Smoking

Many thanks to Christopher Snowden for alerting me to this little piece by Euan Ferguson in the Observer today. It begins with this photograph: Photo: Nikola Solic/Reuters As Euan says, only one small detail gives this photo any glamour at all: A whirl of tutus in a Zagreb cafe-bar during a break in ballet rehearsals: poise, and skin, and fabulous discs of swan-white tuile, and yet what are our eyes drawn towards? Exactly. A little paper tube, being happily smoked. The smell will be of black Balkan tobacco, yes; but it is also the smell of rebellion and the first successful example of people-power since the idea of smoking bans began sweeping the developed world. How so? Well, it seems the Croats are made of better stuff than we are: What have the Balkans ever done for us?

Tom Clougherty makes a sadly good point: We can't rely on a Conservative government doing much to fight the nanny state. On the contrary, what we're promised is an army of local directors of public health, dedicated public health budgets, a bigger, stronger chief medical officer's department, a "holistic strategy to focus public health across departments", "a clear marketing plan to promote healthy living", and a brand spanking new QUANGO – the Public Health Commission – to oversee it all. There was even talk a while back about an 'NHS Health Miles Card', where people would get 'reward points' for losing weight, which they could then redeem against fresh vegetables, subsidized gym membership or even priority within other public services.

Angela Harbutt of Liberal Vision and Samizdata's Jonathan Pearce say much of what needs to be said about the British Medical Association's depressingly predictable demand that all alcohol advertising and sponsorship should be banned. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Simon Clark draws my attention to the next front in the endless War on Smoking. Apparently smoking should be banned from pub patios and other outdoor areas too. Seriously.  Mark my words, however, we'll be hearing more on this, no matter how daft it may initially seem. It continues to mystify me that organisations such as ASH are listened to as though they were some kind of independent umpire, while groups such as Forest are dismissed simply because they receive some funding from tobacco companies.

From - where else? - the Guardian: No national administration would allow paedophiles a say in setting child welfare policies. So why should the views of Big Tobacco on issues of health be taken seriously? And no, I don't think this analogy is too extreme.  One wonders what David Cronin - the author of this nonsense - would consider an extreme analogy? Of course, my own view is that Big Tobacco has been utterly spineless when it comes to standing up to the misinformation and propaganda spread by the "health" industry. Nonetheless, there is something to the notion that Big Tobacco is quite happy to hop into bed with the authorities - but that's because doing so benefits large tobacco companies at the expense of their smaller rivals.

We'll get back to Iran in due course, but first here's a miserable moment from today's press conference at the White House. Asked by some ghastly hack from McClatchy about his smoking (and the so-called "frustration and fear" that comes from stopping smoking), Barack Obama replied: Look, I've said before that as a former smoker I constantly struggle with it. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes. The — am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don't do it in front of my kids. I don't do it in front of my family. And, you know, I would say that I am 95 percent cured. But there are times where ... There are times where I mess up. How craven is that? Pretty dire stuff.

Good and bad news from China: A Chinese county has rescinded a rule urging its government workers to smoke more in order to boost tax income. The authorities in Gong'an county had told civil servants and teachers to smoke 230,000 packs of the locally-made Hubei brand each year. Those who did not smoke enough or used brands from other provinces or overseas faced being fined or even fired. The Good news is that the Chinese recognise the contribution smokers make to the public finances; the Bad news is that they seem to be encouraging a rather stern form of protectionism. Still, you can't have everything - though it's a sad day when you can argue that the Chinese have a more sensible attitude towards sweet Lady Nicotine than we do...

And so it continues. Not content with discovering "passive" smoking, the health boffins have now discovered something called "third-hand smoking"  - all the better, presumably, to drive the last remaining smokers into the mountains (be they the Rockies or the Western Highlands) where, armed with only our wits, a lighter and a dwindling supply of contraband tobacco, we shall slip from cave to cave, lair to lair, all the while pursued by an army of "health professionals" hell-bent on saving us from ourselves... *The hero of Michael Heath's long-running Spectator cartoon strip, The Outlaw, Michael Common is the last, still-persecuted, smoker in England.

Courtesy of the Daily Mash: SMOKERS BANNED FROM LOOKING AT CIGARETTES WHILE SMOKING SMOKERS will have to hold a large piece of card over their face so they cannot look at the cigarette they are smoking, ministers said last night. The 'smoking mask' will include a small mouth hole and a handle though later models may be fitted with elasticated straps... The mask will also carry a warning which reads: "Lighting a Cigarette While Wearing This Mask May Cause You to Set Fire to the Mask Instead of the Cigarette and Burn Your Face Off." Health secretary, Alan Johnson, said: "If you can't see nicotine, it can't see you. And, as any scientist will tell you, if something can't see you, it has no way of knowing you exist.

