Frank Davis App

I created my first mobile phone android app today. I found that there were a whole bunch of websites that created free android apps. So I’ve made one that follows myRSS feeds (both main blog and comments) using Appyet. And then, after Appyet had emailed me my .apk app file (950 Kb!), I read it into my mobile phone and installed it.

Amazingly, it actually worked! Although I couldn’t see my avatar anywhere. And I read a few new comments (including the one from Mac the Knife offering to put money into the ISIS poll). After I found my way to commenting, my laboriously crafted response got lost. So I’ll say here, thank you very much Mac, but it’s not money we need, but time.  And, um,… beer. This survey is being run on an all-volunteer basis, and we’re going to get very thirsty.

And because the app included a twitter feed, I thought I’d sign up to Twitter. And so there I’m now cfrankdavis (I think) – although my attitude to Twitter is pretty much like Leg-iron’s: there’s no way I could confine myself to 140 characters.

Anyway, if anyone reading this has Twitter, I’d be interested to know whether they’ve seen anything.

And then, because it published apps, I signed up as a developer (for £15!!) on Google Play – partly because I’m hoping I can produce a Smokernet app at some point. But I didn’t manage to upload my new app there because it needed a screenshot of the app, and I have no idea how to create a screenshot of a mobile phone (if that’s what they wanted).

So it’s not going to be possible yet to download a Frank Davis blog android app from there yet. But I did create another one on another free website. The app is here, but I haven’t tried it.

Anyway, my mobile phone now has a Frank Davis app on it. So if I can find a pub with a free wi-fi, I should be able to sit there drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and interviewing smokers and watching comments appearing on my blog. i.e. Hard Work.

I doubt if anyone will actually want a Frank Davis android mobile phone app, but if they do, I’ll have to email it to them.

I’m not sure about all this hi-tech twitter feed stuff. I’ve yet to read anything on Twitter that was in the least bit thought-provoking. I don’t think it’s possible to provoke any thoughts at all using just 140 characters.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more important it seems to me that this ISIS poll is centrally all about meeting real people in the real flesh, and… talking to them.

Yesterday’s encounters were rather memorable. The first bunch of smokers I approached in a pub garden were smoking all right, but they weren’t, erm, smoking tobacco. They were smoking grass. And their first question was, “Are you from the CID?” But once I had failed to arrest them, they relaxed, and cheerily filled out the questionnaire. I vaguely wondered whether, in the ISIS pollster guidelines, pollsters should confirm that the respondents are actually smoking tobacco, and not something else. But since I’ve never ever come across this before, I decided that maybe it was sufficiently unusual to not merit detailed advice. They were smoking! How was I to know what they were smoking?

And then there was the rather pretty 20-something who actually liked the smoking ban because it was so much more sociable outside pubs these days. I could only think that if the government banned smoking within a 100 metre radius of pubs, she’d have been saying how it was so much more sociable in fields and ditches these days. I bet she would have loved to have been on board the Costa Concordia when it rolled over and sank in the Mediterranean a few months back, with all those people holding hands as they slid down the side. How wonderfully sociable that must have been!

And then there was the guy who read the question about distrusting experts, and said, “But I am an expert!!!” I didn’t ask him what he was an expert in, but it had never occurred to me that I might actually end up asking these questions of an expert. The same question is not just about experts, but also the mass media. So next week, I bet I’ll find myself talking to someone who works for the BBC, or the Daily Telegraph.

There was food for thought in all those responses. And yet, while all these people volunteered these responses, they didn’t write them in the box provided. They all said very interesting things, but they didn’t write down what they’d just said. I think that I might write down what they said for them (always making it clear that “they said…” this or that).

You’re not going to get this sort of thing on Twitter.

And maybe that’s half the problem with the modern world. David Cameron probably reads all sorts of stuff on twitter, and thinks it’s what the real world is like. But it’s not. The real world is full of surprises. And I had five surprises yesterday from the real world, which I’ve just described. Using something like Twitter you’re using a sort of grunt-medium. Why allow as many as 140 characters? Why not just one or two? “Mm…” “Nn…”  ”Yy…” “Ff…” In txt com wrld, there’s actually a lot less information, not a lot more. And a sort of fog of misinformation has descended. Nobody can see anything, not even the manifestly obvious.

Like what awful damage smoking bans do.

