Didn't people die for freedom?

The anti-smoking brigade is developing frightening speed lately, winning legislation after legislation to ostracise, demonise, denormalise and alienate smokers. Note that's "smokers", not "smoking". They work from the premise of being anti-smoking, but it's nothing more than a ploy, similar to their cries that it's all for public health. Anti-smoking wouldn't mean banning tobacco products from being in possession, that resides solely under the anti-smoker banner.

Hot on the trails of the news that Vancouver has banned smoking on all its many acres of beaches and parks comes the news that it is now illegal to have tobacco products on state owned outdoor properties in Orange County, Florida. This includes parks and pavements and, bewilderingly, the legislation includes a limit for state employees that they can smoke only four cigars a year. In their own time. On their own property. Otherwise their salary loses $650.

Pretty baffling isn't it? That means if you attend 5 weddings in a year, you need to prioritise which ones you can smoke a cigar at. If after the fourth one you feel a bit stressed later in the year, tough. I'm not sure if this is per ever 365 days, or calendar year, but it doesn't make any difference.

Is there any justification for this, anywhere? Because if there is, I'm damned if I can see it. The state has no right to dictate what people can do in their own time or on their property so long so long as it remains within the confines of the law. It strikes me as worrying that America allows its citizens to own guns and shoot trespassers on their property, but certain grown adults can't smoke a legally purchased and taxed cigar. The next step will be "we won't emply you unless you eat salad for lunch and run 6 marathons a year".

Hearing this story instantly reminded me of this:



If you have time, here's an episode that pretty much perfectly sums up the hypocrisy and bullshit of the anti-smoking movement

Toddler Goes to Rehab to Break 40-a-day Habit

Some of you may remember this two-year-old with his 40-a-day habit.

True to form, the health puritans, having a misguided view of themselves as some sort of cavalier muskateers, here to rid the world of health threats - perceived or real - had to get involved for him to stop the habit.

Actually I don't think it's really such a bad thing, having a two-year-old weighing in at 4stone (or 56lbs for you Americans reading this) and smoking two packs a day is a pretty big red flag for lack of parental control or concern, or both. How serious the health risks are of his habit, I don't know; after all, the Semai children start smoking at two and it was found, of 12,000 adults studied, none had lung cancer.

Well the puritans got involved, predictably (what better way to strengthen their mantra of 'for the chiiiildren'?), and the kid went to rehab for a month. Oh, and it was all filmed...

They then showed him the next day as he rolled around on the floor screaming and crying as he threw a fit at being refused a cigarette.

I can understand why they'd want a toddler to stop smoking, but doesn't this reside under psychological abuse? I'm a little confused why they couldn't wean him off instead of cold turkey. The e-cig would have been perfect, but no prizes for spotting that wasn't used. Instead, he underwent "play therapy" to take his mind off smoking. I'll repeat that: play. Therapy. I'm beginning to wonder if that psychologist's degree was bought on eBay. I have no doubt he enjoyed playing with toys, and they probably helped distract him, but this is known as a diversion tool, not therapy.

THe report can be read in the Daily Mail.

This probably isn't the end of this saga, as we're also told

'This year, we found that there are baby smokers, who start from a year old,' admitted Aris Merdeka Sirait, CEO of the National Committee of Child Protection in Indonesia, stating that more than than 30 percent of children there smoke a cigarette before the age of 10.

As shown from the link above, this isn't a new trend at all, but as usual these 'protection' groups either relish dwelling in ignorance, or love a good scare story:

'Unhealthy children will be the future generation of our country. It is genocide.'

How's that for a moral panic?

Be Afraid, be Very Afraid. Vancouver Takes Things to the Next Level

Vancouver isn't the first to pass outdoor smoking bans. Nova Scotia has one, Halifax has one, and parts of California have them - although some of those have ditched all pretence and openly admitted 'hey, we just don't wanna see smokers, ok?' How they get away with that I don't know. Actually I do, it's because it's against smokers, not protected minorities. So everyone reading this, if you want to make a quick buck, influence politics and get your name in the news without any fear of repurcussions, jump on the anti-smoking bandwagon. Everyone else, well done, you still have your integrity.

