Second Hand Chicken Little - The Totalitarian Crusade Against Second-Hand Smoke

This may be a close second to the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax. 
"Claptrap" is an apt term here. m/r

"And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke."
  Rudyard Kipling-- The Betrothed'

The Totalitarian Crusade Against Second-Hand Smoke - Reason.com

There are few issues that are as riddled with outright claptrap as the scare about what smokers' puffing is doing to innocent non-smokers.

Brendan O'Neill | February 9, 2014

If there really were such a thing as a bullshit detector, a machine that bleeped upon encountering nonsense, it would probably go into meltdown whenever someone talked about second-hand smoke.

In the modern public sphere, there are few issues that are as riddled with myth, misinformation, contradictory claims and outright claptrap as the scare about what smokers' foggy puffing is doing to us innocent non-smokers.

In recent years we've been told that second-hand smoke, or passive smoking, as some people call it, is as bad as smoking itself and can give you lung cancer. And apparently if you are surrounded by it in a car that has its windows closed that is like being in the most smoky, nicotine-stained bar you could ever imagine (if such bars still existed, which of course they don't).

Yet it turns out that these claims about the toxicity and cancer-causing powers of other people's smoke are either untrue or unproven. So how do prissy anti-smoking campaigners and health-freaky politicians continue to get away with churning out tall tales about second-hand smoke? Why won't this panic die under the boot of actual facts? What gives it its Michael Myers-like ability to keep coming back, in a crazier form every time, wagging its warning finger at humankind?

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