The New York Times dropped a new term into our language–”third-hand smoke” ^[1]–and another  large dollop of politicized science.

Second-hand smoke is exhaled by smokers. Third-hard smoke is the microscopic particles left behind when smoke makes contact with curtains, couches and human hair. This is why smokers stink when they are not smoking, the article helpfully explains. Now there is “study” that says this heretofore unremarkable particles are a deadly health, especially to small children.

There are a number of problems with this study.

First, it ignores “threshold effects.” If I stand in the doorway and do not cross the threshold, I have not entered the room. In science, we see a lot of threshold effects. Until a certain dosage is reached, no effect appears. But, once the dosage reaches a certain limit, negative effects appear. But, if the dosage is below the threshold, it doesn’t make one safer to reduce it further–it literally has no effect at all. The study cited by the New York Times doesn’t present compelling evidence that the threshold has been crossed.

Second, it fails to control for key variables, like income. Lower-income people generally have poorer diets, are more likely to live in homes with lead and asbestos, be exposed to industrial fumes and so on. As with the largely bogus second-hand smoke studies, I suspect that if you control for income and occupation the measured effect vanishes. Low-income have some many confounding exposures that it is hard to isolate dust from tobacco smoke as a health hazard and higher-income people have fewer exposures and thus can’t establish the scary findings.

But the biggest point, and the most worrying for our society, is the politization of science. Clearly some people believe that all smoking should be banned. They can’t get their way by stamping their feet. While virtually every one favors reasonable restrictions (no smoking in the maternity ward, as was commonplace in the 1940s), very few people want to ban smoking everywhere for every one. So the smoke-banners can’t win a straight-up vote. Generally, they have done what all highly motivated minorities do in a democracy: they approach their goal through a series of reasonable salami slices (banning smoking in offices, public buildings and so on) until they get to some shockingly strange slices (banning smoking in your private car or home, banning smoking outdoors). How do they get the shocking slices accepted by the majority? Ideologically motivated “scientific” studies. And, of course, they invoke “the children.”

Of course, anti-smoking zealots are not the only ones who operate this way. So do environmentalists, corporate lobbyists and others on the right and left.

It is the politicized science that should worry all of us. These “studies” are used because they work and they work because political discourse in this country is dishonest. Rather than state their policy preferences, activists use studies to threaten and intimidate. If your child comes in contact with a seat cushion used by a smoker, she will grow up stupid or some such nonsense. The dishonesty appears in the role of the media, especially the New York Times, treating obviously shabby scientific work as impartial. Why not simply report the facts: anti-smoking scientists release new study contending that tobacco poses new risks? It is still a good story, in fact better because it is honest.

But it won’t scare you. And they want to frighten, not persuade. And that totalitarian desire is what worries me most about our country today.