Quote - It may now be apparent why there is such a general belief that smoking is dangerously harmful. There are 3 reasons. First, studies which in any other area of science would be rejected as second-rate and inferior but which support antismoking are accepted as first-rate. Second, studies which are conducted according to orthodox and rigorous design but which do not support the idea that smoking is harmful are not merely ignored but suppressed. Third, authorities who are duty-bound to represent the truth have failed to do so and have presented not just untruths but the reverse of the truth.
It may be argued that this is news about an old and settled subject. And who cares about smoking anyway. But smoking is really a secondary issue. The primary issue is the integrity of science. This has no use-by date. When the processes of science are misused, even if for what seems a good reason, science and its practitioners are alike degraded. End quote
Then, as I see that antismoking is so very tangled up with vaping and that the promotion of the antismoking ideology, is the complete and total enemy to vaping and vapers and how evil it has been in fracturing society, I was fascinated to read Clive Bates illuminating piece on how doctors have been bribed to promote antismoking and smoking cessation here in Britain. See Doctors, Smoking and Money
His post made me realise how naive I am, how little I truly know, how others like me, get caught up in evil, thinking it is good. The system of
Even if doctors were paid to promote vaping. I would object on moral grounds. Paying the medical profession to promote anything - anything at all - is a scandal.
This brings me to the next bit of information I found that semi answers my suspicion (and it's only a suspicion because I am not an academic with the power to prove anything) that constant nocebos/negative implications on cigarettes and anti smoking promotions, make people sick. It is really strange that the big smoking generation (mine) are the ones that are living the longest and are causing annoyances because we are not dying. This is supposedly because of better healthcare. Yet a huge proportion of us smoked/grew up in smoking homes. This seems to suggest there IS life after smoking. And something is not correct about things Tobacco Control terrify the younger generation with - like "There is no safe level of smoking" and "Second Hand Smoke Kills". We must be an embarrassment!
So here is an interesting piece of information from Denmark Frank Davis. Quote - It has already been shown very clearly that health paternalism does not work: Diseases and hospital admissions in Denmark have skyrocketed since politicians began to interfere in people’s lifestyle – with the smoking law in 2007 as the most significant intervention, and with the other health paternalism that has followed:
End quoteWonder what our British hospital admissions look like? Where can I find out?
Interesting bit in this paper here The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking
Quote And so appeared the results of the whimsically acronymed Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial or MRFIT, with its 12,886 American subjects. Similarly, in Europe 60,881 subjects in four countries took part in the WHO Collaborative Trial. In Sweden the Goteborg study had 30,022 subjects. These were enormously expensive, wide-spread and time-consuming experiments. In all, there were 6 such trials with a total of over a hundred thousand subjects each engaged for an average of 7.4 years, a grand total of nearly 800,000 subject-years. The results of all were uniform, forthright and unequivocal: giving up smoking, even when fortified by improved diet and exercise, produced no increase in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rate for heart disease or for cancer. A decade of expensive and protracted research had produced a quite unexpected result.
During this same period, in America, the Surgeon General had been issuing a number of publications about smoking and health. In 1982, before the final results of the Whitehall study had been published, the then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had praised the study for "pointing up the positive consequences of smoking in a positive manner". But now for nearly ten years he fell silent on the subject and there was no further mention of the Whitehall study nor of the other six studies, though thousands of pages on the dangers of smoking issued from his office.
What the MRFIT authors themselves had to say about their work was quite different:
"In conclusion we have shown that it is possible to apply an intensive long-term intervention program against three coronary risk factors with considerable success in terms of risk factor changes. The overall results do not show a beneficial effect on CHD or total mortality from this multifactor intervention." (Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial Research Group, 1982)
But in 1990 the Surgeon General published "The Health Benefits of Smoking Cessation" and at last the subject was addressed. The Whitehall study was rejected because of its "small size". A once praiseworthy study had become blameworthy. The MRFIT results were described, this time truthfully: "there was no difference in total mortality between the special intervention [quit] and usual care groups." This and the other studies were rejected because the combined change in other factors - eg diet and exercise - made it impossible to apportion benefit due to smoking alone. End quote
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