By Dave Hitt on Jan 5, 2009 in Featured, Junk Science, Nanny Nation

The war on smokers proves the axiom “The first casualty of war is the truth.” After the real dangers of primary smoking were publicized a lot of smokers quit, but not enough to satisfy the nicotine nannies, who concocted a new danger: second hand smoke.

Smartenized® people know that SHS is the biggest scam since homeopathy, but it still has been used to harass and vilify smokers and install smoking bans that put thousands of bars, restaurants and bingo halls out of business. Their goal is to force smokers to quit by making it impossible for them to smoke anywhere and to turn them into social pariahs who are hated and feared by the unwashed masses.

The scam has been fairly successful. At one point about half the US population smoked. Now less than a quarter of them do. But this is not enough for the Nicotine Nazis – their religious zeal won’t let them rest until they eradicate smoking from the entire planet. Consumed with their self-righteous zeal they’ve now concocted a new scam: Third Hand Smoke.

Years ago people in the smoker’s rights movement joked about third hand smoke. Now, as further proof that our society has become so absurd that satire is nearly impossible, the press is now all abuzz about this new fictitious danger, described as deadly toxic particles that hang out long after the second hand smoke is gone. It started with an article in the once respectable New York Times.

Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff, evidently desperate for his fifteen minutes of fame, has published a study that, on first glance, appears to bolster this ridiculous claim. “Your nose isn’t lying,” he says. “The stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ’Get away.’”

The article closes with the statement that Third Hand smoke contains polonium-210, “the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006.” This is yellow journalism at its worst.

Michael McFadden, author of the book Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains sent me some rough calculations about polonium-210. He writes:

“A 30 cig per day smoker gets 1 picocurie per day.

“A typical nonsmoker living or working with smokers would get at most about 1/100th of that per day, more likely only 1/1,000th with good ventilation and/or a more reasonable amount of indoor smoking, so about one femtocurie.

“A child would have to live with a smoker for roughly three trillion days to absorb the dose that killed the Russian.”

And that is for second hand smoke. Since Third Hand Smoke is a fictional construct, we can only base our calculations on assumptions. (These calculations also come from McFadden.) Assuming that 1% of this deadly stuff has been spread on the 10,000 square feet of surface area in a typical 2,000 sq foot house, and also assuming that your method of cleaning is to having your infant lick the kitchen floor clean once a day, the kid would have to lick the floor for one hundred trillion days to accumulate a fatal dose. That comes out to about 274 billion years. The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. The half life of Polonium-210 is a mere 138 days. So in order to ingest a fatal dose, the not only would the floor licker have to keep at it 20 times longer than our universe has existed, we’d also have to completely rewrite the laws of physics to keep the stuff dangerous long enough to do any damage. That wouldn’t even slow down a nicotine nanny, of course – they have quite a bit of experience rewriting the laws of physics.

If the NYT had any ethics they never would have allowed this statement to get past the editor, and would have chastised the writer for including it. Fortunately, ethics and accuracy haven’t been an issue for them for quite some time.

So how did the doctor come up with his proof? Did he visit the homes of smokers and carefully measure particulates on every surface? Did he check out the interior of smoker’s vehicles and measure chemicals on their clothes? Hell no. He did a phone survey to see how many people believe this nonsense. That is the entirety of his research. He had someone call a bunch of people and ask them questions (and we can only guess how loaded these questions were) and presented the results as proof that third hand smoke was deadly. And the New York Times, in their wisdom, published this under a scary headline. Yessir, that there is some real fine and dandy science. Noting wrong what that scientific method, nuh uh.

Of course The Today Show, which is always delighted to jump on any junk science bandwagon, did a story on this. And what a story it was, with computer graphics of a lit cigarette leaving blood-colored stains splattered all over a living room and car interior.

Ignoring the fact that this study was nothing more than a phone survey of uninformed opinions, Dr. Nancy Snyderman expounded on this new scary danger to children. (It’s always for the chilllllllllldreeeeen, isn’t it?) She opened with the fiction, “We know that second hand smoke kills 50,000 people a year.” (Care to Name Three, Nancy?) She went on to say, “Everybody has been on an elevator, and a smoker gets on and you can tell immediately who the smoker is, because you smell those toxins.” You’re not just smelling smoke, you’re smelling toxins. Oooo, scary. “The same stuff that comes out of the tailpipe of a city bus.” She goes on to say, “If you really can’t kick the habit you have to smoke outside. And then I would say guess what? You have to change your clothes. They have to go right into the washing machine, because you are a walking toxic dump.” She didn’t go so far as insisting the smoker then needs to take a shower to wash that deadly stuff off, then call in an decontamination unit to clean up the bathroom, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear some other nicotine nanny make that claim.

MSNBC, who is to journalism what Britney Spears is to music, claims that “Even if you don’t smoke around your children, the study finds that toxins from tobacco smoke can linger in the air, on hair and clothing, long after the cigarette is put out. Those toxins can be easily transferred to a baby or small child. Researchers found that even at low levels tobacco particles can be associated with cognitive problems in kids.” (For the chilllllllldreeeeeen!) The study, of course, showed none of these things, but MSNBC has always found that reporting is so much easier when you just make shit up.

There is no end to the fictions nicotine nannies will create to justify their venomous hatred of smokers. This is their latest one, but, but we can be sure there are more to come. Smokers who politely smoke outside, often in inclement weather, to avoid annoying people with second hand smoke, are now horrible evil bags of toxins that will kill your children. And while the idiocy of this will be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain cell, we can be sure that plenty of stupid people will swallow this lie and use it as an excuse to harass smokers even more.