Unfortunately, He Can't Be With Us Tonight ...

We have a winner in our midst.

Tobacco Control Rhetoric Poll Winner Announced

James Watson (also known as jwatso or Junican) won the TC website poll for best ideas for new ways to talk about tobacco control with 77% of the vote. Some of Mr. Watson’s colleagues on several pro-tobacco blogs may have helped push his good idea over the top

This refers to a competition conducted by the BMJ to find new linguistic tricks with which to further dehumanise smokers. It was heavily supported by the very few anaemic wallflowers for whom the whiff of smoke from twenty paces is akin to armageddon ... as you can see from the voting. Or perhaps not. It more accurately suggests that no-one really cares unless they are paid to do so.

Those who have stayed long enough to read more than a week's worth of the shite blogging offered here will be aware that Junican is a regular contributor to our comments threads.

Congratulations, Junican, you are now free to claim your prize.

In any case, Mr. Watson has won the poll and we sincerely hope that he will use his free subscription to the journal to educate himself further about how the tobacco industry has funded and used ‘smoker’s rights’ groups and others to advance its interests while misleading smokers and undermining even the most reasonable public health protections.

Reasonable? Are they fucking serious? Reasonable flew out the window once the bansturbatory effete - including those at the BMJ - demanded all 60,000 pubs, clubs, and bingo halls as their exclusive domains. Along with coffee shops, greasy spoons, restaurants, bus stops, and every other place that the cunts don't own.

And while it's nice to know that we are 'undermining' their efforts (quite a fillip, that, ta), it's a bit rich to talk of anyone but publicly-funded health professionals doing the 'misleading'.

Consider this, for example.

[...] comparisons showing increases in cardiovascular events after a smoking ban were not submitted for publication because the results were considered implausible. Hence, the true distribution from single regions would include both increases and decreases in events and a mean close to zero, while the published record would show only decreases in events. Publication bias could plausibly explain the fact that dramatic short-term public health improvements were seen in prior studies of smoking bans...

The IOM and other policymakers have relied on the weight of the published literature when making decisions. However, it appears that publication bias did not receive sufficient attention. Our results suggest that only positive studies have been published thus far, and the true short-run effects of governmental workplace smoking bans would be more modest in the U.S.

See, that's what I call 'misleading', and it ain't the tobacco industry doing it. The BMJ - and the similarly 'impartial' BBC - seem strangely silent on such huge studies from a source as comprehensively unimpeachable as the RAND corporation (you may remember that they are implicitly trusted by the EU for tobacco research, and as far removed from the tobacco industry as one can possibly imagine).

Unlike here, of course. I mentioned it back in April 2009. The difference is that the study has now been officially published.

Hyperbolic claims about drops in heart attacks following smoking bans, like hyperbolic claims about the mortal danger posed by the merest whiff of tobacco smoke, fit the agenda of the anti-smoking movement too well to ever be re-evaluated simply because they happen to be a load of crap. If the activists and officials who have endorsed these claims were concerned about telling the truth, they would not have been so reckless to begin with.

Now then, BMJ blog, where's your article on "how the pharmaceutical and public health industries have funded and used ‘non-smoker’s rights’ groups and others to advance its interests while misleading the public and undermining even the most reasonable exemptions to health tyranny"?

Come on guys, you claim editorial impartiality. Let's see it.