The second article on The Free Society can be found at this link so again, if you do read it here, click the link to give The Free Society some extra traffic.

Recently it emerged that the aging population is now a drain on the economy. Of course, it is easy to understand how the elders of society can cost more than the younger generations, as it is typically in old age that we require increased healthcare and medication. However, it is one thing to say the elderly cost more money than youngsters, but it is quite another to say they are, in and of themselves, a drain on the economy.

It is a baffling proposition: old people are draining the economy that they spent their whole lives paying into. Unless each pensioner is racking up astronomical medical bills, it is most unlikely that they take out more than they have paid in. And if what we pay doesn’t cover our eventual withdrawals, one must wonder what purpose the NHS has these days. We are increasingly told that smokers, drinkers and obese people “drain” its resources, despite the huge amount of money smokers alone pay through cigarette tax, and now the elderly are a target too.

If the NHS is unable to cope with these three causes of illness, does it have any value at all? If, as we are told, we are a drain on the NHS, just what happened to all the money that each working adult pours into it to ensure healthcare when required? We are instructed to stop smoking, cut back on drinking and watch what we eat so we save the NHS money by living longer – but now living longer is akin to siphoning untold sums of money out of the organisation.

What is most troubling about this is the idea that the money apparently isn’t there. After all, it should be there: each working citizen has been paying for it long enough. Just what is the purpose of giving a very generous slice of your pay cheque to National Insurance if you can’t use it for what it’s intended?

Such a circumstance would not be tolerated elsewhere: if you paid private health insurance each month only to be told the money won’t actually be used to treat you, you would be able to sue the company for defrauding you. National Insurance is precisely that – insurance – so there is room to argue that the British citizens are being defrauded too.

How much of this ‘defrauding’ is going on? Yorkshire NHS managers are proposing to stop smokers and the obese from having hip and knee surgery, apparently on the basis that their lifestyle choices lower the chance of success of the operation.

Something has been overlooked here, though: the smokers and obese are due a refund. Not just from their National Insurance, but a hefty chunk of the 76% tax per pack of cigarettes goes to the NHS; smokers pay into the British treasury around £10 billion annually, and ASH estimate that they take out in healthcare costs between £1.5-2.5 billion a year, giving the public purse a very nice surplus. If they are not being given the treatment they have paid for, they should be given their money back.

This leads onto the premise that if the NHS is unable to provide what it exists for, why are we retaining it? If it really is losing money, and unable to treat the people paying for it, we would all be better off using the money we spend on it to pay private insurance instead, paying our own personal health fund that we know will be there when we need it.

Simon Clark has been kind enough to post two of my articles on The Free Society website. Click here to view the article on his site (and if you read it here, please at least click the link to give him the traffic) but i’ve included it here too so that people can comment if they want to.

According to a BBC report last year, thirdhand smoke is the “lingering residue from tobacco smoke which clings to upholstery, clothing and the skin releases”. Warning signs, say researchers, is the smell that lingers on a smoker’s clothing or in an area where someone has been smoking.

The concept came to public attention in 2009 courtesy of Dr Jonathan Winickoff, who also coined the term. Winickoff took his discovery to the media not on the basis of a study but a survey. Asked if they believed that “Breathing air in a room today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of infants and children”, 65 per cent of non-smokers said “yes”. And so a new health threat was born.

While the perceived threat of secondhand smoke allowed legislators to ban smoking in enclosed public places, the alleged dangers of thirdhand smoke takes the war on tobacco one step further. According to Winickoff, smokers themselves are “contaminated”. They “actually emit toxins” he says.

How long will it be before smokers are excluded from certain professions, teaching or other forms of childcare, for example? Or perhaps they will be banned from hospitals in case they “contaminate” nurses and other patients.

Thirdhand smoke plays on the standard antismoking cry to “think of the children” (which tobacco control conveniently ignored when they sent smokers home from pubs to smoke around their families instead). Winickoff, for example, claimed that infants spend much more time closer to surfaces, like the floor, and thus ingest more of the toxic brew from tobacco smoke.

