The video above is a demonstration of how 21st century technology can address the smoking issue. It is rather like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut because CS gas in that volume is not a wisp of tobacco smoke in a normal well ventilated room but you get the point.
We know that in truth not one person in reality has died of passive smoking and this public health scam is more about political ideology and hard cash than altruistic concern.
Academics and scientists paid to produce results in paid for studies, which the general public is not allowed to see until they have been
And when legitimate industry exercises it's legal right and makes a reasonable request to ask what this so called evidence is based on, the academics begin to panic.
It's disgusting and totally unacceptable if Linda Bauld has personally received threatening calls but I'm sceptical about that too. The two standard deflections of criticism are always : "Big Tobacco money is behind it" or "Big tobacco has threatened me".
As Dick Puddlecote points out Bauld accuses blogs - which call for Govt to wake up to the real motives behind these studies and the damage and divisions over-regulation are doing to both the economy and society - of leading hate campaigns against her personally and she could also be referring to Tea and Cigarettes as I've written about her before and featured Imperial Tobacco's report.
However, this blog has never called for violence or threats to be made against anyone in the anti-smoker industry despite the fact that they don't bat an eyelid when such threats are made against smokers. Bauld might believe her own damaging propaganda but there is nothing in law yet to say that we must.
What this blog has called for is an independent review and health information which I still believe is desperately needed to redress the balance and put this issue back into a proper perspective.
Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you but some of the outrageous claims about smoking and smokers are simply ludicrous and appear to be designed to incite fear and loathing.
If it was really about care, about people not dying, why not accept that people will smoke and are able to make up their own minds about it. What they want is harm reduction. What is wrong with that? Why does it have to be death or quit and then serves you right?
I would have more respect for Bauld and her kind if they worked to make tobacco safer. The professionals should understand the warnings pumped out continually don't relate to smokers' real lives and some will not quit no matter what is said or done to them.
Instead of trying to rid the world of tobacco, why not invest in developing safe cigarettes for adults or children of the future who fall by their definition of the wayside. It could be done in the 21st century. In pushing that smoke free cause surely more lives have been lost than need be over the last 40 years.
Just imagine if Gio Batta Gori had been allowed to develop that safe cigarette in a programme that was sacrificed to push instead for the ideological smoke free future which has been enforced largely by coercion and has now evolved into downright bullying of a minority.
Govts must realise that in backing this ideology, without allowing consumers the right to smoke a legal product in peaceful association, they are slaughtering equality, civil liberties, freedom of association, private property rights, and a future based on a decent and tolerant society.
And other legitimate industries and their consumers are being targeted by the same professionals who wouldn't be out of place in the early Temperance Movement of last century.
It's time people woke up to what is happening and backed calls for decision making to be based on real science to the benefit and not detriment of people's lives.
UPDATE : It appears few are taking Bauld's whining seriously and there are moves from the tobacco industry to actually start fighting back on our behalf, and not before time. Read more over at Taking Liberties.