State science

State Science is Bad for Your Health:

But the public doesn't know that tobacco use appears to be associated with many positive long-term health outcomes, including lower incidences of Alzheimer's and certain cancers. At this time, such conclusions don't have the weight of the results of rigorous research precisely because studying smoking for positive health outcomes won't be funded. The hypothesis itself is simply too politically incorrect.

Also, among other thoughts:

Alzheimer's disease. Similarly [to Parkinsons's disease], the frequency of this degenerative mental disorder has recently been found to be as much as 50%less among smokers than among nonsmokers for example, by the H studies reviewed in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 1991.

On a related issue (obesity):

But the notion that our expanding waistlines have put us on the verge of a calamitous offensive against our health care system simply isn't borne out by the evidence. And so these incessant calls for immediate, large-scale government interference in how we grow, process, manufacture, market, prepare, sell, and eat our food ring hollow, hyperbolic, and needlessly invasive.

Maybe the whole public panic about health related problems is just another tool of the State to help it expand itself? Like global warming, moral hazards and other such home made issues.