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November 21, 2023

In the early 2000s, entertainers Penn and Teller had a show called Bullsh*t! that aired on Showtime, in which the iconic duo apply their sense of humor and libertarian sensibilities to butcher lots of sacred cows. 

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In recently revisiting some episodes of the show that I enjoyed back then, one moment, in particular, contained a brief bit of what can only be described as the purest prophecy. 

This particular episode from 2003 covered the manufactured health panic over secondhand smoke, and the crusaders who used false “science” to ban smoking in restaurants and bars in New York City, which, as we now know, was the launchpad for similar smoking bans that swept the nation. 

The fact that cigarette smoke is unpleasant to many people was not a reasonable argument for the government to impose smoking bans in establishments owned and visited by free citizens.  Any bar or restaurant, at that time, could choose to allow or prohibit smoking in its establishment.  The strength of the argument in favor of smoking bans was not rooted in logic, profitability, or liberty, but solely predicated on the idea that secondhand smoke was harmful to the passive customers and employees.

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Anyone visiting or working in such an establishment would have chosen to be there, of course.  But that didn’t matter.  It was the government’s job to protect those workers and customers from themselves and one another, they argued, from the “consensus” understanding of the dangers of secondhand smoke.

One crusader for the cause said that nearly everyone agreed that secondhand smoke causes cancer, including the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society.  The problem, as the show points out, is that they were all basing that conclusion upon the same flawed 1993 Environmental Protection Agency study that suggested that up to 3,000 people per year die from secondhand smoke.  In 1998, a court rebuked that study, saying that it “cherry-picked” its data and “deviated from acceptable scientific procedure” to “ensure a pre-ordained outcome.”

Also in 1998, a study by the World Health Organization reached the unequivocal conclusion that its “results indicated no association between childhood exposure to ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) and lung cancer risk” and that the risk of cancer from secondhand smoke among adults was “not statistically significant.”   The problem was that those conclusions were buried in the report’s findings.  Most people didn’t read beyond the press release headline, which made a claim that is directly refuted by the findings of the study it was directing the public toward: “PASSIVE SMOKING DOES CAUSE LUNG CANCER, DO NOT LET THEM FOOL YOU.”

In short, as then–talk show host Larry Elder says on the show:

They lied.  They lied to us.  They overestimated, ignored their own findings, ignored their own standards of significant risk in order to reach a politically arrived at conclusion. They lied.

There were, for most people living and voting at that time, unforeseen consequences to allowing legislators to outlaw things that some people don’t like, based upon the “scientific” reasoning of shadowy and dishonest public health organizations.  But there were some prescient souls who saw the danger in allowing the government this kind of power, and a couple of them happened to be interviewed in a New York City bar for this episode.