I dislike the tag "Smoker's Champion" because it is so banal but that is often what actress Whoopi Goldberg is described as and here in this ABC news report, she defends the rights of US soldiers thrown into the hell of war to be able to smoke.
As she points out :
"If they're so concerned about health, then why send them out to war in the first place?"
Most people on that panel agree that forcing soldiers to quit at one of the most stressful times of their lives is morally wrong except for one woman.
I note how she throws money in at the very first opportunity to bolster her argument. I find these pulled from the air figures, like £800 million as the cost of healthcare, unrealistic. I might believe them if the source was ever quoted and backed up but it never is - and we all know about science by manipulation of data by paid for academics rather than science by biological fact.
She also quotes the number of people killed by pulmonary disease as being caused solely by smoking when we know that isn't always true. A never smoking relative of mine has hereditary pulmonary disease and it is a crying shame that this is never mentioned when citing so called figures of smoking "related" illnesses.
In truth, genetics plays just as much of a role in our illnesses as those products they claim are "bad" for us in a whole myriad of ways - some made up some true but we don't know to what extent because the people who give us this information can't be trusted.
I'm also as mad as a box of frogs about this derogatory fraud that smokers are somehow mentally challenged which I find odd given that three previous generation of smokers built the society we have today including two generations of smokers who won two world wars.
Those on the smokerphobic's side of the debate include historical figures who were more mentally challenged than any smoker most normal people have met in their lifetime. Because we question or challenge their propaganda we are called holocaust deniers or flat earth believers.
And yet their supporters, like Hitler, designed the holocaust and the rooting tooting evangelical nutter W.G Voliva - one of the first rabid anti-smokers who decided non-smokers were "clean" and smokers were not - did indeed believe in the flat earth theory and paid a lot of money to anyone who could disprove his wild and weird theories
Despite the fact that history shows the unhinged to be on the side of the anti-smoker campaign, they still make dodgy claims that they expect us to believe from smoking causes cancer to smoking makes your skin fall off to smoking gives you dandruff. They even claim it will give you TB which real scientists know is scientifically impossible.
The anti-smoker industry's ridiculous suggestions are aimed at one thing to my mind - hatred, distrust, and loathing of smokers by suggesting that they are somehow not the same kind of people as those who chose not to smoke. And that is bigotry. If directed at ethnic people it would be racism.
UPDATE :
How they lie is demonstrated and worked out by The Moose. Most of the smoking and health garbage really is just an illusion based on phobic manipulations rather than true and actual fact.