Hide The Filthy Smoker

Here we go again, 'public health' using children to mask their disgusting ongoing efforts to bully law-abiding smokers who choose to use a legal product where no-one can be harmed.

Many others have registered their disgust at this already, but it is worth adding my own thoughts because this kind of evil needs kicking very hard.

Smoking should be banned in all parks and playgrounds to reduce the chances of children growing up thinking that using cigarettes is normal, environmental health officers have told ministers. 

Zoos, theme parks and anywhere else children play should also become no-smoking zones, in a significant proposed expansion of the outdoor areas in which smokers cannot light up.

They are not even hinting at the possibility of harm now (simply because there can be none), as succinctly put by Sarah at the NNA.

The reasoning behind, and the issues with these proposed 'voluntary' bans is the same. The intention is to 'denormalise' smoking, which in practice means telling the public that a) smoking in kiddie areas is a widespread problem and b) it's harming your kids. It isn't and it doesn't.

Precisely. It is pure, distilled, vile, anti-social, stoking of hatred towards smokers. There is no other plan.

And the only outcome from such a sickening policy will be the encouragement of hostility and hatred towards smokers. If you have ever wondered - as millions of us have - how entire populations were turned into being supportive of the barbaric murder of sections of society in times past, just look on 'public health' in the UK in the 21st century. There is your answer.

That such stomach-churning cunts live amongst us and are paid a fat salary to come up with perverted and totalitarian shit like this should be a national disgrace. But then, if you've spent your life brutalising smokers so much that you find statements like this acceptable, you're probably so mired in the sewer that you and your colleagues have created that you can't see the decent people you are vilely harming through the effluence you spend your time wallowing in.

"Children should be able to have fun and enjoy themselves without seeing someone smoking and thinking this is normal behaviour", [said Anne Godfrey, the CIEH chief executive].

Firstly, it is normal behaviour. Secondly, Anne you hideous fuck, are you seriously saying that smokers are to be hidden from society? That they are too X-rated for children to see? Do you not realise how mind-bogglingly evil that is? Just because you want a new conservatory and have to come up with the odd policy to impress at your next appraisal?

I've been writing about these shameful wastes of DNA for nearly eight years now but they never cease to amaze me. Their inhumanity is absolutely stunning!

And then there is Jim McManus, a director of 'public health' who has made a few nice noises about e-cigs. But it appears it's more due to his psychotic hatred of smokers than genuine care for human beings.

@Dick_Puddlecote i disagree. When we ask parents and kids they are behind it. And we can use it to encourage switch from tobacco to vaping.

— Jim McManus (@jimmcmanusph) September 26, 2016

He sees e-cigs not as a way that smokers can continue to enjoy nicotine in a safer form, but more as a stick to beat smokers with and force them to bow to his will.

@jimmcmanusph You're anti-liberty if you think that's acceptable, read J S Mill

— Dick Puddlecote (@Dick_Puddlecote) September 26, 2016

So, apparently, an acceptable way of 'encouraging' smokers to switch from tobacco to vape is by giving the public a green light to abuse them in public. Because that is a (no doubt intentional) by-product of such insane policies. It is nothing short of incitement to abuse and even possibly violence.

I despair at the kind of mentality that would ever imagine such a despicable proposal to be a good idea. It's times like today when I pray that hell does exist, because these people are rotten to the core and that's exactly where they deserve, one day, to spend their eternity.

I'll leave the last word to Snowdon, because it is perfect.

Crawl back under your rock and take the Chartered Institute for Environmental Health with you.

Quite.

See also excellent articles from vapers on the same subject. McManus, you're an arse.

Denormalisation and virtue signalling - NNA
1984 is a Novel, not a Guide - Facts Do Matter
This is how freedom dies - Fergus Mason
Patience is a virtue anti-smokers don't have - David Dorn

To Play The Game, You Should Really Understand The Rules

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but then some with very little knowledge have made a lucrative living on the back of their ignorance.

Take Simon Chapman, for example. Fresh from a triumphant tour of Europe including a London stopover - on expenses, natch - chatting to a dozen of his pals, the increasingly irrelevant fossilised tobacco control brick-brain has been pouring forth again. This time about the upcoming industry GTNF conference.

Ahem, Simon, here is what that link says.

"... in setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, Parties shall act to protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry in accordance with national law"

Parties, Simon, parties. In this context, parties are national governments, not individuals.

Looking down the list of speakers to which the geriatric Aussie plonker links, there is not a single one who is affiliated with any national government anywhere in the world! So his pointing to the WHO's article 5.3 is entirely irrelevant, as is mention of 180 nations who are collectively sending no government officials there.

We should be careful not to be too harsh on poor old Simon in case this is a dementia thing, of course, but it does kinda help if someone involved in the tobacco control scam were to actually know something about the rules that his grubby profession created. Doncha think?

I do sometimes wonder where these strict tobacco control scruples disappeared to when UK and hundreds of other national government officials attended COP6 in 2014 in a country which had just blasted a packed passenger plane out of the sky and was under worldwide sanctions.

It's a puzzler, isn't it?

Adam Smith vs The Morality Police

The Adam Smith Institute has today published a pretty impressive report which will go down like a lead balloon in the ranks of blinkered trouser-stuffers in 'public health'.

You can read the whole thing here but there are some cracking highlights.

By stifling innovation, regulation may freeze products in a state that is far less safe than free-wheeling capitalism would otherwise provide. Given that most smokers or drinkers would prefer not to die young or suffer from chronic illnesses, there is a clear (and perhaps very strong) profit incentive for the firm that can replicate the experience of smoking a cigarette without producing the harm that cigarettes do. That products like this are finally making their way to market is evidence of the power of this incentive: they are replacing the more harmful original options in spite of, not because of, regulation.

Indeed. And they are being brought to market while those who pretend to be interested in our health are scrambling to ban them.

