A recent court ruling suggests that when it comes to passive smoke, the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good cause. A U.S. District Court threw out a portion of the Environmental Protection Agency's 1993 report on the respiratory health effects of passive smoking.
Why? The court found the standards of objectivity that prevail in legitimate science were repeatedly violated in the EPA's risk assessment of secondhand smoke.
The EPA announced in 1992 that secondhand smoke posed a major risk of lung cancer. That same year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration suggested that secondhand smoke posed a major risk to workers.
Based on the EPA's finding, states and cities continued to ban or restrict smoking in public places. Since then, businesses have spent millions of dollars to comply with local smoking bans.
All of this was done on the authority of the EPA's final study, which, incredibly, didn't include the statistical analysis from two other important studies that were available at the time.
Those studies were published in no less than the American Journal of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine. And, even using the same less-stringent methods as the EPA, they would have shown that passive smoke leads to no statistically significant increases in the risk of lung cancer.
With its entire study results at risk, it is easy to see why the EPA excluded these works from its analysis.
In November 1995, after a 20-month analysis, the Congressional Research Service released a comprehensive analysis of the data used by the EPA.
CRS found that the EPA's lower standard of risk assessment for passive smoke was different from the one the agency had used for other substances. The report questioned the EPA's conclusions.
For example, the evidence that diesel exhaust is carcinogenic appears to be stronger than that for environmental tobacco smoke. But in 1994, the EPA provisionally classified diesel exhaust as a ''probable human carcinogen.''
The EPA was predisposed to reach this conclusion because of the people it had on the case.
The Science Advisory Board that examined the EPA's secondhand smoke work included a leading anti-smoking activist and others who were outspokenly critical of tobacco.
Objectivity was jeopardized further when some of the work related to risk assessment was contracted out to a founder of a major anti-tobacco organization.
This raises suspicions whether the EPA is practicing ''political science.''
Other scientists apparently share the same concern. Alvin Feinstein, a Yale epidemiologist, said he heard a prominent epidemiologist admit that the EPA's secondhand smoke study was ''rotten science, but it's for a worthy cause. It will help us get rid of cigarettes and to become a smoke-free society.''
But should we use corrupted science as a basis for public policy? Should science be adjusted to fit policy?
As a nonsmoker, the debate about environmental tobacco smoke isn't really about smoking. Rather, it's about the integrity in science and how the EPA manipulated that science for political purposes.
Robert Sexton is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University.
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