The big discrepancy though is that no study exists that demonstrates any harm from this tobacco residue, either in children or adults. It is all based on suppositions that are based on US Surgeon General Richard Carmona’s warnings to non-smokers that “there is no safe level of tobacco smoke” and even to “stay away from smokers”. The suggestion that tobacco smoke is dangerous in any dosage defies the basic knowledge of toxicology: “The dose makes the poison”.

Winickoff built on a 2004 study by Georg Matt that claimed that nicotine levels in the dust of children’s bedrooms in homes where parents commonly smoked indoors averaged about 40 micrograms per cubic metre. Worrying over such levels is akin to worrying that a child will get caffeine poisoning from a single Kit-Kat. At the same time it should be noted that while nicotine levels in the dust of children’s bedrooms may indicate that someone has been smoking, nicotine itself is harmless – addictive, perhaps, but harmless.

While it is true that miniscule smoke particles do exist and can cling to surfaces, the issue is not whether they exist but in what quantities. In his book Dissecting Anti-Smokers’ Brains, Michael McFadden wrote of secondhand smoke:

Most of these chemicals can only be found in quantities measured in nanograms, picograms and femtograms. Many cannot even be detected in these amounts: their presence is simply theorized rather than measured. To bring those quantities into a real world perspective, take a saltshaker and shake out a few grains of salt. A single grain of that salt will weigh in the ballpark of 100 million picograms!

For context, a nanogram is one billionth of a gram, a pictogram is a trillionth of a gram, and a femtogram is written as 0.000,000,000,000,001 grams.

The residue from secondhand smoke – what some people now call thirdhand smoke – is so miniscule it is absurd that it should cause anyone serious concern. Quite simply, if a femtogram of tobacco smoke residue is enough to damage our health, a single cigarette should be all but fatal.

Of course we have long crossed the line of absurdity when it comes to tobacco control. Far from objectively researching the issue, researchers now openly admit that their work is aimed at getting smokers to quit or promoting smoking bans. even in private homes.

Talking to Scientific American about his survey, Winickoff said: “This study points to the need for every smoker to try to quit.” He also argues that “Emphasizing that thirdhand smoke harms the health of children may be an important element in encouraging home smoking bans … Your nose isn’t lying. The stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ‘Get away.’”

We can apply this logic to anything whose smell we don’t like. If you don’t like the smell of deep-fried fish and chips does that mean you should run away from it? If science is telling us to fear smell, what hope do we have?

This is a copy of Frank Davis’s blog entry, which I thought you would all find interesting. Original entry here

My concern with smoking and smoking bans began one day in November 2004. I’d arrived at the River and bought a pint, and had sat down at my usual table to read that day’s Independent. On an inside page there was a small article saying that Sir Charles George, president of the BMA, and chairman of the BHF, was calling on the government to ban smoking in public places. He cited a new study which said that carbon nano-particles in smoke might cause an increased number of heart attacks.

‘Who the hell does he think he is?’ I wondered to myself, as I lit another roll-up. I’d never heard of any senior doctor calling for anything like this before, pulling in newspaper reporters and going public. Most doctors operated discreetly in the shadows. Not this one. I surveyed his smiling face in the photo, the jowls beneath his chin spilling over the collar of his shirt.

He wasn’t the last such swaggering doctor. Sir Liam Donaldson was soon to overshadow Sir Charles George, and there’ve been plenty of other doctors coming out of the woodwork of the Royal College of Physicians.

And I still don’t have an answer to the question ‘Who the hell do they think they are?’ or ‘How come they exert so much influence?’

But perhaps what happened was that there emerged a grand conjunction of a variety of antismoking organisations. In Britain there was Sir Richard Doll and Sir George Godber (not to mention my personal bete noire, the malignant Dr W, who inveighed against smoking like a hellfire preacher, and who regular attended BMA meetings). In the USA there was the AMA, a number of antismoking Surgeon Generals, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a variety of (at the time) grassroot antismoking organisations. And then there was Gro Harlem Brundtland, who on becoming head of the WHO in the 1990s, shifted its emphasis towards ‘lifestyle medicine’ – tobacco, alcohol, and food. And the WHO was of course part of the UN. And then there was the emerging EU political aristocracy, of whom Brundtland was herself one, having been Prime Minister of Norway.

