There’s an awesome blog post over at Zofryer.com.
The writer attended a meeting by Banzhaf, and Banzhaf asked his security guards to throw him out.
The security guards, however, were more interested in the e-cigarette.
Check out the full story here, and click here to see what real scientists say about Banzhaf’s health claims.
For the sake of society, and for their own good, we must stop gay men from actively practicing sex.
And discriminating against smokers means that we can also discriminate against gays.
That’s the conclusion of recent Christian extremists in America. Here’s one recent quote:
“What justification is there for condemning smoking and endorsing homosexuality?” asked Dr. Paul Cameron, of the Family Research Institute, a Colorado-based think tank. “Today, all across the Western world, school children are being taught the acceptability of homosexuality and the wrongness of smoking.” (http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/apr/07040309.html).
And guess what? Both their tactics and their justification are borrowed from the anti-smoking movement.
1. It’s unhealthy
Like the anti-smoking movement, the anti-gay movement argues that gayness should be banned because it is dangerous and unhealthy.
You know what? They might be right, for all I know, though I suspect their conclusions may be based on junk science.
But that’s not the point.
I do not have the right to tell these people how to live their lives. And they have the right to make decisions about how to live their lives. And if that involves doing something dangerous, so be it.
2. Science by press release
The anti-smoking movement pushed the absurd idea of third hand smoke (the unproven idea that cancer causing toxins can somehow jump from smokers to non-smokers) via press release. (See what real scientists think: Scientists Dispel Ash Junk Science.)
It seems a huge joke that people who believe evolution is a hoax and that people and dinosaurs coexisted (like www.creationists.org/) should use science to further their cause.
Nevertheless, they are releasing studies which ‘prove’ gay sex is dangerous, and can reduce life span by the 24 years. (http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/apr/07040309.html).
Incidentally, Dr Cameroon is an unlicensed psychologist; he was expelled from the American psychologist’s society for non-compliance with an ethics comittee investigation. He’s also been accused of misintepreting social studies by the American Sociological Association and Canadian Psychological Association. Oh, and he conducts passive smoking studies.
3. Spreading Disease
Like the anti-smoking society, these idiots also argue that homosexuals spread disease (although HIV and Syhilis rather than heart attacks and lung cancer.)
They are probably right. But only for gay people who take the risk of participating in unproteced sex with untested partners.
And that’s their call to make, not ours.
(Strangely enough, the anti-gays argue that gay marriage will promote aids and syphilis. Which is a bit like arguing that straight marriage causes venereal disease!)
What’s the point of this little tirade?
We at the ASHTRAY blog may promote an alternative to smoking to those who choose to use it – but we believe in the freedom to choose, whether that choice be dangerous or not.
When the freedom to choose is taken away from one group in society, it threatens the liberty of all groups in society.
I leave you with a little poem from a religious person who I do admire:
“THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.”
Martin Niemöller
The Nicorette is targeted at children.
That’s the implication of public health group claims such as ASH that the e-cigarette, safe chewing tobacco such as SNUS and other ‘tobacco candy’ appeal to children.
Safe alternatives to cigarettes – e-cigarettes, smoking tobacco and others – have been repeatedly attacked on the basis that their flavours make them more attractive to children.
(In response, NJOY have stopped selling these flavours.)
Yet, as the commerical below shows, the Nicorette inhaler also uses flavours – Fruit Chill.
The same public health groups are unlikely to attack the nicorette inhaler, though.
The reason? Because pharmaceutical groups like GlaxoSmithKline pay them money, whereas the manufacturers of other safe alternatives like the electronic cigarette do not.
ASH US recently announced the electronic cigarette faced an imminent ban in the US.
Fortunately, as far as I am aware, courts in the US make their own decisions, and are not told what to do by ASH.
Still, it continues to perplex me that anyone could oppose the electronic cigarette.
As numerous scientists have told us, the device is probably in the region of being 100 times safer than cigarettes.
Which is probably why many who oppose the cigarette either resort to junk science, or to unproven claims that it could prove attractive to children.
(Which always confuses me. Even assuming that children had a credit card and 100 dollars to buy a starter kit, would they prefer children start using the more addictive and far more dangerous cigarettes?)
It angers me that organisations, whether for financial or an absolute moralistic opposition to cigarettes, do this.
In making baseless attacks – not just on electronic cigarettes, but also on other far safer alternatives to smoking such as smokeless tobacco – they are playing with smokers’ lives.
Given the language of hate increasingly used – ASH has even suggested smokers could receive the death penalty for ‘murder’ by second hand smoke – perhaps that doesn’t weigh too heavily on their consciences.
