By Cindy Hyman

Anderson resident

Smokers and anyone using tobacco products, which also includes President Barack Obama, have been scapegoats; unmercifully demonized and financially punished by legislators and have never been granted the right to be heard or to defend their interests. This is illustrated by the proposal to fund the state’s children’s health insurance program (SCHIP) though increased taxation on people who use tobacco in any form. This tax is expected to range from 61 cents to $1 per pack, in addition to the current tax. Ironically, if more people stop using tobacco, the funding for this program begins to dry up.

In case it’s been overlooked, tobacco isn’t illegal and doesn’t pay taxes, people do — and a minority (43.4 million people) have been repeatedly singled out to pay for government programs that ostensibly benefit society as a whole. Historically, government has stepped in to protect minorities from being beaten up. This time, lawmakers land punches of their own, and further organize a manufactured intolerance into national tax policy. Adult citizens who smoke have actually become a “class,” thanks to antismoker crusaders and legislators who propose smoking bans everywhere.

Take away one freedom, based on a disingenuous interpretation of scientific research, and an overzealous sensationalistic media combined with a misinformed public, and you get legislated public policy that one-by-one eliminates more freedoms. It’s smokers now. Next, the fat and obese. What if you were taxed at a restaurant or grocery according to your body mass index (BMI)?

You say legislators won’t let that happen. Remember the silicone breast implant uproar of a few years ago? Since then leading researchers have conducted studies finding, contrary to what we were told in one of the great scare campaigns of modern times, that there is no link between silicone-gel breast implants and the rate at which women contract diseases such as cancer.

Millions of women were badly scared by various members of the FDA, the surgeon general and other zealous activists who were “protecting our health.”

There is little doubt of the link between smoking and lung cancer, and this is not to say that second-hand smoke is not bothersome or offensive, only that it is NOT a dangerous killer. Why, then, doesn’t the general public know about this? Because scientifically refuted figures continue to be parroted by nearly every health organization and media outlet, disregarding the science, simply because it’s not “politically correct.”

The figure 53,000 deaths from second-hand smoke so often quoted by various health organizations are not “real deaths.” They come from a CDC computer program called SAMMEC ll. This computer spits out data based on formulas derived from relative risk factors. These factors are only assumptions not real and the risk factors for second-hand smoke are actually scientifically considered to be insignificant. To put this in proper perspective, the relative risk of lung cancer for persons drinking whole milk and cancers from chlorinated water is greater than risk factors in studies which formed a basis for the second-hand smoke death rates spit out by SAMMEC II Incidentally, the original studies for developing the formula used by the CDC’s SAMMEC II, were not done by medical doctors/researchers, toxicologists or epidemiologists. They were done by a mechanical engineer and a retired chemist.

Perhaps second-hand smoke is not responsible for every disease for which a cause has not been discovered. A previously unrecognized group of air pollutants could have effects remarkably similar to harmful substances found in tobacco smoke, Louisiana scientists reported in a study presented Aug. 17, 2008, at the 236th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. Inhaling those pollutants exposed the average person up to 300 times more free radicals daily than from smoking one cigarette, they added. The discovery could help explain the long-standing medical mystery of why non-smokers develop tobacco-related diseases like lung cancer, said H. Barry Dellinger, Ph.D., the Patrick F. Taylor Chair of Environmental Chemistry at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.