Anti-smoking group says prosecute Damon Albarn for cigarette on stage

By Calvin Palmer

“Land of hope and glory, mother of the free” is how Britain was once regarded. In those days, people enjoyed the right to smoke tobacco without let or hindrance. Sadly, that is not longer the case.

The anti-smoking lobby in Britain, as in the United States, has over the years wheedled its way into the minds of politicians, or what passes for a mind, using junk science to press home the case for tobacco bans and higher tobacco taxes.

And now those bans are in place, anti-smoking organizations monitor the compliance with a rigor and zeal that would put the Stasi to shame.

The Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), a British anti-smoking charity, although there is nothing charitable about the agenda of this organization, today called for Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn to be prosecuted for smoking a cigarette on stage on the first night of a tour.

The former Blur singer lit up a cigarette while performing at the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth, England, last night.

Bass guitarist Paul Simonon, formerly of The Clash, also smoked during the show in front of an “intimate” audience of about 500 fans.

ASH wants both men to be prosecuted to make an example of them. Perhaps Roland Freisler could be brought back from the grave to preside at the trial.

Spokeswoman Amanda Sandford said: “There can be no excuse for that as it is an indoor place and the law is very clear.

“We are not allowed to smoke on stage unless it’s relevant to the act.

“They should be fined. It’s not just the artist, it’s the premises where the act is held. I would expect the local authority to take the appropriate action.

“It’s not just illegal but more importantly it’s about the message it sends out to fans.

“People in the public eye have a duty not to promote smoking. It’s very irresponsible — I suppose they think it’s rebellious and they may get some extra kudos from it and maybe some extra publicity.”

Who says people in the public eye have a duty not to promote smoking? The answer is of course the gauleiters of ASH.

A member of staff at the Wedgewood Rooms said they had not been made aware of the smoking during the show or received any complaints.

Gorillaz were on the first night of a “rehearsal” tour as they prepare to headline the Coachella Festival in California ahead of a series of shows in the UK in the autumn.

Paul Hunt, head of environment and public protection at Portsmouth City Council, said: “Making sure premises remain smoke-free is the duty of the management.

“If we receive complaints from the public we would contact the business first and issue a warning if we felt the complaints were justified.

“We haven’t received an official complaint about smoking during the Gorillaz’s performance but if this did come to light we would investigate further.

“Our approach is to always work with businesses to make sure they comply with legislation but if smoking is ignored on the premises we would then consider taking legal action which would start with the issuing of a fixed penalty notice.”

So if the people regulating the venue have not received a complaint, why is ASH sticking its nose in? Because that is what the people of ASH do.

People like Amanda Sandford make sanctimonious intolerance appear as if it is a virtue. Wrong! Intolerance in any shape or form is an affront to freedom and has no place in a civilized society.

If anyone deserves to be prosecuted, it is Sandford for vilifying tobacco smokers and waging a propaganda war to deprive them of their individual freedom.

In a different era, intolerance and discrimination of the kind displayed by Sandford and her ilk resulted in charges of crimes against humanity.

[Based on a report in The Independent.]

Chinese officials told to smoke their way out of recession

By Calvin Palmer

Local government officials in a Chinese province have been ordered to smoke nearly a quarter of a million packs of locally made cigarettes or risk being fined.

The Gong’an county government in Hubei province has ordered its staff to smoke 230,000 packs of Hubei-produced cigarette brands a year to boost tax revenues and protect the province’s cigarette manufactures from outside competition.

“The regulation will boost the local economy via the cigarette tax,” said Chen Nianzu, a member of the Gong’an cigarette market supervision team.

Authorities in Gong’an county are taking the cigarette quota seriously and have established a “special taskforce” to enforce it.

According to a local newspaper account, a teacher from a village middle school said officials burst unannounced into the school one afternoon and started sifting through the ashtray and bins in the staff-room.

Three “non-compliant” cigarette butts were discovered by the “cigarette marketing consolidate team”. The teacher was informed he had violated the civil servants “cigarette usage rule”.

After some negotiation the school was spared a fine, but subjected to “public criticism” for “undisciplined practices”.

China has 350 million smokers, of whom a million die of smoking-related diseases every year. Despite anti-smoking campaigns, cigarette taxes form a major component of China’s annual tax-take at local level.

