Do they really, or is that an old wives tale from non-reproducible research, the way the anti-fat scare was?
"The largest and longest study (Enstrom & Kabat) followed more than 35,000 subjects for almost 40 years and found no significant risk associated with second-hand smoke. Similarly, the World Health Organization spent seven years at a dozen research centers in seven countries and came to the same conclusion".
> Since the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, 2.5 million adults who were nonsmokers died because they breathed secondhand smoke [1]
> While the tobacco industry continues to claim that the evidence that passive smoking causes disease – particularly lung cancer – is controversial, every independent authoritative scientific body that has examined the evidence has concluded that passive smoking causes many diseases. [2]
Also, the Enstrom & Kabat study is widely criticised [3] + [4]:
> incorrect definition of passive smoking exposure as a “nonsmokerʼs marriage to a smoker” [3]
> A severe error in the study was the failure to establish a control group of nonsmokers who were unexposed to secondhand smoke. [4]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...
[2] http://www.who.int/tobacco/research/secondhand_smoke/about/e...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236833718_Critique_...
[4] [PPT] www.econ.wayne.edu/agoodman/7550/week14/Second-hand_Smoke.ppt
People that work in pubs and clubs after a smoking ban must see a big benefit.
Everyone old enough to have gone out in the UK in the early 2000s can tell you that pubs and clubs were totally full of smoke and you would come home smelling like an ashtray.
Bit of a weak argument the article makes.