"Your past is just a story..."

"...And once you realize this, it has no power over you." - Chuck Palahniuk

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

"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 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? 

...Smoking in a car with minors is already banned in Australia, Canada, South Africa and in some American states, including California, Maine and Oregon. These bans capture superbly the zealous miserabilism of the modern-day nannying'n'nudging set. They expose the new authoritarians' casual disregard for the notion of privacy, so that even our privately owned vehicles come to be seen as fair game for petty laws to curb and control what was once perfectly legal behavior; they reveal the nannying lobby's powerful distrust of everyday men and women, who are now viewed as so bone-headed and bereft of decency that new laws are required to prevent them from polluting their own children, both physically and morally; and they show what shockingly low esteem the ideal of autonomy is held in these days, so that anyone who stands up and says "I think adults should be free to choose what vices to indulge in and pleasures to pursue" is either laughed at for being naive or branded a wicked stooge for Big Tobacco...

These folk have also told us that second-hand smoke is an "invisible killer" (in the words of Britain's National Health Service) because it "causes lung cancer in non-smokers." Lots of people believe this claim. But there's no evidence to back it up. At the end of last year, the much respected U.S. Journal of the National Cancer Institute carried out an exhaustive study of the research and found "no clear link between passive smoking and lung cancer."

Why does this fact-lite fearmongering about second and third-hand smoke trundle on even as the evidence for it either falls apart or is laughed out of existence by serious research? It's because the whole idea of second-hand smoke isn’t really a scientific one at all. No, it’s more of a metaphor, a metaphor disguised as science. It's a pseudoscientific allegory for our highly suspicious era in which we’re all expected, encouraged in fact, to see our fellow citizens, our work colleagues and even our own parents as toxic creatures whose very breath and touch might harm us.

In short, everywhere and everyone is dangerous; invisible toxic elements lurk in granny’s carpets and restaurant curtains; in your cousin’s hair and your kids' playmates’ toys; on park swings, on public benches, on buses. Better to stay at home, in a totally smoke-free environment, than venture into the filthy world outside your front door. What a dispiriting and divisive view of the world. Through the increasingly unhinged crusade against smoking, we have been cajoled with suspect science into viewing all people—even mom and dad—as the potential poisoners of our bodies and souls. The reason dodgy scientific claims about other people's smoke keep emerging is because they are moulding themselves around, and offering justification for, an already existing social malaise—one in which we are invited to fear people, to fear the world, to disavow autonomy, and to trust the state...

 I would prefer to run the risk of getting a hacking cough through freely mixing with smokers than to live in a detoxified, disinfected society in which we’re expected to judge every person and scenario by how many particulate concentrations they contain."