Beyond reason - Smoking bans are Vaping bans

The anti smoking movement has constructed a whole "Industry" based on smokers and smoking What they promote is now beyond reason. Somehow, thinking people, need to be able to protest the litany that has become lodged in the public mind, that using cigarettes or cigarette substitutes is a terrible, unacceptable behaviour.

Take ASH UK, (Action on Smoking and Health in the UK). ASH was established in the 1970's by the Royal College of Physicians.  ASH says it has a dual focus - (I have made bold two points)
Information and networking: To develop opinion and awareness about the “tobacco epidemic” Advocacy and campaigning: To press for policy measures that will reduce the burden of addiction, disease and premature death attributable to tobacco.

They have done this for almost 45 years.

Well, the thrusts change - first, ASH promoted awareness of the danger of smoking to the personal self, then the dangers of second hand smoke to everyone else.They have striven to reduce the burden of addiction by banging on about the "burden" of smoking, so that even smokers believe it, never addressing the great pleasure smoking gives. It was ASH that manipulated the Government, at the last minute, to introduce the total smoking ban that has been so detrimental to society in the UK. It's aim since 2008 is to have Plain Packaging in law. Its feeding tube to Government is the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health.

Smokefree (the anti smoking arm of The National Health Service) similarly releases anti-smoking speak and works towards a "smokefree" world. It offers help for smokers in the form of clinics and NRT therapies. It re-enforces the attitudes of the industry into the mind of the people. It develops opinion.

All sanity leaving, anti tobacco now promotes no smoking in parks or open spaces. Smoking mustn't be seen as any kind of thing that people do.

"Smokefree" has come to hospitals, old age homes, your own home, prisons, psychiatric units, reform schools, and even the army - where it is truly inappropriate and should have no moral place. 

Society has been assisted to develop (the) opinion that nicotine is a terrifying addictive carcinogen.

All sections of the anti smoking industries need smoking to be de-normalised good and proper. Profitable lobby groups linked to "medicine" or "government" will develop (that) opinion . They will put down anyone who points out any suspicions about the motives for the existence of tobacco control, or complains about legislative intrusions into peoples lifestyles, or the adverse effects of the smoking bans on society and the economy that have occurred in the UK, or who questions the very shaky science of SHS. 

They are already putting down vapers.

There appear to be small cracks in the facade of the anti smoking industry. There are disagreements between the "quit or die" crowd and the "harm reduction crowd". Vapers are seemingly being favoured by the latter.

Both those crowds are anti smoking. They are the ones who have responsibility for the situation as it stands now. They are the ones who have promoted ideas to us via the press, medicine and government and  have made sure that ordinary people, who didn't really give a damn once, will by now have developed (the) opinion that those who smoke are suffering  the burden of addiction and that smoking is a terrible curse to everyone in our modern age of science. 

The smoking bans are a vaper's problem. The smoking bans are in place because of the work of the anti tobacco industry. 
 
I'm watching how vaping is following along behind the smokers. "Vapefree" has come to to hospitals, old age homes, your own home, prisons, psychiatric units, reform schools, and even the army - where it is truly inappropriate and should have no moral place. And now, suggested in Scotland, vaping to be banned in your personal car!

Nicotine is a devilish addiction, it seems, to be banned at all costs.

Smoking is not going to go away even if it were banned outright. And it probably never will be, being a profitable tax source for every government, and, if banned, to a black market. Smoking has been an easy target to tap profits from because it was so common to everyone. SHS fear has been the most easy to promote(aka to develop opinion) in because it pollutes the air and everyone can object to that - especially the moral middle classes that have been so easy to brainwash.

Now vaping, like a genie let out of the bottle that cannot be stuffed back in, will be truly difficult to police.  Vaping is NOT like smoking. Vaping is also here to stay. A vaper's problem is not that they have the moral high ground because vaping is "better" than smoking, their problem is the smoking ban. To others, vapers are smokers, first and foremost, who are addicted to a drug. Anti tobacco wishes to reduce the burden of our addiction. And ordinary people have been so turned against smoking by social engineering, that they simply see us as smokers.

It is a deeply sad if not an insane situation that society "accepts", religious freedom, dangerous sports, LGBT freedom, legal highs, marijuana in various areas, alcohol, porn, sex workers, movie violence, scorns racism, upholds peoples rights for all kinds of minority groups in all sorts of situations, yet smokers, have had no voice having been strangled into silence by law and shame.

The smoking ban should be revised in our Parliament to give smokers their dignity back. And to show the rest of the world that wrongs pushed onto citizens by anti smoking lobby groups can be put RIGHT. Once that happens, vapers will find themselves free of the insanity too. And our world will be a better one.