Assemble together this constellation of interested parties, all of whom meet each other regularly at conferences all around the world, and pump in huge amounts of taxpayer’s money, plus hundreds of millions of dollars from the Master Settlement Agreement in the USA, plus even more money from pharma companies peddling NRT, and a very powerful informal global coalition comes into existence. Its members have access to senior politicians all around the world, and to banks like the World Bank. And they control huge amounts of public and private money.

A few years beforehand, somebody like Sir Charles George was just another nobody doctor. Same for Sir Liam Donaldson. Nobody had ever heard of them. But now they were part of a very large global coalition of like-minded people. And when they asked for things to be done, they started to get done. They had clout like never before.

When Sir Liam Donaldson threatened to resign when the UK Labour government showed signs of not wanting a total smoking ban, it would have been an insignificant protest 10 or 20 years earlier. But now that Donaldson was a player in the emergent global antismoking consortium, he was a bit more than just Chief Medical Officer. He had friends in high places all around the world, who could be persuaded to look less favourably upon a loan here, or a trade agreement there. So Donaldson got his total smoking ban. And he got his big office too.

One important feature of this coalition of interested parties is that none of their members have been elected. Not in the AMA or RWJF or BMA or BHF or ASH or the WHO or the UN or the EU. None of them. These were people who were meeting up with each other in conferences, working out between themselves what they wanted done. Since they weren’t elected, they didn’t need to consult the public. They didn’t particularly want to anyway. They were the experts, after all. They’d done the research. Their job as doctors and researchers and experts was educate the public, and tell them what was good for them.

And now they were finding that, whereas in the past the politicians had seldom done what the doctors asked of them, suddenly the politicians had become more than willing to accommodate their requests. Smoking bans in all public places, without any loopholes for small bars or private clubs? No problem. Bans in parks and cars? Certainly. Concealed displays of tobacco, and plain packaging? Done. Floggings and nose-slittings for first offenders?

The politicians were finding themselves dealing with a very powerful, influential, and wealthy global coalition who could make life difficult for them in all sorts of ways if they didn’t go along with their demands. And in this new political reality, all the key decisions were agreed in private among the key players in the coalition. The smoking bans. The fines. The display bans. Etc, etc. This was the new post-democratic order. It was government by experts and by committees. The job of elected politicians was to implement the instructions that filtered down to them from the coalition.

So when the second most senior member of the the Con Lib Coalition government, Nick Clegg – himself a smoker – , says that there’s no more chance of the smoking ban being repealed than capital punishment being re-introduced, he’s actually telling us just what power these people exert.

And the same is true elsewhere. It’s said that one of the conditions of the Greek bail-out was that they impose a strict smoking ban. The same is probably true of Spain, which may well be needing to be bailed out soon too. In the corridors of power in the EU, in some meeting of key players, some senior doctor insisted that the bail-out funds be conditional on rigorous smoking bans. The demand was probably made over lunch in some Brussels restaurant, just after the asparagus had been served.

The politicians know perfectly well that they’re screwing their own people. Smoking bans shatter communities and bankrupt pubs and cafes. That’s why they can’t look them in the eye and talk to them about the rain of undemocratic rules and regulations they keep imposing on them. That’s why Cameron and Clegg and all the rest of them won’t ever talk about it. Because they’re no longer serving their own people, but a confederation of powerful interest groups which can, at a flick of a switch, shut off funding, close off hard-won exemptions, and enforce previously unenforced regulations. They spend their days in Westminster trying to placate nameless eminences grises who have more direct and immediate power over them than an electorate which only gets to have its say every 5 years or so, and whose votes are soon to be counted in ways which will be designed to neutralise public opinion anyway.

If so, more and more people will wake up to learn that their governments are more interested in serving the interests of international power-brokers and bankers and pressure groups than in serving their interests. It will become the peoples against their governments, all across Europe.

