon Brown's former advisors, Neal Lawson. In a nutshell, the author attempts to exploit the recession to persuade readers to turn against the free market. 

The book is riddled with factual errors and outrageous statements, as you might expect. Here's one of each:

Even the new [railway stations] like Liverpool Street and St Pancras are just shopping malls attached to platforms and ticket offices. Everywhere and everything is an excuse to sell.

Victorians, on the other hand, made stations that were more sensual and authentic. It was a joy to be in them to sit and wait. Now there are so few seats that you have to buy a coffee just to sit down. 

The trains are not part of a grand public service but engines for private profit.

Er... not quite. The railways were very much "engines for private profit" in Victorian times, what with them being entirely run by private companies. Britain's rail network wasn't nationalised until 1948, when British Rail was created. They then proceeded to close down hundreds of miles of track, ripping down countless "sensual and authentic" Victorian stations in the process.

That, however, is merely an hors d'oeuvre for this piece of swivel-eyed lunacy:

Totalitarianism, the accusation levelled against Communism...

That's right, "levelled". As if the jury was still out.

... is a system of control that regulates every aspect of public and private life. Consumerism and Communism are two different versions of totalitarian societies: both offer a pseudo-vision of freedom but operate to systematically refine their dominance. 

Good grief. That could very easily be the most stupid thing I've ever read. 

Totalitarian Communism (is there any other kind?) involves secret police, murder, torture, mass starvation, no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of religion, a one party state, rationing, endless queueing and forced labour. Oh, and 100 million deaths.

Consumerism involves people sometimes buying things they don't really need.

I'll take the electric toothbrush over the Siberian concentration camp, if it's all the same to you.

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