International Social Impact Survey Starts

Well, today at least three people started asking smokers to fill out the ISIS questionnaire. Someone’s been pounding the streets of Torbay today in the bottom left corner of Britain, and Leg-iron’s taking it round to a smoky-drinky tonight in the top right corner of Britain. And I was out this afternoon in the middle of Britain. We’d all printed off copies of my compressed-format English questionnaire.

Meanwhile, it’s being translated into French*, Greek, Dutch, and Spanish. It’s already been translated into German, using a quite separate questionnaire designed by Reinhold. Emails are flying all over the world carrying little pictures and suggestions and advice. Text messages too.

In the background, progress is being made to enable the completed forms’ information to be entered into a remote server (two of them, actually) by pollsters using either their computers or mobile phones. It will actually be possible for pollsters to enter the data directly using their mobile phones, without any paper at all.

And an online poll, using the same questions, is going to be launched in tandem with the paper poll. We already have a domain name for this.

Here’s what the latest v.12 English questionnaire looks like:

This shading has been introduced partly to try to differentiate the ‘official use only’ top strip from the main body of the questionnare, and stop people trying to fill it in, but also to highlight the checkboxes – because most people seem to miss the Do You Smoke? question in the top right corner.

It’s not really quite professional quality (like Reinhold’s), but it serves its purpose. With four of these questionnaires on a single piece of A4, nobody found them in the least bit unreadable, and everyone zipped through the questions in under a minute.

And I’m not sure if my polling methodology is actually very professional either. It consists of driving to a pub, buying a drink, heading out into the garden, and keeping an eye out for smokers, and then asking them if they’d like to fill out a questionnaire about the social impact of smoking bans. So far, everyone that I’ve approached has readily agreed. And then I sit keeping an eye out for more smokers, until I’ve finished my drink, and head off to another pub. It’s the pub-crawl polling methodology. You keep at it until you end up under the table.

And it’s astonishing that it’s all happened so fast (and is still happening). After all, it’s only a little over two weeks ago that I had the idea that we could do our own poll. Since then something like 20 volunteers and advisers have huddled together in a private blog to thrash out the questions, and who does what, and what goes where. And now, two weeks on, we’re already hitting the streets.

And the main blog (i.e. this one) has been very helpful too in responding to my trial questionnaires, and showing what issues smokers seem to care about most. And there have been little jewels of advice dropped in the comments. You guys have been really helpful.

And as I was sitting with my beer and cigarette out in a sunlit pub garden, I wondered if Tobacco Control could move this fast. Almost certainly not. Theirs is a gigantic organisation, and you probably have to apply in triplicate just to use the toilet. Large organisations can’t move fast. What we’ve got is a small band of people who will improvise solutions to problems as they arise (and I bet we’ll be hitting plenty of problems over the months ahead).

And it’s all being run on a shoestring. My principal expenses so far have been the beers I’ve been buying myself, and will no doubt carry on buying. Well, somebody’s got to do it. We’ll no doubt be accused of being funded by Big Tobacco, or being a ‘front group’ for them, or something. But the evidence that we’re not is to be found in this blog, and also in the other private blog (which I can make public with the press of a button). There have been no stretch limos full of tobacco company execs handing us money or advice. We’re doing it all ourselves, using the resources we already have.

And we’re asking questions that Tobacco Control don’t ever seem to have asked. They’re pretty simple and obvious questions, most of them. So why hasn’t TC been asking them? Well, the simple answer is that TC doesn’t give a screw what smokers think. To them, we’re just vermin to be eradicated. You don’t ask vermin what they think of your Zyklon B, do you? No, I thought not.

Anyway, back to the serious questions. Iro Cyr rushed off without completing the French translation. So I throw it open to my readers to answer these questions:

*1. What is the French for ‘total’ (as in ‘total ban’)?

2. What is the French for ‘partial’ (as in ‘partial ban’)?

3. What is the French for ‘better’, ‘much better’, ‘worse’, and ‘much worse’?

I bet I’ll have the answers to these questions by tomorrow morning. That’s how the internet works. Mais oui! Bien sûr.

Connecting Up Smokers

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few weeks how to connect up all the disconnected smokers scattered all over the world. It’s something I’ve always wanted to see happening, and it’s something I’m sure will happen: smokers will start to swarm like angry wasps. In fact, they already are.

