Image from this deep and meaningful critique of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I never thought about one of my favourite childhood films that way, to be honest, but I got drawn into reading it after finding a picture to illustrate the phobia of those who work for and support Tobacco Control and promote the Tobacco Industry as this iconic image of evil against children.
They use children and young people as human shields in the war against the Tobacco Industry and its consumers but in reality those children they say they care about are now the adults they despise who have choosen to ignore the No 1 Anti-Smoker Commandment - "Thou Shall Quit". Those children who have continued to smoke throughout the last five decades are an embarrassment because they just won't "Die" - Commandment No 2.
Smokerphobics don't use common sense when panicking about Big Tobacco. The fact it exists means it must be on the hunt for children to inject with pure nicotine before locking them in cages of addiction for the rest of their very short lives.
I very much doubt that packaging has anything at all to do with why young people start smoking. Anti-smokers should look deep into their soul and ask how much have they contributed to it?
Cigarettes are so damn expensive and in this material NuWorld, kids have much better things to spend their pocket money on in the shops they go into. My guess is that generations of children over the last couple of decades have taken up smoking via the anti-smoker instigated cheap black market because over restrictions based on paranoia has allowed it to become out of control and unregulated.
Answering "yes" to the shopkeeper's question of whether the much cheaper fags you bought for your mum or dad was enough to get you a pack of 10 in my day. A generation later my kids had to prove they were old enough. That was a good move, a practical move and so were the other steps taken over the decades of sensible and independent Govt to prevent children and young people smoking.
Thanks to anti-smoker driven irrational legislation we have gone full circle and tobacco has become as easy to get hold of now as it was in my childhood. I doubt the man with a baccy bag, who goes around estates with his fake and corrupted tobacco, would even bother to ask kids if the cheap stuff was for their parents.
They can pour money into Trying to sort it out but well, we all know how that failed in the prohibition era of '20s USA.
Chris Snowdon links to a site run by smokerphobics who are calling on Govt to "Do Something" about a problem that doesn't even exist. Their target is hatred of a legal industry and not prevention of tobacco being sold to kids. If they were so not prejudicial in their view they would know this, as Chris points out :
Undeterred by the fact that all tobacco advertising was banned in the UK thirteen years ago, and that marketing to children was banned decades earlier, 38 Degrees are putatively concerned because tobacco companies "reportedly spend a fortune on designing cigarette brands and packs so they are more youth friendly". Note the careful, lawyer-pleasing use of the word "reportedly"—most cigarette packaging has barely changed since the 1940s.
Common sense flies out of the window when hatred can implant paranoia in others' minds. We all feel the results of "Tell A lie Often Enough..." I would hope that the Govt ignores these phobics - especially as it seems they have been stamping their feet like toddlers over cuts - because they should know tobacco is already, even illegally, regulated to the hilt.
I shall be contacting my MP again soon and I would urge other people to do the same. Politicians need to be given a healthy slice of reality. If you don't quite know how to word it, Chris has a template.
It's not all bad news in today's blogosphere. The Devil's in the Detail highlights a report that appears to suggest an amendment to Bhutan's insanity on tobacco laws.
The Bhutanese govt, apparently, doesn't want to punish smokers but there is no word yet on those smokers it has thrown into jail to rot.