The British Medical Association is spouting a lot of BS about smoking in cars

There used to be a thing called liberty (Photo: Alamy)

Today’s discussion about banning smoking in cars proves that when it comes to cigarettes, which many people now view as the greatest evil of our age, you can spout as much BS as you like and no one will bat an eyelid. The British Medical Association says lighting up in cars should be outlawed because in these small, enclosed spaces, smoking generates 23 times more toxins than you would find in a smoky bar. This scary factlet has been repeated everywhere. From the Daily Mail to the Guardian, Salon to Marie Claire, everyone is banging on about how those inconsiderate muppets who smoke in cars are creating an environment 23 times more disgusting than that which existed in olden-day pubs where men in flat caps used to puff all night long.

The only problem is that this isn’t true. There has been one thorough study into this “23 times more toxic” claim about smoking in cars – carried out by researchers at the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal – and it found that it was nonsense on stilts. That wasn’t its precise wording, of course; the study actually said: “In [an] exhaustive search of the relevant literature, we failed to locate any scientific source for this comparison.” The researchers suggested that anti-smoking activists and journalists should stop using the magic 23 number because it is “not credible”. Apparently it first appeared as a brief quotation in an article about smoking in cars in a US newspaper the 1990s, before entering mainstream academic discourse in 1998 when the journal Tobacco Control featured it in an editorial. The rest, as they say, is history.

Even to the ordinary, non-science-trained man in the street, it should be obvious that the idea that having a fag in a car gives rise to 23 times as much toxicity as exists in a smoky bar is bunkum. Where smoky bars tend to be constantly cloudy, sometimes unpleasant places, cars have four (or more) windows that can be flung open in order to ensure that all cigarette smoke escapes and some fresh air gets in. Yet the 23 claim persists because there is a deeply conformist attitude towards smoking bans today. When it comes to smoking, no one is prepared to raise their head above the parapet and say: “I think these claims might not be true.” Even today’s army of sceptics and science purists, those Twitter-based defenders of the Gospel According to Men in White Coats, tend to keep schtum when it comes to the warping of scientific evidence for the purpose of clamping down on smoking. They’ll leap with naked glee upon any government report on drugs that contains an error or any expression of climate-change scepticism that gets something wrong about glaciers. But reports about smoking that make stuff up? They don’t mind that.

Everyone’s critical faculties go up in a puff of smoke in the face of government or charity propaganda about evil tobacco. People allow their disgust for smoking, which they look upon as the filthy habit of stupid and immoral people, to override their instinct to ask questions and take the authorities to task. It’s time we started being a bit more critical of the increasingly unhinged war on smoking. For two reasons. First, because using pseudoscience to force people to alter their behaviour is always a very bad idea. And second, because there’s this thing call liberty, which some of you might have read about in history books, which should mean that people be free to choose whether or not to light up in their own vehicles.