Smoking ban in homes

Action on Smoking and Health (in the UK) is getting more fanatical by the day. In this BBC report, Martin Dockrell, ASH's policy officer, concludes:  'There is a strong case for social and private sector landlords designating some entire blocks as smoke-free to respect the choice and the health of the great majority of their tenants.'

This directly contradicts Deborah Arnott's words reported by The Independent only yesterday: 'While we can't pass legislation to prohibit smoking in the home, smoking in cars can and should be prohibited by law' [emphasis added].

The background to Dockrell's urgent about-face? A study led by Jonathan Winickoff (who invented third-hand smoke) declaring that children who live in apartments are more exposed to smoke than children in detached houses. They tested children across the US for cotinine, which is found (but not exclusively) in tobacco.

Researchers limited the sample in this study to children who live in a household where nobody smokes.

No control, then?

Overall, researchers found that 84.5% of children who were living in blocks of flats had a cotinine level that indicated recent tobacco-smoke exposure, compared with 79.6% of children who were living in attached houses and 70.3% who were living in detached houses.

So nearly three-quarters of children of non-smokers in detached houses have a high degree of cotinine in their systems, and children in smoking households were not studied. Exposure to nicotine is measured, but not the effects of exposure, which we are left to imagine. The study carries the authority that one expects from the man who coined the phrase 'third-hand smoke'.

Martin Dockrell should be ashamed to peg ASH's policies on such rotten calculations.