Jump to full article: Manchester (NH) Union-Leader, 2005-02-21
Author: MICHAEL FUMENTO Guest Commentary
Intro: PERHAPS I shouldn't have been surprised at my reception last week at a Lakewood, Ohio, hearing on banning smoking in restaurants and bars. Such events tend to bring out the penny-ante dictators. After all, when customers can readily find smoke-free facilities and nobody's forced to take a job, such bans are inherently authoritarian. But these people made Mussolini look like freedom's friend. . . .
Specifically, those behind the national jihad against so-called "passive smoking" insisted I must not speak. . . .
I informed the panel that the study that began the crusade, published in 1993 by the Environmental Protection Agency, had actually found no statistically significant link to lung cancer, requiring them to use a new standard for significance to get the "proper" results. . . .
And I told them that the largest of the passive smoking studies (35,000 participants) and longest (39 years) found no "causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (passive smoking) and tobacco-related mortality." . . .
So now you know why there was so much fuss and feathers over my impending testimony. It wasn't the Fumento they were afraid of; it was the facts.
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