And it means that policymakers concerned about public health should draw back from the heavy-handed approach based on the precautionary principle that they currently take. The precautionary principle assumes that the status quo is acceptable – with so many people dying of smoking-, alcohol- and drug-related illnesses that is clearly not the case. A new drug or reduced-risk tobacco product that kills some users may still be a massive improvement if it kills one-twentieth as many users as the thing it’s replacing. Our rules go way beyond basic safety standards – they impose a massive burden of proof on anyone trying to market a product that competes with the existing vices that harm people every day. 

A ‘permissionless innovation’ approach may be the best way forward. In this framework, firms are free to innovate and markets anything they like to consumers, with the proviso that untested products must be explicitly marketed as such, with the firm forced to pay the price if and when things go wrong. A regulatory approach on this basis would create a pathway for new reduced-risk products that were, if not 100% safe (such a thing is impossible), a lot safer than the things they were replacing.

This, of course, is never going to fly with 'public health' professionals simply for the fact that thousands of them would instantly become redundant. They need the precautionary principle to exist or they'd have to forsake their annual trip to Tuscany and the Lexus would have to be pawned.

Where's the attraction to state-funded parasites if the state is absolved of its huge financial burden by free markets and regulated free choice of individuals, eh?

What's more, puritanism could be threatened. Those with irrational prejudices just don't like people enjoying themselves, and David Nutt draws a superb parallel with the idea of less harmful booze.

It is unlikely that these innovations would be wholly welcomed. There could be a negative reaction from some parts of the public health movement, just as there has been with e-cigarettes. For some in public health, the very idea that people want to consume nicotine for pleasure is an anathema. It would be unsurprising to see similar attitudes toward synthetic alcohol from campaigners who do not want to see a safer form of intoxication encouraged and who might claim innovations of this sort are a distraction from trying to reduce alcohol consumption or encouraging abstinence.

Isn't it interesting to see prohibitionism in reverse? For years we have seen tobacco control being used as a template for those who want to ban other pleasurable consumer products. Now we see e-cigs being cited as a template for pushing back against the increasing extremism of puritanical junk science-toting fucktards who just don't like the choices of others and pretend their pointless policies are to do with health rather than their own odious bigotry.

The ASI press release adds more policy to the study, and there's not a lot you can argue with unless you're a vested interest prohibitionist.

New study reveals discoveries in cigarettes and alcohol sector could have seismic effects on public health, but are currently blocked by “morality police”

The UK has the opportunity to be a world leader in reducing the risks of drinking and smoking following its exit from the European Union, a new paper from the Adam Smith Institute released this morning reports.

The new study reveals how heavy-handed EU and UK government regulations have held back the development of safer alternatives to drinking and smoking, with public health officials pursuing abstinence campaigns to the detriment of risk reduction products that could save thousands more lives every year. 

Despite slashing smoker numbers, e-cigarettes been hampered by regulation. Although they are 95% safer than combustible cigarettes according to Public Health England, e-cig companies are unable to market their comparative health benefits to the public, and the latest round of EU regulations will make the development of newer, better, and safer e-cigarettes for consumers much more difficult.

As the latest innovation of ‘heat not burn’ tobacco products is brought to market the report underlines the importance of fostering innovation and competition on safety. Regulators are becoming increasingly restrictive rather than fostering innovative and satisfying alternatives to smoking and drinking. 

Theresa May’s government would be wise to utilise Brexit to throw out regulation like the the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive and save thousands of lives a year. Replacing it with a system of ‘permissionless innovation’ where a regulatory pathway for safer products to be developed and marketed is created, both by big players and by new entrants to the market. 

Sam Bowman, Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute, said:

“It’s innovation not regulation that got us e-cigarettes. They emerged and prospered in spite of regulation, proving to be the best way to get people to quit quickly that we know of. But despite this, misguided public health officials are trying to clamp down on them because of evidence-free and dangerous fears that they ‘normalise’ smoking.

“Other products like synthetic alcohol and reduced-risk tobacco products promise to repeat the success of e-cigs for new people, but only if we let them. It is crucial that the government does not stand in the way of hangover-free alcohol.

“Regulation must be flexible and encouraging of new products that are safer than the vices they’re competing with. Britain can be a world leader in safe alternatives to alcohol and cigarettes, but we need regulation that foster those things instead of stamping them out.”

Just imagine that! "World leader". 'Public health' do so like being the first to do something don't they? So surely they should embrace this with open arms!

Sadly, they all generally pursue only their own self-interest and would shun anything that the Adam Smith Institute ever suggests, even if it is perfect common sense like this which should have those interested in health salivating instead of withdrawing to their state-funded boardrooms to find a way of derailing it.

Which is all rather interesting seeing as it was Adam Smith who introduced the concept of self-interest being the motivator of economic activity. In the 'public health' sphere, the only self-interest is how much they can suck out of the state that funds them, so they will quite naturally reject these suggestions out of hand because - whether they are beneficial to public health or not - they will result in the loss of grant funding for a whole lot of highly-paid parasites in the "OMG, think of the children" profession.

When we talk about disruptive technology, we refer to modern innovations which sweep away indolence and entrenched and costly positions. These are the big burdens on progress, much like candle-makers objecting to the introduction of electricity.

'Public health' is now playing the role of the candle-peddlers, desperately clinging onto their own self-enriching snobbery instead of looking at alternatives which could deliver more benefit to the public than their antiquated restrict, tax and ban mentality could ever be remotely capable of.

Do go read the ASI report here, and let's hope it gains the much-needed column inches it deserves.

Caution: Health Nazis At Work

Next week sees the annual Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum being held in Brussels. If you weren't aware of it, it is an industry event which discusses all aspects of products provided by tobacco companies and their suppliers.

Last year, this event so heavily leaned towards tobacco harm reduction that even Simon Clark of Forest took to saying that he felt like "a pork chop at a Barmitzvah". It's fairly understandable seeing as all tobacco companies are now producing risk-reduced products that they would wish to discuss them with people who are experts in the field. It's no secret that the industry is moving in that direction and you'd think that 'public health' would be pleased about the fact that industry emphasis is shifting away from lit tobacco and onto safer products.

You'd also think they'd be pleased about recognised public health academics being invited to teach "Big Tobacco" how to do things properly, wouldn't you?