More than half of all male doctors in China smoke, but the government is now trying harder to get them to kick the habit in order to set an example for others.

It would appear the Chinese have a better grasp of free-market economic theory than capitalism’s champion, the United States.

While state governments are proposing to increase the tax on cigarettes to make up for budget shortfalls, thereby running the risk of actually reducing tax revenue, the Chinese have been quick to grasp the concept that more cigarettes sold means increased revenue.

With that kind of thinking, it is easy to understand how China has emerged as a world economic force, although I am not sure I agree with the compulsion aspect. However, it can be argued that the punitive cigarette tax imposed by states in America is “compulsion” under a different guise.

[Based on reports by The Daily Telegraph and AFP.]

Florida jury awards $8 million to smoker’s widow

By Calvin Palmer

A Florida jury awarded $8 million (£5.6 million) yesterday to the widow of a smoker whose death was caused by his addiction to cigarettes.

The decision of the jury in Fort Lauderdale could prove to be a major potential legal setback for tobacco company Philip Morris.

Their verdict was in favor of Elaine Hess, widow of longtime smoker Stuart Hess, who died of lung cancer in 1997 at age 55. He had smoked for 40 years.

Philip Morris USA, a unit of Altria Group Inc, said it would appeal.

The verdict is the first of potentially thousands of cases to go to trial in Florida.

Alex Alvarez, an attorney for Elaine Hess, said he and other lawyers who worked on the case felt vindicated after winning $5 million (£3.5 million) in punitive damages on Mrs. Hess’ behalf and $3 million (£2.1 million) in compensatory damages.

“She’s a 110-pound elementary school teacher, and she went up against Philip Morris, one of the most powerful companies in the world, and won,” Alvarez told Reuters.

“We have paved the road for these other litigants to come in and seek their day in court as well. We’re happy to be able to do that for them.”

Of course, he is happy.  What Alvarez failed to point out is that he and other plaintiffs’ lawyers stand to make millions out of these cases.  They could be on a nice little earner.

Alvarez was referring to about 8,000 cases filed after the Florida Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 2006 to throw out a $145 billion (£102 billion) jury award in a class-action lawsuit filed in the early 1990s by Miami Beach pediatrician Howard Engle on behalf of thousands of sick smokers.

In its 2006 ruling, the state Supreme Court left in place key findings that tobacco companies knowingly sold dangerous products and concealed the risks of smoking.

That promised to help the thousands of smokers who filed individual lawsuits against the tobacco companies because they would not have to prove those issues again.

In a statement saying it would seek appellate review of the case and of what it called the “constitutionally flawed” punitive damage verdict, Philip Morris vowed to fight on against all pending litigation in Florida.

“We will vigorously defend each of these cases, which will turn on the facts unique to each plaintiff. We do not believe today’s verdict is predictive of outcomes in future cases,” said Murray Garnick, an Altria senior vice president and associate general counsel, speaking on behalf of Philip Morris.

“This case was selected by plaintiffs’ lawyers from among thousands of others to be the first tried presumably because they believed it was their best case,” said Garnick.

Edward Sweda, a senior attorney for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, agreed the Hess case was no guarantee of the result of future trials.

But he added that it also did not bode well for Philip Morris or its parent company.

It also doesn’t bode well for common sense or people taking responsibility for the outcomes of their own actions.  When Hess started smoking 40 years ago the risks of smoking were well-known, unless Hess was illiterate or he and his wife belonged to a strange sect that had absolutely no contact with the outside world.

It was a choice Hess  made of his own volition.  It turned out to be a bad choice and so there has to be someone to blame, such is the litigious, I would even go as far as to say childish, nature of American society, a trait that is also fast becoming ingrained in the  British way of life.

Strange how premature deaths from alcohol abuse do not seem to generate lawsuits against the beer and liquor companies.

This ruling and the cases being brought against the tobacco companies do not represent justice. They represent the agenda of the vociferous anti-tobacco lobby who will not rest until tobacco is removed from society.  There is no rhyme or reason to it, just plain hatred of tobacco and tobacco users.

It is the mentality of the Salem witch trials.

[Based on a report by Reuters.]

