While there's no question that tobacco companies were less-than-truthful with their customers about the negative health effects of smoking, anti-smoking crusaders may be telling some lies of their own.
From Fox News:
"Smokers who cut back the number of cigarettes they smoke may not be reducing the cancer-causing chemicals in their bodies as much as they hoped," reported the Washington Post this week.
The Post report was spurred by a study conducted by University of Minnesota "researchers" and published in the Jan. 21 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The researchers studied a group of 153 smokers who reduced their smoking by 25 percent during the first two weeks of the study, by 50 percent during weeks 2-4 and by 75 percent during weeks 4-26.
At weeks 4, 6, 8, 12 and 26 of the study, the researchers tested urine samples of the smokers for the presence of NNAL and NNAL-Gluc, byproducts of a compound in cigarette smoke called "NNK" that may (or may not) play a role in the development of lung cancer.
As the smokers reduced the number of cigarettes smoked per day, statistically significant reductions in the levels of urinary NNAL and NNAL-Gluc were reported by the researchers...
The University of Minnesota study does not change this fact for at least two reasons: (1) the researchers did not study the impact of reduced smoking on health and so cannot claim that it has no effect on health; and (2) what they did study (urinary levels of the NNK metabolites) may not even be biologically related to cancer risk in smokers and so may be utterly meaningless in terms of health consequences.
The condemnation of harm reduction on the basis of this study is so unjustified as to be blatantly dishonest. Lying to smokers about the health effects of smoking less is simply despicable ― and isn't that one of the anti-tobacco activists' primary criticisms of the tobacco industry?
Many people are going to smoke no matter what. Rather than accept and work within this reality to reduce the consequences of such smoking, the anti-tobacco industry is taking an "our way (tobacco prohibition) or the highway (more smoking-related disease)" approach.
Conclusions based on faulty research and half-truths were the tools of the tobacco industry in its crusade to defend smoking. To see these same methods being used by anti-smoking activists is disturbing, to say the least. It seems like these people are expecting everybody to quit cold-turkey.
Lets be honest, some people are not going to be able to quit, but they could possibly reduce the amount that they do smoke. Apparently a simple reduction in smoking isn't enough, they must have total submission to their agenda.
These methods are convincing me that these activists are more interested in furthering their crusade to ban smoking then they are in the actual health of smokers. I don't think anybody will argue with the fact that smoking is bad for your health, but that doesn't give anybody the license to lie about it.