My article on smoking shelters on hospital grounds was published in the Guardian today. Follow the link to read it and leave your two cents.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/nov/30/smokers-forced-out-of-hospitals/

Hopefully most of you are aware of the petition I started to try to keep Philipina Schergevitch in her home. For those of you unaware of the story itself, click here. The upshot of this alarming story was the aforementioned petition; in 4 days we got 88 names, one for each year she has been alive, and emailed it off to the Housing Association. Unsurprisingly I’ve had no response (yet) but the original story was in newspapers all over Canada, and signatories for the petition were citizens from the UK, Austria, America, Canada, Australia and some other European countries. This is another demonstration that we can all pull together when we need to.

Last night Eddie Douthwaite of Freedom2Choose Scotland emailed me the following, a scan of the Scottish newspaper Sunday Post’s article on Philipina and the campaign. The article can be read here.

Following this, Michael McFadden sent this link. Read it, weep, and show everyone you possibly can. The more people understand where this tirade is coming from, the more hope we have of gaining enough support to stop it.

Once again, a huge thank you to everyone who signed the petition and helped spread word of it, the support was overwhelming.

It’s not a headline I was expecting to write, but that’s the startling news now. The perpetrators don’t consider it assault and theft, they consider it some sort of moral crusade that can only be good, but make no mistake about it: a group of people swarming a person and taking their legal, paid-for cigarette out of their hand or mouth is assault and theft. Here’s the low-down:

“The final idea was to go out and literally ambush smokers and take their cigarettes off them. The adverts don’t works so we are going to make you stop smoking.”

Firstly, “literally ambush” is illegal and constitutes a premidated attack.
Secondly, take their cigarettes off them. The cigarettes they legally purchased in a premise that is legally allowed to sell them. If they rushed up and stole your watch, or even a bottle of water, it wouldn’t be accepted.
Finally, the adverts don’t work? Sure they do, many people believe them, others realise they’re bullshit. But it sure as hell isn’t anyone’s place to make anyone else stop doing what they want, especially when what they’re doing is legal.

The group in question is children of CHundred of Hoo Comprehensive School in Medway. They call themselves the Ciggy Busters and even film themselves in the act of assault and theft – happy slapping is punishable, but this apparently is condoned.

The teacher responsible for this, Margherita Gramegna, said:

I was scared about doing something so crazy on the street – I mean you can get arrested.

But we researched it properly and planned it in a way that we covered all the possibilities.

We didn’t start directly with the general public because we were scared of their reaction, so we planted some people to demonstrate with first.

She also said that

I knew we could not really go and film in public and attack people in that way and take goods off of them, so we devised a cunning plan.

We planted some people and we started with them. People were watching and following us and at the end we tried with some other people.

Huh. She acknowledges it was an attack, that it was illegal and that she was scared of public reaction, so they just utilised tactics to convince themselves they were in the clear. Wrong. Encouraging students to behave in a manner is not only immoral and unjustifable but utterly against the law, too. So what did the law have to say about it? Nothing. The police were actually told before the event took place that it would be happening, and rather than turn up to arrest the infantile, intolerant little dipshits, they turned a blind eye. It’d be interesting to see if they do the same should they be informed a gang is running around stealing other purchased goods from the general public.

One of the most worrying things of this story though is the neglect from the teacher. She has willingly put her students into a potentially dangerous situation – there are plenty of people on the streets who won’t take kindly to being assaulted and having their tobacco wrenched from their person, and will think nothing of fighting back. Where is the teacher responsibility (and that of the law)? She should be the first to say it’s dangerous and not acceptable behaviour – no doubt she wouldn’t condone them stealing alcohol from patrons leaving the supermarket (how could she, with a name like Margherita?).

The possible side-effects of such a stupid attack could be enormous. Aside from the students being assaulted back, what would happen should one of the smoking victims become injured as a result, or even worse, if one suffered a heart attack from the shock of what’s going on? It’s shocking this is condoned on any level, and the police should be arrested for not upholding the law (most other people get sacked for not doing their job, why are the police exempt from that?).

