Pro-Ban Supporters Ban Anti-Ban Supporters

An anti-ban conference was set to be held in the European Parliament conference. Even before the conference was held the pro-banners were worried that anti-banners would prevent their conference from being held, as this slightly paranoid video below, which I found on Pro-Choice doctor, shows.

Or maybe not so paranoid. The conference was banned, and instead of being ashamed of hiding the fact that they were obstructing free speech the European Public Health Alliance actually boasted about it.

I don’t pretend to know either way whether passive smoking can seriously damage health, although I was surprised once to hear the person who discovered the link between lung cancer and smoking, Sir Richard Doll, dismiss the danger of passive smoking in a radio interview not long before his death.

However, I have lost faith in European health advice after their opposition to smokeless tobacco. As Clive Bates says:

no-one seems to think it is important to justify the partial ban on smokeless tobacco in the EU – a bizarre intervention, and utterly without precedent, to ban a much less hazardous product variant than the market leader, in this case cigarettes.

Just to illustrate his point, I have taken an image from his original post and added it below – the graph shows the drop in lung cancer mortality after the introduction of smokeless tobacco in Sweden.

But that’s going way off the point – which is, in a democracy, that you allow people to state their mind even when you disagree with what is stated.

And on that point it is worth recalling another Anti-Smoking campaign which was not in the least democratic – the Nazi’s little known anti-smoking campaign.

(Note – after help from the British Delegation of the Independence/Democracy Group the conference was eventually held under the name “Thinking is Forbidden.”

Related posts:

1. Anti-smoke campaigners as fascists???

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