EIB/RUSH: James Delingpole writing in I don't know what. I did not print out. But I've heard the name Delingpole, and I know he's got credibility. The bottom line is that passive smoking, i.e., for those of you in Rio Linda, secondhand smoke, does not give you lung cancer.
Now, this is something that I, El Rushbo, have known instinctively my whole life. Ever since the anti-smoking zealots got geared up, they have tried to pass off this silly idea that secondhand smoke can cause cancer as well, and it's always been laughable. The tiniest bit of common sense will tell you it couldn't. But there were enough people scared about it, that believed it, but there's a new report publicized by -- are you ready? -- the American Cancer Institute. (gasping) Which will come as no surprise to anyone with a shred of integrity, decency, or intelligence, who's looked into the origins of the environmental tobacco smoke crisis.
"It was a decade ago that the British Medical Journal, published the results of a massive, long-term survey into the effects of second-hand tobacco smoke." Do you remember we had that survey and it got buried? We publicized it. UN, any number, there was no danger whatsoever attached to secondhand smoke. Might not like it, might make you uncomfortable. It was not and did not and could not make you sick. And it got buried.
"Between 1959 and 1989 two American researchers named James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat surveyed no few than 118,094 Californians. Fierce anti-smoking campaigners themselves, they began the research because they wanted to prove once and for all what a pernicious, socially damaging habit smoking was. Their research was initiated by the American Cancer Society and supported by the anti-smoking Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.
"At least it was at first. But then something rather embarrassing happened. Much to their surprise, Kabat and Enstrom discovered that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (i.e. passive smoking), no matter how intense or prolonged, creates no significantly increased risk of heart disease or lung cancer."
Now, again, it's important to remember that the two guys who started this research were fervent anti-smoking zealots, and they were out to prove that secondhand smoke killed. It didn't take 'em long to find out that not only did it not kill anybody, it didn't matter. It didn't make anybody sick. It didn't matter. And then similar conclusions were reached by the World Health Organization, which concluded in 1998 after a seven-year study that the correlation between secondhand smoking and lung cancer was not statistically significant.
That got buried, but we have always kept it available. We can bring it back to life any time we want at RushLimbaugh.com. So now we've got three different studies proving that there is no cancer risk, no heart disease risk to secondhand smoke. Now, you might be saying, "So what, Rush? If people still don't like it, what, are you grassroots to bring back smoking in public?" No, no. I'm not that unrealistic.
Again, the lesson here is that you were lied to by a bunch of leftist busybodies. You were lied to in order to be forced to live your life the way they wanted you to. You were being denied freedom. You were being lied to and manipulated into believing something that wasn't true so as to impact the way you and everybody else lives, and you were converted into a member of the army of the anti-smoking who would go out and harass anybody else who smoked. You were lied to, to further the lies of a bunch of zealots.
That's the important point here, and who are these people? They're leftists. I don't care whether you're Phil Robertson or whoever. They will try, they will do whatever, they will lie to you. But their attempt, their effort is to control the way you live and what you think. Now there's medical news today. I kid you not. "Apple-a-Day as Effective as Statins" for whatever statins do. What are statins for, cholesterol? Yeah, an apple. Medical research.
I got the news. It's a news story. An apple a day is far more effective than whatever prescription medicine you're taking. But apples don't come with prescriptions and doctors can't be paid to tell you to eat one. Well, I guess they could. But who's gonna do it? And you can't eat apples 'cause Meryl Streep said they're putting Alar on 'em, which is killing our kids. It was a big story on 60 Minutes.
This stuff, I don't know, it's a bugaboo with me, folks. Because the left is made up of busybodies, or worse. Do you realize how many people are going through life believing things that aren't true, and it's affecting their enjoyment of life? It's affecting the way they raise their kids. It's affecting the way they live themselves. It's so unnecessary. That's what bugs me about it.
Gotta take a break. Well, that's for another day.
I was gonna talk about cigars and cigar smoking, but I'm not gonna make this personal.
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