Welcome, this is Cato Daily Podcast with Anastasia Globa.

Today is Wednesday, May 2nd.

For today's podcast, I interview Jo Battagori a contributor in This Springs

issue of Regulation magazine. Jo is a fellow at the Health Policy Center in

Bethesda and a former deputy director at the National Cancer Institute.

His article, Stoking the Rigg Terror of Second Hand Smoke, exposes the fallacies and fabrications

in the scientific literature documenting the risks of secondhand tobacco smoke.

I'm on the phone with Joe today.

Would you say that the risks of secondhand smoke are exaggerated?

Well, they're not exaggerated, they are invented. In order to exaggerate something you have to start from some point that you can justify.

The fact is that none of the risks of ETS are justified in any measurable way.

And so whatever is said about the ETS risk is not exaggerated, is simply invented.

But numerous studies claim otherwise and hasn't the

Surgeon General personally testified as to the risks of secondhand smoke?

Well that doesn't make it measurable or measured. In fact, none of the studies, none of the

reviews of the Surgeon General and others can justify to have measured ETS exposure.

You write in your article that uncareful reading the scientific literature does not

support the horrific claims of the Surgeon General about secondhand smoke, as you've

just said.

What do the studies actually purport then?

Well, the studies make the allegation that there are some risks, but in order to arrive at some risk

definition, one would have to, first of of all be sure that he has measured the

...