In response to the letter “End smoking in Ames Restaurants” by Sophia Magill on Oct. 7, I’d like to get one thing out in the open before I start my rant: I have never used a single tobacco product in my entire life; I think that any use of tobacco is a vile and disgusting habit. However, why does the government think that people are not smart enough to find food in places that don’t allow smoking? We are not stupid.

This is a free country. If a bar owner wants to let people smoke in their building, it is their right to do so. No one has ever been forced to go to, or work in a smoking restaurant. If you don’t like smoke, don’t go to a smoking restaurant.

Sophia ended her letter with “Our Ames community leaders need the authority to once again save lives by enacting policies that will protect our residents.” What’s next, are you going to start regulating cake and ice cream because of the obesity epidemic in this country?

But the funny thing is, regulating the junk food would probably save more lives than a restaurant smoking ban.

All of these bloated numbers out there are based on two primary studies: one by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1993 and one by the World Health Organization in 1998. The EPA study was thrown out by a federal judge because the EPA “‘cherry picked’ its data” and “deviated from acceptable scientific procedure … to ensure a preordained outcome.”

And even though the EPA “cherry picked” its data, it could only come up with 3,000 smoking related deaths, a far cry from Sophia’s 250,000 deaths. And despite the WHO’s press release titled “Passive Smoking Does Cause Cancer,” their actual report states in its conclusions: “Our results indicate no association between childhood exposure to

[environmental tobacco smoke] and lung cancer risk.”

The report went on to say that any increase in risk due to workplace exposure was not statistically significant. If you’d like to know more about how they manipulate numbers, I highly recommend visiting the Cato Institute at www.cato.org. I urge the Iowa Legislature to think about the liberties of Iowa business owners before bowing before politically motivated junk science.

Jon von Gillern

Senior

Computer Engineering