Something the newspapers do a lot of these days is to tell a story as if it's happening locally, when in fact it's on the other side of the planet and affects the UK... not in the slightest.
One such story concerns a two-year-old who has been smoking since he was 18 months old and now has a tantrum if he's not allowed a cigarette. Where is this? Birmingham? Brighton? Kirkcudbright? Lower Piddle? Livarot?
Nope. Indonesia.
It's an antismoking rant based on the lifestyle choices of a different culture in a different country. Our British rules, our preferences, do not apply there.
In some European countries, the legal age for sex is 13. We can all go 'Oh, it's disgusting that they let them play hide-the-sausage at that age'. In some American states, it's 21. Is it okay if they say the same thing about us, who let our young play the pokey game five years earlier? Or are they 'restrictive'?
In the UK it would be illegal to let a child that age have a cigarette. In Indonesia, it apparently is not.
And yet the commenters include:
so is the father being arrested for child abuse? He caused a baby to have an addiction.
No he is not being arrested, because he isn't doing it in the UK where it would be illegal. As for the 'addiction', I still dispute that. We smokers have to believe we are addicted so that Nicorette can sell us nicotine in another form. We can't possibly just stop, just like that - even though every ex-smoker I know has stopped just like that. Everyone I know who tried the gum and patches, without exception, is still smoking.
Those who stopped, stopped for one reason. They weren't enjoying it any more. Like someone who once lived for skateboarding but then decided it wasn't interesting any more. They simply decided not to bother, so they stopped.
Those who believe they are addicted to nicotine, when provided with patches and gum containing nicotine, are still 'addicted'. To nicotine, in an equally expensive but non-enjoyable form. The patches and gum will never work and they are not supposed to work. If they worked, smokers would quit and stop buying patches and gum. That is not, and has never been, the business model of Big Pharma.
You must believe you are addicted. if you don't believe that, Big Pharma can't make money out of you.
The child has a tantrum when he is refused a cigarette for exactly the same reason any toddler anywhere has a tantrum when refused any form of treat. It is not that he is addicted. It is that he is spoiled. A tantrum gets him his way, so he uses it time and again.
Another comment:
This absolutley horrified me, god knows what other drugs this child will turn to in the future if at 2 years old he is already addicted to cigarettes.
How sad, such a waste
I've been smoking tobacco for around 30 years. I have never taken any illegal drugs. My father has smoked for around 60 years and has never even considered hard drugs. Is tobacco now a 'gateway' to illegal hard drugs? When did that come about? What kind of cretin believes this nonsense?
So an Indonesian child smokes, which isn't illegal in Indonesia, and the Righteous are out in force to demand they fit in with Righteous teachings.
For the record, I don't think children should be allowed to smoke or drink. The developing body is much more susceptible to damage than the adult. On the other hand, I consider the child to be the sole responsibility of the parents. If you want to feed your children on arsenic and asbestos, you're an idiot but it's up to you. It's your DNA line that will be wiped out and if you really think arsenic and asbestos are food groups, that's probably for the best.
More from the comments -
The oft-criticised smoking ban (nanny state or what?) used to greatly help me before I retired from teaching. When I caught a young pupil would-be smoker I'd remonstrate, "So, Darren, the whole country is quitting - and you start.
The whole country is not quitting, no more than the Cambodian academics committed mass suicide or the German Jews took a sudden fancy to gas showers. Smokers are not 'quitting', they are being forced out of everywhere for no reason beyond 'I don't like it so you can't have it'.
And yes, it is the nanny state at work. We are being ordered into compliance. We are not relieved that we can finally free ourselves of an addiction. We are incensed that we are being ordered to stop doing something that might or might not harm us, but won't harm anyone else. Passive smoking is a lie. Not a mistake, not a misreading of data. A lie.
It is all based on those patches and gum. If the likes of the Dreadful Arnott and her ASH cohorts cared a damn about stopping smoking, they would be trumpeting the Electrofag because it is the only thing that will ever work. Instead, they want that banned too. Why? To sell more patches and gum that aren't intended to work. You can smoke an Electrofag with zero nicotine and it feels like smoking. The nicotine is the buzz but it's not the habit. The habit is the relaxation that comes with watching smoke curl into the air and that can be achieved with a zero-nicotine Electrofag that produces no harmful chemicals of any kind at all.
There is no addiction. We smoke because we like it. When we don't like it any more, we stop.
Just like that.
Belief in addiction is as strong as real addiction. You can develop a real alcohol dependency because it changes the metabolism of your liver. Stopping alcohol intake 'cold turkey' can cause such disruption that it kills you. You need to wean yourself off.
