I wish it were acceptable to complain about stinky purfumes and body sprays. They fill the air with volatile organic compounds. Plenty of people are happy to chuck on something smelly while hypocritically complaining about other types of smells. Some cause allergies (hayfever) in me to the point I have to leave an enclosed space or suffer consequences. I know friends that get headaches from them.

Hear, hear! Some are worse than others, some don't bother much, but lots of perfumes give me headaches.

Right. And where is the "no safe level of exposure to perfume" PSA?

It's entirely rational to suspect the motives and veracity of statements like this.

The harder you make it to engage a behavior, the more likely it is to become extinguished or reduce. These are nusges. It's basically how you influence people incrementally toward a desired outcome.

I too, am bothered by some of the history of tobacco-related data. I am ok with the government using indirect methods to reduce tobacco deaths.

Wearing perfume doesn't makebthe too of preventable deaths. Perfume smell may be as annoying as cigarette smoke to some people. There's a clear reason why there's societal pressure to address and regulate one I dustry as opposed to another.

Whether a given government is using shit science and where it draws its concerns in regards to societal pressure valves to release, has a lot to do with who the leaders of the administration are. This is why politics needs to be a leading concern for any researcher or citizen that prefers effective methods of dispersing evidence-based knowledge.

I once encountered a smoker who smoked something seriously insane that smelled like burning shit. I could barely believe it's happening.

“ it’s not that absurd to worry about urban smoke outdoors contributing to urban pollution”

Where do you live that second hand smoke is a significant urban level pollutant?

Take a pack of cigarettes, 25g, divide it by 3 (your 30% of people are smokers) = 8.3 g per capita and burn it.

Now consider all the diesel per capita that is burned in this dystopian city of smokers.

No, we don't get to pretend these trucks have diesel particulate filters. Not if the city has 30% smokers. [1]

Anyway, at 8g/person, pollution controls wont save the argument - smoking is a negligible urban level pollutant.

[1] or propose a city with lots of smokers that has strict and enforced diesel rules. Tel Aviv? Israelis used to love to smoke.

Reminds me of a discussion at a students' senate meeting on campus a few years back, when they were discussing banning tobacco smoke everywhere including in the parks away from buildings. People who noted that PM2.5/PM10 emissions from construction sites (ubiquitous at the time), or even BBQs, where much greater than cigarettes, even if all people on campus were chain smoking (we maybe had 5% smokers), were ostracized. The times we live in lol.

There are other large source of particulate emissions, larger than cigarettes, there is no doubt about that. Why would that mean we shouldn’t have rules about smoking in public places? Is it okay to try to address multiple issues at the same time, and do something about the ones we actually have control over, even if it only partially addresses the problem?

It’d probably be ideal to eliminate the other sources of particulates too, it’s not necessarily a competition, though we all like buildings and BBQ. But out of curiosity - were the people noting that one BBQ is a bigger source of particulates than one cigarette also being fair about the averages, like the fact that there are generally many fewer BBQs running at far lower density and far less often than cigarettes? Are you sure they weren’t argued down because the point might be both somewhat misleading and also somewhat irrelevant? (I’m not certain about that, just suggesting it’s possible. It’s also a fact that there are people who like to ride on high horses and get uppity about their beliefs. I might be one of them sometimes.)

Exactly, you mention beliefs, while the point was (is?) one of science. By the way, have you ever heard of banning coal BBQs? I'm not sure at all that the exposure is less severe. Say you are at a party, there's a BBQ 20ft away, and some annoying guy lights a cig 10ft away. I'd bet you money that the BBQ harms you more, or at least emits more than 4 times (you need to scale by the square, diffusion of a fluid) PM2.5 than the cigarette.

Yes, I mentioned beliefs and was admitting that some of the behavior you saw might be based more on human beliefs than science. It wouldn’t be the first time it ever happened, right? ;)

I have heard of banning coal BBQs. I’m sure you’re absolutely right that the instantaneous exposure per second can be worse if you’re close and downwind from one than a cigarette from the same distance. But how often do you go to a party? Is it dozens of times per day, every day? Because that’s how often I bump into smokers when walking around downtown. Part of the CDC’s point is that the damage is cumulative, and you need to integrate over time and space. Exposure to one big source for a short time can be a little bit bad, while exposure to many small sources for a long period of time can be much worse.

