"At War With The Tobacco Industry"

Well we have always suspected as much, but today the WHO's newly-installed leadership has finally admitted that it isn't interested in what works to encourage smokers to quit ... it just hates the industry.

Director General Dr Tedros Ad-hanom Ghebreyesus (an Ethiopian with a dodgy background) only took office in July this year but his genius has already seen Robert Mugabe recruited as a {cough} goodwill ambassador before worldwide disgust forced him to backtrack.

AKA Idiot

Well now, he has confirmed to us all that he is even more deranged than his predecessor Margaret "Oh I do like a Dictator" Chan. Commenting on corrective statements - that is, corrective, as in to correct what was said previously - being aired in the US, this African lunatic declares that it isn't enough, and that nothing the industry can do ever will be. So he's declared the WHO to be at war ... not with the real or perceived harm of smoking, but with the industry.

These public statements acknowledge that the companies – Philip Morris USA, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Altria – knew the damage their products cause but kept selling them anyway.

As they are obliged to do by laws which demand they have a fiduciary duty to not shit all over their shareholders. I just thought I'd add that because he seems to forget that it's not good etiquette for legal businesses to nuke pension funds and unleash a global criminal market which would make Colombian and Mexican drug cartels look like warm up acts for the Teletubbies.

And it is not just courts that are taking action against the tobacco industry. The recent decision by French bank BNP Paribas to stop financing and investing in tobacco companies – including producers, wholesalers, and traders – is just the latest sign that public health is finally being put ahead of commercial interests.

BNP Paribas have done this against commercial interests, apparently, and not because they might see an angle in it by way of increased gullible 'ethical' investors or the avoidance of shroud-waving fuckwittery from the likes of unelected extremist African-led supranational cults.

And even if so, why can commercial interests not work in favour of public health anyway? Every leap forward in the history of public health has been aided and abetted by private industry and innovation, only a cretin would think the profit motive isn't a powerful force to harness.

Sadly, Dr Tedros is that very cretin, because he is determined to prevent that ever happening.

The industry couldn’t be trusted in the past, and it shouldn’t be trusted to do the right thing in the future. 

Even today, the same tobacco companies are marketing new products that they claim are less harmful – like “heat-not-burn” devices, which vaporize tobacco to produce a nicotine-containing aerosol – and funding front groups purporting to work for a smoke-free world.

Is he sounding, you know, a bit like a Luddite to you here? The evidence isn't in yet on either heat not burn or the Foundation for a Smokefree World, but this stunning Ethiopian savant don't need no stinking evidence. He may not know much about nicotine delivery systems, but he knows what he likes.

Enough is enough; at this critical moment, we must not let the momentum slip. Governments and health organizations like ours are at war with the tobacco industry, and we will continue fighting until we beat Big Tobacco.

Not beat cancer, or heart disease, or COPD, or any other illness they attribute to tobacco. No, the very first priority is destroying the legal tobacco industry. That's it. Period.

This is the same WHO which said "help yourself" to Thailand when they wanted to prohibit vaping and bang citizens up for 5 years for possession of e-liquids, and who passed that recommendation in India which is now planning to do exactly the same.

And now, under his leadership, Dr Tedros is planning to crush heat not burn products - responsible for "one of the most remarkable events we have ever seen in global efforts to reduce cigarette smoking" in some markets - under the clunking fist of his stratospheric ignorance.

However reluctantly, these companies have called on all of us to reject their products. We think it is time to take them up on the offer.

So there you go. As I've always maintained, it's never been about health, but now we are seeing that it never will be either. These dangerous extremists aren't even giving breathing space to what might work in the future! Under the leadership of an Ethiopian with a chequered background, the WHO just declared its principal aim is one of destroying a legal industry instead of working towards improving the world's lives and health.

He, and those members of the WHO who elected him their Director General, are clearly fucking insane.