Smoke gets in your eyes but coffee staves off dementia

By Calvin Palmer

Cigarettes and coffee have been part of my life for more years than I can remember.  The two go together in perfect harmony and fire me up for the day.  After a mug of coffee and three cigarettes, I am ready to take on anything a harsh world can throw at me.

And that first nicotine and caffeine rush is maintained throughout the day.  My daily consumption amounts to five cups of coffee and a pack of cigarettes.  To the health fascists, I am the devil incarnate for enjoying these simple pleasures.

And before members of the new SS, the white-coated Stethoscope Sirens, get on my case, I would never encourage anyone to take up smoking.  I simply ask that those who do smoke be allowed to enjoy a cigarette at places where cups of coffee are sold, outside a restaurant or café is just fine by me.

Given my enjoyment of coffee, I was pleased to learn that a team of Swedish and Danish researchers have concluded that drinking coffee in mid-life can help prevent the onset of dementia later in life.  So as the years advance, I may well become poorer and poorer but at least I will have my wits about me.

This conclusion was based on a study that tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.

After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less.

People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.

The research was published this month in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Dr. Miia Kivipelto, an associate professor of neurology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the study, said:  “This is an observational study. We have no evidence that for people who are not drinking coffee, taking up drinking will have a protective effect.”

She suggest several possibilities for why coffee might reduce the risk of dementia later in life. First, earlier studies have linked coffee consumption with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes which in turn has been associated with a greater risk of dementia. In animal studies, caffeine has been shown to reduce the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, coffee may have an antioxidant effect in the bloodstream, reducing vascular risk factors for dementia.

Previous studies have shown that coffee drinking may also be linked to a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease.

All I need now is research that shows cigarette smoking and second-hand smoke have beneficial effects for some other malaise.

Wouldn’t it be great if cigarette smoking and passive smoking helped clear up hemorrhoids and even prevented the affliction?

In the remake of The Ladykillers (2004) by the Coen brothers, the character of Marva Munson, played delightfully by Irma P.Hall, recounts that her late husband said, “There are only two kinds of people in the world: those with hemorrhoids and those about to get them.”

If cigarette smoke were found both to cure and prevent hemorrhoids, state and city legislators would overturn the anti-smoking legislation introduced in recent years as fast as they could take the cap off a tube of Preparation H.

I guess that is what is called a pipe dream.  Oh well, time for coffee and a cigarette.

[Based on a report by The New York Times.]

Truth Goes Up In Smoke

Jacksonville’s hospitals are to ban smoking from their properties, as of November 20.  Anyone wishing to smoke a cigarette will no longer be able to step outside but must leave the hospital property altogether.

According to Dr. Bob Harmon, the director of the Duval County Health Department, “Tobacco and smoking are public health enemy number one and this brown plague must be brought under control.”

Emotive use of words there, Bob.  Plague kind of implies that someone standing 25 yards away from a person smoking a cigarette is likely to be stricken instantly, or within a few days, by some deadly disease.  I wonder if Bob can back that up with some hard scientific facts?

He would be right out of luck if he was looking to the World Health Organization.  It conducted a study, just over a decade ago, to look at the link between passive smoking and lung cancer in seven European countries.  The report was suppressed in 1998, according to The Daily Telegraph and The Economist, when it emerged that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer.  WHO immediately issued a press release saying that the British media had “misrepresented” the report and yet when the study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in October 1998, it showed a statistically insignificant small risk from spousal and workplace Environmental Tobacco Smoke and that ETS exposure during childhood was not associated with an increased risk of lung cancer.

In 2003, a study by Dr. James Enstrom and Professor Geoffrey Kabat appeared in the British Medical Journal.  The study looked at the wives and husbands of 35,000 smokers over a period of 40 years and concluded that the link between passive smoking and disease “may be considerably weaker than generally believed.”  Their research did not support the anti-smoking lobby’s claim that passive smoking causes a 20 percent increased risk of lung cancer and a 30 percent increased risk of heart disease in people who live with smokers.

“Exposure to environmental tobacco smoke could not plausibly cause a 30 percent increase in risk of coronary heart disease,” Enstrom and Kabat concluded.  “It seems premature to conclude that environmental tobacco smoke causes death from coronary heart disease and lung cancer.”