Outdoor bans are slowly creeping through. Calgary has a bylaw that states smoking by doorways isn't allowed. I'm not actually too against that, provided the distance you have to be isn't stupid. It can be intimidating to walk through a crowd of people, and, fair enough, the smoke can be irritating to some. But let's not get the cart before the horse on this - if smokers hadn't been kicked out in the first place, they wouldn't be crowding doorways. It's nonsensical to all of a sudden proclaim 'well now we can't get to the door without breathing toxic smoke!' because if you'd been a little tolerant and sensible in the first place, smokers would peacefully enjoy their tobacco in a separate room, or a ventilated communal room, indoors. So excuse them while they brave the weather huddled together in the only place there's shelter - the overhang above the door. OK? OK. So while I can understand the argument against smokers gathering in doorways, I'm not at all in favour of 'shunting them further down that way'. No, treat them like human beings, put a roof over their head while they enjoy their legal product that they bought and paid for, and we'll all be happy. In the UK, the tax from tobacco provides about a quarter of the health services, so no one can afford to lose sight of the true cost of penalising smokers to such an extent.

What's this post about? The Vancourier has released an article explaining how nauseatingly low the anti-smoking campaign has got there:

It's official. Vancouver is a no-smoking zone. Butt them out on your shoe and fall in line.

A new bylaw takes effect today--in every Vancouver park (all 224 of them) and beach (except for Wreck) and along the entire seawall, smoking is prohibited. Anyone caught smoking will be fined up to $2,000.

Pretty sweeping huh? The anti-smoking lobby must have worked really hard to pull that one off. Actually, no. What makes this story even worse is the staggering fact that a handful of people have this sort of power:

This new bylaw, which outlaws a legal activity in a city of 570,000, was crafted and enacted solely by the seven-member park board--an entity few Vancouverites know anything about.

Wow. Seven people, controlling 570,000. As most Vancouverites don't know the board even exists, presumably they're an unelected body, so what right do they actually have to pull this off? Probably none. As for the reasoning behind this insanity (brace yourself):

According to [park board commissioner, Aaron] Jasper, the park board heard from "health care professionals" who claim secondhand smoke--even on a breezy beach--represents a health hazard. He noted the "environmental impact" of cigarette butts, and most bizarrely, went all Smokey the Bear on us. "Forest fires," said Jasper, "are a grave concern."

Forest fires? In Vancouver? Have there been any forest fires in Vancouver lately? Like since 1886?

"Well, this year there has been nothing I've been made aware of."

Got that? Picked yourself up from the floor?
Secondhand smoke, which poses no threat indoors, is now a health concern now only outdoors, but along the coast with a strong sea breeze that barely lets you keep your hair and clothes. The serial killer of smoke can easily withstand such a gust of air though, and still find victims. I'd love to know who these "health care professionals" are that he's been talking to.
Environmental issues of cigarette butts? Um, Jasper? There's these things called bins, and people, well, put things in them that they are done using. And most of them have these other things called ashtrays on the top of them, used for, well, putting cigarettes in. These 'bins' and 'ashtrays' actually stop the cigarette butts winding up on the floor and thus remove the 'environmental issue' of discarded butts. Now you're up to speed, can you review this policy?
Forest fires in Vancouver... I'm not even going to bother touching that one.

The bylaw gets worse, by the way (not that you expected anything less, no doubt):

Penalties not only apply to smokers but smoking accomplices. For example, if you light a cigarette for your 83-year-old grandfather who stormed the beach at Normandy but now resides in a wheelchair with limited use of his trembling hands, you can be fined up to $2,000.

And if, despite permission from the driver, you light up inside a taxi that happens to be on park board land, you're subject to punishment. Up to $2,000 worth.

