Public Health Now Further To The Left Than Cuba

MyChoice Australia last month made a very salient observation about the current World Trade Organisation dispute surrounding plain packaging.

Tobacco producing nations, including the Dominican Republic and Cuba, argue that plain packaging laws create illegal obstacles to world trade. 

Yes, Australia’s getting a lesson in free trade courtesy of communists.

Hardly surprising, really. If you were to view the Twitter feeds of Australian tobacco control execs recently, you could be forgiven for thinking that the election of mildly right of centre Tony Abbott as PM was akin to a return to sticking 10 year olds up chimneys and exiling petty criminals to, err, dustbowls on the opposite end of the world.

His crimes, it seems, are opposing carbon taxes and same sex marriage, while also appointing his cabinet on more substantial criteria than if they happen to have a vagina.

Whatever their outward reasoning, though, it's pretty clear that they're mostly just pissed off that a non-lefty government is not likely to shovel cash their way as liberally as they have become accustomed to.

It's a global feature of the health lobby in general. In the UK, for example, we have the likes of Gabriel Scally who advocates "socialism for all"; Sir David Nicholson, former card-carrying member of the Communist Party who now enjoys a comfortable retirement after NHS deaths under his watch and presiding over a culture of suppressing criticism; and Martin McKee who tweets about public health when he has time free from rabble-rousing about globalisation, public sector power, and the evils of capitalism.

Meanwhile, in the freedom-loving USA, public health fanatics are eagerly applauding Cuba for starving their citizens.

A few months ago, we noted a bizarre study in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) that suggested that the famine caused by the repressive Communist Cuban Castro regime was good for people’s health. Harvard’s food-scold-in-residence, Walter Willett, commented positively on the outcome of state-sponsored famine, suggesting the study showed “powerful evidence that a reduction in overweight and obesity would have major population-wide benefits.” 

Now, the study authors (and Willett, presumably) indicated that they didn’t support the dictatorial methods, just the state-controlled outcome. But now Willett has gone a step further. He recently told a Harvard conference that “children are being exploited, same as sweatshops” and declared obesity “a natural consequence of a capitalist food supply.”

Now, agree with their politics or not, all of the above have one thing in common. None of them need to be elected in order to influence at the highest level, just like their Godhead, the WHO. Exactly what dictators throughout history have always aspired to.

Through public health, they've found a way to interfere in the lives of everyone on the planet fiscally, economically and socially without ever having to ask the public for approval. If you object further, or things don't quite go to their master plan, bullying, smears and ad hominem is usually enough to scare politicians into jumping when they're told to.

And tomorrow, an unelected EU Commissioner's Tobacco Products Directive - drafted under a long shadow of corruption and designed to completely ignore any consultation which disagreed with its pre-determined positions - will slime its way past plenary with the help of the socialist bloc(k) vote. Funny, that.

Wherever he is right now, I expect Stalin is applauding in admiration.

UPDATE: Thanks to a fellow jewel robber by e-mail, here's supporting evidence via the Twitter feed of  John Ashton, head of the UK Faculty of Public Health. Wow!

Tragic Tuesday

In light of the EU's upcoming foolishness on Tuesday, this tweet couldn't have been better constructed.

Whatever happens with e-cigs next week, thousands of vapers have learned that 'public health' is a financially & morally corrupt enterprise.
— Christopher Snowdon (@cjsnowdon) October 5, 2013

Not just vapers, either. Friends and relatives of vapers - and vaguely interested onlookers - will have been watching the insane campaign against e-cigs with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief at the shameful actions of a tobacco control industry which had previously captured their trust. On Tuesday, their belief will be beggared and that trust will be lost.

Of course, some of us have always seen through these charlatans. Since my first article on e-cigs back in 2008, I've always been intrigued to see how far their adherence to pharma interests would take them before self-respect forced them to salvage their ever-disintegrating integrity.

Y'see, I've always said that e-cigs have immense potential for showing the vast majority of professional anti-smokers up as the evil, degenerate, corrupt, and damaging troughers that they are. But what I didn't expect was that they would be happy to see their reputations - and their claim to be interested in health - flushed down the drain with further weasel words and outright lies.

Consider, for example, this jaw-dropping doublespeak in a letter to the Telegraph yesterday, signed by just about every prominent tobacco-centric public health advocate you could mention.