I was referring to a specific situation (a university campus) that already banned smoking from all indoor areas, and all outdoor areas within 100ft from buildings (could have been 200, I don't remember). The question was whether to ban it everywhere. That scene I used of the party was very accurate, you'd have about 1 in 20 people who smoked. You'd not bump into smokers in any other settings, basically. (You'd maybe see a random smoker smoking on their own far away from buildings.) This was early 2010s at a west coast university.

Also, you don't need to be downwind from the BBQ. It's a point emission of fluid (particulate). It diffuses. The intensity scales with the square of the distance. (Same exact process as the cigarette smoke.)

> Even urban outdoor second hand smoke really is a higher risk than air travel radiation.

Isn't this exactly what's in dispute? What's the evidence that this is true?

Not really. The actual topic of conversation underneath the smoke is the political neutrality of the CDC, and public mistrust of science and government funded sources of information.

If you are really curious about the evidence, follow the thread up and click the links. I already posted links that have some stats and links to studies on the harms of second-hand smoke, and so did @dionidium too. :)

I didn't see anything in your links that addressed second-hand smoke specifically? I think there's a broad consensus that a) tobacco is a significant cause of premature death b) low outdoor air quality (e.g. high PM25) is a significant cause of premature death. But given that tobacco smoke does not show up in your link's list of major contributors to low outdoor air quality, that does not add up to a statement that second-hand smoke is significantly dangerous.

You’re talking about the WHO link specifically? You’re right, that link doesn’t mention secondhand smoke because it doesn’t have a list of major contributors (doesn’t mention cars or factories either). I’d agree it’s probably not a great example of what you’re asking about. I really only posted the WHO link because the WHO uses similar language to the CDC saying things like ‘there are no safe levels of exposure to pollution.’ Might not answer your question, but I think the WHO pollution guidelines published a few months are good reading (https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/345329).

To clarify what I was talking about above, I’m saying the close exposure to smokers is high in urban areas -- in proximity, frequency, and density. There’s also broad consensus that the risks and harms of secondhand smoke are greater in proportion to proximity of the smokers, and that downtown urban areas where people congregate have higher concentrations of cigarette smoke than other places. I’m not personally claiming that average Pm2.5 air quality over time sees a measurable impact from cigarettes. (Even if true, I would expect cigarettes are dwarfed by cars --- but 6 trillion cigarettes a year isn’t nothing, right?) I’m really primarily claiming that being in an urban area like a downtown city center is high exposure to secondhand smoke, being very close to smokers is often a many times per hour occurrence in busy urban areas, walking and entering/exiting buildings.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

> 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).

To be clear, I don't think the CDC is full of political operatives intent on fighting a culture war. What I think is that almost nobody at the CDC smokes, that they don't know many smokers, that they (correctly, more or less) perceive smoking to be a lower-class-coded activity, that there is probably near-universal agreement within the CDC that smoking is an undesirable (maybe even "gross") activity (associated with low levels of educational attainment).

On the other hand, they all fly in airplanes. They attach little or no moral weight to flying. Everybody they know flies on airplanes. Etc, etc.

I think it's unlikely that this isn't influencing their language. The risk of smoking, in their view, isn't something to be managed or weighed or compared; rather, smoking is an abhorrent activity that should be stamped out of existence.

How could that possibly not influence how they write about it?

That’s extremely heavy and unfounded speculation on your part. How do you know who flies, or what their morals are, or who they know?? You’re now attempting to move the goal posts to a different playing field entirely. Your beef was over radiation, which has extremely low levels of risk compared to air pollution, not the morals of flying. The questions about the environmental impacts of flying is certainly getting enormous amounts of exposure currently, why do you think people at the CDC are any different from the rest of us in that respect?

You’re still trying to paint a picture of hypocrisy where none exists. The CDC is presenting facts on risks, not moral judgements. The fact is that the risks of smoking are large, it kills many times more people than all causes of flying related mortality combined, and that is the reason there is a lot of information decided to educating people about those risks. Smoking is also one of the easiest things to change, it’s a choice, and it’s a luxury, not necessary for anyone to do. Why not try to reduce it? They’re not judging people who smoke as low class, they’re pointing out correctly that smoking is something that statistically harms people of low SES disproportionately, not just health wise, but financially. The whole idea is to try to help those people escape. It seems strange to me to spend any energy complaining about the CDC’s language of smoking, while ignoring the vast amounts of social damage left in the wake of Big Tobacco.

I don't care about the morality of flying and I'm not suggesting they should, either. That's the whole point. Of course they use stronger language wrt activities they look down upon than for activities they don't.

