The Tobacco Control Lie Machine

I haven’t seen much news about the Philippines today. It got pushed off the top spot by the biggest art sale in history. But I mentioned yesterday in passing that the black lung lie was being wheeled out in the Philippines:

Eight provinces across the Philippines launched a new campaign to warn people about the risks posed by smoking and, specifically, the risk caused by the tar delivered by cigarettes, according to a World Lung Foundation (WLF) story published in Asian Scientist.

The campaign, called ‘”Sponge”, has aired in more than 10 countries already. Its Philippines version, which was developed by the Department of Health with support from the University of the Philippines and the WLF, was test marketed among focus groups during 2008.

It is said to graphically depict the tar that collects inside an average smoker’s lungs.

It is being made public on television and radio and at outdoor venues for a minimum of four weeks, with some provinces sustaining the campaign for longer.

Coincidentally, today my Black Lung Lie page got over 3,000 views. I think this happens from time to time, when some new forum discovers it. Today one of the readers left a message:

That’s unbelievable – never realized they done this. That’s pretty interesting about the pigs lungs being dyed to ‘simulate’ the supposed real thing. I wonder how long this will be kept quit for.

And I guess that actually is the key question: how long will this be kept quiet? Because sooner or later it’ll become common knowledge. And when people realise that they’ve been lied to about “black lungs”, the credibility of Tobacco Control will collapse. And when that happens, nobody will believe a word they say, or anything they’ve ever said.

Perhaps the answer is that it won’t become common knowledge until the mass media start reporting it as a Big Lie. But while Tobacco Control is spending zillions on antismoking ads in the mass media, those media outlets will never question any of it. They probably know as well as I do that it’s a fraud. But they’ll only break the story if and when the ad money stops flowing.

I was wondering today whether Tobacco Control is at all bothered about telling lies like the black lung lie. But then, it’s hardly the only lie they’ve told. They tell lies the whole goddamn time (for example). These days they’re telling brand new lies, by the dozen, about e-cigarettes. They have no difficulty whatsoever telling lies: lying has become second nature.

Do they ever worry that one day their credibility is going to collapse? They ought to worry. Because, if their credibility collapses, their War on Smoking is going to end very ignominiously, perhaps even with some long jail sentences.

But maybe they’re in too deep now to climb back out. I read a book about Bernie Madoff a while back which explained how he’d constructed his particular ponzi scheme by accident, rather than intent. He’d started out as a bona fide investment advisor, and converted to a ponzi scheme purely as a temporary expedient during a downturn in business – except that what was supposed to be a temporary expedient became permanent. Bernie Madoff had known for 10 years that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would eventually catch up with him before it finally actually did – and put him away for 150 years for his $65 billion swindle. And then his newly-bankrupted investors were shocked and bewildered that they’d been lied to for so long by someone they’d trusted implictly.

Most likely the same will prove to be true of Tobacco Control. They probably started out fairly legitimately, with the best of intentions. But then it became a new kind of ponzi scheme whereby more and more smoking-related health hazards had to be concocted to keep government funding flowing. And to keep government funding flowing, smokers needed to be taxed more and more. So it’s a ponzi scheme that works by screwing smokers en masse. It’s a confidence trick very much like Bernie Madoff’s. But far, far bigger. And perhaps, like Madoff, they also know perfectly well that sooner or later their particular ponzi scheme will collapse, like all ponzi schemes eventually do.

If they’re now diversifying into alcohol and food, it’s probably because they’ve screwed smokers about as much as they possibly can, and the tax revenues from tobacco are falling as smokers turn to bootleg products. And so sugar or salt or alcohol or fat are becoming the “new tobacco”, with health threats constructed around them, following the tobacco playbook.

In many ways the AGW scam is arguably a very early spin-off of the Tobacco scam. Because once the scam was working very nicely, they started looking around for some other trace gas in the atmosphere to construct an imaginary new threat around. And they found it in carbon dioxide, and the associated theory of carbon dioxide-driven  global warming. And, once again, governments poured in money. And the mass media talked up the threat. And more or less everybody believed them, all  over again.

But essentially this kind of scam is nothing other than large-scale robbery. There are zero real benefits, and ever-mounting costs. Looted economies slide into recession, and then depression. And tax revenues start to dry up.

And that’s probably when the whole vast ponzi scheme starts to collapse. Because when the mass media cease to be paid to keep the deception afloat, they’ll be the first to start screaming the truth that they’d been paid for decades to not tell. And when bought politicians no longer get their cut of the action, they’ll suddenly start becoming newly vocal too.

It’ll be the story of the century: how unscrupulous knighted doctors and university researchers and established politicians and large industries colluded for over half a century to construct the most gigantic scam in the entirety of recorded human history. The mass media will be able to live off the shock and horror of it for decades. And politicians will be able to build reputations around bringing the malefactors to justice. And they’ll be asking: How were we all fooled for so long?