SIR - In response to the letter (October 3) from Liberal Democrat MEPs opposing medicines regulation for e-cigarettes, we agree that e-cigarettes have significant potential to help smokers who are not otherwise able to quit smoking, by providing them with safer alternatives to smoked tobacco. It is therefore important that regulation does not stifle the growth of this market.

Well, I think we can all agree on that. But how do they plan to do this?

Currently, e-cigarettes come under a range of consumer legislation. However, we believe that some additional safeguards are required to ensure that these products are effective, deliver nicotine safely and are manufactured to a consistent quality; and that the advertising and promotion of these products to non-smokers, including children, can be prevented.

Now, please, somebody tell me how anyone in the known world can possibly not be aware that adding regulations will - without a scintilla of doubt - stifle growth of any market?

E-cigs are delivering massive harm reduction results worldwide - without costing a fraction of a percent of the cost the oleaginous signatories of this letter charge the taxpayer for their time - yet they still insist that they are caring for your health by inflicting burdens on a product which renders their own expensive and damaging brain farts laughable by comparison.

Yet again, the {cough} brilliant minds of tobacco control seem to be getting their ideas of economics from a place where no other economist has ever been before. Quite literally, they seem to be living on another planet.

The permissive medicines regulation ...

A permissive regulation? An oxymoron so historically classic as to be worthy of a plaque on the wall of the British Museum, surely?

... proposed by the British regulator, the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, and supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, will achieve this and provides a good model for other EU member states.

Let's leave aside the pathetic call to authority - in this case, others with a close relationship with pharmaceutical interests - as if we didn't see it, OK?

What they seem to be saying here is that a regulation which involves millions of pounds of investment, years of form-filling and tests, and which results in a ban on any company which can't fulfil them, is somehow a good model for "regulation [which] does not stifle the growth of this market".

Really?

This would ensure that e-cigarettes are treated in the same way as nicotine replacement therapies, such as gum and patches, and that they would be as widely available as tobacco.

That, my friends, is the whole game in a short paragraph.

Simply so they will not be more attractive than utterly useless pharma-manufactured "gum and patches". The fact that levels of nicotine in e-cigs are necessarily higher for them to be effective matters not to public health advocates ... because, for them, it's never been about health anyway.

To get to the stage of having this remarkable nonsense voted on in Brussels, we have seen some quite incredible stuff. Firstly, it has to be said, it could only work if drafted by someone for whom corruption doesn't seem to be a stranger.

It then required anti-smoking organisations behaving like the type of loon we used to see standing in High Streets, under a sandwich board, declaring that the end of the world was nigh due to some inconsequential ill he had inflated in his tiny mind to apocalyptic proportions. The police would sometimes pop into his newspaper article-papered shed to ensure he wasn't self-harming as he ranted and screamed about child-devouring aliens and giant, industry-financed robotic, curare-armed maggots under his bed.

They'd mop his brow, say 'there, there' and warn him not to keep scaring Mrs Lilyfoot at number 42, or the man with the big needle might pop round again. Before walking away laughing and advising social services to increase the dose next time they called.

But this is the kind of behaviour the tobacco control industry has been feigning in order to make the world believe that massively safer equals harmful; restriction is access; barriers to entry equal growth; regulation is permissive; prohibition is availability; and, of course, failure is success.

There is always the hope that idiot politicians will see through these - struggling for a word here, hmm .. disgusting, yes that's it - disgusting people, but the experience of sci-fi novelist Neal Asher suggests that's a non-starter.

Nope, it's just something which will have to unravel by people slowly realising for themselves that they've been lied to for a very long time. A big stepping stone towards that happens on Tuesday when the tangled web starts strangling those who spun it and millions more work out that it's never been about health.

There'll be a live Facebook chat event with the creeps on Tuesday afternoon if you're interested. Just log in and have your say here from 4:15pm. It's after they've voted, natch, but then they haven't listened to us peasants in the past couple of years anyway so it's at least consistent.

Link Tank 05/10

The usual, please Landlord.

Screw Stoptober - smoking is cool

The stunning hypocrisy of the Guardian

Snus tobacco is good for public health

Fast food drive-thrus are getting slower

Hungary university bans miniskirts leading to the best protest ever

Bans — when it’s time to re-examine

What could be better than a woman who brews beer?

Punk band films porn on Westboro Baptist Church's front lawn

Jeros: the jellyfish-shredding robot

Cash For Control

Back in 1997, Labour got into a bit of a mess with a donation to their party. The £1m they were given by Bernie Ecclestone led to a very public abandonment of their political principles.

Blair's adviser at the time was Alastair Campbell.