In a small way, the ISIS International Social Impact Study will help to hook people together. We’ll be interviewing smokers, and handing out website addresses. I’m sure some of them will be interested, and follow up. We’ll also be collecting email addresses. And it’s a survey which is being organised by a tiny little bunch of people from all over the world. People in Britain and America and Germany and Holland and Spain and Greece, who have never actually met each other, or know what each other look like. This study group is a little bit of international connecting-up-togetherness in itself.

But the principal purpose of the study is to find out how smokers are getting along with (or not getting along with) the tidal wave of smoking bans they’ve been hit with over the past 10 years or so. And so, quite separately, I’ve been wondering how to hook smokers up together, and build them into the political entity they’ve never been before, but which they must now become if they are to defeat the antismoking juggernaut that so grievously persecutes them.

My first idea was the Smokernet, which would be a mobile phone app that would store email addresses and phone numbers of identified smokers, creating a network through which messages could propagate, just like the internet. It’s attracted a great deal of interest from one person, who’s been actively working to set up something along these lines on an ipad or iphone. The interesting thing about him is that he’s a lifelong non-smoker. It’s something I tend to forget: most non-smokers don’t mind smoking at all. They’re not antismokers. And many of them can see what’s being done to smokers, and are as appalled as anyone. We smokers have many friends.

Anyway, him and me (and rather more him than me at the moment) have been investigating peer-to-peer network systems of the sort that are needed. If we can get something going, it has the potential to grow very rapidly. It’s the sort of thing that could go viral.

But I had another idea today. I noticed that two New Zealanders had encountered each other in the comments of my blog, and I asked if they’d like each other’s email addresses. After all, New Zealand isn’t a very big country, and they might live a couple of blocks from each other in Christchurch or someplace. It’s something I’ve done before. I had a small hand in hooking up some of the members of Junican’s Bolton Smokers’ Club. I’ve got the email addresses of quite a few smokers all around the world, and I can (and do) act as a hub.

So today’s idea was for a hub website (which would get advertised on my blog, and maybe on quite a few others) where smokers could leave their email addresses or phone numbers, just like they do with me. The smokers would arrive at the site and be presented with a world map, and be taken to their country or state’s section, where, once they’d registered, they’d be given the names or avatars of other registered smokers in their country/state, and asked if they’d like to meet them online or in person. If two people wanted to meet up, the hub would issue invitations, and help organise times and places.

It would be a sort of smokers’ dating agency. And in fact, male smokers would probably use it to find female smokers, and vice versa. The hub would essentially do what I occasionally do, but would do it all day every day for a growing number of smokers. And it would be totally automated. The hub would spend all day comparing the records of its registered smokers, and then suggesting that A meet up with E, because they both like Duane Eddy and cheeseburgers and Hunter S Thompson.

And here’s where it would be a bit like Smokernet. If smokers met up with other smokers, they’d be able to confirm to the website that the people they’d met actually were smokers. Smokers would accrue points in this manner. Any antismoker who got into the system, and pretended to be a smoker would lose votes, and eventually get thrown out of the system.

Unlike the Smokernet, this central hub system would grow pretty slowly, because it would probably only be advertised on the internet, and only on smokers’ blogs and maybe places like Forces and F2C. And it would actually complement the Smokernet, and outfits like Forces and F2C, and bloggers like me.

I haven’t managed to think of a name for this new idea. Smokerhub?

And together they’d all serve to gradually bring scattered smokers together. Into a swarm.

For I’ve come to believe more and more that smokers must come together, all over the world, male and female, black and white, Christian or Muslim. The only reason that Tobacco Control have been so successful in ramming through antismoking legislation all over the world is because smokers have never been a cohesive social unit, and don’t have a political voice. Now that they are under attack, it’s time for them to gain one. And until they do, politicians aren’t going to listen to them. Smokers are going to have to do what African-Americans in America did to recover their dignity with Martin Luther King and co. They’re going to have to do what Jews did in creating Israel. Because they’re essentially facing exactly the same existential threat.

But the difference is that while there’s only about 10 million Jews in Israel, and 40 million African-Americans in the USA , there are about 1,300 million smokers worldwide, many of them being royally screwed by thieving, predatory Tobacco Control. If just 1% of those smokers can be hooked up together, that’s 13 million people. If 10% can be hooked up, that’s 130 million people. Numbers of people of this sort aren’t going to want to create an Israel for smokers: they’re going to want their own countries back. And they will get them back.

