Enemy No.1: Waging The War On Secondhand Smoke

Jim Repace's powerful memoir chronicles the generational struggle for smoke-free workplaces by gassed-out nonsmokers. Railing against the smoky mores of the 20th Century, they battled the dark forces of Big Tobacco. We encounter their tales of misery in smoke-filled offices, restaurants, bars, casinos, and hospitals, as well as trains, planes, ships, and in durance vile. We relive the contentious courtroom dramas, great and small. Prying open once-secret tobacco files, Repace reveals the malevolent machinations of the tobacco industry. He takes us behind the scenes at the EPA in its ultimately successful effort to assess the risks of secondhand smoke, and at OSHA in its ill-starred attempt to eliminate workplace smoking. He recounts the poignant congressional hearing to ban smoking on aircraft. Repace's pioneering public interest research and expert witness testimony stoked the industry's white-hot rage. The cast of characters includes outspoken scientists, physicians, and activist citizens engaged in guerilla warfare against the vast tobacco army of corporate criminals, corrupt congressmen, shyster lawyers, sleazy spokesmen, and bent tobacco moles, purveying half-vast junk science aimed at preserving the pollution of indoor air in pursuit of profits. ENEMY No.1 describes the rise of the nonsmokers' rights movement in the 1970's, the struggle for clean indoor air laws and the tobacco industry's underhanded efforts to thwart these laws for many years. It is written from the unique perspective of a scientist whose research helped underpin the movement, leading to a decades-long battle with Big Tobacco, as detailed in their secret files. This first-hand account describes the political strife and policy changes leading to widespread adoption of clean indoor air laws covering workplaces, aircraft, restaurants, bars and other venues. The tobacco industry reviled Repace as "a thorn in its side," tried to discredit his work and to get him fired from the U.S. EPA. In 1998, The Wall Street Journal reported that the tobacco industry regarded Repace as "Enemy No. 1."In the late 1970's, James Repace, then a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington DC, used borrowed equipment to clandestinely measure fine particle air pollution from secondhand smoke in restaurants and bars, weddings and waiting rooms, bowling alleys and bingo games, smoking and nonsmoking homes, indoor sports stadiums, and in dinner theaters and in dives. Published in the journal, Science, he and his NRL colleague Alfred Lowrey demonstrated that secondhand smoke pollution massively exceeded that on busy commuter highways in rush hour, and could not be controlled by ventilation, providing a firm foundation for smoke-free laws.This led to a second career at the EPA as an air policy analyst. Striking again, in 1985, Repace and Lowrey published an article in Environment International estimating that as many as 5000 American nonsmokers died each year from lung cancer due to passive smoking. The national publicity led to the landmark 1992 EPA Report, pegging U.S. lung cancer deaths at 3000 per year, accelerating the adoption of U.S. clean indoor air laws. In a third strike in 2004, Repace published the first measurements of indoor air pollution before and after a state-wide smoking ban in a casino, six bars and a pool hall in Delaware. Published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, it showed that 90% to 95% of airborne soot and carcinogens declined after the ban. The international publicity led to widespread hospitality industry smoking bans. Repace received the Surgeon General's Medallion from Dr. C. Everett Koop, awards from EPA, OSHA, The American Public Health Association, The Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The International Society of Exposure Science, and the U.S. Departments of Health and Transportation.

• | Author: James L Repace
• | Publisher: Repace Associates, Inc.
• | Publication Date: Feb 11, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 534 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0578197022
• | ISBN-13: 9780578197029