[lmm]

> Even if true, I would expect cigarettes are dwarfed by cars --- but 6 trillion cigarettes a year isn’t nothing, right?

I don't really understand this reasoning - the way I see it any effect that's dwarfed by cars might as well be nothing, there's no sense worrying about a splinter in a broken leg.

> The CDC link does reference the Surgeon General’s report, which links to a whole pile of primary sources on secondhand smoke. You can also Google around for primary sources for links between smoking and general air pollution. I just tried and found a handful of papers studying outdoor smoke exposure levels, e.g., https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/48/3/918. The main consensus that I see is that for a range of small distances like 10-20 feet, outdoor exposure is plenty high enough to be very concerned about the risks, and that high traffic areas can collect smoke and increase exposure.

Hmm, sounds like there's a measurable impact which is honestly more than I expected. Still, it seems like a rather cherry-picked measurement; they compare levels in the evening when the traffic street is presumably mostly empty, and note that the traffic street had worse air quality after midnight. They notably don't compare levels in the morning or afternoon when traffic would actually be present and the traffic street presumably had overwhelmingly worse levels of pollution. And they jump straight to recommending a ban on smoking. To my mind to put that on any kind of rational basis you'd have to first set a safe level of PM25 and then propose banning the biggest contributors to PM25 on streets that exceeded it - but reading between the lines of that paper, I assume that once you measure PM25 over a full 24 hours that would mean banning cars long before banning smoking.

[dahart]

> Any effect that’s dwarfed by cars might as well be nothing, there’s no sense worrying about a splinter in a broken leg.

Now we’re conflating several different things. The overall contribution to AQI metrics might be dwarfed by cars, but the overall mortality is not - estimated rates of mortality from smoking related causes is higher than the estimated rates of mortality from pollution.

There might be no sense in looking at cigarette smoking to reduce AQI metrics, but there’s every reason to look at smoking to reduce premature death & hundreds of billions in unnecessary health care expenditure, right?

I don’t want to play armchair researcher and defend that paper, it just happened to be a primary source that I found online. If you want to pick apart the methodology, it’d be better to find a different primary source that empirically demonstrates that proximal secondhand smoke is not harmful.

I take responsibility for sending a slightly wrong impression, I didn’t mean to suggest that smoking is a huge contributor to pollution per-se, I see my comments implied that, but I was only trying to say that outdoor smoke in urban areas is a real risk factor to non-smokers, that exposure to secondhand smoke downtown is a very common occurrence, and it seems to be supported by some research. The point I was making is that secondhand smoke can and does affect people outdoors even if it doesn’t push the AQI, and the reason is proximity - smokers are on average hanging around much closer to non-smokers than cars are. The bulk of cars are far away on the freeway, while the bulk of smokers during the day are working near me, pre-pandemic anyway.

[lmm]

> Now we’re conflating several different things. The overall contribution to AQI metrics might be dwarfed by cars, but the overall mortality is not - estimated rates of mortality from smoking related causes is higher than the estimated rates of mortality from pollution.

But "smoking related causes" is conflating two very different things. If you want to ban smoking because it's harmful to smokers, that's a very different argument from banning smoking because it's harmful to others. It would be very convenient for people who want (out of what is - to them - legitimate concern, but is coming from a very different cultural background to that of most smokers) to ban smoking if secondhand smoking were clearly harmful, but frankly if this kind of paper is the best they have then I strongly suspect that it actually isn't.

> If you want to pick apart the methodology, it’d be better to find a different primary source that empirically demonstrates that proximal secondhand smoke is not harmful.

It's hard to publish a negative result and hard to get funding for work that goes against the narrative. And fundamentally the onus is on the people claiming an effect to demonstrate that it's real.

> The point I was making is that secondhand smoke can and does affect people outdoors even if it doesn’t push the AQI, and the reason is proximity - smokers are on average hanging around much closer to non-smokers than cars are.

Again that's something that I think would need to be scientifically shown rather than just assumed.

[dahart]

To be clear, secondhand smoke has absolutely been scientifically proven to kill people. We’ve been discussing the margins of outdoor secondhand smoke, which is, I admit, harder to demonstrate conclusively with simple stats. Outdoor conditions vary wildly, and proximity certainly matters.

I agree that it’s hard to publish a negative result, but the fact is that I gave you a primary research source that was trivial to find and claims to show only a moderate effect, and you’re still rationalizing your discounting of it and rationalizing why you don’t have any primary sources to support the view that outdoor secondhand smoke isn’t harmful.

It would be silly to claim that secondhand smoke is not harmful outdoors, because we already know for a fact that exposure to secondhand smoke is harmful, and being outdoors just reduces the exposure depending on conditions - wind, dissipation, distance, partial enclosure, etc. There’s no question about whether it’s harmful, the only question is how much.

People aren’t banning smoking because it’s sometimes risky. People are banning smoking because it’s always risky, and non-smokers don’t always have control over their exposure levels. The outdoor exposure levels might be considerably lower than indoor exposure, but why should you tolerate any exposure at all? If you can smell it, you’re breathing additional pollution and toxins. You haven’t given any reasons at all that we should accept and tolerate lower-than-indoor levels of risk and damage just because they’re lower. Some people prefer none, and isn’t that a right they should have in public places? Why should people even tolerate the smell if they don’t like it? Would you tolerate a small amount of tastable but moderately low risk poop from your neighbors in your drinking water, given a choice?

[lmm]

> To be clear, secondhand smoke has absolutely been scientifically proven to kill people.

News to me. If that's true, why do conversations about secondhand smoke involve so much rhetoric and so little science?