This is actually quite tragic. Many members of the elderly generation enjoy nothing more than sitting on the coast, and many enjoy their pipes, cigars or cigarettes too. But they can't do this, they have to remove themselves from the beach, smoke somewhere else, then totter back. This is inconvenient for everyone, but when we're talking about a demographic of people which has a large number of wheelchair users or people generally unsteady on their feet, it's disgraceful. They're probably wondering what liberties they actually fought for back in the day. But, they're also the one generation in society you can depend on to not give a damn and continue regardless, and thank God someone is doing that, because the 'rebellious youths' are nowhere to be seen.

But of course, this is done for our own good:

"This isn't about punishing people, it's about educating people," said Jasper. "Your personal habits are your personal habits and as long as they're not infringing on the peace and enjoyment of others and the health of others, continue whatever you're doing. It's not my place to tell people what they should do."

It never ceases to amaze me, truly. Smokers can't infringe on the rights of others, yet, as a legal product, smokers do have the right to smoke tobacco, so these rules and bylaws are affecting their own rights and freedoms. And as we all know, smoking on the beach or park isn't affecting the health of anyone else, much less their enjoyment - and peace, peace?! I have no idea what he even means. The only way smoking disturbs the peace is when one of those omnipresent self-righteous fuckwits creates a scene by taking it upon themselves to cleanse the population, leaving it devoid of smokers. Smokers are pretty content and quiet when they're puffing. Tobacco has that effect, you see.

"Our job is to make sure that everyone can have enjoyment of our parks and public spaces."

Except smokers.

If this was a TV drama, I'd be enthralled, anxiously waiting for next week's installment to find out what unbelievable plan will be unveiled next. But somehow, unbelievably, this is real. We can't decide whether burkhas should be allowed in schools because we don't want to offend anyone, but there's not even a second thought to treating smokers like second-rate citizens. It's like selling kids ice-cream and saying 'oh, but you can't consume it. No, it'll kill you. Use it as an ornament, or go way out into the woods where no one can see you'.

I might just go live in the mountains.

Youths Want Landlords to Decide Smoking Status

According to a survey by Freedom 2 Choose, teengers think landlords should have the choice of whether an establishment permits smoking or not. The Morning Advertiser reports:

Members and supporters surveyed 1,312 under-25s in five different areas of England and found 99.7% think pubs and clubs should have the choice about whether people can smoke inside.

And 98.4% think pubs and clubs should be allowed separate smoking rooms.

Just 1.8% said the smoking ban deterred them from smoking, although 85% said it had affected their social habits.

Meanwhile, 85.2% agreed that second hand smoke does not pose a health threat.

What's most interesting about this is that it's young people, i.e. the generation brought up hearing the scare stories of smoking and passive smoking, the generation that has been PC'd, the generation that has always been accustomed to anti-smoking reports and legislation. So despite a lifetime of anti-smoking propaganda, the vast majority believe passive smoking doesn't pose a threat to health and believe smokers should be allowed to enjoy their legal habit under a roof. Perhaps all is not lost.

This begs the question that if the public is not in favour of a ban, why do we, a supposedly democratic society, have one? How can we, in this age of technological advance and proposed tolerance to others, not allow separate smoking rooms or proven ventilation to combat the annoyance of smoke?

Older generations were never in favour of the ban, either. In fact, they were predominantly the ones smoking in venues like pubs or bingo halls, had grown up in smoky environments and smoked most of their lives. I'd bet any money that a similar poll of adults and the elderly would find similar results, because people are generally tolerant and smart enough to realise that they're not going to get struck down with cancer by a night in a smoky pub. Not until we're given a single name of a person who died from secondhand smoke exposure.

The public have spoken. We don't want a draconian ban, and we don't want our liberties removed.

Finally Recognised: Smoking Ban Main Cause of Pub Closures

This isn't news to most people, we knew before July 2007 that the ban would have a negative effect on trade. How did we know this? Because we, paying, smoking customers, said we'd stop going places we weren't welcome. We didn't need a degree in economics to be aware of the fact that if paying customers stop turning up and spending money, the profits of the establishment will dwindle.

