Inspired, perhaps, by the ’success’ of Nurse Bloomberg’s smoking ban, a bunch of overbearing British doctors are now looking to see similar legislation imposed in the UK. Given the increasing presumption of health care ‘professionals’, there’s nothing surprising about that, but I was struck by the claims of how many lives are lost to the (largely imaginary, of course) scourge of passive smoking: 1,000 a year apparently.
In reality, of course, this is a number that has been picked out of the (smoke-filled) air, but it’s time to start tallying the tallies. Here’s Jane Brody from the New York Times on the supposed death toll (65,000!) in the US, a country with a population between four and five times the size of Britain’s, but with passive smoke that is, it seems, far far more deadly.
How come?