But, no. You see, for the dinosaurs in the tobacco control industry, it's long since ceased to be about health, but more an ideological crusade against all industry in general. Hence why one of the academics who has agreed to speak has been sent a distinctly sinister letter by Tobacco Free Kids, a dysfunctional and fanatical American organisation which would collapse tomorrow if everyone stopped smoking and their Master Settlement Agreement payments ceased.

You can read it below.

CTFK - Letter to Dr Christopher Russel

These vile, disgusting people simply cannot contemplate anyone sitting around a table and talking about risk-reduced products in a calm and civilised manner, simply because they despise industry and are petrified of the consequences to their careers if e-cigs and other products take hold. They've been attempting to inflict this kind of fear and intimidation on their own for decades, as Michael Siegel and James Enstrom (pursued for over a decade for producing the wrong result in a SHS study) can attest to. They are, for want of a more contemptuous word, scum.

They have no care about the health of any population; they only care about their own salaries and perpetuating the irrational hatred they have for smokers and the people who provide popular products that smokers like to buy. Their chief method for ensuring these prejudices and their own self-enrichment are enshrined forever is to lie 24-7 and smear and bully anyone who doesn't submit to their will. Everyone must toe the line and fuck the consequences.

Tobacco Free Kids - who despise e-cigs and spread provable falsehoods about them on a daily basis - and others like them, are nothing but grubby criminals, and I do so hope that one day they are made to pay for their immense catalogue of felonies.

I also hope that Dr Russell ignores this repulsive intimidation and attends anyway. Personally, if I'd received it I would have used it to wrap roadkill with and sent it back to them with a few choice words written with a sharpie.

It's never been about health, you know. Always remember who is on the side of the angels here.

Liars Always Get Found Out In The End

Well here's a thing.

We jewel robbers have been insisting for years that tobacco control exclusively employs junk science as a means to mislead politicians, but have been called shills, trolls, accused of working for the tobacco industry and all manner of other insults.

By far the most egregious of these flights of science-free fantasy have been the heart attack "miracles". The first of all of them was - you won't be surprised to hear - imagined and promoted by Stanton Glantz and focussed on a small town in America called Helena. If you're not familiar with it, read the extract from Velvet Glove Iron Fist which explains how the claim that heart attacks declined by 40% following the town's smoking ban was not only garbage, but mathematically impossible.

You know what? Via Michael Siegel, it looks like we were telling the truth all along. Fancy that!

Helena Miracle? Not So Much; New Study Casts Doubt on Conclusions of Anti-Smoking Groups 

This week, a new study was published in the journal Medical Care Research and Review which re-examines the relationship between smoking bans and heart attack hospitalization rates. 

(See: Ho V, et al. A nationwide assessment of the association of smoking bans and cigarette taxes with hospitalizations for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia. Medical Care Research and Review 2016. Published online ahead of print on September 12, 2016. DOI: 10.1177/10775587/16668646.)  

The authors summarize the study as follows: 

"We examine the association between county-level smoking-related hospitalization rates and comprehensive smoking bans in 28 states from 2001 to 2008. Differences-in-differences analysis measures changes in hospitalization rates before versus after introducing bans in bars, restaurants, and workplaces, controlling for cigarette taxes, adjusting for local health and provider characteristics. Smoking bans were not associated with acute myocardial infarction or heart failure hospitalizations, but lowered pneumonia hospitalization rates for persons ages 60 to 74 years."

This merely repeats the findings of another study back in 2009 - the largest ever undertaken - on 217,023 heart attack admissions and 2 million heart attack deaths in 468 counties in all 50 states of the USA over an eight-year period which came to the conclusion:

"We find that workplace bans are not associated with statistically significant short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for myocardial infarction or other diseases. An analysis simulating smaller studies using subsamples reveals that large short-term increases in myocardial infarction incidence following a workplace ban are as common as the large decreases reported in the published literature."

Despite the incontrovertible fact that heart attack "miracles" are impossible and utter junk, these deliberately mendacious studies turn up in every juridiction where smoking bans have been enacted and each is exactly the same; they are all - without exception - an exercise in tobacco control lying.

In the UK, our first taste of it was Jill "Pinocchio" Pell's purposely-created lie that heart attacks plummeted in Scotland by 17% immediately after their ban. Despite being described as one of the 10 worst junk stats of 2007 by statisticians in The Times, it was believed by wooden top politicians and dickheads at the BBC for the simple reason that ASH, ASH Scotland, UKCTCS, CRUK, BHF and just about every other bunch of lying arseholes promoted it as settled science and proof positive that smoking bans saved people from collapsing of cardiac arrest at the bar.

When Pell's gerrymandered and cherry-picked stats were later compared with real data from NHS surveys, it was shown to be a pile of poppycock, but by then the lies the tobacco control industry intended had been accepted as fact and flown around the world. This 17% figure is still, to this day, quoted by politicians in defence of smoking restrictions; and ASH and their pals - despite knowing very well the figure is a blatant lie - continue to let people believe it.

When the same method of lying by junk research was employed in Wales and promptly rubbished by statistician Michael Blastland on the BBC, Public Health England's Martin Dockrell - then at ASH - launched an incredible attack accusing the impartial statistician of being a "conspiracy theorist" and a "dissident".

Indeed, Linda Bauld emphasised these junk studies in a review - and specifically referenced Jill Pell - when she was paid to pretend that smoking bans had had no impact on pubs whatsoever.

International evidence of impact on cardiovascular health

Recent systematic reviews of the international literature on smokefree legislation have also outlined its impact on cardiovascular health, primarily on hospital admissions for MI and other related cardiac conditions (IARC, 2009, Callinan et al, 2010). The recent Cochrane review included ten studies that reported hospital admission rates for MI or coronary heart disease following the introduction of smokefree legislation (Callinan et al, 2010). Five of these were in the USA, three in Italy, one in Canada and the final study in Scotland as cited above (Pell et al, 2008). Ten of these studies showed a significant drop in hospital admissions for MI following the legislation, with the remaining two showing a drop in deaths from coronary heart disease and the Scottish study showing better prognosis following acute coronary syndrome among non-smokers. 