Oddly, a lot of other people seemed to think less paying customers would have no effect on profits or trade. Naturally, Stanton Glantz and his band of merry men knocked up a report or two claiming to prove that smoking bans had a positive effect on trade, but it's pretty much a given these days that if Glantz says something, the opposite is true (bear that in mind for future reports). Never trust anyone who resorts to science by press release, because you can be sure the actual facts will be the opposite - otherwise they wouldn't need to rely on press releases in the first place.

We were told that the recession was responsible for pub closures, bingo hall closures and basically all closures within the hospitality trade. I've never had trouble agreeing that the recession had some effect on it, however I was also always aware that pub closures had a very obvious pattern after any smoking ban around the world. We have the benefit of bans being enacted at different times around the world, Wales enforced theirs before England, parts of America had it before that. What we could always see, no matter what country and what year, was an immediate and predictable effect on trade.

Yesterdays Morning Advertiser acknowledged that we were right:

CGA data has been manipulated by CR Consulting to reveal a striking correlation in the rate of closures in England, Scotland and Wales following the smoking bans in each country.

Previously, the different start times of the ban have obscured the similarity of the decline across Britain, causing commentators to look to other reasons for pubs closing.

Now, the report says “the smoking ban is demonstrably the most significant cause of pub closures”.

“While there is significant variation in the trajectories of the pub estates before the ban there is an almost total correlation between the three GB lines after the ban. This indicates that they are affected by a strong common factor ­— the smoking ban.

“The correlation is in fact so close that the trend line for the three countries is identical.”

and

“With smokers being moved outside, the price premium [in pubs] can no longer be justified [by drinkers] so more people drink at home,” it maintains.

“This has a cumulative effect — as fewer people use the pub it becomes less of a social draw.”

Vindication sure is sweet. It's pretty disgraceful that this needs to be printed in the news before people believe it, but as they say, common sense isn't all that common

Big Pharma exposed

This is the industry we're all up against. Not just smokers and people who are somehow compelled to take 'diet' drugs, but every one of us is facing a huge industry that is constantly trying to convince us we're ill; an industry that makes drugs and then defines a new 'illness' to sell those drugs, that spends three times as much money on marketing as it does on research, that has doctors and health organisations in its pockets. The pharmaceutical industry is so powerful it has been granted immunity, so if someone suffers severe reactions or dies as a result of a drug, no action can be taken against the industry. Drugs can be created and fast-tracked through testing, meaning you, your family and perhaps most importantly, babies and children, are being injected or pill-fed drugs that are potentially lethal and a lot of the time have no positive effect anyway. None of us should allow ourselves to be human guinea-pigs.

Check out some of the other videos in the side-bar, too.

Secondhand Smoke, Firsthand Lies

Secondhand Smoke has reared its ugly head again. We were so caught up with display bans, plain packaging, thirdhand smoke, outdoor bans, apartment bans, potential private housing bans, airbrushing smoking out of photos and banning it from films that secondhand smoke all but disappeared.

It's actually a pretty brave comeback, seeing as a lot of people never bought it in the first place and a lot of others have gradually realised it's a lie, too. But, two days ago, Science Daily reported this:

being exposed to even low-levels of cigarette smoke may put people at risk for future lung disease, such as lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Ok, former Surgeon General Carmona was spouting this rubbish, in direct contradiction of his report, back in 2006, so it's nothing new. It goes on:

Epidemiological studies have long shown that secondhand smoke is dangerous

No, they haven't. The famed 1992 EPA report contained 11 studies, none of which individually showed a risk. The only way they purported any risk was by lowering the Confidence Interval to 90% and cherry-picking data, and even then the 'risk' emerged so low that it wouldn't be accepted in any other area of science. The large study undertaken by the WHO found no statistically significant risk, the only statistical significance was that passive smoke offered a 22% decrease in a child's chance of getting lung cancer as an adult - a protective effect. The largest passive smoking study, by Enstrom and Kabat, also found no risk. President of the prestigious Research Institute Necker, retired world-renowned pulmonolgist Professor Philippe Even has spoken of the lack of risk from secondhand smoke:

There are about a hundred studies on the issue. First surprise: 40% of them claim a total absence of harmful effects of passive smoking on health. The remaining 60% estimate that the cancer risk is multiplied by 0.02 for the most optimistic and by 0.15 for the more pessimistic … compared to a risk multiplied by 10 or 20 for active smoking! It is therefore negligible. Clearly, the harm is either nonexistent, or it is extremely low.