Should you think I’m overreacting with the word ‘assault’ or mentions of possible heart attacks or injury, take a look at the video of the kids in action. Click the video to watch it in Youtube and read a handful of the comments to see that the teacher really did put her students in a potentially hugely dangerous situation.

Not a day goes by that doesn’t see more garbage spewed by anti-smokers, in the vain effort of further demonsising smoking, the tobacco industry and smokers themselves. This is a couple of years old but is showing its head again http://www.smokefreepartnership.eu/IMG/pdf/Spotlight_5.3.pdf Straight away we know it’s a crock, because the “spotlight” on FCTC is in support of it, rather than exposing the horrendous implications it carries. It’s full of factual errors, which I have rebutted point by point and which should be passed around as much as possible so people can do what the blog title says.

1. Its products kill. Tobacco is the only consumer
product that kills one half of its regular users
when used as recommended by the manufacturers.
More people die from tobacco related
conditions per year than tuberculosis, hepatitis
and HIV4 combined.

“smoking-related disease” is intentionally fickle. There is not one single illness that smokers get that non-smokers don’t; in fact, rates of “smoking related” illness is rising faster in non-smokers than smokers, most probably due to the fact that we have less smokers these days, showing that the illness is not smoker-specific but because the percentage of smokers was higher it produced an illusion. Therefore, the claim that 50% die from tobacco is fraudulent – while 50% may die from cancer, emphysema, heart disease etc, this figure isn’t much different than the non-smoking population. With life expectancy at an all-time high, cancer and other diseases come with the territory. Plus, the countries with the highest rates of smokers, like Japan and Greece, have lower rates of heart disease and lung cancer than countries with the lowest rates of smoking, like the USA. Seeing a smoker with lung cancer does not mean smoking caused lung cancer, the cause could be the same as it would be in a non-smoker. As Lord Nimmo said, the fact non-smokers also get the disease means we cannot say with certainty that had the smoker abstained from the habit he would not have suffered it anyway. Finally, plenty of products kill people when used as intended, if a tyre blows out on a motorway then the risks of a high-speed crash, and fatality, is high. And let’s not forget guns, a product whose design is specifically to kill. Not only is the 50% figure bogus, but the claim that tobacco is the ONLY product to kill a high percentage is outrageous, especially taking weaponry into consideration. The CRUK site has figures explaining that 0.03% of smokers get lung cancer a year – a number far lower than anyone would imagine given the anti-smoking hyperbole. Even Richard Doll noted that smokers have a 99.9% chance of NOT getting lung cancer (annual risk).

2. If tobacco products were developed today they
would not be allowed on the market. The tobacco
industry developed at a time when there
was little understanding of the detrimental
health effects from smoking so that until the
1960s, it had little oversight from regulators.

Possibly, but it’s difficult to say. To this day, no animal study has ever managed to induce lung cancer in an animal using tobacco (excluding tobacco condensate on bald mice to induce skin cancer; any irritant can cause skin cancer however). Furthermore, smoke-exposed animals typically outlive the non-smoking animals AND suffer less cancer, which means if tobacco were developed today it would very likely be marketed as safe, just as other animal-tested products are. In the field of epidemiology though, the average age of a smoker developing lung cancer is 65 (the same age as it is for non-smokers, incidentally). If the average smoker starts at 18, it takes almost 50 years for cancer to become apparent. So if tobacco were introduced today and subjected to epidemiology, given the very long length of time it takes to notice any disease the study would probably not last that long, and tobacco would probably be passed as safe. Even if the study went on for 50 or 60 years, it may well note that given smokers get lung cancer at the same age as non-smokers, and there is no immediate risk from the activity, tobacco would probably not be banned. We consume and use things everyday that we know may pose a threat to us, so there is no reason to think that tobacco would be an exception.