I'll just digress for a minute here and remind you that this is why we are the ones on the side of the angels and why they deserve to be in prison. We expect certain qualities out of people who waste our taxes - deliberately lying to con gullible politicians into illiberal courses of action is not one of them.

Anyhow, back to Siegel ...

When these studies were first published, I warned anti-smoking groups not to use these conclusions to promote smoking bans because I believed that the conclusions were not adequately supported by the data. In particular, I criticized these studies and questioned their conclusions because they did not adequately account for secular trends in heart attack rates that were occurring even in the absence of smoking bans. 

I also argued that it was not plausible to see such large effects in so short a time span because it takes many years for heart disease to develop. In contrast, I noted that respiratory effects might be observed immediately.

In other words, the "scientists" in tobacco control had been told that such studies were carefully-selected poppycock but ignored the advice and ploughed on with the lies anyway. In fact, they did more than that.

It is interesting to note that it was my expression of the above opinions about these studies back in the mid-2000's that led to my "expulsion" from the tobacco control movement, including being thrown off several list-serves, ostracized by many of my colleagues, accused of being a "tobacco mole," being characterized by my hero and mentor - Stan Glantz - as being "a tragic figure," having copyright to one of my articles violated by an anti-smoking organization, no longer being invited to speak at tobacco conferences, not being able to present at tobacco control conferences anymore, not being able to obtain further research grants, and having colleagues refuse to appear with me at conferences to discuss these or any other scientific issues. In fact, it was this censorship that led to the creation of the Rest of the Story in the first place.

Much like the way your humble host was dismissed as a troublemaker, so even were those in the tobacco control industry itself who even attempted to tell the truth.

It's how such cliques in the tobacco control arena roll. If you challenge their decisions, ideology, or even hint at disagreeing with a policy or decision they have made, you are excluded from their echo chamber. Dissent is prohibited, even if you're correct.

Nearly three million page views later, perhaps these groups knew what they were doing because it appears that I may have been right all along. By silencing me, these groups were able to disseminate their pre-determined conclusions widely to the public through the media long enough for the conclusions to be generally accepted. Now, it is too late to undo the damage. The media and the public have already made up their minds, and one article noting the results of this new study is not going to correct or undo 10 years of dissemination of unsupported and errant scientific conclusions.

I do love the use of language there. "Errant scientific conclusions" can be taken to mean scientific incompetence or deliberate lying, it most certainly cannot possibly refer to rigorous evidence produced by objective and honest people.

It just goes to show yet again that if you trust a tobacco controller you must be off your rocker. I've often said that if they tell you the time you should still check your watch, but I'd go further than that these days and say that you should check your watch again immediately afterwards just in case they have stolen it.

Eyes Wide Shut

Now, much as it pains me to keep mentioning the embarrassing event last week where hardly anyone turned up to see the legendary vandal academic Simon Chapman (after he bravely taunted vapers for not attending despite having demanded they be banned) ... it appears to be the gift that just keeps on giving.

Y'see, he's been questioning the figures.

It's a clever (albeit customarily rude and arrogant) attempt at misdirection by the dunderheaded lobcock, but anyone who has ever arranged a function of any sort knows that those who say they will turn up is never even close to the number who actually do. And his estimation of the 'crowd' differs greatly to those of three personal accounts I have come across, the most generous of which could only say "12 maybe, at a push".

Of course, considering Chappers was there for the whole day, and definitely for the hour that he stood in front of them reading his speech from a piece of paper, perhaps - I dunno - he could have counted them? Or maybe he was unsighted? Reading with his back to the audience? Frosted glass between him and those in attendance, perchance; or perhaps his eyesight is failing, it would be understandable for someone of his age and failing faculties I suppose.

Still, we shouldn't mock the afflicted, he's never been that great at adding up, after all. Maybe counting to 12 was just too taxing.

The 'Bravery' Of Simon Chapman

Following on from yesterday's article about the global joke that is Simon Chapman, you can't help but laugh at this.

Brave and fearless Chappers was just itching to face up to his detractors,so he was. So very disappointed that no-one turned up to listen to his fuckwittery, what with us all having jobs and stuff instead of being paid out of the public's taxes to go on holiday.

So imagine how surprising it was to read this about brave, brave Sir Simon.

So on the one hand he was dying to bravely hold a position of exalted power over vapers in the audience by way of a microphone and more chance to speak but, on the other, cowardly demands that no-one be allowed to challenge him from a position of equality.

I do believe this is called having one's cake and eating it. Still, if it makes the old fool happy as he becomes progressively more irrelevant, it would be pretty cruel of us to deprive him of his delusions of grandeur, don't you think? Believe me, you're going to miss high comedy like this when he carks it.

UPDATE: In fact, as I now understand it, brave Chappers specifically demanded of the RSM that none of the "vaping mafia" - as he put it - be allowed to attend the event at all! How odd, then, that he should tweet complaining that there were no vapers in attendance, eh?

ECHO, Echo, echo ...

Some of you may remember this tweet by bone-headed prohibitionist Simple Simon Chapman last year.

He also described the event as "a small meeting of vaping activists in Poland" in an article for the 'public health' industry's favourite shitsheet, The Conversation.

Presumably, by cherry-picking images he had collected from Twitter feeds of the many people who attended the event, he was attempting to dismiss the gathering as somehow irrelevant or something, because - as I made an effort to find out at the time - there was quite an impressive turnout.

"Attendance comprised in excess of 250 delegates representing 43 countries in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australasia. Our records show that 42 vaping consumers registered to attend."

So, if Chappers would describe over 250 delegates from 43 countries "a small meeting" and therefore a target for ridicule, I wonder what he would make of this?

@DavidDorn_VTTV @JarrodGreen67 @Clive_Bates Apart from speakers there were maybe ten or so in the audience.

— Marcus Munafo (@MarcusMunafo) September 18, 2016

Just ten? So what on Earth was happening at this - by Chapman's logic, quite pathetic and miniscule - event to cause so many people to stay away in their droves?