Interviewer: It is an indisputable scientific fact. Anti-tobacco associations report 3 000-6 000 deaths per year in France ...

Even: I am curious to know their sources. No study has ever produced such a result.

Interviewer: Many experts argue that passive smoking is also responsible for cardiovascular disease and other asthma attacks. Not you?

Even: They don’t base it on any solid scientific evidence. Take the case of cardiovascular diseases: the four main causes are obesity, high cholesterol, hypertension and diabetes. To determine whether passive smoking is an aggravating factor, there should be a study on people who have none of these four symptoms. But this was never done. Regarding chronic bronchitis, although the role of active smoking is undeniable, that of passive smoking is yet to be proven. For asthma, it is indeed a contributing factor ... but not greater than pollen!

A pretty different picture to what we're led to believe, then. But why wait until retirement to tell the public this information?

As a civil servant, dean of the largest medical faculty in France, I was held to confidentiality. If I had deviated from official positions, I would have had to pay the consequences. Today, I am a free man.

Not sure what he means? Ask Dr Enstrom, one of the remaining scientists who lets his research speak for itself rather than speaking from a political idology or agenda. His bravery to remain a true scientist has cost him his professional position (more here and here)

Back to Science Daily:

but there have never been conclusive biological tests demonstrating what it does to the body at a gene function level, until now.

"Even at the lowest detectable levels of exposure, we found direct effects on the functioning of genes within the cells lining the airways," says Dr. Ronald Crystal, senior author of the study

She's right, there haven't been conclusive biological tests demonstrating what it does to the body. Actually, it's still not known what 80 a day does to your body, and it's also the case that light smokers, of about <5 a day, have no elevated lung cancer risk over non-smokers. That won't stop this laughable research though:

"The genetic effect is much lower than those who are regular smokers, but this does not mean that there are no health consequences," says Dr. Crystal. "Certain genes within the cells lining the airways are very sensitive to tobacco smoke, and changes in the function of these genes are the first evidence of 'biological disease' in the lungs or individuals."

Sounds good, right? Not really. We experience gene mutations and changes in functions every single day, simply through being alive. Our cells die and get replaced and our body heals itself of all manner of damage. Simply noticing that the lungs are part of this process is not damning news. It's akin to saying that when you eat, your digestive system changes and therefore eating is bad for you. when we eat, our whole body changes; blood is directed to the stomach and our body works hard to process what we eat - it's not inconceivable for someone to turn around and say 'hey, the body is working really hard to get that stuff out, because it shouldn't be there!' See where I'm going with this?

There's probably not much point in me including the following excerpt as it's now so routine in study reports that we'd be more surprised to not see it, but just in case you're wondering why this so-called researcher is spouting such propoagandist manure:

Dr. Crystal says that this is further evidence supporting the banning of smoking in public places, where non-smokers, and employees of businesses that allow smoking, are put at risk for future lung disease.

I think the gaping flaw is that if a wisp of smoke is maliciously altering lung function, how can we smoke 40, 60 a day and survive to be elderly? Even CRUK acknowledge that the average age of cancer in a smoker is 65 - the same age as it is for non-smokers.

As for the specifics of this "study", check this out:

Crystal and colleagues took urine samples from 121 participants to see how much exposure people had to cigarette smoke, measuring nicotine and its breakdown products. This allowed them to classify participants as active smokers, nonsmokers, and people with low-level exposure.

Like it isn't bad enough trusting a doctor with a stripper's name, we now see a sample so small most other studies and sciences wouldn't even permit it, and categorised people based on nicotine in the urine. Let's hope they didn't have potatoes, aubergine or tomatoes for lunch. CNN reported on it, too, saying:

Crystal speculates that the effects of secondhand smoke may be reversible if a person cuts off exposure to smoke entirely.

Of course she did. I think someone needs to tell her what secondhand smoke actually is