Title changed on 23.11.2015 to a less coarse version!
I have to face the fact that I am completely a fish out of water. Am I the only one who has been very uncomfortable since vapers started fighting for their right to vape?
Well I know Pat Nurse is flaming furious with us - and me - which I have found very hurtful. I have spent many, many blogs defending the right of smokers to smoke, and hating Tobacco Control, and even pointing out that people who defend vapers are STILL part of Tobacco Control. I was equally pissed off when one of the well known bloggers actually blogged that I "idolised" Clive Bates which shows how people DON'T read properly! Fortunately he apologised, and if Clive Bates reads my blogs, as he says he does "sometimes" he is under no illusion that I still can't forgive him for his part in the Smoking Ban, and promoting Anti Tobacco ideology as he does.
I have done this criticism for three years.
There has been twice in flow of readership of my posts where I could see that I had really offended someone. Once, was when I quoted Thoreau's 1848 essay "The only political duty of a man is to correct any injustice he directly causes and to deny his cooperation to other injustice.">> "If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.... ... If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too"
This implied vapers are scrambling on the heads of drowning smokers to save themselves. I even saw it discussed as an "offensive idea". That was December 2013.
September 2014 I wrote - "I believe we cannot get justice for vapers until smokers are treated with respect. We can only change vaper-hate by releasing society from their shriveled smoker-hate existence. Now is the time for all anti smoking activists to set themselves free from the dogma and creed they have placed in "Public Health". May enlightenment come upon you. Awaken! May the smoking bans be reviewed with moral honesty. The deceit you offered is now being used against vapers. It is YOUR faults! The REAL PROBLEM for everyone is the attitude to SMOKING."
Now it is nearly December 2015. Very little has changed.
Then, in July 2015, I posted Big Tobacco - friend or foe to vapers? about a device sent to me by a Tobacco Company to review on my YouTube Channel. I think that condemned me as a Big Tobacco Shill. I offended loads of people who, evidently, HATE and DETEST "Big Tobacco".
Why should vapers hate and detest Big Tobacco seeing we were recently their good customers? Well, they do, because they have been taught to by Tobacco Control. They are the mouthpieces now of a prohibition ideology that they have been brainwashed with. They have moved to vaping to get away from smoking because they believe that smoking is abhorrent.
And that is why I am a fish out of water, and why I am so uncomfortable with "harm reduction" (a Tobacco Control mantra) and the attitude of vapers to smokers (smelly, dirty, exuding SHS) (another Tobacco Control mantra) - I am UN-BRAINWASHED!
Until I was fifty, I lived in Africa. Everyone smoked. We smoked through pregnancy, outside, inside, at the surgery with the Doctors, in hospital, at parties, functions, cinemas, events, in front of children, near babies, in our own homes and in other people's homes. I can't remember anyone's kids with asthma, allergies, cot death. Some friends died in accidents, one of a brain tumour (but she didn't smoke) and my father-in-law died quite peacefully at 75 after a week in hospital with lung cancer, He drank heavily and smoked 50 plain cigarettes a DAY! Even for a smoker, that was considered "over the top". I have entered my seventies, healthy and well and facially not wrecked as we are told smoking ravages the face.
I have been one of the lucky ones - along with all the other lucky ones in my life who smoked. So I have a completely different attitude to smokers and smoking because I have not seen the horrors of it borne out in MY experience. Tobacco Control have spent vast sums on propagandising scientific "twististics" with one aim - to eradicate smoking. And we have, without question. repeated their mantras. They have been a very profitable industry unto themselves and their side-kick, Big Pharma.. Public Health simply pass on the propaganda.
Big Tobacco supplies a product that customers buy because they enjoy using it. I don't hate Big Tobacco - their advertising has been no more mendacious than Tobacco Control's propaganda. Likewise, some people who follow me, know that in 1981 I overcame my alcoholism with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous - alcohol is poison to me personally - yet I do not despise the companies who produce Vodka, or Whisky or any of the other alcoholic drinks that others enjoy.
Four years ago, BY COMPLETE ACCIDENT, without planning or forethought, I switched to vaping. I love vaping more than I loved smoking. When I was a smoker, I never shared my delight with others or reviewed products on YouTube. Smoking was just smoking. But vaping is altogether nicer - for me. Smoking was something everyone "did" but vaping is a complete "hobby". I do not expect others to have to like it as I do.
I don't mind if people smoke or not. I quite enjoy the smell. I have never been in anyone's house where the walls or ceiling were yellow, and no houses I lived in were like that. Pubs nowdays smell worse than they did when they were smokey - and they were certainly healthier then, as smoke is a bacterial fumigant.
I am one of the "ageing population" that are not dying - the generation of smokers.
The world is not a happier place by the application of prohibition - "smokefree" . Again, I say, the whole idea that it is perfectly acceptable to denormalise smokers, even though they are still about a quarter of the population, when we don't "allow" such persecution to other minority groups, is astonishing to me. If you had described this world as it is now, to me when I was twenty, I would have thought you were a liar or delusional. It's a horror story.
I have to face the flipping fact that I am not a vaper, nor am I a smoker. I'm just the odd (wo)man out that has substituted smoking with vaping and unless Tobacco Control is completely dismantled, I will be persecuted for the rest of my days.
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