Prohibitionist Junk Science?

I think so. Some are trying to make the case that even third hand tobacco smoke is a health hazard. I'll admit I'm very skeptical that even 2nd hand smoke is all that dangerous if not exposed to frequently. You'd hard pressed to convince me that someone is threatened by me smoking a cigarette 20 or even 10 feet away down the sidewalk.

harleyrider's comment to the story deserves repeating. I suspect the science behind 2nd hand smoke was developed the same way they're playing with the 3rd hand smoke issue:

harleyrider1978 wrote, "This study appears to be wall to wall junk science. They seem to be most worried about "carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines or TSNAs..several hundred nanograms per square meter of nitrosamines" (1)

Guess where Nitrosamines are also formed? Cooking fish, where TSNAs are measured in microgrammes, but in the Berkeley paper nanogrammes a factor of a thousand times smaller. (2)

Nitrosamines are also found in ham, milk, children's balloons and tap water. (3)

Finally the World Health Organization's cancer mouthpiece the International Agency Research on Cancer says on Nitrosamines: "5.2 Human carcinogenicity data. No data were (sic) available to the Working Group." (4)

So we have a dose that is so low, cooking a fish produces 1,000 times more "carcinogens" on a chemical which has not been proven to cause cancer in the first place.

Junk science that insults the intelligence.