The tobacco companies could help out here. They could put, as I’ve already suggested, a little card in their cigarette packets inviting their customers to “Join Team Benson & Hedges” or “Ride the Winston Cult”. Big stores like Tesco and Asda all have their loyalty cards. Why don’t the tobacco companies do it too? In the process, they’d be demonstrating something of the social conscience that their detractors say they don’t have. I hope Deep Smoke is listening.

And then, when we’ve got about 200 million smokers all hooked up into an angry swarm, we can go and screw Tobacco Control and the WHO and all the Nazi doctors in it right into the ground.

…

In other news, two famous singers died young prematurely this week. Donna Summer and Robin Gibb. And they both died of cancer. Donna Summer had lung cancer, and Robin Gibb had colon cancer.

I guess they must’ve been smokers. After all, everybody knows that only smokers get lung cancer. And everybody knows that only smokers get any sort of cancer at all.

But, the odd thing is, neither of them were smokers! Now ain’t that strange?

She may have been the Queen of Disco, but Donna Summer wasn’t one to light up a cigarette.
On Friday, one day after the Grammy-winning singer’s death at age 63, her family confirmed to Us Weekly that she succumbed to lung cancer, as was rumored. But, defying common misconceptions about the disease, her loved ones explain that the “Last Dance” singer’s cancer “was not related to smoking.”
“Ms. Summer was a non-smoker,” the new family statement says of the chart-topping “Last Dance” crooner.

…

The late Robin Gibb had famously avoided alcohol, drugs, smoking and unhealthy foods throughout life, so many are wondering how this all could have happened to him.

The Right to Smoke

I’ve been invited three times now to join the Right to Smoke Facebook cause, and each time I’ve declined to join. Here’s the invitation:

[ ... ] has invited you to join their cause on Facebook:

The Right to Smoke
1,176 members
ensure that smoking remains legal and that people have the right to do whatever they desire to their own bodies. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. No one denies that anymore. But what is even worse are public policies that restrict a person’s right to consume substances, however harmful, as they please. A person’s body is their own dominion, and the government does not have a right to keep a person from poisoning themselves if they so desire. These policies, good-intentioned though they may be, present a tremendous threat to the liberty of those, smoker or not, who oppose government intervention into personal lifestyle, and as such, they should be abolished. I’m not advocating that anti-smoking groups should not be allowed to express their opinion, nor do I think that an establishment owner should be forced to allow people to smoke if they don’t want to, but in the case that someone DOES want to allow smoking in their own private establishment, it is their choice and their responsibility, not the government’s. This group is for smokers and non-smokers alike who believe in the aforementioned libertarian values. All donations go to the American Lung Association. 1. People should have the right to govern their own body 2. Establishment owners should be able to decide whether or not smoking is permissable 3. The sale and production of tobacco substances should not be subject to the results of its health risks.

There are a number of things in this passage that brought me to a halt. Leaving aside the first sentence for now, what about the second one?

Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you.

Do they? I’m always worried by sentences that start off: “Everybody knows.” Well, I don’t know any such thing. I’ve been smoking for 40 years, and I’m still alive. There hasn’t been any decline in my health that I can ascribe to smoking.  So what’s bad about it? What have I missed?

No one denies that anymore.

Well, actually, I do.  I deny it. And what’s more, I think that most antismoking research is utter garbage, and has been garbage from its Nazi origins right up to today. I’m very near the point of saying that it’s all utter garbage. Why should I believe any of it? And I’m very far from the only one who feels this way. So this statement is simply untrue.

A person’s body is their own dominion, and the government does not have a right to keep a person from poisoning themselves if they so desire.

Sorry, but I don’t think I’m poisoning myself when I smoke. Just like I don’t think I’m poisoning myself when I drink a beer. Or eat a cream cake. And I did all three of these things today, and I’m still alive.

And maybe, if people really were killing themselves using universally recognised poisons -like arsenic, in large doses – governments actually should intervene? The Reverend Jim Jones got most of his followers to drink kool-aid laced with poison. Would anyone have objected if, warned in advance, the US Marines had parachuted in and prevented it from happening? Or would people have said: No, they’ve got a perfect right to kill themselves if they want to, so don’t you dare send in the Marines and trample on their rights!