3. The industry cannot be relied upon to
regulate itself. As early as the 1960s tobacco
industry sponsored research showed that
nicotine was addictive. This information was
never willingly disclosed by the industry. The
tobacco industry also uses tactics in the developing
world that are outlawed in other areas5
such as promotions to children6 and young
people smoking, advertising that glamorises
smoking. The tobacco industry also exploits
farmers to such an extent that they struggle to
break-even7.

Nicotine is actually a habit, not addiction. ASH have recently admitted this (http://www.ash.org.uk/media-room/news/ash-daily-news/:ash-daily-news-for-16-july-2010#article_514). It is also verifiable by noting that NRT has a failure rate of over 98% – if nicotine was the sole reason for smoking then smokers would happily turn to NRT. In any case, nicotine being addictive is a moot-point – alcohol can be addictive, as can caffeine and many prescription drugs. The tobacco industry tried to develop a safer cigarette in the 1960s but was squandered by the anti-smoking movement – even when the industry DOES try to regulate itself, it is hindered. Nicotine occurs naturally in the tobacco plant and any additives the industry uses are approved safe for consumption and are found in our food, drink and air.
Tobacco accounts for huge profits and generated income for developing countries. How it affects individual farmers is a separate point, but it must be remembered that banning their prime crop is going to cripple them financially far more than the tobacco industry. Criminalising tobacco is not the answer, but instead the respective governments should implement legal protection such as minimum wage. Any business can treat its workers badly, this is the reason sweatshops in developing countries are so popular for such brands as Nike and Adidas. While their actions are not condoned, there is no purpose in singling out the tobacco industry – they abide by the little laws in the country. The tobacco industry also employs thousands upon thousands of people around the world.

5. The industry has actively fought against
regulation. The tobacco industry tried to block
the development of the FCTC and weaken its
content and has attempted to discredit the
WHO. An independent enquiry into the tobacco
industry’s attempts to undermine the WHO
concluded that “the attempted subversion has
been elaborate, well financed, sophisticated, and
usually invisible8”.

Of course it has, what business would not try to halt a movement trying to put it out of business? The WHO are openly anti-smoking, with posters showing they want the whole world to be smoke-free. If you ran a business, would you not stop someone destroying it? The WHO have no objectivity with tobacco, either; their study into passive smoking, the world’s largest ever carried out, found no statistical significance for non-smokers exposed to smoke, and even found a 22% decreased risk of lung cancer for babies exposed to smoke. The results were duly hidden. They should be discredited, and the tobacco industry wasn’t the only one to do it: the British media was very vocal when it got hold of the study results.
The FCTC is a hateful and wasteful organisation, attempting to outlaw smoking around the globe and put a government monopoly on nicotine delivery. The FCTC costs vast sums of money to be a part of and removes government choice in deciding what laws and regulations to place on tobacco. As an initiative, it is intolerant and hateful, with a sole purpose of destroying the tobacco industry.

6. The tobacco industry has either suppressed
research or aimed to create ‘controversy’
around the harmful effects of smoking. Despite
strong scientific evidence demonstrating
the negative health effects from smoking
tobacco, the tobacco industry has
consistently sought to discredit it and funded
confounding studies. This was especially the
case of second hand smoking. Gilmore and
McKee9 show how the industry systematically
tried to undermine a crucial Environmental Tobacco
Smoke study conducted by International
Agency for Research on Cancer.

The studies – and internal documents – of the tobacco industry are freely available on the internet. The prime reason the industry refuted third-party studies was simple: they were bogus. A good example is the famous smoking beagles study, with its methodology having 80 something smoking dogs and only 7 non-smoking dogs, allowing them to make the (unsurprising) discovery that the smoking group had higher rates of illness. Epidemiology cannot ‘prove’ cause and effect, and that is the only research on smoking and illness for humans. Moreover, as said earlier, it has been consistently shown that countries with high rates of smoking have less rates of lung cancer than countries with low rates of smoking. The industry had good reason to discredit the studies.
With regards to secondhand smoke, the IARC study in question is the aforementioned WHO study, finding no statistically significant link, meaning no reason for a smoking ban. The WHO radically twisted these results, but they are available for all to see on the internet should anyone doubt this. The other large study, by Enstrom & Kabat, was initially funded by the American Cancer Society and anti-smoking groups. The primary data came back showing no risk of SHS and these groups, with their clear agenda, pulled funding. It is no secret they only support studies that are guaranteed to provide the ‘right’ results. Their tactics are worse than those of the tobacco industry and their claims of discrediting studies is wholly hypocritical.