Well that's me done.

And NO - I have had no funding from any tobacco group!

What Vaping made me learn

I smoked for 50 years. In 2009 I bought one of the very primitive electronic cigarette devices of the time to take away on holiday where smoking was banned.  It was a dreadful thing, giving only a headache and no satisfaction. I returned to smoking after the first day, shivering out in the freezing December weather, next to the rubbish bins out back, with the other smokers.

2009 was only two years on from the indoor smoking ban in the UK. At that time, it was legal to smoke in places that was your "home" away-from-home even if it was a designated hotel room, a mental health ward, a prison, an old age home. Even so, banning a legal activity on private property, overriding ownership, seemed an illegal action to me. Unlawful. Since then, prohibition has got worse. No smoker escapes the persecution.

So my attempt to vape in 2009 was a disaster. I became a smoker more determined to continue smoking in the face of every unlawful action against me. I accepted that using an electronic cigarette was something I would never do.

I became a VERY angry smoker. The anti tobacco groups were becoming more and more vindictive. The immorality of what they promote was seared into my mind when I watched a loved one in psychosis, banned from smoking in a mental health ward - her "home" and old people dying outside in the cold whilst having to smoke there. Something loving disappeared from the world when prohibition entered it.

So I learned from my own smoking life experiences, that anti tobacco ideology, is as immoral and vicious as any promoted in History for the suppression of humans. I suspected that what society was told about smoking, was not actually true, but lies.

I determined to smoke till I died. Smoking was such a pleasure. I loved it. And furthermore, in my own life, I knew of no one who had died from "smoking related" illnesses. And I was well and healthy, myself.

In 2011, we went away again. and I have told this story before - I bought a device, which I had carefully researched on the Internet. This time, everything about it worked for me. It looked good, it worked well, and it was SATISFYING! At first I dual used. But gradually, I found I somewhat preferred vaping (new word for me in those days) to actually smoking. I liked the fact I could "smoke" inside. I especially liked that!

I learned that "smoking" inside a room with friends and family, the comradie of NOT having to go outside in the cold drizzly weather, was something I had been starved of by law.  The pleasure of smoking, the friendship, the old delight was recaptured for me.

Vaping, supplanted smoking in my life. This old determined smoker, without huge effort, switched her brand. To me it seemed miraculous.  I told others about it on a YouTube Channel. Those videos show another thing I learned.

I see how quickly the technology has changed. It does so almost weekly. It gets better and better.

So, because of my own miracle, I started this blog to share my delight. But it wasn't to be for long. At the back end of 2012, nasty rumours started to appear in the press. Anti smokers were becoming anti-vaping. My angry smoker came to the fore because, to me, the ideology is the problem. Vaper's problems stem from the anti smoking ideology.  I blogged my feelings.

I have learned that what we are told about smoking and vaping, is not actually true.

I learned this because I see how the ideology is working out against vaping. Our anti smoking health experts have absolutely no shame. If they can behave like this about vaping, they have done the same against smokers - you can bet on it.

I am very wary of "harm reduction" scientists too. They appear to be on our side. They are part of the big ideology. We need to be "saved" for our own good.  I believe we need to be "saved" for the  benefit of the whole group of anti smoking industries and their charitable and medical corollaries for THEIR own good - jobs, funding, futures.

How public health is treating vaping has opened my eyes to a lot of other stuff too. I have become sensitive to anti vaping spin. I realise that most of everything we read and hear in the media about any topic, here in the UK, is an illusion. What is offered to us, has someone's ideology attached to it.

The banning of vaping indoors is on the way. The untruths and lies are being promoted to make sure that society will conform.

My vaping has confirmed to me that the anti smoking industries, collectively, are wicked. 

Vaping is not smoking

Vaping is not smoking. It really isn't.

Smokers who try vaping and are displeased with it, know that.

Smoking is not vaping.

Vapers who have substituted smoking by vaping, trying smoking again and are displeased with it, know it.

There are some undeniable facts about smoking and vaping.

Smoking and vaping as ways to enjoy nicotine, do not satisfy everyone.

Smokers have become very anti vapers and vapers, anti smokers.

It's like the chicken and the egg - which came first?

My own sister, who is a smoker, is strangely aggressive to me about my vaping. She did try vaping but "hates" it.  That's fine by me - it's her choice. But I sense she is cross with me because I no longer smoke. It's as if I have become the traitor!  It's extremely strange, really it is....and if you follow my blog, you know I have always defended  smokers.

If there had been no Tobacco Control Industry dividing society into hate factions with nasty mantras like smoking kills, complete myths like smokers lungs are black, monstrous lies like Second Hand Smoke is deadly, and introducing prohibition, would smokers smoke and vapers vape in perfect harmony?