And maybe that's as it should be! Again, I am asking people to notice when this happens.

The CDC hasn’t been “politicized,” in other words; their project is intrinsically political.

> their project is intrinsically political

I don’t think that case has been made here, you’re failing to demonstrate it. I disagree that intrinsic politics has anything whatsoever to do with the safety of smoking vs radiation exposure of air travel.

There are times when other people politicize what the CDC says. Your comments here explicitly and repeatedly attempted to politicize the secondhand smoke recommendations. Covid is also one of them, and it seems like you might be dancing around and hoping to implicate Covid politics while trying not to talk about it directly. The CDC has been actively trying to stay out of the politics and simply help people understand the risks and statistics, and what choices they can make to reduce their risks.

> of course they use stronger language wrt activities they look down upon

They don’t look down on any activities. They report safety stats and safety guidelines. The language is stronger when the mortality rates are higher, period.

You're not the only one here who has suggested I might be trying to make some kind of clandestine point about COVID. I've been on this difference in how the CDC treats these two topics since long before COVID existed and COVID couldn't be further from my mind.

Then I’m sorry. Truly. I was speculating wildly and incorrectly. My apologies.

It's not a proof but I really enjoyed Zizek's thoughts on how fight against smoking is an ideology :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r238kp3ar_A

Hehe, I don’t know who this is, but it was fun to watch. “I’m a kind of Stalinist fascist ... if I take drugs, then I become passive, and enemies can attack!” LOL!

So, the argument he didn’t even attempt to address in his comparison of smoking to other drugs is that smoking hurts other people directly, while other drugs don’t. The primary reason we have rules against smoking in public is it’s effects on people nearby who are not choosing to smoke. This entire thread was about secondhand smoke, and Zizek didn’t address it.

Similarly, the reasons we have some regulations on smoking in private, and the entire reason we have regulations on drugs is because of the direct damage it does, statistically, to the users, and to the indirect damage it does to other people. For the minority of bad cases, hospital visits for overdoses and car accidents, social services for addicts or their children, rehab, and loss of jobs are real issues. For the larger majority there are still measurable effects on drug users’ lifespans and on the economy.

We are a collective and have no choice about that. We have some shared resources that we need to agree on. If you want to enjoy freedoms, you have to respect other people’s freedoms. Where’s my freedom to breathe clean air if you smoke near me? (I happen to have some athsma, the risks to me of secondhand smoke are greater than mild exposure to carcinogens.)

So yeah, not only is it not a proof, it’s not even a reason to buy the argument that anti-smoking sentiment is ideological. To prove that it’s ideology, you need to demonstrate that smoking is safe.

Note the change from secondhand smoke to outdoor secondhand smoke, once you responded rationally. This poster may be a bot.

It's not absurd to worry about it, it is absurd to say there is no safe exposure level and leave it at that. Especially because so many people smoke it is important to be informed about the actual risks of second hand smoke.

If I'm walking down the street do I need to cross the street if I see someone approach with a cigarette? If I'm at a bar and smell smoke coming in should I leave?

I hear your point, and agreed already that more detail would be nice.

To be fair, the CDC does not ‘leave it at that’. Their page that @dionidium linked to does not either start with or stop with the statement “there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke.” It’s one statement among many that include actual statistics, and so incredulity over a line of summary taken out of context might be slightly misplaced.

The CDC is in the business of setting guidelines, so the context of their statement that it’s not risk free is a suggestion that regardless of your situation, it would be better to not expose yourself to smoke. This happens to be in complete agreement with the message and recently updated guidelines by the World Health Organization, and with statements by the American Medical Association.

Reasonable people are free to make reasonable choices. A little smoking and drinking isn’t going to kill anyone, and we all know that. So we don’t need to get upset when someone says a little is a little bit bad. That said, for someone with athsma, they might reasonably choose to cross the street, since smoke is a trigger and meeting someone on the street who smokes is a very common occurrence if you walk around in urban areas. If they go to a bar, then they’re probably asking for it. :P

No safe level means one person a mile away is a problem.

I bet they would say that's absurd, with a straight face.

A wise man I knew used to say

"Dilution is the solution to pollution".

In fact, once you think about it, that's also the only solution.

To bring it to the relevant topic of the day, I don't believe I will ever see the CDC issue a statement that "no level of exposure to the COVID-19 virus is safe", and recommend China level of quarantine.