> People aren’t banning smoking because it’s sometimes risky. People are banning smoking because it’s always risky, and non-smokers don’t always have control over their exposure levels. The outdoor exposure levels might be considerably lower than indoor exposure, but why should you tolerate any exposure at all? If you can smell it, you’re breathing additional pollution and toxins. You haven’t given any reasons at all that we should accept and tolerate lower-than-indoor levels of risk and damage just because they’re lower. Some people prefer none, and isn’t that a right they should have in public places?

If they should have that kind of right, they should have that right in respect to other sources of air pollution like cars or wood fires too. If it's about risk, we should set a safe level and ban the biggest contributors to it. If it's about cost/benefit, we should do an honest assessment of how much benefit is required to justify how much pollution, and set a corresponding tax level on all sources of air pollution, or a cost/benefit level for which kind of sources we'll allow and which we'll ban. Maybe the missing reason here is that we're quietly putting a higher value on the pleasures of cars (i.e. of upper/middle class people) than the pleasures of smoking (i.e. of lower-class people)?

> Would you tolerate a small amount of tastable but moderately low risk poop from your neighbors in your drinking water, given a choice?

I think the fact that you go for a disgust-based argument is pretty telling: this isn't about the health risks of secondhand smoke, it's about a cultural disgust of smoking and smokers.

I hate smoking and smokers as much as anyone, but this thread has really made me think about public officials' eagerness to ban it.

[dahart]

> News to me. If that’s true, why do conversations about secondhand smoke involve so much rhetoric and so little science?

If the fact that second hand smoking has been proven risky is news you to, even indoors, it means you haven’t even googled the question, and that you didn’t click any of the links at the top of this thread. The CDC page has a literal pile of primary source research and data. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...

Do you really want to know the answer to the question you asked? You can find the answers without talking to me. I fully encourage not reading the rest of my reply and just answering the questions you asked yourself with an open mind. Or is this about debating me with logic alone until I stop responding? Logic doesn’t compete with history. It’s irrelevant whether rhetoric is involved, but for the record the reasons rhetoric gets used sometimes is precisely demonstrated by your response to primary research: you didn’t believe it. Okay, if you discount the science, then maybe reason or emotion can work. If you discount reason and emotion too, then maybe you’ve decided and are closed to hearing any input on this topic?

> If they should have that kind of right, they should have that right in respect to other sources of air pollution like cars or wood fires too. If it’s about risk…

I agree with you, we should all have rights about clean air. But you’re now intentionally ignoring the reasons we already discussed. It’s was never about risk alone, it’s about risk vs benefit. Do you need to jump to strawman arguments after we’ve already covered this? Cars have high value in addition to their risks. Cigarettes have no value. It’s weakening your argument and leading me to believe you’ve simply decided that safety is not a valid concern and that you’re choosing to ignore facts. I’m giving you more credit than this, I know you know that cars have real utility and that cigarettes don’t. Your class distinction is a bit cringey and broadly speaking mostly false, I think you already know that too.

> I think the fact that you go for a disgust-based argument is pretty telling

I think the fact that you’re the one using spin framing and rhetoric here while accusing others of doing what you’re doing is telling. I didn’t go for a disgust based argument, I went for a safety argument. Poop is not safe to drink in any amount, my “moderately low risk” was a cheeky parallel to the smoking safety argument. Poop is gross, so I see why you’re trying to use that against me, but secondhand smoke is also gross.

> this thread has really made me think about public officials’ eagerness to ban it.

Why? Are you confusing what I’m saying with what the CDC says? Are you using my rhetoric to justify claiming that public officials are using rhetoric? Isn’t that jumping to conclusions? You still haven’t yet given a single reason why smoking should not be banned, despite the fact that it’s harmful to human health and harmful to the economy, and has no redeeming values. You’ve only expressed fear, doubt, and uncertainty as a response to both reason and primary source research, with only rhetoric of your own in response.

[lmm]

> The CDC page has a literal pile of primary source research and data. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...

There's certainly some interesting stuff there, but it's very clearly written with a heavy bias and very clearly not a primary source (indeed they state explicitly that their second-hand smoke estimates are based on unpublished data, which seems like a huge red flag).

> Do you really want to know the answer to the question you asked? You can find the answers without talking to me.

I am genuinely interested, just common-sense sceptical. Even heavy smoking is not that deadly (especially compared to something like cars - just looking at the impact on people I've known personally). The idea that there would be this huge mortality impact from the much smaller level of smoke exposure that second-hand smokers get just doesn't pass the sniff test. If I take the report you linked at face value, I'm supposed to believe that second-hand smoke kills fully 1/10th as many people as actual smoking - but most of the risks of smoke exposure are linear, and there's just no way that people are breathing in 1/10th as much tobacco as second-hand smoke as actual smokers do. So something stinks.

> Cars have high value in addition to their risks. Cigarettes have no value.

This is your fundamental assumption that's been going unspoken until now, and it's the part I'm taking issue with. Cars don't have a lot of value, IMO. And you're simply ignoring the fact that many people enjoy smoking, or you've decided it somehow doesn't count. It has a lot of value to them, that's why they do it.

Of course if you start by assuming that the value of smoking is zero then you'll reach the conclusion that the cost/benefit isn't worth it. But you could justify banning anything that way (I'm sure there's not a single thing in existence that has absolutely zero health risks associated with it). And I'm pretty sure the decisions about what things are zero value are being made mainly by classism (probably not intentionally, but just because the people who contribute to this kind of public health report come almost exclusively from a particular class).