Well, it was a panel debate at the Royal Society of Medicine where the keynote speaker was none other than - you guessed it - Simon Chapman.

10.15 am
“A sneeze in one country causes international pneumonia tomorrow”: explaining the plain packaging pandemic 

Professor Simon Chapman, Emeritus Professor in the School Public Health, University of Sydney 

3.15 pm
Years well spent. A reflection on a professional lifetime spent in public health advocacy 

Professor Simon Chapman

Of course, unlike the many images posted on social media confirming big attendances at GFN last year, we have no way of verifying Munafo's estimate because no-one tweeted any pics. So we have to use caution and go by 'public health's' margins of error - that is, the 'crowd' could have been as high as 11 or as low as 9!

By way of comparison, an event at the very same venue in July this year to discuss the question "has regulation of pleasure gone too far?" attracted an audience of around 40, the vast majority of whom were interested medics.

As some wag quite astutely pointed out on Twitter, if environmentalist and advocate for action on climate change Chappers wanted to have a cozy little chat with a few friends and acquaintances in London, perhaps he could have done so on Skype instead of flying halfway around the world to talk to the vanishing few who want to listen to his narcissistic burbling.

I wonder if the dozy tumbleweed-magnet did any scintillating vaper-spotting while he was here?

Tobacco Control Fantasy Evaporates In Court

Great news from those spunky Dutch!

Cafes and bars can continue to set up special smoking rooms where customers can light up, judges in The Hague said on Wednesday. 

Good. As it should be.

Anti-smoking lobby group Clean Air Nederland had gone to court in an effort to have all smoking rooms abolished. 

Yep, that's what disgusting anti-social fuck-knuckles do. They would never go into these rooms themselves, but they went to court to stop everyone else from choosing to and to stop businesses choosing to provide them.

And the reason?

It argues that allowing cafes and bars to sanction smoking in certain areas conflicts with international treaties signed by the Netherlands.  

Note the absence of any mention of bar staff? That's old hat now. What this hideous bunch of interfering spooge-gobblers were complaining about is that the elected Dutch government was not adhering to a rule laid down by a cabal of unelected extremists at the WHO.

Fortunately, the Dutch court system recognised a very salient fact that tobacco controllers would prefer politicians didn't know.

The court ruled that CAN cannot call on the World Health Organisation treaty which requires signatories to actively combat the use of tobacco and to protect people against tobacco smoke.

The text of the treaty does not state that there should be a ban on smoking or that countries are obliged to introduce one, the judges said in their ruling.

This is article 5.3 of the FCTC (and even the FCTC in its entirety) being called out for what it is ... a big empty threat that the lying bullies in tobacco control wave around as if it were legally enforceable. Now, I don't know if they're just incredibly dense or that they actually believe their own lies, but we should thank the Dutch legal system for stating the bleeding obvious and ruling that FCTC guidelines (the clue is in the name) are nothing to do with the rule of law or legislation in any country which has ratified it. They are quite simply a mendacious tool that the tobacco control industry uses to control dissent and ensure their incompetence isn't challenged by people who know what they are talking about.

As Snowdon explained last year, tobacco controllers have built an elaborate fantasy around article 5.3 which they regularly try to use as a club against civil consultation and common sense policy-making.

Local councils have been sold a bill of goods by ASH about what they can and cannot do. I've been reading a document entitled 'Guidance for Trading Standards on engaging with the tobacco industry' which is endorsed by ASH and Public Health England. ASH has its own list of tips entitled 'Developing Policy on Contact with the Tobacco Industry'. Both of them offer highly misleading advice to local authorities based on a misrepresentation of Article 5.3. The first of them says:

This document articulates the legal obligations placed on public authorities by the Treaty and illustrates established best practice for those working in the sector.

The 'Treaty' has never been enshrined in law in Britain or the EU, so this is wibble from the outset. There are no 'legal obligations'. From a legal perspective, the FCTC is nothing more than a bunch of aspirations, but even if Article 5.3 was the law, it clearly refers to health policy, not trade policy, smuggling or waste disposal.

None of this stops ASH from making thinly veiled threats like this...

[Article 5.3] could be relied upon in legal proceedings brought by an individual or other non-state body against a public authority. An authority that does not act in compliance with the convention may be exposed to risk of judicial review. If a local authority decides to diverge from the guidelines it is suggested the reasons for doing so should be documented.

This is intimidation, plain and simple. It raises the spectre of lawsuits (that will never be filed) to coerce councils into taking an extreme position to suit ASH's comic book worldview.

Except, of course, in the Netherlands a bunch of deluded cranks thought that FCTC guidelines were so powerful that they could file a court case. They have now found out that their fantasy of legislative status for a wish-list written by vile tax-spongers, and a puerile "na-na-na-not listening" clause drafted by some of the world's biggest lunatics, aren't actually legally enforceable after all.

CAN said immediately that it would appeal.

Of course they will. The illusion they are trying to create dies and reality gets noticed if they don't.

Let's all look forward to their lying asses being whipped again in due course.

Desperately Seeking Dictatorship

I've mentioned before that the tobacco control industry is totalitarian by nature. By that I mean that their methodology is identical to that employed by some of the most hideous dictatorships in the world.

Once you realise this it doesn't come as much of a surprise that tobacco control industry junkets are often held in countries where dictatorship and oppression of the public are perfectly acceptable ways of governing.

And, true to form, we've seen further reminders this past week that the tobacco control industry would like to enforce policies more suited to totalitarian dictatorships than western democracies too.

Take this 'research' published on the 5th for example.

Should electronic cigarette use be covered by clean indoor air laws?

Of the restricted vapers, only 12% (n=124) reported finding it difficult to refrain from vaping in places where they were not supposed to.  

CONCLUSIONS: This study found that most vapers report unrestricted use of their e-cig. Of the restricted vapers, the majority (88%) do not find it difficult to refrain from vaping in places where they are not supposed to vape.

It's pretty clear where that's going, isn't it? Like all tobacco control industry junk science, it started with a preconceived conclusion that comprehensive vaping bans are desirable everywhere, and the argument being implied is that not many vapers would mind too much so we may as well have a law.

