Twice in two days I've launched into a random rant about the smoking issue and I've realised that I've been in perpetual rage since July 2007. It isn't getting any better despite my wish that it would.
I never felt this way before and I don't think that anger will abate until the fraudulent anti-smoking industry stops funding untruthful propaganda designed to stigmatise smokers with a daily drip feed of hate designed to socially exclude them and bully them whenever the occasion arises.
The industry, which depends on the harassment of smokers for profit and the naivety of Govt minister to push it's fraud into policy, is calling the Tobacco Display Ban an urgent matter of child protection.
As usual it is out of touch with reality but it is more about the Denormalisation aspect of promoting - again by daily drip feed - "smokers as child abusers" rather than any real and meaningful effort to protect children from taking up smoking.
They say :
The tobacco industry depends for its future on recruiting and addicting new consumers, many of whom begin smoking as children. Such legal challenges are undoubtedly costly to government in terms of both legal fees and time spent defending these public health measures through the courts. However the costs to our society run deeper still, and will be measured in lives lost as this lethal and addictive product continues to recruit new users.
Note how they deliberately use the word "addictive" and their emotive use of children as human shields. But they are talking about a time more familiar to my childhood over 40 years ago. Perhaps they haven't noticed how much has changed or they are so dependant on their jobs that they have to keep on coming up with new scare tactics to frighten the public. Perhaps they are just being deliberately fraudulent with a view to influencing policy against smokers because they hate them. It's hard not to think this given what they have done and it's hard to think they care about children. I am the childhood smoker they want to eventually criminalise as an adult because I wasn't of the generation that heard their message.
ASH's insane idea to ban sales of tobacco - which is what will happen as a result of their madness because of the costly charge of shop refits - will force open the black market and lead kids of any age to get tobacco far more easily, and drugs if the baccy man has those in his stash too.
As a child smoker who took up the habit aged 8 years old, I know that what they are proposing will only make the situation worse. So much has changed since I used to go to the shop with my dinner money and I know for a fact that responsible shop owners haven't sold to under 16s (which used to be the law) in 30 years.
Yes, some get caught out but usually because the anti-smoking industry has set a trap by deliberately sending in older looking youths to further their argument for a ban. They are creating a problem that isn't there because it helps to take forward their ideology of tobacco eradication and stigmatisation of legal businesses and adults associated with tobacco consumption and sales.
If they get their way, tobacco use will go undeground like drug use and, well, we all know that kids today don't use drugs because they are not on sale down the local shop or supermarket.
I mean, I must be be on something myself when I sit through court cases such as that of a 17 year old girl with a £200 a day heroin habit.
What makes me so angry these days is the pure unintellectual rubbish that those who you would expect to know better take on board without even consulting with anyone else who might have useful and specialist information to add.
They will not work with us for the greater good of everyone because we are "the enemy" - not Big Tobacco but the little man or woman. And it's the poor they get at most because as the weakest members of our society they can. While the rich can smoke, drink and eat themselves to excess, the poor are denied simple pleasures because of, well, being poor.
That inequality angers me and I rage because decades ago we decided as a society that stigmatisation, bullying and harrassment was wrong and equality was right. We even had laws to protect people from being sacked from jobs, or discriminated in the workplace because of their lifestyles and yet no law exists to protect smokers from being sacked for being smokers or being refused jobs because of being a smoker.
A friend told me about photoassist.com, a photo agency, which she says prefers non-smoker employees but expects smokers to sign a pledge to say they won't smoke at work. That is the law so it's insulting and I'm sure they don't ask those who like alcohol, or the occasional glass of wine to sign any pledge not to drink at work or eat unhealthy food. Perhaps that's coming. The barriers to fairness have been smashed down.
Why this kind of harassment is being legalised by Govts on the fraud of the Unelected smoke free industry made up of ASH, their partners, and their pharmaceutical bedfellows is beyond me. I've never understood it and that angers me too. I find these days that it takes just a mention of the smoking issue to make me fly into rage.