My problem with the antismoking zealots (actually I have a whole bunch of problems with them) is that they regard tobacco as a poison, and I don’t. And I don’t think that beer or whisky is a poison either. It’s the dose that makes the poison. Even water in sufficient quantities is a poison. Anything can become a poison.

These policies, good-intentioned though they may be, present a tremendous threat to the liberty of those, smoker or not, who oppose government intervention into personal lifestyle, and as such, they should be abolished.

Are they well-intentioned? I don’t think the antismoking campaign is in the least bit well-intentioned. I don’t think that policies that expel millions of people from society, making pariahs of them, are the teensiest bit well-intentioned.

I’m not advocating that anti-smoking groups should not be allowed to express their opinion, nor do I think that an establishment owner should be forced to allow people to smoke if they don’t want to, but in the case that someone DOES want to allow smoking in their own private establishment, it is their choice and their responsibility, not the government’s.

Well, I want to completely suppress antismoking organisations. They are AntiSmoking Hate groups, and they are utterly vicious. They are a band of thieves, robbing smokers of their good name, and of their money.

This isn’t a simply a matter of freedom of speech. It’s much bigger than that. These antismoking campaigners aren’t just saying things, but doing lots of things as well.

This group is for smokers and non-smokers alike who believe in the aforementioned libertarian values.

That’s libertarianism, is it?

All donations go to the American Lung Association.

I don’t know for sure, but I have a horrible suspicion that ALA is as antismoking as they get. I wouldn’t want to hand them even more money.

But now let me go back to the first sentence, that I skipped over.

ensure that smoking remains legal and that people have the right to do whatever they desire to their own bodies.

It may just be me, but I have a real problem with the whole idea of rights. When were these rights conferred on people? And when were they revoked? The way I see it, it’s not that I have the right to do whatever I like to myself, but that I actually have the ability to do whatever I like to myself. I could, if I so wanted, saw one of my legs off right this minute. And if someone confiscated my saw, I could do it some other way. With a penknife. Or a pair of scissors. And this ability of mine is inherent in my nature. I’m always deciding to do things to myself. I went for a walk today, and had a beer and a cigarette, and then I walked back home again. And that’s something I did to myself. And when I got home, I warmed up some Chinese roast pork with fried rice and ate it. And that was something else I did to myself. The ability to decide to do things which have some effect upon myself is part of the whole package of being alive. So I really don’t need these rights things. Particularly if, shortly after they have been conferred on me, they’re promptly taken away.

So you’ll almost never find me arguing that people have a right to do this or that. I  feel much happier saying that people have no right to do this or that to me. And by this I really mean that it’s not right to do this to me. I don’t think I have a right to life and liberty and free speech. I instead think that nobody has any right (i.e. it’s not right) to take my life, or my liberty, or my freedom of speech. I don’t think I have a right to smoke: I just think nobody’s got any right to try to stop me. Their right doesn’t exist. And it never did exist.

And in part this is because they can’t stop me anyway. I’m always going to be able to get a little bit of some herb, and stick it in my pipe, and smoke it.

Anyway… , perhaps I’ve made it a tiny bit clearer why I haven’t signed up for this particular Facebook cause. I just wish they’d stop inviting me. Or write something that I don’t find myself disagreeing with almost every sentence in. They’ve got enough members anyway.

ISIS questionnaire

I’ve been running two blogs for the last couple of weeks. Apart from this one there’s a little bunch of people over on the Social Impact Survey blog trying to get the survey on the road.

We’ve got a draft final version of the questionnaire, and I thought I’d show it so that people can see what we’re doing, and maybe make a few last-minute criticisms. And also so that maybe we can pull in a few more pollsters (any country welcome).

The questions largely came out of my online questionnaires from a week or so back. We decided to ask about things that most smokers don’t seem to like. Pub smoking bans. Reduced social contact. Staying home more. Distrust of experts. Intense dislike of retirement/care home smoking bans. And general loss of “quality of life”. We also added a catch-all question to see which kinds of smoking bans had adverse effects. And we’ve got an option to allow them to write their own stuff.

There’s also an option for them to give a name and an email address. And we’ll hopefully have a website up and running by the time we start polling.

