If you follow nicotine policy—and you should, not just because it's intrinsically important, but because it's very revealing of a lot of contemporary attitudes—you will know that while the evidence of a direct causal link between smoking and lung cancer is extremely strong, the evidence for the harms of what's been called "secondhand smoke" is…not so much.

Which is why we appreciate cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat writing in Reason to highlight a recent study American Cancer Society study showing, once again, that the risks from secondhand smoke are negligible.

In 2003, Kabat and a colleague published a controversial study, using data from 1 million adults, showing that risks from secondhand smoke are negligible.

This new study, which aimed to estimate the number and proportion of cancers attributable to potentially modifiable risk factors found that cancer risk from secondhand smoke exposure is approximately 41 times lower than that from active smoking. The new ACS study used survey data on health behaviors and national statistics on cancer incidence and death rates.

As Kabat notes, exposure to secondhand smoke "is known to cause eye and throat irritation and to exacerbate preexisting respiratory conditions." That is a far cry from claiming it kills people, however.

Writes Kabat: "Looking at the passive smoking story from 30,000 feet, we can see that scientists reported […] very small risk estimates as grounds for mortal fear. In their eagerness to publicize their findings, researchers did not examine the weak data on [secondhand smoke] in light of the basic methodological considerations they teach their graduate students, such as the distinction between correlation and causation, possible misclassification of exposure, confounding variables, publication bias, and other potential biases. The news media, public health authorities, and the scientific community all followed suit, deeming the evidence strong. Anyone who questioned this dogma was branded a shill of the tobacco industry."

There are obvious direct policy implications. In our liberal societies, we take for granted that adults can do whatever they want as long as it only affects them, but not when it affects other people negatively. Most smoking bans in public places are justified based on claims about secondhand smoke. These claims, it turns out, are false. It's pretty obvious when you look at the discourse around nicotine and nicotine regulation, the real problem is with the kind of people who smoke, who tend to come from the uneducated underclass. This is why there has been such overregulation of e-cigarettes. E-cigarettes help people quit smoking, so public health authorities should be overjoyed about them and encourage their use. Instead they have thrown up all sorts of roadblocks short of bans, including, absurdly, banning them in many public places. That's because it would help the wrong sort of people.

"Many such cases," as some would say.

Indeed, there are broader implications beyond nicotine. The marked tendency of the public health establishment in general is to take vanishingly small risks and prescribe very strong policy responses to such risks, with only the most casual regard for tradeoffs and how that might affect other goods. Kabat wrote a book on precisely this subject in 2008, titled Hyping Health Risks, which we will be looking up.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Chyna — The New Right group America 2100 has an interesting look at how pro-China legislation gets enacted and anti-China legislation gets blocked, including by allegedly conservative Members of Congress.

#LGBT — If you're like us, you may have read reports about laws allowing the state to take children from their parents if they refuse so-called "gender-affirming care," but you may have thought that the reality can't possibly be as bad as what the headlines make it look like. It is, as a report from the Daily Caller News Foundation's Megan Brock makes clear.

#MAHA — On Fox, President Trump says RFK Jr. will be part of his cabinet.

#Budget — Nice fact-check from CRFB on President Trump's Medicare proposals during his first term. "President Trump’s budgets included proposals to reduce the cost of Medicare through changes to provider payments and drug pricing reforms that have generally received bipartisan support," they write.

#Immigration — Brookings tries to ascertain the potential impacts of both candidates' immigration plans on the macroeconomy. "Overall, differences in immigration policy alone could cause GDP growth in 2025 to be roughly half a percentage point—or $130 billion—lower in a second Trump administration than under a Harris administration," they write. Obviously this includes assumptions on how the economy would readjust under a restrictionist immigration policy. Restrictionists believe that higher wages would result in higher capital investments and higher productivity growth, resulting in more growth over the long run, but the assumptions baked into standard models aren't meant to capture this kind of effect.

#TradeWars — Pirate Wires' Mike Solana calls it: if President Trump is reelected, he will respond to the European Commission's aggressive efforts to regulate Silicon Valley companies with a trade war.

#Life — Horrifying story from the AP which shows what euthanasia looks like in practice in countries that have legalized it. An elderly man who was his wife's caregiver wanted her to die with him. "The couple had several appointments with an assessor before the wife ‘finally agreed’ to be killed.'” To be clear, this is murder, plain and simple. There is no jurisdiction where euthanasia has been legalized where it hasn't led to a very fast slide into the kind of horrible things that advocates tell us won't happen.

#Survey — New Gallup poll: Majority of Americans Feel Worse Off Than Four Years Ago.

#Media — The great investigative journalist Julie Kelly, now with RealClearInvestigations, reports that "Kamala showed up at 5:17pm despite a promise the interview would start at 5pm and last for 30 minutes to give Fox enough time to turn around the taped interview for his 6pm show. Kamala didn’t want a live interview then started the taped interview almost 20 minutes late before her aides cut it short."

Friday Essays

Mathieu Bock-Côté, a québécois sociologist who has also had a very successful second career as a pundit in France, now has an essay in The American Conservative on how Justin Trudeau's aggressive multiculturalism has revived Québécois nationalism.

At the great journal The New Atlantis, a devastating critique of the faux public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari. In fact, if you have the time, you should read the entire new issues, dedicated to "Builders."

River Page, at The Free Press, believes that "The Apprentice" is, "finally", a good Trump movie. “There’s no doubt that director Ali Abbasi finds Donald Trump abhorrent, but The Apprentice doesn’t demonize him,” he writes.

Roger Pielke, Jr. is of a vanishing breed: a honest scientist. His Substack, The Honest Broker, was originally focused on his specialty of climate science, and has since evolved to a broader remit of trying to understand science truly objectively and without biases. We're happy to share his article commemorating the fourth anniversary of his essential publication, which includes an offer for a "30% off forever" discount.

We thought this week we would have a selection of essays by Helen Andrews, who was most recently editor at The American Conservative, and is one of the most talented essayists of her generation. We have read her collection of essays Boomers at least twice.

Helen engaged your correspondent in a debate, early in 2020, on the wisdom of Covid lockdowns—and history records that she was right and we were wrong.

One of her most famous essays is this classic on women who opposed the women's suffrage movement.

In this review of a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, she writes that "Eleanor Roosevelt’s career vindicated every misogynist cliche about women in politics."

This review essay is a trenchant analysis of America's post-Floyd "racial reckoning."

This essay on the debate surrounding statues of Robert E. Lee starts with one of the best opening paragraphs in history.