Mengele's playthings.

I think I might buy a pipe. I had a few pipes, many years ago. One of the curly Sherlock Holmes ones and two straight ones. I also had a clay pipe but it was hard to smoke because it would heat up too much. Maybe I was doing it wrong. A pipe is the only kind of smoking I don't currently do. I have roll-up cigarettes and cigars and Electrofag but no pipe. This must be remedied.

Where do I get one these days? Anyone know? I can find a shisha pipe far more easily than a Sherlock these days.

I did try those Skoal Bandits once, a long time back. I believe they are called Snus now. They didn't interest me. I never bought a second pack and didn't even finish the first. I just don't see the appeal. No, for me it has to be the smoke and nothing produces smoke like a pipe. There is an Electropipe but I can get pipe flavours for Electrofag. No, I want a real pipe again. I want Three Nuns tobacco once more.

I'm thinking ahead here. Home grown tobacco will be hard to make into rollups. Easier to make into cigars as long as I can find a dusky maiden with cigar-rolling thighs and also easier to smoke in a pipe.

Why increase the smoking? Because it's naughty. The same reason that so many children are now smoking. No, it's not because they see smoking in Disney cartoons. I watched them as a kid. I watched Tom and Jerry cartoons where Tom smoked a cigar. I watched all the Popeye cartoons with his corn-cob pipe. I watched old black and white films where almost everyone smoked. I watched Groucho Marx with his cigar and Stan Laurel with his pipe made out of his hand, lit with his thumb. I have that on DVD and it still makes me laugh.

I took up smoking at the age of 21 when I was certainly able to make up my own mind about it, and none of the cartoons influenced me at all. Few of my immediate group of friends smoked. Peer pressure, if it had existed among this chaotic group, should have stopped me smoking. It didn't work.

I will develop further smoking routes precisely because I am being told not to. That is something the authors of the 'Nudge' idea have completely failed to grasp. When you push people, they push back.

When you proclaim that 21 units of alcohol is a limit, people see it as a target. When you set unit levels for each drink, people are not shamed into sobriety. Instead they print score cards. It makes the evening more interesting. Tell them that three pints is binge drinking and they will think, as they sip the fourth, that well, it's bingeing now. Might as well make a night of it. Nothing to lose.

When you tell children they can't have booze, they will go all out to get some. When you tell them smoking is bad, they have to try it. When you tell them vegetables are healthy, they won't touch them. Children believe themselves indestructible, always have and always will. Tell them it's dangerous and they are guaranteed to try it. Tell them it's wholesome and they won't touch it. The tobacco companies are not recruiting new smokers among the youth. ASH and the NHS are.

Here's some more child-smoker recruitment from another idiot, found by Fraser. As far as the health freaks are concerned, life is about living for as long as you can even if you find it excruciatingly dull. Life, for them, is not about enjoyment, it's all about lasting longer than the guy next door and eventually dying of nothing.

Not smoking, not drinking, not eating salt or fat and remaining within the Standard Human shape will not make you immortal. You are going to die. That is certain. Your options are to live a Puritan morbid and dreary life or to enjoy the time you have. Sure, you might live longer as a Puritan and if that suits you, you carry on. I would absolutely hate to live like that and if it means I die sooner, that's my problem, not yours. Live your live as you see fit and leave me alone to live mine. Is that so much to ask?

It seems so, when fake science is the order of the day in any attempt to smack the smokers (tipped by commenter Luke and also by Email).

The researchers looked at the level of chemicals linked with cancer, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), in 12 patients after smoking.

Fair enough, you might think.

A PAH was added to the subject's cigarettes, which was then modified by the body and turned into another chemical which damages DNA and has been linked with cancer.

Well now, let's look at that first sentence again.

A PAH was added to the subject's cigarettes,

And once more for the terminally hard of thinking.

A PAH WAS ADDED to the subject's cigarettes,

The subjects were smoking cigarettes to which a carcinogen had been deliberately added. How did they get ethical approval for this? And what does it prove? That when you add a carcinogen to cigarettes, it acts like a carcinogen? That will work just as well with broccoli or tofu. It will even work with water or air. It is nonsense. The ethics commitee should be charged with attempted murder over this.

So it's fine to expose people to a carcinogen that isn't already present in detectable levels in cigarette smoke in order to re-prove that the carcinogen is a carcinogen, even though ordinary tobacco doesn't contain enough to prove an effect. It's fine because they are only smokers and don't matter.

If you proposed doing this experiment with dogs there would be outrage. Even more outrage than you would face if you kept a dog outdoors and only gave it a shelter with 50% or less protection from the weather. Try proposing to experiment with diesel carcinogens on non-smokers and see how far you get. I am struggling to get approval for a non-drug cure for Clostridium difficile that has already been proven to work and which I take a dose of daily because it stops other gut problems too, yet dosing human beings with known carcinogens just to invent a new propaganda page for ASH is okay. And you think I should trust the NHS? Hell, I object to being forced to pay for this crap. Worse, the propaganda is reinforced by the BBC who also demand money with menaces. At least when you paid protection money to the Krays, they left you alone. This is worse.

Out there are dribbling morons nodding and saying 'ooh, yes, the Dreadful Arnott is right, smokers are evil and subhuman and can be experimented on Mengele-style and that is all fine and good and Mengele's experiments on twins were justified if they smoked'. Oh yes, they are out there. Some are reading this and thinking 'What is this subhuman complaining about? We stopped experimenting on animals because it was inhumane, but experimenting on smokers is perfectly fine'.

Well, bollocks. I am buying a pipe and increasing my smoking range. I am doing this because like those who have drunk three pints in a day and have been classified as binge drinkers, I have nothing more to lose. I smoke and I am already condemned for it. I am lower than the experimental animals. Even if I stop I will be an 'ex-smoker' and treated like a drug addict so why bother? ASH and the NHS have ensured that I have no incentive at all to stop smoking. None.

I am Mengele's subject now.

Soon, you will be too, whatever you enjoy.