As Clive Bates politely points out in the comments, their reasoning is that of a fucking dim teenager.

The authors cannot simply assume that everyone and at all times shares their preference for 'clean indoor air'. Vapers may prefer a convivial vape and a venue owner may be pleased to offer them a space to do it. Unless this is creating some material hazard to other people, why should the law stop this mutually agreed arrangement? Simply arguing that it doesn't cause that much discomfort among that many vapers isn't a rationale. If the law stops them doing what they would like to do there is a welfare or utility loss to consider.

Quite.

Then there is this separate 'science' published on the 8th, again in the extremist comic known as the Tobacco Control Journal.

Use of electronic cigarettes in smoke-free environments 

Only 2.5% of those who used e-cigarettes in smoke-free environments reported negative reactions from other people.  

CONCLUSIONS: E-cigarette use in smoke-free environments was common, suggesting that most e-cigarette users do not consider smoke-free laws to apply to e-cigarettes. Explicit laws should be considered if jurisdictions want to prohibit e-cigarette use in public places.

So what they're saying is that most people couldn't give a fig about e-cig use in public, but we need a law about it anyway.

Now, let's get this clear. The only reason that there are smoking bans at all is because there is perceived harm to bystanders. This was a result of 'research' into long-term enclosed exposure to secondhand smoke, which - even after heavy twisting, torturing and manipulation of the data - could only create a weak statistically piss poor relative risk. It was enough to con scientifically-illiterate politicians, though, so that's all that mattered.

I can predict confidently that there is no possibility whatsoever that crooked tobacco controllers will be able to repeat that trick with e-cigs. And, d'you know what? It seems pretty clear already that the inveterate liars in the tobacco control industry are well aware of that too. They have abandoned the "won't somebody think of the bar staff" route because they know it will never wash and instead are chasing the dream of a vape-free world because ... well, just because.

So, instead, they are just saying "it's not that difficult"; "vapers won't mind too much"; "e-cig users are not doing what we want"; and "the public aren't objecting enough, so we need a law to make them".

I shouldn't need to remind you that this is exactly why ASH was formed; the anti-smokers in the Department of Health were irritated that the public didn't hate smoking enough to create an anti-smoking movement, so they used taxpayer funds to found one themselves (and continue to waste our taxes feeding it).

Yet again, e-cigs are exposing the tobacco control gravy train for exactly what it has always been; a bunch of disgusting anti-social prohibitionists motivated variously by the money they can get out of it and/or a selfish dislike for the choices of others. It has never, nor ever will be, about health.

I do get that concern but I think if it annoys others it's an issue. https://t.co/9YJha9iccp

— Ruth Malone (@MaloneRuth) September 7, 2016

That's what it has always been about. Annoyance, not 'public health'.

And now, the tobacco control racket seems hell bent on getting e-cigs banned anywhere and everywhere simply because they don't really like them that much. But then, that was all the crusade about smoking was about too, so it's hardly a shocker, is it?

They have no concern whatsoever for the damaging consequences of their actions. None at all. Businesses can die; people can carry on smoking; unnecessary laws can lead to even more reckless ones; enmity, spite and intolerance can flourish; public can be set against public, vitriolically and sometimes violently; and totalitarian precedent-forming policies can be put in place in otherwise free countries where they weren't tolerated before; but tobacco controllers simply don't care. All they care about is what they personally want and what they can get out of it financially, nothing else.

This is why I often say they deserve to be in prison, because that is where we put people whose actions are a danger to society by way of menaces, coercion and fraud; it is where we send people who are damagingly anti-social and threaten civil cohesion. Tobacco controllers are guilty of these societally-harmful actions on a daily basis, and they are - as we can see from the tobacco control lunacy linked to above - still driving headlong towards a future where governments can ride roughshod over free choices, property rights, and the freedom of businesses to form their own policies on non-harmful activities.

And yet again it is e-cigs and vaping which rips away the thin veil of respectability behind which they try to hide their extremist totalitarian yearnings.

Always remember that we're on the side of the angels here, won't you? Not them.

A 44 Year Monopoly

Via this blog's esteemed mascot, it has been revealed that ASH has yet again been thrown a wad of our taxes with which to bully smokers and generally be a right royal anti-social and destructive pain in the arse.

The figure this year - a regular annual occurrence since ASH's inception in 1972 - is £160,000.

You can view the award letter below.

ASH Grant Award Letter 2016-17

As usual there are a couple of laughable clauses in the document, most notably ... (emphases mine)

This award has been made under the provisions of Section 64 and may not be used for lobbying or to fund original research and consultancy services must not be offered under this grant. ASH has confirmed that the grant will only ever be used for tobacco control delivery and not for any activity that could be considered as lobbying, nor will it be used to fund research or provide consultancy services.

This is political sophistry of the first water! An organisation like ASH does very little else but lobby, it is exactly what officials and staff at the Department of Health set it up to do in the early 1970s.

This was most evident recently with the monumental lobbying effort Deborah Arnott and her fellow tax-spongers put in to convince politicians to bring in the pointless tobacco control gravy train-perpetuating plain packaging policy. They were in and out of Westminster tapping up MPs so often that they would have felt less exhausted if they'd pitched tents and sleeping bags in committee rooms instead of commuting!

It will also come as a hell of a surprise to vapers that ASH don't involve themselves in lobbying considering the extraordinary and sustained lobbying campaign they have directed towards first trying to get e-cigs banned, and then ensuring Article 20 of the TPD was rammed through in the face of perfectly logical and entirely reasonable objections.

Quite simply, if ASH didn't lobby, there would be no need for them to exist.

You might also be amused to read this condition of the award.

[T]he Department [of Health] has no commitment to renew financial support after the term of the grant;

Well, erm, considering this is the 44th year in a row that ASH has received free cash from taxpayers - without any kind of competitive tendering process as is supposedly required for all government-awarded contracts - we can take that one with a pinch of salt, can't we?

