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Blinded By Tobacco Lobbyists' Smoke

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By SEAN LEDIG Special to the Tribune

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 29, 2008

Joseph H. Brown's at it again.

Nearly six years after an overwhelming majority of Floridians voted for Florida's workplace smoking amendment, he's still railing against it, as he did on May 18 in these very pages. He's still cherry-picking evidence to say we're all a bunch of idiots for voting for the amendment while ignoring thousands of reputable studies, easily available to anyone with access to Google, that say we're right.

It would be tempting to just say that he needs to get a life and get over it already. The people have spoken and this is what they want. But as one of the 3 million Americans who is allergic to tobacco smoke, and as one of the 20 million Americans who suffers from asthma, I can't begin to say how personally offended I get when someone tries to tell me that there is no proof that secondhand smoke is harmful.

So as someone who suffers very real health problems when exposed to secondhand smoke, I won't allow Brown's contentions to go unchallenged. For example, he cited Judge William Osteen's 1993 decision against the Environmental Protection Agency for classifying tobacco smoke as a carcinogen.

But, if Brown had entered Osteen's name into the Tribune's own story archive, he would have found that Osteen once worked as a lobbyist on behalf of tobacco farmers in Kentucky.

Not that it should matter what a judge thinks about scientific methodology. If I want an opinion on the law, I'll ask one of Osteen's colleagues on the bench. If I want a scientific or a medical opinion, then I'll consult with a scientist or a medical doctor.

Which brings me to the next problem with Brown's column, where he cites a 2003 British Medical Journal article which claimed that secondhand smoke is not harmful. If Brown had bothered to check, he would have found that the study was condemned by the Journal's parent organization, the British Medical Association, for its numerous research flaws.

He would have also found that the author of that article, James Enstrom, solicited and received money from the tobacco companies for his study.

In reality, you will be hard-pressed to find a medical doctor not on the payroll of the tobacco companies who believes that secondhand smoke is safe. Certainly none of the four local ear, nose and throat doctors who've treated me believes that.

Decisions about smoking in the workplace should not be left to the business owners any more than other issues of worker and consumer safety should be left to the whims of the marketplace. No one, not even Brown, would want to live in an America where restaurants could serve rotten meat or where factories could pollute the air and water at will or where a car is so poorly made that it bursts into flame during a fender-bender.

If the marketplace were truly responsive to the wants of the consumer when it came to smoke-free workplaces, then it wouldn't have been necessary for a referendum on the subject. Business owners would have made their workplaces non-smoking on their own.

As more and more scientific evidence becomes available on the risks of secondhand smoke, I'm sure we'll see other restrictions on public smoking to protect non-smokers and children.

For me, they can't come too soon.

Sean Ledig is a Tampa writer.

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