Paul Bergen had an interesting post on Smokles the other day.
In it he touched on the attraction of risk.
While I am no expert in the subject, it brought back to me rapidly receding days of childhood.
What was the attraction of smoking? A huge part of it was that it was illegal (for our age group), it was bad, it was risky, it was rebellion. For the same reasons we bought dope off dodgy dealers and felt bad and brave.
Which makes me wonder, how attractive will a ’safe’ alternative be to children looking to rebel?
This e-cigarettes attraction to children, of course, has become a key argument of the ‘anti-smoking’ lobby as the rest of the case has gradually been brought crashing down to the ground.
But I wonder if the electronic cigarette might be a lot more attractive to children if it was made out to be as bad and dangerous and Banzhaf, ASH and the rest of the big Pharma possy would like it to be!
In a new press release Ash is calling all smokers throughout the US to pay more money on health insurance than non-smokers.
Smokers already pay more on health insurance in a number of states.
Carolina has just joined those states, forcing smokers to pay 30% of health care costs rather than 20%.
Dodgy Maths
Ash argues that smokers costs the health system more than non-smokers.
What they are leaving out is the huge taxes smokers pay.
While we don’t have exact figures for the US, we do know that smoking taxes in the UK pay for the cost of smoking diseases several times over.
What’s more, smokers cost the country less overall, with smokers dying younger on average and therefore costing the UK less in pensions and less in treatment of old age diseases.
The truth is that non-smokers’ moral judgements on smokers have lead to a situation where smokers already pay more than their fair share of the tax burden.
Discrimination
What is scary is that anti-smoker discrimination in resurging in a country which has worked so hard to get rid of other forms of discrimination.
Let’s remember that this is the same anti-smoking lobby which has argued that we should leave smokers to die rather than treat them.
Ash, of course, goes even further than this.
They believe that even ex-smokers should be denied treatment that could save their lives. See “Action on Smoking and Health Suggest that Former Smokers not be Eligible for Heart Transplants.”
More? Check out what three proffessors of medicine have to say about some of Ash’s health claims.
Ash Accuses E Cigarette Research of Being Compromised
In a recent letter attacking E Cigarette Direct, ASH claimed that Electronic Cigarette Companies could not be relied upon to be neutral because of their financial interest.
They also claimed that any research commissioned by Electronic Cigarette Companies was compromised.
That research includes an analysis by Murray Laugeson, former principal medical officer of the New Zealand Department of Health and winner of the World Health Organization Tobacco or Health medal and citation “for achievements deemed worthy of international recognition in promoting the concept of tobacco-free societies.”
Yet the very organisation that claims electronic cigarette research is compromised is accepting money from a major pharmaceutical company.
Funding
It’s not easy to find out where ASH’s money come from.
We know they make some money by charging for advice on how to separate children from their parents.
But their financial reports are vague on the sources of their funds.
Busted
Pfizer, though, is not.
Jim Corken, of E Cigarette National, pointed me towards this document on the Pfizer website.
ASH is the first named partner in a $47 million dollar funding programme by Pfizer.
Pharmaceutical companies
Pharmaceutical companies have a major interest in the electronic cigarette:
1. They sell billions of dollars of nicotine replacement aids per year. (Unfortunately, these don’t work.) The market for these aids has been largely created by the Big Pharm funding of the anti-smoking movement, which has seem hundreds of millions of dollars channelled to public health organisations, much of it via the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
2. The big pharmecutical companies are evidently worried by the nicotine cessation industry, as shown by a report entitled:
E-Cigarettes Will Revolutionize The Face Of Tobacco Smoking And Could Pose A Threat To the Smoking Cessation Market
3. By removing the current electronic cigarette companies, big pharm can benefit by introducing their own version of the electronic cigarette in their future. Their huge donation to public health organisations means that these bodies are unlikely to protest.
Hypocrisy
It is standard for commercial companies to fund research into their products.
The FDA itself is funded by pharmecutical companies and, more recently, by the tobacco companies whose products kill more than 400,000 a year.
Testing organisations are supposed to maintain independence despite the source of funds.
ASH has attacked E Cigarette research because they can not reply directly to the points raised by our recent letter to the Peninsula:
1. That the electronic cigarette contains less nicotine than real cigarettes.
2. That the ingredients of the electronic cigarette are far less harmful than those contained in real cigarettes.
That they have made this accusation at the same time as receiving money from organisations with a direct negative interest in Electronic Cigarettes is simply breathtaking in its level of hypocrisy.
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