What a shower. From Simon Clark's Taking Liberties blog, comes this unsurprising element of the government's latest consultation on smoking: "Question 12: Do you believe that more should be done by the Government to reduce exposure to secondhand smoke within private dwellings or in vehicles used primarily for private purposes? If so, what do you think could be done?" This is, I assume, a consultation that only applies to England but doubtless there's something just as depressing and invasive being planned in Scotland too. The sad thing, of course, is that the Tories will be little, if at all, better. It's enough to make one consider moving to the Matanuska-Susitna Valley...

More evidence emerges that England selected the right man when they asked Fabio Capello to rescue their football team. From the Times today: On another issue - Wayne Rooney's smoking habit - Capello was curiously indifferent, a stance that brought out sweat beads on the foreheads of his FA employers, fearful of their manager unwittingly being cast as the spokesman for a generation of English butt-heads. Capello later returned to clarify his position and the moral guardians were headed off at the pass... Capello's lack of interest in making a judgment revealed that the difference between football people in Europe and Britain is not merely a matter of tactics or technique. The fact is, smoking is not seen as the great taboo for a sportsman abroad that it is here.

If Philip Morris commissioned research which found that the smoking ban in England & Wales, a year old today, had been a dismal failure many, perhaps even most, people would dismiss said research, considering it partial. Well they would say that wouldn't they? So why are figures* from anti-smoking organisations such as ASH or Cancer Research UK accepted uncritically? Maybe they are indeed sound but I see no great reason for ignoring the vested interests at play on their side of the dispute while pointing out those that might influence more tobacco-friendly findings.

My old friend Gerald Warner has, I'm glad to discover, a blog at the Telegraph entitled Is It Just Me? (sometimes, yes, Gerald, I'm afraid it is...). In his most recent post Gerald reports that the health industry has opened a new front in the Tobacco Wars. Not content with persecuting smokers, the unco guid are preparing to take aim at snuff aficionados. Seriously. As Gerald observes, this is no surprise: Of course, it had to happen. The health fascists, having overrun the cigarette, cigar and pipe-smokers, are now advancing on the snuff-takers. We have been here before. Persecution of snuff-taking began in the early 17th century when Sultan Amurath IV of Turkey made it a capital offence.

The boys at The Daily Mash have the gory details... SMOKERS will have to hold a large piece of card over their face so they cannot look at the cigarette they are smoking, ministers said last night. The 'smoking mask' will include a small mouth hole and a handle, though later models may be fitted with elasticated straps... The mask will also carry a warning which reads: "Lighting a Cigarette While Wearing This Mask May Cause You to Set Fire to the Mask Instead of the Cigarette and Burn Your Face Off.

It could have been worse, I suppose. There was a proposal that you'd soon need a special license to be permitted to purchase cigarettes in Scotland. Presumably this would be accompanied by arm-twisting from "health care professionals" to persuade you to stop, or mandatory sessions with a shrink to demonstrate that you were indeed sufficiently and genuinely bonkers as to be granted a special license to enjoy abuse tobacco...Happily, if somewhat surprisingly, that proposal hasn't actually passed. Yet. Still, yesterday the Scottish parliament confirmed that it was going to ban the display of cigarettes in shops. Apparently a ban on tobacco advertising - itself an outrageous abridgment of liberty - was not enough.

Anthony Holden in The Observer: Carmen is back at Covent Garden for the first time since last summer's Orwellian smoking ban and I'm delighted to report that the Royal Opera has taken not the slightest notice. If there's any opera in which onstage smoking should be mandatory, this is it. Cigarette girls and soldiers alike all puff their heads off during the first act, to the point where the fumes drift gratifyingly into mid-stalls. And, even better, there are none of those ludicrous health-and-safety signs out front, as, for instance, at the Old Vic, to warn us of the perils of entering a smoke-stained auditorium. Of course in plucky Scotland this production would be shut down by zealous council officials.

It's entirely possible that the research cited in this New York Times story has been corrupted by the fact that it seems to have been sponsored, in part or at "arm's length" , by a tobacco company. That's fine. But I would have thought a more useful article would have spent its time demonstrating that this researcher's conclusions were, on the evidence, bunk rather than seeking to dismiss them on the grounds of where their funding came from. Or, to put it another way, can we expect the NYT, or any other newspaper, to treat smoking-related claims made by government or other branches of the health industry that have just an obvious agenda with quite the same degree of skepticism? Of course smoking can help cause cancer and other nasty, painful diseases that can kill you.