Third Hand Smoke: The Newest Fear

Written by: Evrviglnt on Sunday, December 13th, 2009

Napoleon Bonaparte once remarked that “In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.”  It appears that the left in America has taken that quote to heart.  We are seeing an amazing race to regulate, impose and demonize every obstacle to utopia by, in what appears to be inevitable, the November mid-term elections that will augur in a “cooling trend” for Democrat power in the congress.  But if we have learned anything over the last sixty years it’s that statists don’t take weekends off.  It’s predictable that our EPA would declare a building block of life like carbon dioxide as a deadly gas, or our congress to fashion a 2,000 page healthcare bill so as to make health care more efficient and affordable – we’ve come to expect the leviathan to eat and grow at an frantic pace.  But sometimes what we miss when we focus on the large movements to centralize power are the undercurrents of fascist thought that drive collectivization in this country.   A good example of this is the advent of “third hand smoke” as the new danger to our health.  From the New York Times:

That’s the term being used to describe the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers’ hair and clothing, not to mention cushions and carpeting, that lingers long after second-hand smoke has cleared from a room. The residue includes heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials that young children can get on their hands and ingest, especially if they’re crawling or playing on the floor.

Radioactive materials?  They’re telling us that our children are in danger of radioactive poisoning because yesterday somebody smoked tobacco in that same room?  Next thing they’ll be telling us is that loneliness is contagious.  That’s absurd, of course, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a study somewhere that can, at least tangentially, support the notion that third hand smoke is something to fear:

The study reported on attitudes toward smoking in 1,500 households across the United States. It found that the vast majority of both smokers and nonsmokers were aware that second-hand smoke is harmful to children. Some 95 percent of nonsmokers and 84 percent of smokers agreed with the statement that “inhaling smoke from a parent’s cigarette can harm the health of infants and children.”

But far fewer of those surveyed were aware of the risks of third-hand smoke. Since the term is so new, the researchers asked people if they agreed with the statement that “breathing air in a room today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of infants and children. (bold added)” Only 65 percent of nonsmokers and 43 percent of smokers agreed with that statement, which researchers interpreted as acknowledgement of the risks of third-hand smoke.

So far all this study proves is that second hand smoke propaganda has worked, but that’s enough of a start to stoke new fears that will lead to new laws:

The belief that second-hand smoke harms children’s health was not independently associated with strict smoking bans in homes and cars, the researchers found. On the other hand, the belief that third-hand smoke was harmful greatly increased the likelihood the respondent also would enforce a strict smoking ban at home, Dr. Winickoff said.

“That tells us we’re onto an important new health message here,” he said. “What we heard in focus group after focus group was, ‘I turn on the fan and the smoke disappears.’ It made us realize how many people think about second-hand smoke — they’re telling us they know it’s bad but they’ve figured out a way to do it.”

Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician who heads the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said the phrase third-hand smoke is a brand-new term that has implications for behavior.

“The central message here is that simply closing the kitchen door to take a smoke is not protecting the kids from the effects of that smoke,” he said. “There are carcinogens in this third-hand smoke, and they are a cancer risk for anybody of any age who comes into contact with them.”

Taking this logic a necessary step further means contemplating the dangers of any and all lingering dangers from household cleaners to double western cheeseburgers.  What about colognes and perfumes?  Deodorants?  Newly painted fences and freshly cut grass and the pollens sprung into the air?  How is it that anyone at anytime is ever allowed to spray insecticide anywhere?  You can’t argue that the can of raid you used to kill the colony of spiders gathering on the patio is not dangerous because the chemicals dilute themselves into a fine mist dissipated into the environment around you when we’re worrying about people contracting cancer from sitting in a room that someone smoked in yesterday!  If we are willing to construct a web of regulations to protect our health from every conceivable attack, why would we differentiate between the obnoxious and the deadly?  What are we willing to do in order to die healthy?

Do you recognize a theme here?  The Left uses inordinate fear to impose onerous regulation for our own good.  The charge that noxious second hand cigarette smoke can kill is a complete lie.  No study, from activist groups to the World Health Organization has ever been able to prove it, yet because we want to rid ourselves of the stink we delude ourselves into circumscribing the freedoms of others to suit ourselves.  I can understand wanting restaurants and airplanes smoke free, but beaches and parks?  It’s not about health – it never was – it’s about control, and health trumps freedom (and the rights of private property owners).  The anti-smoking zealots have succeeded in stoking paranoia even as their leftist brethren belittle the second hand moral decay that undermines our very will to assume responsibility for our behavior and the standards of our communities.  What do you think is more deadly: the acrid scent of a cigar or the thumping message of gangster rap?  What promises more devastation: the looming killer of day old cigarette smoke absorbed into your sweater or the all-encompassing net of laws it would take to stamp out dangers measured in infinitesimal increments we can hardly measure?

It’s easy to discern the direction we’re headed.  We’ll declare somesuch a danger to children, and make laws that infantilize all adults.  But we’ll take those things that are adult foibles and infatuations and force our children to swim through the fetid culture of immorality and sexualization.  Then we wonder why so many American adults are craven and cowardly and so many of our children are jaundiced and fearful.  The left has been busy undermining the institutions of religion and family for decades now, and we can see now their purpose: a society that abides by a subjective morality meant to enforce a principle of individual appeasement.  It’s a road that only leads to slavery – both politically and spiritually, and makes a mockery of the notion that America is the land of the free and home of the brave.

Possibly Related Posts:


Stumble It!
Topics: Health and Science

 

All comments are moderated, all trolls will be strapped to plywood boards and lobotomized. Proceed with caution!

CommentLuv Enabled