With smoking, you can just stop. Yes, you can. If you're smoking and not enjoying it, take the advice of a friend of mine who stopped.
"Giving up smoking is easy. Just stop putting fags in your mouth and lighting them."
Don't waste money on patches and gum that are only there to keep you paying. If you believe you are addicted to nicotine, how can you expect to get away from that by taking nicotine in another form? They want you addicted. To their patches.
If you don't enjoy it, stop doing it.
And if you want to impose British culture on other countries, start by demanding the US drop the legal age for sex to 16 and for drinking to 18, and see how far you get.
14 comments:
whatever next
if the anti-smokers had their way they'd probably even try to stop him having " after pre-school drinks" with his mates in the nags end... :)
i hate the media. notice they dont report the damage a 2000 lb j-dam does to an iraqi infants lungs. and theyre on view after over-pressure sucks them out of their mouths. ( not in a good mood today)
Yup, agreed.
Dr William T Whitby In his book, ‘The smoking scare de-bunked’ quotes a number of anomalies that fly in the face of anti-tobacco rhetoric; eg. "Dr. C.Y .Caldwell wrote in the British Medical Journal of February 26th 1977 that the Semai people of Malaysia start smoking at the age of two when they give up breast feeding. It is a sort of weaning. Then they continue to smoke all their lives - and THEY DON'T GET LUNG CANCER!"
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/cgi/getdoc?tid=isf14d00&fmt=pdf&ref=results
Whitby in fact identified the erroneous nature of the anti-smoking campaign in the early 1980’s. “It is the Big Lie of the twentieth century and I feel I can easily show this to the intelligent and unbiased reader” - are we any nearer to this? I think we are, as a result of anti-smoker mania and their OTT propaganda!
Wikipedia has an entry for the Semai - 'The Semai are a semisedentary people living in the center of the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia. They are particularly known for their non-violence.'
Surprise surprise - no mention of their smoking culture in Wiki though!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semai
Kin-Free,
Thanks for that link. Perhaps THIS is the real reason for the attack on smoking - from page 26:
Over the centuries tobacco played an important part in the social life of most countries. People thought nothing could be more pleasant than talking in coffee houses and taverns with their pipes. Smoking meant companionship and conviviality, harmony and peace. It was the great social cementer. How absurd it is now to hear the antismokers condemning smoking as anti-social.
It is now clear that companionship and conviviality, harmony and peace are the last things the elite want.
Companionship - feminism, sex 'education' and the 'gay' lifestyle have meant fewer people having life-long companions and family life.
Conviviality - there's not much about thanks to the smoking ban, attacks on free speech, filth on TV and in music via the tightly controlled and manipulative 'entertainment' industry.
Harmony and Peace - what we have is mass immigration and other divide and rule tactics, unjustified warmongering overseas and government-sponsored terrorism.
I suspect that the number one reason for the attack on smoking/smokers is to stop people from talking in coffee houses and taverns. Any social cementer has to be destroyed, like morality, belief in God and country, and free speech together with the ability to communicate intelligently, hence the 'hate' laws and dumbing down of education and the media.
This leads to weakened family, parent/child relationships, respect, community spirit, and with the pub and post office closures, dwindling church congregations, dying town centres, people are becoming more detached from each other and we become weaker and more open to abuse from those in power.
Probably to prove your theory.
I gave up smoking, LITERALY over night. (From 10 to 15 pipes per day)
I decided the money would be better spent elsewhere.
Interestingly enough, for the bansturbators, I did the same with Hash about ten years ago (From 5 to 15 joints per day).
I KNOW the feel of the first smoke of the morning on the back of the throat. It is bloody GREAT.
Addicted? No. But I can remember it.
I remember my Granny reading me stories rom Brothers Grimm. That was GREAT.
Addicted? No.
I am addicted to NIETHER!
(This does NOT mean I am an "anti smoker". Far from it. I go into smoking pubs by choice. Even though I no longer partake of the weed. Those pubs that are "no smoking" are all full of stuck up ponces.............. Hmmm. Is it a "class" thing?)
I would like to believe that second hand smoke doesn't cause negative health effects but doesn't all the research prove otherwise? (I don't want to be told that its all nanny state funded research that's biased, I want evidence that it doesn't)
Mr Wallis.
"Second hand smoke".
Oh DEAR, are you in the right place to hear ALL about that!
Mr. Wallis, you are turning science on its head with that question.
If I declared that car exhausts caused cancer, asthma and water on the spleen, would it be up to the drivers of cars to prove that it was not true? Would it be fair to say that if they could not prove it was not true, they must not use their cars?
