Do As You Are Told!

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

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.

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:

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?

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:

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:

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

Let’s not forget my personal favourite:

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

Then there’s this:

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)