Or not?

Vaping - down memory lane - before the prohibitionist packs

I stopped smoking in September, or was it October 2011? I accidentally started a You Tube Channel called "Vaping for the Over Sixties". I started this blog six months into vaping.At first it was fun - more light hearted than grim.

2012

Do you remember Steeljan? Vaping Trolls

After I did a radio interview at Vapersplace - Sobranies for Kev at vapersplace

And Triple Coils with Scott Bonner Cripes! Triple coils

 

My kind of science! - I don't need science - the cat tells me

Vaping was fun - lighthearted - even in the loo! Shriek!

But sometimes it was more serious.

Alienating vapers - We ARE smokers!

Alienating smokers - My world of vaping is not like my world of smoking - uh uh

Here are my blog stats six months in  - Thank you Vapers

And I thought THAT was quite impressive. I'm obviously easy to please!

I've always done my own thing. I am not affiliated to anyone, and I have no reputation to defend. I have no career that's threatened. I'm free. I love it when lots of people read my posts and talk to me - and often they do. It makes me feel it's been a worthwhile three years. 

I'm not trying to get noticed by important people. 

I naively feel that people are good - and nice. I like people. Except when they run in packs,  In vaping and smoking circles I am finding there are packs - people running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Or snarling at each other. In-circles politics, reputation protecting. Or smokers against vapers or the other way around. 

I don't like "Government" because of the packs. Packs bully, snap and threaten. They are empowered by the subservient mentality of their members. They self perpetuate. Tobacco Control is a pack. Public Health has become a pack.

We vapers and smokers have only one force implacably against us - prohibition by the dominant packs. I don't know what we can do about it - it's some kind of modern mental illness inherent in modern packs who are rewarded by their members with prestige, degrees and funding. 

It's grim.

Dodgy science unpicked for vapers but smokers deserve it too.

I have been taking a rest. But I have been watching the behaviour of the idiots, the fundamentalists and the sages.

I am an ordinary person. What more can we do, but watch? Ordinary people - not criminals - smokers like I used to be, have no academic power, no political power, no financial power. Everything a smoker does is legislated for in some way.

No group in the West, have been treated in such a way for an activity that is legal.

I point out that everything vapers are enduring in the pogrom against us, directly stems from the smoking ban.  The motive for the smoking ban should be reassessed. It was not about health - not remotely. To get it accepted, the fundamentalist anti smoking groups seeded the minds of smokers and non-smokers alike with fear - and the science behind their facts, is as dodgy as it is about vaping.

Smoking is a normal occupation to millions of people who choose to smoke. Rates of smoking were already dropping as people, without any intimidation by regulation, were giving it up out of their own choice. I believe technology would have produced an electronic cigarette because technology is inclined to do that kind of thing. Hon Lik was not motivated to make an electronic cigarette by the smoking ban, but by wishing for something safer than smoking!

Enter the prohibitionists! And real misery. Best if they had left well alone.

I WAS a smoker, and the pain of the anti smoking persecution has not left me. There are millions of voiceless people out there, just like me! The total smoking ban that was, to our utter disbelief, passed by an unwitting UK Parliament in 2007, was not in OUR name. It was the result of heavy lobbying by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) which is an industry set up to further the anti smoking ideology and guarantee their own jobs from (mostly) Government Funding - aka a fake charity.

Fake Charities are Britain's shame! 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/salarysurvey/table/0,12406,1042677,00.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2835947/The-Great-British-rake-really-happens-billions-donate-charity-Fat-cat-pay-appalling-waste-hidden-agendas.html#ixzz3JEe5pWq7
http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/where-the-workfare-money-goes-charity-rich-list-released/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2550648/Fury-234-000-salary-boss-Save-Children-Charity-chiefs-huge-wages-reined-say-MPs.html


Clive Bates has just published another brilliant post. It's a pity smokers have no Clive Bates!

I wish someone would question the dodgy science about Second Hand Smoke too - in defence of smokers and the warped fracturing of society that THAT dodgy science has caused.The anti smoking ideology and the massive world-wide industry it has now become, needs to be unpicked piece by piece on the basis of the faulty science it has promoted.

Some strange societal mutations have been spawned from it. Only smokers are assumed to develop lung cancer. So that if you are a non smoker, you miss out on early diagnosis. The idea that no young people get lung cancer except smokers is an illusion created by Anti Smoking Ideology.

The idea that at age eighty-something, you die from old age, but if you were or happen still to be, a smoker, you die from a smoking related illness, is another unpickable piece of science. Strangely illogical don't you think?

