We Don’t Need No Tobacco Control

I probably would have agreed with Simon Clark ten years ago.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe there should be some degree of tobacco control, whether it involves marketing, age restrictions or places where you can smoke.

To that extent we’re all supporters of tobacco control.

Not any more though. Ten years of a tyrannical smoking ban have left me wanting all tobacco restrictions lifted. Because I no longer believe anything that I have ever been told about tobacco for the past 65 years.

Back then, you could smoke more or less everywhere, except churches. Well, when this ban is eventually lifted (as it will be), I want to see smoking in churches too. In fact I want to see vicars delivering sermons while puffing on pipes. And the congregations doing the same as they listen.

Back then, children weren’t supposed to smoke before the age of 16. Well, I’m sick to death of seeing chiiildren used as battering rams to force through one vindictive law after another. When the ban is lifted (as it will be), I want to see childhood abolished. Because since “childhood” was invented in Victorian England 150 years ago, we have all been gradually becoming children. Henceforth, children will be called “little people” and will have exactly the same status as everyone else. And if these little people want to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, then let them.

And as for marketing tobacco, why should there be restrictions? When the ban is lifted (as it will be), it will be freely advertised everywhere and sold everywhere in wonderfully attractive packaging without any restriction at all. And instead of those stupid sugar cigarettes with red tips that used to be sold to children little people, there’ll be half-size real cigarettes for them. And boxes of matches too. And ashtrays.

And as for the Tobacco Control Industry, why on earth should anyone support these charlatans and shysters? They have no value whatsoever. They do nothing but harm. Absolutely nothing.

They aren’t saving any lives, because tobacco isn’t killing anyone anyway – certainly not secondhand smoke – despite their cherry-picked studies claiming the opposite. And, furthermore, although the smoking ban was supposed to reduce the prevalence of smoking, it actually does the exact opposite: more people smoke.

There are no benefits whatsoever from smoking bans, but there are enormous costs. Smokers don’t stop smoking, but simply stay home and continue to smoke there. And because they stay home, they don’t spend at the pubs and cafes they used to frequent, so those places close in their thousands. And because smokers stay home, they don’t spend much elsewhere in the economy either, with the result that there is fall in demand across the entire economy as 20% of the population (40% in countries like Bulgaria) stay home, guaranteeing economic recession.

And worst of all, smoking bans are enormously socially divisive. They divide people into non-smoking insiders and smoking outsiders (“Smokers will be exiled to the outdoors,” Deborah Arnott gleefully predicted, and she was right). They divide communities, set friends against friends, husbands against wives, employers against employees. The entire fabric of society is riven from top to bottom.

It is a shameful obscenity that we now have a society in which a considerable minority of the population (20%) is now being demonised and marginalised in ways that evoke the memory of Nazi Germany.

Tobacco Control must be destroyed. It is utterly poisonous and predatory. It should be closed down, and its principal officers prosecuted for fraud, defamation, and any other charge that can be laid before them (including murder). We owe these people nothing at all. Quite the opposite: they owe us everything they have taken from us.

Only when they are gone, all gone, every single last one of them, will our battered society and bleeding economy begin to slowly recover.