The relentless march

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So they are going to ban flavoured tobacco and stylish cigarette packaging?

Why should I care?  I’m not interested in cigarette packets and I don’t smoke flavoured tobacco so their proposals don’t affect me.

Or do they?

This is yet another step in the relentless march of the Righteous Puritans in their petty obsession with denormalising smokers.  It is based on nothing but personal prejudice, as they haven’t a single fact to back up their twisted logic.

Of course they use the bleeding heart excuse that this is “to protect our children”.  How?  Correct me if I am wrong, but it is illegal to advertise cigarettes in this country.  It is illegal to display cigarettes in this country.  It is illegal for anyone under 18 to buy cigarettes in this country, so will someone please tell me how the tobacco industry is “targeting children”? The tobacco industry cannot target anyone if they cannot advertise or even display their produce in public.  Enforcing the existing draconian laws is more than sufficient, yet they still have to march on introducing yet more rules, laws and regulations.

So this move annoys me because it is nothing more than yet another petty vindictive move by a narrow minded minister, whose Department of Health is probably killing far more people than cigarettes ever did.

Lovely pictures

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As and from tomorrow, all tobacco products have, by law to carry a prominent image on them in Ireland.

CigPics

They are using the standard images that have been around for a while, and I must say they brighten up the packets, somewhat.

Frankly I find the images amusing.  They are obviously are designed to shock but bear so little resemblance to life that they are rather pathetic.  What has a child in an oxygen mask got to do with anything?  It it a feeble attempt to persuade all smokers that their children will all end up in Intensive Care?

Naturally they drag out the old Black Lung.  This is one of the great lies perpetrated by the Tobacco Control Industry and has been debunked many times over.  For those of you who are still not convinced, I would ask one simple question – how come smokers’ lungs are frequently used in lung transplant operations?  If a smoker’s lungs are supposed to look so horrific, then surely any surgeon would refuse to transplant?

One of my favourites is the image of the hypodermic needle [unfortunately I don’t have a sample to hand] with the message that smoking is addictive.  I have seen many things in my years but I have yet to see anyone injecting nicotine!

Maybe I am missing out on something?

Condemning the non-smoker

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A post by TheZAP
 
Whenever you end up arguing with a rabid anti-smoker, they will always resort to using their trump card – the dreaded lung cancer. "Eighty per cent of all lung cancers," they will tell you gleefully, "Occur in smokers".
 
The origins of this claim go back to the early 1950's and a research project (Epidemiology again) by a certain Dr Doll. He maintained that 80 per cent of those he interviewed were both smokers and had lung cancer. His target audience were in late to middle age and back then, and over eighty per cent of the general adult population were smokers anyway, so it was no great discovery at that time. It was the equivalent of suggesting that 80% of those he interviewed ate vegetables.
 
However, the mantra has remained now for over sixty years, though the situation has changed drastically. In the 1950's, GP's encouraged people to take up smoking as a treatment for asthma. Indeed at that time, it was believed that smoking protected you against lung cancer. Doctors themselves routinely smoked in their surgeries too. But now in the USA, only 20% of the population smoke and they, like us, are subject to harassment, coercion and force for partaking in their chosen legal habit.
 
However, new data is coming to light that should update Dr Doll's findings. The figures for lung cancer in the USA for 2012 are at hand, and to say they are startling, would be an understatement. To quote Dr Lynn Eldridge, "Nearly 80% of people diagnosed with lung cancer now, in 2012, are non-smokers". While this is staggering and you may find these hard facts counter-intuitive, the real meaning of it is even more unbelievable.
 
You see, it shows that 20% of the population who smoke, are responsible for 20% of the lung cancers. If this is true, and the hard numbers are there, then it means smoking does not cause lung cancer. It means that something else, as yet unknown, affects smokers and non-smokers alike to cause that deadly disease. No matter what you want to believe, that is what this means.
 
The point of Dr Eldridge's article though, is that all of the concentration of time and money on smoking, is ignoring the 80% of non-smokers suffering the disease and preventing efforts to discover the true causes of lung cancer. This moves the whole topic from the realms of shocking news to scandalous waste and mis-management. The heavily funded anti-smoking groups are willfully wasting public money on a self declared hate campaign against smokers, based not on medicine but on some quasi-religious beliefs they hold personally. 
 

It started in the playground

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This has nothing to do with children.

This has nothing to do with health.

This is just another petty vindictive move by a bunch of small minded bigots who have a pathological hatred of smokers, or indeed of anyone enjoying themselves.

It is an unworkable law.  Various police forces around the world have stated that it is unworkable, as it is almost impossible to enforce.  So the next step will be to ban smoking in all cars whether there is a child or not, just in case there might be a child.

I have watched these anti-smoker zealots.  They are humourless joyless individuals.  They were the kids who were never picked for games in the playground and who consoled themselves by pulling the wings off flies.  They were the kids who licked up to the school bully just to get a little protection.  Now they have found themselves a new bully of the political variety and they are wetting themselves with joy.

It’s time someone pulled their wings off.