6. The interests of the tobacco industry, selling
more tobacco, are in direct conflict with the
goals of public health. In order to continue
generating high profits the tobacco industry
needs to replace the smokers who have either
died or quit. The industry argues that it does
not directly target its advertising at young people.
However a major study found ‘a positive,
consistent and specific relationship’ between
exposure to tobacco advertising and later takeup
of smoking among teenagers10.

Tobacco advertising is banned. Most smokers start as teenagers because that is when it is legal to do so, just as most people begin to drink when it is legal to do so. The goals of public health are not to encourage people to be more healthy, but to conduct phony studies to fulfil political ambition. The tobacco industry does indeed need people to smoke, or it will have no profits. However, their advertising is banned so there can be no claims made against it. People smoke because they want to.

7. Corporate irresponsibility: WHO has stated
that corporate social responsibility and tobacco
companies are an “inherent contradiction’. The
tobacco industry’s own documents show that
most of its youth smoking prevention campaigns
are designed to promote the industry’s
political and marketing aims rather than to
reduce smoking. Their campaigns mostly focus
on underage smoking, stressing that smoking is
an adult activity rather than an unhealthy one.

It would make little sense for any company selling a product to try to reduce the number of said product being sold. There is no factual error in what the tobacco industry says: smoking is an adult activity. A quick look at the Philip Morris website clearly shows abundant health warnings, too, but in this day and age no one is ignorant to the potential risks from smoking. What is more remarkable is that the tobacco industry does this at all, as other industries do not promote such self-harming warnings – for instance, Coca Cola does not mention the aspartame in its diet drinks can cause a variety of health problems.

8. Negative to society: The World Bank argues that,
on economic grounds alone, tobacco should be
controlled, and estimates that when all costs of
tobacco around the world are subtracted from all
the benefits, the net result is a global economic
loss of US $200 billion each year.

They ‘estimate’ that because the real figure could never be in agreement. In Britain alone, smokers pay between £8 billion and £12 billion tax, and “smoking-related diseases” costs about £1.5 billion. Smokers therefore pay an extra £6.5 bn – £10.5 billion. Taking into account that this is a similar trend in other countries, each country has a lot of profit. Then factor in the amount of jobs the industry offers and it is clear that tobacco is very good for the economy.

Last week I came across this terrible, frightening article http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.02720.x/full

I sent the following email to both authors explaining their errors and ignorance and thought some of you would like to read it and pass it on. No reply as of yet (I don’t expect that to change either)

Dear Ms’ Gartner and McNeill,

I have just come across the paper “Options for global tobacco control beyond the Framework Convention in Tobacco Control” and have some comments, if I may.

Firstly, you state “Retail display bans and mandatory plain packaging of tobacco products are simple extensions of advertising bans. It is accepted widely that cigarette packs provide brand imagery, convey promotional messages, are displayed to maximize imagery and positioned at eye level in the most visible position in shops [1,2]. Restricting packaging and placement are accepted by the public for other products, such as ‘prescription only’ medications [3].”

Whilst this is true, the paper fails to note that prescription only medicines are visible at eye-level and in brightly coloured packages. Tobacco products are banned from advertising, so a display ban is not necessary. The simple fact is that tobacco is never not behind a counter, meaning children do not have access to it unless the shop proprietor is willing to break the law (in which case, a display ban is useless). Products being at eye-level is no conspiracy, it is simply so consumers are able to see what is available. Moreover, plain packaging and display bans will encourage criminal gangs. Tobacco smuggling is big business now and with plain packages it will be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between legitimate and illegal. There is also the risk that illicit tobacco contains unregulated ingredients that could cause any level of harm to the user. There is also proof that display bans increase youth smoking rates – see this link http://blog.iea.org.uk/?p=3468

Secondly, the paper says that “Many jurisdictions ban distracting activities while driving, such as using a mobile phone. Smoking while driving has been linked to traffic collisions [4], and a good case can be made that lighting a cigarette, smoking it and disposing of it are unnecessary distractions that increase risk [5] and expose other car occupants to high levels of second-hand smoke [6].”

