Do As You Are Told!

Unsurprisingly, there’s another ‘campaign’ about second hand smoking.

Campaign launched about dangers of children’s exposure to second-hand smoke

I thought that this particular part of the anti-smoker arsenal had long since been over utilised, it turns out I was mistaken.

Y’see, in April this year one particular anti-smoking group kicked the bucket. It became an ex-anti-smoking group. Most folk I know celebrated the demise of Healthier Futures, which followed on from the demise of Smokefree South West – both groups tried a last ditch re-brand in order to stay current with “public health epidemics” – with Fresh NE taking ownership of the Healthier Futures IP.

Now it seems that Fresh are intent on swinging a club towards taking control of what you do in your own home.

About 85% of secondhand smoke is invisible and odourless but many people are not aware that steps like opening a window, smoking by the back door or smoking in another room does little to protect children and other non-smoking adults.

That’s a large percentage of the “secondhand smoke” to worry about isn’t it? So only 15% of the smoke from a lit cigarette or an exhale is actually visible? I call bollocks on that. In fact, I can go one better than that (h/t Bill Gibson for reminding me of these):

Taken from this study:

Our results indicate no association between childhood exposure to ETS and lung cancer risk. We did find weak evidence of a dose-response relationship between risk of lung cancer and exposure to spousal and workplace ETS. There was no detectable risk after cessation of exposure.

A sample of 650 lung cancer patients, and 1542 control subjects up to 74 years old interviewed about Environmental Tobacco Smoke (Second-Hand Smoke for you public health types) who had not smoked more than 400 cigarettes in their respective lifetime. The result?

ETS exposure during childhood was not associated with an increased risk of lung cancer

Well I never!

Further to that, in a submission to the Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS) in the US, there is this gem to admire. Specifically the following table:

Table 1 of the report Toxic Toxicology – Littlewood & Fennell

To reach the lower threshold for each of the listed components, a vast quantity of cigarettes would be necessary. So much for the “harms of secondhand smoke”.

Which, Fresh try to make sound worse than it is by:

“However, many smokers think they’re already doing enough by opening a window or smoking the back door, without realising how poisonous secondhand smoke spreads around the house and lingers long after you can see it or smell it.”

Ah, creeping close to the thirdhand smoke bollocks, as I’ve written before is utter tripe. So now we have another campaign from the useless bed wetters, using the usual imagery natch, to get folk to stop smoking in their own home.

https://twitter.com/FreshSmokeFree/status/876720930608869376

Yep, an image of a kid wearing a t-shirt with “smoke blackened lungs” meant to be “hard hitting”. Complete with hysterical nonsense such as:

Every time you smoke, you breathe out secondhand smoke. The particles are so small 85% of them are invisible and odourless.

Oh no! Particles! Never mind the particles from normal, everyday pollution eh?

Let’s not forget my personal favourite:

The harmful chemicals creep from room to room, waiting for your child to breathe them in.

Those nasty chemicals eh? How dare they creep from room to room!

Then there’s this:

If you can’t get outside and aren’t ready to quit, could you go longer between cigarettes until you next go out? You could try nicotine spray, gum, patches or lozenges to get you through? Or if it helps keep your home smokefree, evidence suggests e-cigarettes are 95% safer with no evidence of harm to bystanders.

Look, just fuck off. It isn’t up to you what folk do in their homes. There’s scant evidence on the supposed harms of cigarette smoke already, and if folk don’t want to stop smoking then frankly, there is absolutely fuck all you can say that will encourage them to do so.

Here’s hoping that now Fresh have the Healthier Futures IP, they’ll quickly follow them into oblivion thereby freeing up more cash for useful things.

I think what we have here is a cross between The Greedy and The Idealists. With a healthy dash of The Controllers thrown in for good measure. Not exactly a winning combination.

Smokefree homes my arse. Just leave us alone!

(image credit alice-photo/shutterstock.com)

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17 thoughts on “Do As You Are Told!

  1. It is indeed disgusting that anti-smoker scum exploit children and emotional responses to them and they should be called out on it each and every time. There is as much evidence that SHS is beneficial to health of children (likely related to hormesis).
    You will find some of this evidence in my response to the Scottish proposal to ban smoking in cars a few years back(which was ignored);
    https://kin-free.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/public-consultation-scottish-parliament_31.html

  2. Heh, if you think THAT is extreme, remember that California is always ahead of the curve. Check this from the Mayor of Laguna, California just as they’re passing their most recent toughening (the sixth such) of their city’s antismoking law:

    http://www.ocregister.com/2017/05/09/laguna-beach-becomes-first-city-in-orange-county-to-ban-smoking-in-town/

    “Despite the proposed ban, Mayor Toni Iseman still worries about smoke that comes from inside homes — a complaint she’s heard often from residents.”

    I’d suggest Googling and listening to Phil Och’s 1960s’ era gem: “Knock On The Door”

    – MJM, who remembers the Philadelphia bar owners and NJ Casino execs laughing in his face and saying “Mike, believe me, they’ll NEVER start banning smoking HERE!” ::sigh::

    1. Ah yes, California. The home of the deluded and the crazed. I’m not at all surprised that CA gets there first.

  3. And if you want to see the sort of pseudo-science they’ll use against vaping in people’s homes, read this brief excerpt from the “Of Vapors And Vapers” section of TobakkoNacht — The Antismoking Endgame: http://www.tobakkonacht.com/selections.html

    Remember: Antivapers are simply Antismokers dressed up in new clothes. Same tricks. Same lies. Same money.

    – MJM

    1. I have TobakkoNacht Michael 🙂

      It should be mandatory reading for any smoker/vaper.

      It might have taken me a while to realise this – Antivapers are simply Antismokers dressed up in new clothes. Same tricks. Same lies. Same money. – now I do, I wonder how I ever missed it before.

  4. That chart was part of a larger report prepared by my friend Anne Fennell of Littlewood & Fennell. Just believe in giving credit.

    1. Apologies, I did link directly to the report itself in the preamble prior to the chart image. I have since added a caption detailing where the chart came from.

  5. Anybody with decent technical professional knowledge who has examined the literature (epidemiology and physics/chemistry of ETS) can see that concentrations of potentially toxic components in ETS (even indoors) are far below danger thresholds and thus are not dangerous to healthy humans (including children). The claim of grave danger ETS belongs to the realm of medieval witchcraft, not of science. However, this danger is taken as a fact by most medics and (by consequence) has become so deeply ingrained in society that any decent reasonable conversation on it is practically impossible. Evidently, fear to ETS is a fundamental element behind the global authoritarian smoking regulation. Future historians will be very amused by the persistence of this scientific fraud during the late XX and early XXI centuries.

    1. That’s just it, most anti-smokers don’t have any decent level of technical professional knowledge. All they have is an irreverent hatred of smokers & smoking (some will claim not to, but we know that’s not true; why else would they support such blatant fuckwittery?). Thanks to soundbites, and decades of social engineering, the damage has been irreparably done.

    2. Excellent comment. Too bad the mainstream media is ignorant of the facts or knowingly ignores them.

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