You may have noticed a familiar name signing off the award letter too, that of Jeremy Mean, the former head of pharma-funded MHRA who so nearly succeeded in strangling vaping at birth. Perhaps, then, this part of ASH's grant application appealed strongly to him and his former associates.

"Identify and communicate opportunities for local enforcement to support the effective implementation of the TPD including Article 20 on electronic cigarettes."

Yep, if you thought common sense and a new direction from PHE & RCP towards harm reduction might lead to a blind eye being turned towards the daft TPD regulations, think again. ASH is there to make damn sure any transgressions are properly punished, and promised to do exactly so when they were holding out the begging bowl.

Additionally, since Mean is now Deputy Director of Tobacco Control at the DoH, he could feasibly form part of the UK's delegation to the similarly pharma-funded WHO's COP7 jamboree in Delhi in November. You know, the organisation which currently wants to see e-cigs banned worldwide. Nothing like being given another bite of the cherry, now is there Jeremy?

There really is no other racket quite as blatant as the 'public health' racket.

Charge!

Phew, that was a close one!

A longstanding 'public health' lie came close to destabilising the NHS over the weekend.

A move that could have seen obese patients refused surgery in an attempt to save money is to be reviewed after national NHS bosses intervened. 

A proposed restriction by the NHS Vale of York Clinical Commissioning Group would have seen non-life threatening procedures delayed by a year for those with a body mass index exceeding 30. 

The rule would also apply to smokers. 

NHS England, which can intervene as the CCG is under special measures, said the group had agreed to rethink the move.

As Snowdon has already noted, this is not how most people would expect the NHS to operate.

Rationing healthcare on the basis of lifestyle was never part of the NHS's plan in 1948. It it had been, there would have been even more resistance to the nationalisation of the industry than there was. But after years of wrongly scapegoating smokers and fat people for the NHS's spiralling budget, it's no surprise to find the service being turned from a free-at-the-point-of-need Ponzi scheme into a tool of outright coercion and punishment.

Indeed.

It's what happens when health nazis torture statistics in order to play on bigotry and prejudice and pretend that smokers and the overweight are taking more than their fair share of NHS resources. Because that's exactly what this is all about, as alluded to in the BBC article.

"They are trying to lose weight in the vast majority of cases and to deny them treatment that they need on the basis of their weight, without then offering them effective help to help them lose weight is rather like discriminating [against] a segment of the population on the basis of their colour or religious persuasion."

Besides which, it has, quite simply, never been true (like almost everything you ever hear from 'public health') that unhealthy lifestyles unnecessarily harm NHS finances. Whenever economic costs of socialised healthcare are calculated, it is always the 'healthy' - and not those who choose riskier lifestyles - who put the most burden on health services.

It should be obvious, especially since 'public health' wants to simultaneously tell us that smokers and the obese live far shorter lives. Healthcare costs for those who are considered healthy are more expensive to the system both short and long-term, and the largest financial commitment any government commits to - pensions - are hugely more costly too.

When tobacco controllers, or any other 'public health' charlatan, tell you that x costs the NHS y amount of money, they are lying by way of only giving you one side of the equation.

It's not hard to understand really.

While smokers and the overweight are often criticised for the financial impact of their unhealthy lifestyles, an obese person's medical bills actually average 10 per cent less overall than those of a person of normal weight. 

Smokers require even less treatment, say the researchers. 

The reason is that the healthy tend to live longer and so, while they might not have to battle lung cancer, heart disease or diabetes in their fifties, they may need long-term care for illnesses of old age such as Alzheimer's. 

As a result, any "savings" made by them being healthy when young are more than offset by their being ill in old age.

Tobacco controllers - who know better than the rest of us that smokers don't actually cost the NHS more than anyone else, quite the opposite - usually counter this incontrovertible fact with shrill straw men such as "so you're saying that governments should encourage smoking because it's good for the country's finances?". Well no, we are just arguing that 'public health' lobbyists should stop using outright lies to push their agenda.

The result of all this wholesale lying by health lobbyists is daft policies like that proposed by the ignoramuses at NHS Vale of York. To save money, they have taken the stance that the best thing to do is penalise the people who cost them the least amount of money in the long run. It's why they are not handling budgets or performing actuarial calculations in the private sector .. because if they were they'd be sacked.

Restricting treatment is just one stupid policy recommendation that 'public health' lying creates, the other is the regular call - which you may have heard from the most easily-gulled in society - to charge smokers, drinkers and the obese for NHS treatment. You know, because it's self-inflicted, innit, and why should they pay for the healthcare costs of others.

This is very dangerous ground for the NHS. Once you get into that line of thinking it renders the NHS unworkable. There's little need for those lucrative sin taxes now, is there Mr politician? Just think of all those treatments the NHS provides which the public regularly object to, and there are very many. If we can pick and choose who is treated and who is not, there are going to be a lot of green ink letters from Mr & Mrs Disgusted of Cheltenham.

There are also dozens of dangerous activities anyone could name that might end in long-term and incredibly expensive palliative care, why should the public collectively pay for extreme risk-taking? And you know that unwritten contract we have whereby we pay our taxes and you promise to treat us accordingly? Well, there is just the taxation now, if the benefit is being withdrawn for large sections of the population, we'll see those taxes dramatically cut so we can source healthcare elsewhere at our own cost, Mr Politician Sir, or we'll see you in court.

You can't have a protection racket without the protection, now can you?

It only takes one successful case and the NHS could be holed beneath the water line. Imagine the free-for-all as those most able to negotiate the red tape and best-placed to afford it opt out of a portion of their taxes and go private. Oh joy!

I've written about this kind of backward thinking from NHS administrators (who ironically are the biggest direct drain on the NHS) before, and whenever I do I find myself thinking "bring it on!", just before health service grandees intervene and tell the local idiots to shut the fuck up and stop trying to derail the gravy train.

Just like this weekend.

Oh well, these instances are becoming more and more frequent, so better luck next time, eh?

As a footnote, Snowdon also mentioned the appalling 'nurse' Jane "They'll just have to die" DeVille-Almond in his piece. If you've not heard her contribution to the "do no harm" principle of the medical profession before, you can listen to it below.

