Scaremongering can be fun.

Hello, antismokers, it's playtime again.

While you sip your half-litre cappuccinos, remember that caffeine is a psychoactive drug and you are addicted. Because you are a helpless addict, you must be controlled for your own good, because just five cups a day will make the voices in your heads louder.

It's more effective than LSD and twice as addictive. Stock up on espresso now, and plant your own beans. The anticoffee days are dawning. You need your coffee, you helpless addicts, even if you know it will make you fit only for a rubber room. I hope you have medical insurance because we smokers aren't going to pay for your containment from our taxes.

Five cups eh? I really have to give that a try.

Oh, and while you fear the terrible cancer-causing meat, the bloating of the burgers, the artery-clogging of the chips and the trouser-soiling wrath of the beansprout, there is one thing left you can eat.

Tuck in. You know it's good for you.

You don't have to worry about cucumbers. Apparently they're on their way back to their home planet. The rest of your food will kill you before they return with their radish reinforcements and the courgette cavalry.


Will they fall for it? Well, I have spent a couple of hours this evening reading the comments on this article (found through Jredheadgirl) and yes, they will believe it. Look at their sincerely held beliefs in those comments. These are people who will believe absolutely anything and to hell with any logic or evidence.

Frank Davies and the now-retired-from-blogging Pat Nurse suggest direct action. Break the law so often it becomes unenforceable. Seems to be working with those super-injunctions, in fact as the Brian Rix of the football world has discovered, getting the injunction has only made his life into a tabloid-reported bedroom farce. Sympathy? Sorry, ran right out of that, one smoking ban ago.

I can see how making the law unenforceable would work, but I prefer a different path. A much more cruel and evil path, and one that is amusingly fully within the law. Look through a few of those frustrated gas-chamber-operator comments and see what they truly believe.

That's right. They genuinely believe that my smoking will kill them.

They genuinely believe that second hand smoke is more dangerous than active smoking. They are ripe for third, fourth, fifth and more hands of smoke and every one more deadly than the last. Homeopathic smoke will kill them instantly.

So I'm going to convince them it's true. Not from here, but face to face in the real world, one by one. I'll put the fear of smoke into them until they are calling for the cattle trucks and the gas chambers. Except they can't burn us because that will release all the smoke in us. They can't bury us because that will contaminate the land. They can't shoot or stab us because the smoke is released with the blood. They have built us into monsters and I will be what they want.

Blood transfusion? Are you sure it didn't come from a smoker? Really, really sure? You're certain it wasn't me, lying to the nurse in the donation clinic? Organ donation? Where did that come from? Only smokers die, remember. The nicotine in those things will make you wake up addicted, you know. Then your bits will all go lumpy and your teeth will fall out.

Best avoid vitamin B3, antismokers. Look it up. Look at the name. There is no such thing as vitamin B3, it is a nicotine derivative sold as a vitamin by Big Tobacco to get you hooked. Stay well away from it and from anything containing it. Eradicate it from your diet, along with the other fake vitamins I'll tell you about when we meet.

You'll meet me one day, antismokers. On the bus or on the train, in the departure lounge, on the street. I'll find you. Even in places where smoking is banned, the Electrosmokers will make you clear because you won't be able to help fake-coughing and hand-waving at the steam, and possibly even shouting them down. I won't be Electrosmoking.

I'll appear sympathetic and agree with you, then share my 'knowledge' of what you have actually just inhaled and how long it will take to kill you. I will be earnest and serious and advise you on what to do to avoid an agonising and lingering death. And you will do it, and it will make no difference. Your conditioned fear runs too deep for the rituals I will suggest to have any effect. You will believe you are going to die.

As for your conditioned children, well you conditioned them. I will use them against you. Their innocent terror will tear your heart and the only way to stop it is to tell them the truth, assuming you even remember what that word means. Conscience? Pffft. They will grow up to be as vicious and spiteful as their parents, so sod them. There will be those who will be shocked, who will say 'You can't scare children like that' and I will say 'Why not? Why would I care about a society that has excluded me?' I'm dehumanised, remember. Those children are not even the same species any more. They are the future, and that future looks horrible.

It's not just going to be about smoking either. I will explain the chemical mix in that cardboard cup of coffee you're drinking and what the plasticisers in your bottle of water will do to your gender. I will detail the changes in your brain caused by your phone and your iPod and your laptop. I will explain subliminal imagery on TV and I will turn every outbreak of infection into a biological attack aimed at you personally. Is any of it true? I don't care. It will be plausible and that's enough.

Every new ban, every new restriction, every new scare story and every new nannying rule will be one more swing in the playground for me. I'm going to encourage those who invent these insanities to higher and higher levels and you antismokers will be with me all the way. You can't get out now. The only way out is to admit what you have been and you cannot do it. You cannot face yourselves. All you have is spite and you are addicted.

No matter how high the madness roller coaster goes, you can't get off.

Eventually the madness will be too much for the general population and they will revolt, but by then they'll have seen you. You, not me. Like those Righteous, I will operate in the background. The drones will spread my lies alongside their own. They will be the ones picketing coffee shops and slapping bottled water off the supermarket shelves. They will be the ones taking plastic yoghourt pots away from children in schools. I'll be nothing more than the voice in their head after their fifth coffee. When it all goes pop, I'll be MacCavity. That's when the Righteous drones will finally see how few they really are.

Years ago I played around with something called 'cold reading'. One of the tricks fake-psychics use. I never pretended to contact the dead but it has many other uses if you want to spook the crap out of someone for fun. If I say so myself, I was fairly proficient at it, although anyone who knew me soon cottoned on to what I was up to so it worked best with strangers.

Who's the stranger on your train tomorrow, antismokers?

Who's that handling all the fruit on the display? Who's picking up items from the shelf and putting them down again? Who touched that door handle or that shopping trolley before you? Dare you accept that change? You don't know where it's been. Who pressed the buttons on the credit card machine or cashpoint, and which ones did they press? Remember, the more dilute the smoke, the more deadly it is. You were safer in those smoky bars than you can be anywhere now. Too late, you've banned them. Every damned one. Now you don't know where the smokers are. Hey, if we can't be in the pub any more, we have to amuse ourselves in other ways.

No mercy, no conscience, no compromise. As Frank quoted in that article, the only way to fight them is to be like them.

Or to be worse.