Or would the onus be on me to prove it was true? I'd be calling for a total ban on the use of cars, remember. No small thing. Many people would be inconvenienced.
As it is, antismoking propaganda simply declares second hand smoke to be deadly. Think back a few years, before the smoking ban. Were nonsmoker corpses littering the streets back then?
Then they demand that smokers prove it isn't. If we cannot prove that it is harmless, we remain banned.
It is not possible to prove a negative. If I were to test a sample of chicken for Salmonella and find none, I would not report that sample as Salmonella-free. I would report 'not detected in 25g' or whatever sample size was required.
It might still be there, but at very low numbers. I cannot prove it isn't there without pulverising every chicken and testing every last bit, in which case there'd be none left to sell.
So if you ask me to declare a flock of hens as 'Salmonella-free', I can't. It is scientifically impossible. I can declare it as 'no detectable Salmonella' but I can never prove the absence of risk.
So by turning the question back on smokers, the antismokers set an impossible task. Prove that there is no risk at all in any situation, ever. Can't be done.
Meanwhile they are shielded from the real scientific and moral question - is it right to persecute a section of society as harmful, when there is no evidence at all that they cause any harm?
There is no proof of harm caused by passive smoking. None. Yet we smokers are required to prove our innocence even though there is no evidence against us.
Read up on the techniques used by the Spanish Inquisition and other oppressive regimes. Not on some Internet forum. Get a good history book.
Seriously. No joke.
You will be surprised.
Furor - I've known several people who stopped smoking because they lit up one day and just decided they weren't enjoying it, and didn't want to smoke any more. No cold turkey.
Preferences change, and forcing people to keep on smoking by convincing them they are addicted is cruel.
Profitable, but cruel.
LI
Your response to Mr Wallis states the reality as clearly as is possible. The reality is that the whole Smoking Ban is based entirely upon the possible adverse effects of tobacco smoke on workers in 'public places' - the whole point being that workers in these places have no alternative but to 'put up with' the adverse effects.
But one must ask the question, "Are there any adverse affects at all, or, if there are, are these adverse affects of any more significance than the adverse effects of walking along a road and breathing the exhaust fumes of traffic?"
That is an interesting thought, but is irrelevent.
The really important thought is that those who say that exposure to the smoke of people who enjoy tobacco is harmful have to PROVE that this is so. As you say, many studies indicate that there is no such harm. But, as you say, it is not possible to prove a negative.
We have seen this recently with the Ash Cloud: "Your safety is our paramount priority". Doesn't it sound good? However, the reality is that what this statement means is "OUR safety is of paramount priority".
Politicians are fond of saying, "This is the right thing to do". The statement obviously invites the answer, "No, it is not!" But that response itself invites, "Prove that it is not!" But you cannot prove a negative!
The political response to, "This is the right thing to do" should be, "PROVE IT!"
I apologise for not wording it correctly, and you make a very good point on proving a negative.
What I mean is that in the face of the evidence that passive smoking has negative health effects (admittedly my only research is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking), how can we just discount this and claim there are no passive negative health effects?
Asking the sam question, using different words does not alter the fact that Leg Irons answer to your first post still stands for this one. As far as I can see.
Show the proof that it DOES have negetive effects, then that can be countered. But NEITHER side of the discussion can be PROVED.
Anyone that sais it is "100% PROOF that ABC is, or is not true" is no scientist, and no philosepher either.
The weight of evidence, a lot of it gone into by Leg Iron on this very site, is against the "dangers of passive smoking".
I see that demon tobacco (aided by his accomplice, Mr Al Cohol) have killed another person.
That's right, isn't it? These three fine, upstanding members of their local community would never have done it if not for that...
MR WAllIS
If your only reference is Wiki then I would suggest you attend the WHO website which were trying to prove the causality between passive smoking and deaths - from whence the whole shabang arose. They conducted the biggest ever survey across many countries in order to find said causality.
When the findings were finally coomplete they issued the concusion which they had set out to discover but refused to publish the data and fought for several years against it being published in the USA courts. During this time the anti smoking mania was pushed out to the people who were to be inflicted with the ban.
Eventually the information was released in the USA under their FEO laws which showed their results to be totally unjustified regarding passive smoking and that their was no detectable effect.
Of course - the can had started being kicked by then and only 1 paper (Daily Mail) published this scandal in the UK on a single day. so 'Consensus' believe what they were told to believe by the states which have an agenda of their own. Which has nothing to do with the welfare of the people.
You see the same happening with Climate change ! The truth is coming out but the politicians refuse to accept the REAL evidence because it upsets their agenda.
Anyway - to see the information clearly and concisely set out (and you can cross ref if you do not believe it) try the FOREST website.
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