Tobacco Control Is Like The Wild West, Urgently Requires Regulation

In my entry at the Tobacco Tactics website, there is a section entitled "Denigrating Health Professionals". As you can imagine, I am extremely proud of this, so much so that it features prominently in my Twitter banner.

You see, this is because they fully deserve the abuse for the extensive catalogue of lies they have told over the years. It's a shame that my page hasn't been updated since 2012, but I sometimes think that could be because others are starting to see that I'm right. Simon Chapman, for example, is now viewed by even some of his own 'public health' colleagues as a dangerous crank and spreader of blatantly false bullshit.

He's not alone, of course, as The Sun's front page splash proved the other day.

Now, I've been writing about this stuff for a long time, but I am struggling to remember anything worse than that from any tobacco control or 'public health' source. It seems that - despite the internet exposing their practices to more scrutiny than ever - they have not cleaned up their act, but instead strive to be increasingly worse. Many sections of the tobacco control industry, it seems, believe that the answer to their lies being exposed is just to lie even more than before!

The 'research' that led to that study has already been skewered comprehensively by others (see here, here, and here), quite an easy task (apart from if you're a journalist) since it is truly desperate stuff.

However, I'm more interested in what this says about 'public health' in general and tobacco control in particular. By that I mean what punishments are there for disseminating execrably false information such as this? The 'public health' movement is forever telling us that we need regulations to stop the damaging excesses of industry, but they have arguably far more potential to harm the public if they come out with garbage which directs the public wrongly, yet are totally unaccountable!

In my business, if someone I employed was lying to primary or secondary customers, I would be calling them into my office and disciplining them harshly if not dismissing them for gross misconduct. Reason being that such actions could undermine the company's integrity and put our revenues and future contracts in jeopardy.

In tobacco control, though, it is the other way around; lies are applauded by fellow tobacco controllers and they derive more revenue from the lies (by way of increased publicity and grant status), rather than less. If controls were the same as they naturally are in the private sector, they should be losing their integrity too, but don't because they self-describe as 'experts' and everyone believes them ... even though many of them knowingly lie through their teeth every day.

As I've mentioned many times before, though, the reaction by tobacco controllers to the behaviour of some of their colleagues - ranging from unprofessional to gross misconduct I'd venture to say - has ranged from mild rebuke (as the maximum) to deafening silence. At times, they have even jumped on the lunacy bandwagon themselves!

Under the line at Clive Bates's article, Linda Bauld despairs at having to constantly defend vaping, rather like the Dutch boy and the dyke. That's all well and good, but it is tobacco control which punched the holes in the dyke in the first place with thoroughly disingenuous and regularly mendacious claptrap, as I've described before.

However, the world's prime promoter of such things - Mad Stan Glantz - has been a star in the tobacco control industry firmament for a very long time. Bauld and the rest of the UK tobacco control community have known he's a weapons grade lie machine for decades, but have been quite happy to let it all go without comment.

Glantz has been falsifying data and producing jaw-dropping junk research (like this, for example) since many of the current crop of career tax-sponging anti-smoking prohibitionists were in nappies, yet not one of these fine upstanding 'experts' and 'scientists' has ever bothered to pull him up on any of it before.

So there is some vague hint there by Bauld that some tobacco controllers like Glantz have been a bit naughty, but that'll be all it is; a vague hint. To make it any more than that would - quite rightly - call their own expertise and impartiality into question.

@CaeruleanSea His previous junk has been very useful to PH people. They can't suddenly admit that he's a clown.

— Christopher Snowdon (@cjsnowdon) May 7, 2016

What is urgently required is some serious oversight of the 'public health' Goliath. Tobacco control, especially, has to whipped into line and told that this isn't some jolly little club where lying is allowed with a wink and a smile, but is supposed to be professional and not run and operated by people with the professional acumen of Del Boy and the morals of Alan B'Stard.

All the while tobacco control was calling for more regulations on e-cigs with the glib and inaccurate sound bite that a perfect and successful free market was "like the Wild West", the only industry which has truly acted (and continues to act) like the Wild West has been the totally unregulated and entirely unaccountable tobacco control industry; where black is white; economic principles are inconvenient and to be ignored; and where truth is a lie and vice versa.

In Bauld's comment, she also hints that this is an international problem so, therefore {shrug}, what can we do?

I do think there is someone somewhere worrying about this. This includes funders as well as researchers and others. The problem is that funders operate largely within a domestic (national) sphere in public health and the international environment (beyond a few countries) is overwhelmingly opposed to tobacco harm reduction. That is not the full story but it is part of it.

Well, it would be some kind of start if the UK could show some leadership (tobacco controllers like that word, don't they?) and actually do something useful.

Let's look at the organisations who are supposed to oversee 'public health' in the UK. The Faculty of Public Health is run by lunatics who are - along with the Chief Medical Officer - complicit in the deceit being forced upon the public regarding e-cigs; the different branches of ASH pay lip service while permanently trying to destroy vaping (after already having destroyed snus); and PHE are so limp that it looks like they just want to take government cash and not ruffle any feathers.

Where is the outrage from the lucrative 'public health' community towards such absolute crap being fed to the public by news outlets they usually despise such as The Sun, Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times? Why are angry letters not being publicised by 'public health' grandees even now, two days after the damaging headlines.

If you were a cynic, you'd think it wasn't about health or something, wouldn't you?

So, there's a reason why I denigrate health professionals. It's because it is not an honourable industry so they deserve no respect, in fact it is arguably fundamentally corrupt.

To borrow one of their oft-employed arguments, self-regulation has signally failed with 'public health' and tobacco control, their profession is like the Wild West; it ignores extremist views and they all urgently require harsh regulation to curb the public health harm their excesses cause.

I'm sure many will agree, just not publicly in case they get attacked by the most corrupt in their echo chamber or it results in a loss of the state funding they all parasitically crave.

So, in the meantime, I shall watch the inevitable tumbleweed emanating from the likes of PHE, RCP, ASH, FPH etc over recent headlines with amusement, while they laughably describe other industries as unregulated, negligent and harmful.