Of all the questions, the hardest of all was the age question. In fact, it still isn’t really resolved. People felt that asking people their age was rude. So we’ve gone for very broad age categories. But even that hasn’t ended it. “Working age? What if they’re not working??”

And also we’ve got a colourful little logo which adds a bit of sparkle (although most of the questionnaires will probably be printed in black and white). The compressed version above can have 4 on a single piece of A4. There’ll be several versions – French, Spanish, German, and Greek. Some will have extra questions that some people want to ask in addition to the core group above.

I’m pretty pleased with it. I took it today and got it printed, and then went and road-tested it on one person, a bartender. He went through it in under a minute, and asked no questions. Afterwards I asked him what he thought of it, and he said it was simple and straightforward, with nothing “shifty” about it.

The study is set to last for 2 – 3 months. I’ve no idea how many completed questionnaires we’ll get, but I’m hoping for at least 1000, maybe several times more.

When we’ve collected the data, we’ll be entering it manually into a central online server using our own computers or mobile phones. That side of things is under development at the moment, and should be working soon.

And in the end, we’ll see if we can get it all published somewhere.

So waddya think?

P.S. Apologies to those readers who couldn’t initially see the image of the questionnaire.
P.P.S. We have a Dutch poll too. Yayyyy!!!!!!!!!!

Smokernet

It was sunny today, and I went and sat out in my favourite pub garden with a beer and a cigarette, and mulled over my latest idea: Smokernet.

The all-volunteer International Social Impact Survey that I’m helping to set up should be able to reach several hundred smokers (and maybe even several thousand) and find out what smoking bans have done to them. In the process we’ll be handing out a website address where news of developments and progress will be posted, and where most likely the final report will be published. We’ll also be asking for email addresses of the smokers we interview, in order to send them updates of news. Something like this might serve as a new centre where smokers can go (along with Forces, F2C, TICAP) etc.

But what I was thinking about today was a quite different idea. It was for a mobile phone app in which smokers could keep the email addresses or phone numbers of other smokers they knew. If there were enough smokers with this app, and they were all connected together in a net of friends of friends of friends of friends, and it was also possible to propagate messages automatically through this network, you’d have a smokernet, which would be just like the internet, except just for smokers. The smokernet could be used to survey smokers, and send advice/information/etc.

How could it be arranged to only include smokers? Smokers would be asked to only invite other smokers onto the smokernet, and the certainty that someone on it actually was a smoker would be measured by the numbers of invites that a person had received. An invite to someone would be a way of saying “This person is a smoker”. If one person says “This person is a smoker,” then they might or might not be. But if 100 people say “This person is a smoker,” then he or she probably is one.

The concern here is that antismokers might manage to infiltrate the smokernet, and cause havoc. In fact, they would almost certainly try. But if they did manage to get on, they’d probably only be able to do so by taking up smoking, and becoming recognised as smokers. How many antis would be prepared to do that?

But if this happened, and somebody recognised an email address or phone number as known to belong to, say, Deborah Arnott, they could be denounced, and their recognition removed, and evicted from the smokernet. Maybe anyone who denounced anyone else would have to lose recognition as well, to deter casual denunciations.

Anyway, these considerations aside, what was attractive about this idea was that the smokernet could grow very quickly, and include millions and millions of people, all on a friend-of-a-friend basis. Smokernet would create a swarm of smokers, with information being passed between them. And I’m all for creating a huge swarm of smokers – preferably angry ones.

And the smokernet would have no centre. There’d be no smokernet central hub. It would just connect up smokers.

As I thought about it this afternoon, it was very much as a mobile phone app which could rapidly propagate messages. But it could equally be an internet application.

And then when somebody like Deborah Arnott says that 75% of smokers love smoking bans, the smokernet could be consulted, and the actual figure retrieved, and it would be 0.5% instead. The smokernet would allow smokers all around the world to be consulted.

The smokernet could also become politically powerful. Politicians might start to be concerned if, for example, 70% of smokers in their country were considering voting for someone else. Smokernet would weld smokers together into a political entity.