He doesn't seem to have changed much in the intervening years. He obviously still believes that lobbing dosh into a party's coffers is a perfectly legitimate way of influencing policy.

It will make me feel unclean to be Tory donor but if David Cameron commits to Minimum Unit Pricing I will make 10k donation to Tory party
— Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret) October 2, 2013

Err,  isn't corrupt practice like this frowned upon by Labour? Shouldn't they be appalled at the very idea? And do you think this was the way Ecclestone approached Campbell and Blair all those years ago?

Ireland To Ban Small Boxes

Just when you thought the hare-brained idiots who back plain packaging couldn't get more absurd ...

In January down in Australia, we saw the hilarious response to Boxwraps, a company which created stickers that adult smokers could choose in order to hide sick government wet dream psycho gore porn.

The Australian Medical Association has urged the federal government to step in and ban the stickers, Steve Hambleton, president of the AMA commented: “I would be confident that the government would response very quickly to stop this defeating the intention of their legislation".

Yes, they actually wanted to ban stickers.

I don't know if they got anywhere with that, but fast forward to last week and Irish health minister James O'Reilly is proudly declaring to the world that he is equally loopy.

Dr Reilly stressed any plans by tobacco companies to sell plain permanent boxes so smokers can transfer cigarettes in to them would be tackled.

A ban on small plain boxes, eh? Well, best of luck in drafting that particular legal document, sunshine.

Now, if you'd just arrived at this debate and read back, you'd be forgiven for thinking that these people must have been lying the big one for quite a while. I mean, wasn't the entire point of plain packaging to stop those 'glitzy' packets that look like Lego or Ferraris luring kids, or eradicating colours which prey on how utterly weak and pathetic women are? If so, surely O'Reilly should be ecstatic about the thought of plain boxes replacing them, yes?

Well no, apparently. It's now about stopping adults - who have already made their choice at the shop counter - from exercising their own free will as to what they would like to put their tabs in. Once again, it's not about the chiiildren, and it's not about health, as O'Reilly kindly confirms.

The Health Minister has vowed to win the war against the tobacco industry as he moves to enforce the standardised packaging of cigarettes.

Yep. And that is all the tobacco control industry has ever been interested in, a shameful war against a legal industry. They are in hock to their own favoured nicotine suppliers and will ban anything - legal or not - which interferes with that.

If it means banning e-cigs, so be it. If it means banning stickers, so be it. And if it means banning small rectangular boxes, well, that's just another hoop they will jump through to achieve their goal.

They may be absurd loons who truly believe that banning boxes and stickers doesn't make them appear as wackos and extremists, but that hasn't yet registered with yer average idiot politician. It's like watching on as someone who thinks he is Napoleon engages in serious conversation with Tim Nice But Dim, isn't it?

Katy Perry 'Saves Lives'

From The Telegraph:

One in five top ten songs in the UK have alcohol-related lyrics, a study has revealed, fueling concerns that music is promoting an unsafe image for young people. 

Researchers found that the number of chart hits containing references to alcohol has doubled in a decade - a figure rising partly due to US-imported songs.

It's had a hell of an effect on teen drinking according to official National Statistics, so it has (page 137).

As well as on those adults amongst us who also still listen to pop music and subliminally take in all those harmful messages.

On this evidence, perhaps the state should start paying chart stars to sing more about brushing their teeth with a bottle of Jack, eh?

Or maybe - just maybe - humans aren't as stupid and easily malleable as our self-installed betters insist that we all are.

Pinch, Punch, First Of #Octabber

I had forgotten it was October until, while waiting for my return train this morning, I found I was smoking a GV rollie outside a VIP e-cig shop on Manchester Piccadilly Station Approach. You can't miss it - it's festooned with so many big red Stoptober posters and balloons that the products they sell were rendered almost invisible.

That's when I remembered that this starts today.

If you weren't already aware of it, you can find details here.

We hope that #Octabber explains what we are all about and displays at least some of the anger we feel. You don't have to choose Stoptober. It isn't compulsory no matter how it feels. You can find friends and a safe haven here. Next time an unwelcome approach nags you to quit your tabs then be sure to tell them that you won't be joining Stoptober because you support #Octabber. 

Good luck to anyone who does choose to quit smoking during October, or any other month of the year. Quit or smoke, it's your choice.

That seems fair enough, but do also go read this light-hearted article at The Free Society and - if you think it's your sort of thing - be sure to pinch the graphic and definitely use the hashtag.