The American Cancer Society, whose data had been used by Enstrom and Kabat, levelled charges of scientific misconduct against Dr. Enstrom.  A subsequent investigation by the University of California cleared Dr. Enstrom of the charges.  The American Cancer Society did not apologize.

In 2007, Dr. Enstrom defended his research in Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations and showed that it was not “fatally flawed” or that he made “inappropriate use” of the underlying database. His paper also refutes the erroneous statements made by powerful U.S. epidemiologists and activists about him and his research, and defends legitimate research against illegitimate criticism by those who have attempted to suppress and discredit it because it does not support their ideological and political agendas. 

But when someone is on a crusade, getting wrong results does not pose too much of a problem and the truth is all too easily jettisoned.  There is plenty of junk science for the anti-smoking zealots to seize upon, although it is frightening when the members of the medical profession suspend their critical faculties and allow prejudice to hold sway.

The hospital ban elicited a response yesterday from Timothy Davlantes, M.D., president of the Florida Academy of Family Physicians, on the Letters Page of The Jacksonville Joke aka The Florida Times-Union.

Dr. Davlantes wrote, “I would like to applaud these Jacksonville healthcare facilities for their decision to protect employees, patients and visitors by implementing a campus-wide tobacco-free policy.”

Protect them from what?  Oh, it must be the “brown plague” the other good doctor was talking about.

It is a pity Dr. Davlantes did not use his letter to the editor to condemn the export of $158 million of cigarettes to Iran during the years George W. Bush has been in office.  I guess his Hippocratic oath and anti-smoking zeal do not apply outside the United States.

Is that cigarette smoke I smell?  No, just the whiff of hypocrisy and an attack on personal freedom.  Maybe it is time to heed the warning by John Stuart Mill in 1859 of the danger posed to liberty by “the tyranny of the majority.”

Or should that, in the 21st Century, be the tyranny of the medical profession?  Doctors do have a tendency to come across as being all-knowing but the plain truth is that medicine is not a precise science governed by immutable laws.  It is based on science, uses science but, in essence, is an art.

A doctor may say that he or she thinks something may be occurring or may have an effect but cannot say with 100 percent certainty it is the case.  Take, for example, the recent acknowledgement that certain chemotherapy used in the past had no beneficial effect on patients.  Sounds to me that when doctors started using it, they must have been just stabbing in the dark.  But once a doctor dons the white coat, the rest of society assumes that they have god-like status and know all the answers.

Yes, it is true doctors can perform incredible things to save lives and the application of their skill relieves pain and suffering but they are not infallible; if they were, medical malpractice attorneys would not be in business.  And if doctors such as Harmon and Davlantes have got it so right, how come they can often be proved wrong?

A few days ago, The Daily Telegraph carried an interview with actress Diana Rigg, the delightful Emma Peel in The Avengers televison series.  The article revealed that Ms. Rigg, even at the age of 70, was still smoking 20 cigarettes a day.  According to medical thinking, she should have been dead 10, 15 or 20 years ago.  It may well be that lung cancer or heart disease eventually claims her but she will not have been cut down in her prime, unless 75 has become the new 35.

Her eventual death will, of course, be smoking related.  The way medical statistics are compiled, if I were to die tomorrow in a road accident, my death would somehow end up as being a smoking-related death because my health records show that I am a smoker.

Now, don’t get me wrong about this hospital ban on smoking.  I would not want to see nurses and doctors walking along a hospital corridor, puffing on a cigarette.  I would be appalled if a surgeon conducted open-heart surgery with a Winston stuck in the corner of his mouth.  But banning smoking in the hospital grounds is just another curtailing of personal freedom, with no justification other than the wish by some people to eradicate tobacco from society.

It was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who said, “If repeated often enough, a lie will become the new truth.”  The anti-smoking Nazis have learned that and learned it well.

[Joe Jackson, the English singer and musician, has written an excellent essay —  http://www.joejackson.com/smoking.php — on anti-smoking hysteria and debunks the myths surrounding passive smoking.  Forces International — http://www.forces.org/evidence/index.htm — exposes the junk science used by the anti-smoking lobby to persecute people who happen to enjoy smoking cigarettes.  The United Pro Choice Smokers Newsletter — http://www.smokersclubinc.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4191 — documents the Dr. Enstrom saga.]