The antismokers are cranking up the volume on their rantings lately. They have even pretended that someone's died from Electrofag, which is silly and easily shown to be silly.
Not as silly as telling smokers that we're all going to die of stomach and throat cancer and even if we give up we're still at the same high risk for 30 years. So there's really no point in giving up then, as many commenters on that story have noticed. Bit of an own-goal by an increasingly frantic Health Stasi.
Another thing more and more commenters are noticing is that while smoking rates have declined massively, cancer rates and respiratory illness rates have risen. More and more are now questioning how a reducing cause can have an increasing effect. Eventually someone will wonder what it is that is causing the increase in these ailments, rather than blindly accepting that it's all the result of smoking. A point that is made among many other interesting points by HandymanPhil.
Soon, tobacco products will have to be hidden from view so children will not see them on display and therefore will never buiy them. Then they'll be in plain packaging so children will not be attracted by pretty colours and will never buy them.
Eventually tobacco will only be available as an unappealing plastic bag of dried leaves from some seedy street-corner salesman, and that guarantees children will never buy them. Just as they never buy cannabis. Note the hysteria in the comments - these children gave no cannabis to any other child and for all we know, that packet contained a lump of dried chicken litter rather than anything smokeable, and yet there are terrified adults demanding that police intervention is not enough. The deviants must be deleted from the school. Expunge the heretics!
They are eight years old. They are not hardened drug runners. They are kids with a bit of contraband and in a few years, that contraband will be tobacco. Or maybe a lump of dried chicken litter pretending to be tobacco. Being Cheeeldren won't save them this time. The Offended Mob is upon them. Ah well, at least they are learning about modern life early.
Those kids might think they are in trouble now, but all they had was cannabis. Imagine if they'd had a pack of rolling baccy! They'd be off to the detention room with the closing-in walls and the spikes.
Childen will try harder to get something they're not allowed to have. There were very few smoking children when I was little but there were, at that time, no age restrictions on cigarettes. I could, as a small child, go to the corner shop, pick up a pack for my father and buy sweets with the change. Cigarettes held no interest because there was nothing mysterious or rebellious about them. We could even buy sweets shaped like them.
The more mysterious tobacco becomes, the more kids will want to know about it and the more they will want to try it. No wonder the tobacco companies are silent in the face of all these restrictions. They must laugh themselves to sleep every night.
The government are promoting smoking harder than any tobacco company's advertising department ever could, and they are doing it for free.
And they are too stupid to realise it.
12 comments:
I noticed yesterday that one Council has now took it upon itself to make chippies hide the salt.
They will not be happy until everyone is as miserable as sin.
How do you manafe to be so coherent at these ungodly hours, Leggy?
I have to get up at 4 every morning, and I can barely see until the caffeine bomb kicks in, and when I do, I find you've written another piece of brilliance!
Keep 'em coming, mate. You are my first point of contact with the outside world every day, and your musings always bolster my cynicism before I check out the news headlines.
Gawd bless ya!
Interesting title this time, was opposite from what I thought when I first saw the title then read the article.
State Pushers, I thought meant Pushers of the State, as in someone who pushes the ideals of the state upon the people.
You mean of course Pushers, of tobacco, cannibis, salt, anything else that certain pharisees (the biggest sin in the Bible btw was named by Jesus as being a pharisee, when he said those sins of the harlots are easier to forgive and forget and do less damange to others and would therefore have them be in heaven before the greater sins of the pharisees which do nothing but end up with people hanging dead on the cross from all their hypocritical bad-mouthing of others - though I digress) - pushers who are pushers not knowing they are pushing the stuff, but by making everything look and sound so exotic and forbidden of course that then everyone will go out and want it.
Or else, maybe that is pushing the state ideology these days too, that of the pharisees, the ones God said would all burn in hell faster than anyone else in this world, everyone else being at least redeemable and sorry for their sins at some point, the pharisees just going on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever .....
"They are kids with a bit of contraband and in a few years, that contraband will be tobacco."
Or salt!
I'm going to stockpile those little bags they give you in McDonalds. Come the day, I'll be dealin'. Then I'll move up to distribution. I'll be the salt equivalent of Tony Montoya!
Some famous chef was extolling the virtues of salt this morning on his usual cookery slot during breakfast tv. He said that we needed it in our food and if we cut it out altogether, we'd get leg cramps etc. and recommended sea or rock salt as it has a stronger taste. Then the programme presenter agreed with him!
I almost fell off my chair in shock!
I knew that life was taking a sinister turn when the little bags of salt began disappearing from plain crisp packets.
I have never smoked; never felt the desire to smoke, and do not understand why anyone would want to smoke (and the same is true for other drugs - alcohol excepted. I do not like the smell of tobacco smoke; this, of course, clashed with my liking of a pint - I could not go down the pub without needing a shower afterwards.
That said, though I liked the benefit of the ban of indoor smoking, it does make me very uncomfortable that those who DO like to smoke are made to be such pariahs. I have no objection to what anyone wants to put into their bodies, so long as they do not impinge too heavily on my own wants.
However, Nanny knows best; those irksome little toads lurking in the corridors of power do seem to have some internal competition about who can come up with the most puerile intervention with us lowly citizens.
RP
I read the story about the school children and the suspicious plastic packets. What amused me was the statement that the whole might of the teaching estabishment and the police force could not get the children to say how they came by the packets 'because they kept blaming each other'. Blaming each other for what? Or are the police keeping that bit secret?
Anyway, I had a giggle leaving a comment just to annoy the hysterical parents and commenters. I expect lots of red arrows.
You are so right about the publicity bit. "There is no such thing as bad publicity".
Oh...here is another thing that I have just spotted.
The comments were going along nicely with 3 following each other at 7.24, 7.26 and 7.42 am, and then suddenly stopped and have not resumed since. Very odd.
Thanks to you for the info LegIron, I purchased an njoy ecig and very much enjoying the puffing pleasure of a zero nic menthol flavour.
I can't remember the site but it had a FAQ on ecigs and said that if you were a non-smoker you don't need an ecig.
Well, as a former smoker that had given up through choice ages ago I disagreed - I love smoking, I love the whole process of inhaling flavours and blowing out smoke and enjoying the associated pint, chat and good company.
The ecig enabled me to recapture all the pleasures and I am pleased to say that when I have spoken to pub landlords before engaging the ecig, all of them have said "no problem".
The only problem I have seen are the stupid bastards that have seen my ecig in action and think the pub landlord has allowed smoking in pubs!
Might try and find one looking like a cantelope melon rather than a real cigarette.
...cantaloupe...(sorry)
Beware of Geeks - If you want an Electrofag that looks nothing like a cigarette, try this one.
It looks exactly like the lighter I use for lighting my pipe, so it looks like you're inhaling the lighter gas.
If any idiot tries to copy you, they won't be actually breaking the law but they won't do it again!
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