The first rant this week was at the check out at Iceland when the cashier told me how her husband was photographed by the local press in a sort of "show and shame" piece about the problem of smokers outside of hospitals.
We were chatting about the local Netto up the road being taken over by Asda and supermarket shopping generally as my junk food/ microwave specials were passed through the barcode reader. She said she liked Morrison's and smoking came up when I told her we boycotted that store because they sacked two employees at Christmas for smoking in the car park.
She's a non-smoker supporter of choice. She doesn't like smoking next to her but she has no problem at all with separate areas in public places or separate public places. What got me angry was how embarrassed she was at her husband's actions. I said she was supposed to feel like that because of the whole "Denormalisation" and pro-stigmatisation programme. I said she should have been proud of him.
I also went off on one yesterday during a debate about the BBC's alleged "impartiality." I said the smoking issue was a prime example of how the BBC doesn't present both sides and indulges in press release propaganda on this issue.
The BBC's coverage of Communist USA's New York outdoor smoking ban, for example, has not one word from the other side of the debate nor does the BBC care how people - especially the elderly - will be affected by this.
If the BBC cared to ask they would soon learn that this issue has nothing to do with smoking.
During my ranting debate with a colleague, it was said that the broadcaster, nor any other "responsible" media, would want to do anything that could be accused of promoting smoking because whatever we think about choice, smoking is "bad for you."
They don't even ask if we promote smoking - they assume we do and don't care that they are slandering us. They don't ever report, for example, that we just want to be left alone and want the harassment to end but we don't go around telling people to take up smoking.
In the same way the Broadcaster harasses young and vulnerable families with children who can't afford a TV licence, they also use the power of their partciular media and influence to stigmatise smokers. The BBC is on board with the plan. Perhaps it doesn't realise how much it has been used.
The BBC has never, for example, even bothered to debate the alleged stance that "smoking kills and is bad for you."
I believe that for some people it is "bad" but not all and that is the risk we take. If the effects of smoking on smokers is different, and if genetics has at least something to do with the illnesses we get, that might explain why some die after a few years of smoking while others smoke from childhood to 100 years old and stay in relative good health their whole lives.
The antis say these people are in the minority - well they are anyway - but actually when it comes to smokers, those who die young are unfortunately in the minority.
As a child smoker with no legislation at the time to protect me - except for my mother's back hand if she caught me at it - and as an adult who has always smoked and fears that quitting could seriously damage my health, I still wait for serious and truthful research to be done on why some die young and others smoke unaffected. Inconvenient maybe but true none the less.
Tobacco used in moderation can be good for you actually. Before the propaganda, health promotion, EU directives, changes in legislation, public health programmes, nannying and now nudging, doctors would tell patients to smoke moderately for their health in some circumstances. A non-smoking young colleague was told recently that smoking can ease endometriosis, ironically because she doesn't smoke nor wants to take it up.
A real medical nurse friend of mine with 30 years experience also said two or three cigarettes a day sorts out irritable bowel syndrome. Tobacco is a herb, despite being maligned as a "drug" to hype up the "addiction" angle. When I read the ingredients on a packet of Boots own brand herbal seasick pills the other day, I noted tabacum was one of the ingredients. So it's OK to use the natural product when packaged and pushed by Big Pharma but somehow wrong to buy it from Big "evil" Tobacco.
The word is getting out via blogs, and the recent good news in Holland which has negotiated some fairness back on to the agenda is testament to that, but it seems the corrupted UK State institutions are trying to stop us from talking because they don't like what we say.
It seems other people across the world are raging as much as me but for different reasons. If the oppressive states of Britain and the USA are anything to go by then the likes of Egypt would be well advised to avoid democracy which in this NuWorld is simply about elective dictatorship and doing as you are told by the state.
All freedom has gone. The anti-smoker industry murdered it and until they back off, I fear my rage will continue and my compulsion for this tiresome battle will never end.