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Put out the Ash Scott Baines calls for the government to allow an fair debate on smoking.
There is conserable pubic debate at present about the role of government in regulating smoking. The Prime Minister has called for a “Big Conversation” on whether local authorities should be able to ban workplace smoking. Yet the government seems unwilling to allow a fair debate. Instead, it is hugely bankrolling one side.
Action on Smoking and Health, which calls for smoking to gradually be made illegal, received £177,640 last year from the Department of Health. It also received £136,936 from the Welsh Assembly. This is money earned by taxpayers, including the especially heavily-taxed smoker, which goes towards an organisation that persecutes them. Ash offers an entirely negative contribution to society. Its funding should be stopped.
Scott Baines
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The prohibitionist are trying to outlaw what they cannot convert.
Part of my job consists of assisting smokers to stop, and I agree entirely with the negative take on ASH. Their whole approach is utterly wrongheaded – only by defending people’s freedom to smoke (within reason i.e. without harming others) can people have the freedom to decide for themselves whether they wish to continue.
But the money spent on ASH isn’t the real scandal – that’s government/NHS support for nicotine replacement therapy (patches, gum, inhalators and the rest). Nicotine replacement therapy wouldn’t pass as an effective medicine in any other field – it has a one year success rate of about 5%; after one year, the vast majority of its users have returned to smoking or never stopped. (For more on this, I recommend combing the British Medical Journal’s online archive. )
NRT itself has origins in the various ‘clean cigarette’ projects of the 60s and 70s – basically, the search by drug companies of a way into the profitable nicotine market. This was fairly innocent and wellmeaning at the time – the harm in cigarettes was thought to consist entirely in the amorphous ‘tar’ in the lungs. Nicotine is now implicated in several cancers and its use considered generally unsafe, but this has had little influence on the NRT clinics run by the NHS.
My advice to smokers: ignore ASH, live your lives, don’t let anyone interfere, make your own mind up for yourself and be happy. And if you need help in stopping, don’t bother with Nicotine Replacement Therapy. There’s no shortage of alternative routes, and you’ll save yourself time and money.
In this country, the state operates a health care system free at the point of use. This naturally leads to excessive demand and thus spiralling cost. It is inevitable, therefore, that the state will try to limit some of the cost by attempting to limit some of the dumber things people do which harm their health.
Naturally, it will be objected that the state shouldn’t be operating such a health care system. But it is, and it is highly unlikely that the people would consent to its wholesale privatisation, and this needs to be recognised. Taxpayer funding for anti-smoking campaigns isn’t going to stop, however objectionable it may be.
BTW, I smoke.
EG
Euan Gray writes:
“It is inevitable, therefore, that the state will try to limit some of the cost by attempting to limit some of the dumber things people do which harm their health.”
Then again (as has been pointed out ad nauseam), the net contributions to the NHS made by smokers far outweighs their cost to it.
As arguments go, the economic one is sheer nonsense.
Even without the tax contribution smokers make, they represent a positive in state-run health systems. Remember the trouble Philip Morris got in a few years back, pointing this out to…I forget which Eastern European government?
Because smokers die, on average, ten years before non-smokers.
Everyone is going to die, and doing so is usually expensive (something like 80% of the healthcare dollars in the US goes into the last six months of people’s lives). The things smokers die of aren’t any more expensive than the things everyone else dies of (for every smoker who needs costly long-term oxygen support, there’s someone who keels over suddenly of a heart attack). Do your dying ten years earlier, and you save the state a decade’s worth of care.
I second James, incidentally. As an ex-smoker, I can vouch for the utter uselessness of nicotine replacement dohickies. They had absolutely no effect on my desire to put things in my mouth and set fire to them.
What did it for me was a case of acute bronchitis.
What happens is that first one is too sick to care about smoking and second it hurts to much to inhale.
So for a week or so, no smoking. This covers most of the acute withdrawal symptoms.
As soon as you are on your feet, so to speak, destroy/trash/give-away your stash.
Quit buying — this is much easier than ‘Quit smoking’.
This is not to say that every once in a while….
However, I have not smoked in a year and eight months.
Like they say – One day (or is it hour) at a time.
Uncle Bill – I did the opposite. I smoked 60 a day and loved smoking. Loved it, loved it, loved it! For some reason, I decided I didn’t want to smoke any more and was going to give up at midnight.
BUT, just in case I was wrong, I went out and bought a carton of 200, just as a little hedge, and put them in the kitchen drawer.
I smoked my brains out that night, went to bed, and when I got up the next morning, I wasn’t a smoker any more. Little by little, I gave the packs in the carton to friends who’d come over and run out of cigarettes (no, their smoking in my house didn’t bother me a bit). I liked knowing they were there, in my kitchen, in case I had a nicotine fit at 2 a.m., but I never touched them. The carton got given away to friends. I never went back to smoking.
I am a smoker, have terminal cancer and if there is a link between the two, the responsiblility is 100% mine. I am 50 years old and have known since the age of 5 that smoking was pretty dumb. The sanctimonious rantings of ASH and their attempts to inhibit freedom sicken me. I also observe that the majority of my passionately non smoking family and friends have the same attitude to these self appointed guardians of society.
Cloned lung transplants.
Use em up, throw ’em out, buy a new set.