Indeed, using a mobile phone has been banned, but only using a handset – it is not illegal to use a hands-free kit, with the premise being that both hands are free. Smoking permits both hands to be free to drive, as the smoker can place the cigarette in their mouth or the ashtray. Lighting and disposing require less time than initiating a phone call via a hands free kit, using satellite navigation equipment or changing the radio station – all of which are legal. It is also legal to eat and drink while driving, despite the fact both activities are far more distracting than smoking. If the driver unscrews a bottle lid and drops it, it will be a huge distraction as they will wonder what to do with the open vessel. Similarly, if they take a bite from a sandwich and spill the ingredients over themselves, they will be distracted. The paper also overlooks the very real psychological effects of not smoking. By that I mean that if a smoker has a long drive, the stress of not smoking will be a far greater distraction than the act of smoking itself. Psychological distractions will cause decreased awareness, while craving a cigarette can also trigger decreased awareness, as well as mild anxiety and stress, which could prompt the driver to drive less sensibly in order to get to the destination quicker or find somewhere to stop.
The other simple fact is that a car is one’s private possession, like a home. Banning smoking inside takes government interference a step too far and removes any degree of responsibility for the owner. While second-hand smoke exposure will be higher inside a car than outside a car, it is up to the passengers to decide if they think the risk is too great for them or not. Moreover, a smoking ban in cars would be blanket, meaning that even a single person with no children who only drives alone would still be banned from smoking.

Thirdly, “Adolescents’ exposure to movies containing positive smoking scenes has been found to be associated with greater likelihood of smoking initiation [7]. Research also suggests that this effect can be reduced by screening anti-smoking counter advertising prior to these movies [8]. The net effect of these measures, in addition to those in the FCTC such as tax increases, is likely to be a slow but steady downward trend in smoking prevalence.”

This is a falsehood. Smoking rates were declining year on year until the smoking ban, at which point it increased. People will not stop smoking just because they are told to, in fact it will cause the opposite effect. Furthermore, increased taxes will not lower smoking rates but will merely drive trade towards the black market, causing economic problems, a strengthened criminal activity and the introduction of unregulated tobacco products. It should also be noted that while current measures mean children can only purchase cigarettes from licensed premises, criminal gangs will have no problem in pushing their products on the streets, in clubs and outside schools. I have made that last point bold because the enormity of it cannot be overstated.

Fourth, “However, more radical approaches need to be considered to achieve a faster impact on smoking prevalence and related harm. In this category we place: harm reduction with low nitrosamine smokeless tobacco (LNSLT) and/or high dose recreational clean nicotine products [9]; improving the regulatory structure [9]; restrictions on where tobacco can be sold and the number of outlets [10]; regulated market models, i.e. moving retail sales from the open market to a government controlled monopoly [11]; and smoker-licensing schemes that require smokers to obtain a licence to purchase a restricted quantity of tobacco always accompanied by advice as to its harmfulness [12].”

Why is smoker reduction so important? It is not a case of cost, because smokers pay into society far more than their estimated health costs withdraw. In a free society people are allowed to consume legal products and engage in risky activity. There is simply no reason to hound smokers or force them to quit. In this day and age, no one is ignorant to the risks or dangers, meaning each smoker made a conscious choice to smoke, in the same way that alcohol users choose to do so despite consuming a neurotoxin and risking alcohol poisoning or disease later in life. Unlike alcohol, tobacco does not make a person violent, nor are there ‘smoke driving accidents’ like there are drink driving accidents. Alcohol suffers no display ban nor packaging rules, indeed alcohol is promoted at exceptionally low prices, and not behind a counter where children are unable to reach it.

I await your response.