I enjoy Clive Bates posts on behalf of my vaping-self. But my used-to-be-a-smoker-self sees them as an exposure of how corrupt all the Anti Smoking Industries are. If they are doing this to vapers, one can assume the same was/is done to smokers. They have made an anal, terrified and abstinent society on purpose by engineering it so. The world is not better for it!

Growing wise to corruption

This post is the result of my last post Tobacco Control in action - harming the people 

It is about my illumination into the world of corruption. It is about my illumination into the world of manipulation of the people by those who have money and power. It is my illumination that ordinary people, even in our democratic systems worldwide, have absolutely no way to change anything because democracy has been soiled by the world of corruption. 

I have blogged often that the trouble for vapers is caused by the way the many tobacco control industries have purposefully engineered society to hate smokers. There are not words enough to describe the fracturing of society that has followed. In the UK here, one simple example of unfortunate outcomes, are the demise of Pubs due to the smoking ban and now the fact that there are thousands of older people who need  costly "loneliness caring" where once they would have been socially nurtured by going down to the Pub.

As I write this, I am listening to the TV on how the culture in the UK "needs to be changed" in its attitude to drinking. Drinking is costing too much. Prevention is better than cure, they say. I point out street drinking might have got worse since the smoking ban since people are out in the streets.

When do we stop winging about the money it costs when we do things to ourselves? Do we ban sports? Do we tell future knee/hip replacement applicants that they did it to themselves by running too much? Do we ban bell ringing, dancing, headphones, motorbikes, bicycles, gardening, DIY? Or any other activity that produces injuries we did to ourselves that cost?

COST. Money. Money. It makes the world go around. I don't have the solution, but it truly is an evil thing. I am no righteous person. I see how it affects one aspect of my own life. I do social networking for tourism to the village I live in. It used to be a paid job. I did it well. But a few years ago, the funding ran dry. I still do the same job (actually the work load has increased because I also work on the website too) but because there is absolutely no reward and I am already a busy person, I do the job very badly - when my guilty conscience makes me uncomfortable! I have grown to hate it. 

So that gets me to Clive Bates Doctors, Smoking and Money.

I have slept on the illumination that, in the UK, doctors who work for the National Health Service (NHS) are PAID to prescribe to their patients. I have looked up how very beneficial my husband has been to our local surgery in earning them money. Overnight several ideas have come to me.

The first is that this system is open to profound corruption.

What a doctor may prescribe is tightly controlled by NICE

How incorruptible is NICE?

NHS doctors are paid to promote treatment.

Illness is a doctor's best friend - every referral/drug prescription gains more cash.

Collecting points is financially beneficial to surgeries, yet might not be in the interests of patients.

How many referrals for further treatment/diagnosis are unnecessary? 

Is data gathered from points registration by surgeries  a true reflection of national health?

Points for the surgeries might feed points for specialists, hospitals, and other services   a sort of points "layer cake"  - everyone conforms at an enormous cost, for simply doing their jobs which are already salaried.

I think the points system is a  perfectly understandable effort to make doctors tow the line and provide proper healthcare to the people. But the discovery of it for me, has been like exposing the Wizard in OZ

So doctors in the UK that work for the NHS, are paid extra if they do their jobs as prescribed. I am sure that being a conforming doctor is worth the effort, and might be done better through it. I know not being paid for all the effort of social networking I do, not for me, but for something else,  has made me a sloppy worker who couldn't give a damn!

But the biggest danger in the practise of paying doctors to conform, reach targets etc is that it makes doctors into robots of the prevailing political system.

Yesterday I wrote Quote - The system of bribing paying doctors to induce fear into people who smoke is evil and it is the way society has been molded into a fearful, compliant, hypochondriac mass. It soils the government, the medical profession, any science that might be extrapolated from data collected from this "points" system, the drug companies and all the many tobacco control industries promoting antismoking that are complicit. It is an immoral use of power. This is politics at it's worst.

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.End quote

Today, that seems a bit over the top. Yet, yet....something inside of me, my moral compass, is greatly uncomfortable. Corruption is so EASY with money and power.

All that ordinary people, like me, have to fight it with, are words.

Tobacco Control in action - harming the people

This post is the combination of three thoughts that exposed themselves to me whilst reading other people's posts. The first post/paper I  read was  The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking. (see more below) . The final conclusion hit me as being pertinent to what is happening in the Vaping world.

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 bribing paying doctors to induce fear into people who smoke is evil and it is the way society has been molded into a fearful, compliant, hypochondriac mass. It soils the government, the medical profession, any science that might be extrapolated from data collected from this "points" system, the drug companies and all the many tobacco control industries promoting antismoking that are complicit. It is an immoral use of power. This is politics at it's worst.

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 quote

Wonder 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