Incidentally, quite a few smokers don’t like being called “smokers”. I’ve heard it said that “smoker” is a word that was invented by antismokers. But I don’t think this is true. I’ve got a Collins English dictionary that was published in about 1980, and it’s got the word “smoker” in it. I don’t think it’s something that antismokers have introduced. And I don’t remember the word “smoker” suddenly appearing. It was always around, and I bet that if someone’s got an old dictionary (US or English) from 1920 or whenever, the word “smoker” will be found in it. It’s an ordinary English word, no different from butcher or baker or candlestick-maker. And I bet the same is true in German (raucher) and French (fumeur). So I’m quite happy to be called a smoker, and for a network of smokers to be called a smokernet.

Anyway, that was the gist of the idea. It’s one I’ve been toying with for a few weeks. Perhaps there’s some obvious flaw in it that I haven’t thought of.

Which is why having a blog that is read by about 800 people a day is so handy for tossing out ideas.

So, go on, tell me what’s so completely and utterly and laughably stupid and wrong-headed and unworkable about this idea.

Deep Smoke 2

A long response by Deep Smoke (who once worked for a tobacco company) to a question from markw:

Question:

All kidding aside could you ask Deep Smoke why the Tobacco Companies won’t fight the shs claims using tobacco control’s own air quality testing which proves that shs is NOT a workplace health hazard?

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com/2010/10/air-quality-testing-of-secondhand-smoke.html

Answer:

I don’t know why and I can only speculate. Initially, Big T did publicly fight all of the SHS claims, but this was what — 20, 30 years ago and more? A great deal has happened since then, such as the Master Settlement and all of those 40-60 year-old documents that tobacco control love to cite as proof that Big T is evil. The early 80s is about when most of the media began to support tobacco control groups while ignoring Big T. Obviously, that stymied the public fight in a huge way. Also keep in mind the FCTC from the WHO, which is partially designed to keep Big T out of the public fight. So I could answer markw’s question with another question: If no one pays you any attention, if no one is interested in what you have to say, how the hell can you fight against bogus claims?

Big T does fight these SHS claims when it has to, but only in court, when they are sued. Big T is sued often, yet wins the vast majority of individual consumer lawsuits. Not really consumer lawsuits, typically it’s a family member of a smoker who died in their late 60s early 70s from pneumonia, and a family member will claim that death and that they have also been harmed by SHS. It’s opportunism and greed: bitter, grieving vultures hoping to get a quick and easy payout from Big T. This is why tobacco control doesn’t use the courts to sue tobacco companies and instead uses politicians to achieve its ends of tobacco control, because they know they’re going to lose on health claims. TC have always lost on these grounds, with only a rare few exceptions when a judge or jury is particularly hostile to smoking (these decisions are reversed on appeal often). Any dumbass lawyer who would introduce TC propaganda in a court would be pummeled severely, so they have to prove beyond doubt that SHS actually harmed someone, and they cannot prove it. You never hear about the vast majority of these cases in the press, or if you do, and the plaintiff loses their suit, then the press simply ignores the whole thing, like it never happened.

Also do note that none of the smoking bans have made any difference to cigarette sales — people are still smoking. There is an overall decline in tobacco use and sales in western countries, yes, but that decline has been consistent for five decades prior to any public smoking bans. It has nothing to with bans. So from a Big T perspective, if it’s not hurting profits, then why spend money fighting it? It is, however, more complicated than this. Big T would love to see a relaxation of smoking bans, but they also supporting public opinion that SMOKING KILLS and PROTECT CHILDREN in order to be more “adults only” and “friendly” so I would think they do not want to jeopardise that position by taking on a fight they would only lose in the court of public opinion.

It is also a matter of legal standing. As said before, TC doesn’t not challenge Big T in court any longer (plain packs is different). Look at what is happening with possible smoke drift laws in Australia. Big T cannot get involved, apart from a press release, because it’s an attack against the individual smokers, not tobacco companies. You will see more and more of this as TC shifts its focus away from the companies and begins to attack individuals and/or housing complexes in court. They are already doing so in a number of places and these people do not have the resources to fight these claims. At the same time TC is trying to get laws implemented, one after another, usually in small towns and villages at a local ordinance level, and no governments nor councillors will consult with Big T. They pass laws to protect children or others without ever seeing any evidence of harm, because it looks good politically.

So there is no fight that can be fought. The only thing that Big T can do is keep selling a legal product to those who want it. The fight will have to come from us, the consumers. Unfortunately, most of the consumers also believe TC’s propaganda, and feel ashamed that they smoke, so they aren’t willing to fight either.