Once you tell a lie you have to keep telling more lies to cover it up. Never has this been more true than in the tobacco control movement....
Figures released today show that hand rolled tobacco sales continue to rise after the cost of machine rolled cigarettes was hiked by a further 11p in the recent budget. With that news we have been bombarded with public messages from the anti smoking crusaders about how much worse for our health "roll up's" are.
In their scramble to convince the world that everything involving a tobacco plant is lethal they have once again forgotten that they have also lied that the opposite is true.
When the lung cancer epidemic hit the Western world in the 1930's people had been smoking for hundreds of years; scientists of the day therefore were quickly able to discount smoking as a factor in the sudden rise of the disease. The modern anti smoking movement has been forced to think up an excuse to make this rather unfortunate truth go away; in their claims that smoking causes virtually every lung cancer they say that it is only machine produced cigarettes that cause lung cancer due to them being 'smoother' thus enabling the smoker to inhale deeper and for longer resulting in prolonged exposure to the lungs.
In telling this first lie they overcame the problem that people didn't get lung cancer prior to 1930.
They must be hoping everyone forgot about that by now because today's lie tells us exactly the opposite; - Professor Martin Jarvis, of Cancer Research UK, talking yesterday about hand rolled cigarettes said: "The risks of smoking related disease are even greater than from more expensive packeted cigarettes."
Cancer Research UK has for sometime been at the very centre of anti smoking activity in the UK, they are funders of ASH and their annual statement set out their vision, not to find cures for cancer, but to step up education and prevention primarily by the vilification of smokers.
So which are we to believe? Hand rolled cigarettes are safer and that's why no-one got lung cancer before 1930 or machine rolled cigarettes are safer as you are telling us today?
Today's reversal also reveals other inconsistencies with the lies of the anti smoking movement, for example they have now said that hand rolled cigarettes are more harmful because they deliver more nicotine. This comment lies at the very heart of everything that is rotten in tobacco control because the less nicotine you get the more you will inhale and the more you will smoke to make up for it.
If tobacco control was in any way, shape or form interested in public health and concerned about the harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke the very first thing they would do would be to increase nicotine output. Nicotine from cigarettes is harmless and the quicker you get it the less you will smoke. We know the anti smokers know this because it tells us on the nicotine replacement products that they deliver just the nicotine without the harmful chemicals. Nicotine replacement therapy products fail with 99.5% of those people who use it simply because they don't deliver anywhere near enough nicotine to satisfy the craving. After all a quit smoking product that actually worked wouldn't be very desirable to the pharmaceutical industry who make millions every year from this market.
So the smokers get the thin end of the wedge no matter what; the antis have no desire to see increased nicotine in cigarettes because they know full well they would be much safer and that would seriously damage their mission towards full prohibition. The pharmaceuticals have no desire to make a quit smoking product that works because that would end their market overnight. The tobacco companies don't have to do anything because cigarettes get far more advertising nowadays than they ever did when they were on TV adverts and racing cars and they know the youth will rebel against the virtuous. Finally of course we have Her Majesty's Government, who will happily slap 11p on cigarettes at every opportunity safe in the knowledge that tobacco consumption hasn't really fallen much in real terms for the past 20 years.
So, the next time you read that someone died of a "smoking related illness" after smoking for 50 years, remember that the very people who tell you this are the same people that deliberately avoided doing anything about it.
They are the people above who will tell you whichever lie suits today's agenda.
