Passive smoking and its pre-history in Britain: policy speaks to science?

This paper analyses the emergence of passive smoking as a ‘scientific fact’ and its relationship to policy objectives for smoking control in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. It relates this ‘discovery’ to the emergence and changing objectives of the post-war public health coalition, founded on the concepts of epidemiology. It examines the reciprocal relationship between scientific facts and policy aims, arguing that passive smoking was a ‘scientific fact waiting to emerge’. Its conceptual and policy implications embodied the environmental individualism of late twentieth century public health and the alliances with technology and biomedicine within it.