A lawyer is arguing that subjecting psychiatric patients to nicotine withdrawal lengthens their confinement in institutions.
The Supreme Court will hear an appeal in the long-running battle by psychiatric patients to overturn the smoking ban at state-owned health facilities.
Barrister Richard Francois said banning patients – who are confined and particularly vulnerable – from smoking, is inhumane under the Bill of Rights.
He told Larry Williams DHBs are forcing nicotine withdrawals on people who are particularly vulnerable and in a time of crisis.
“They don’t want to be in that institution. No one does. Then you subject them to this additional burden which creates a lot of problems.”
Mr Francois said nicotine withdrawals mirror the symptoms of a mental illness and can be misinterpreted by staff – leading to patients spending longer in an institution than necessary.
“Those symptoms are interpreted by nurses and staff as just being another signal, another sign, of how insane they are.”
The people who do this to mental patients are beneath contempt. They are bastards. Utter bastards. And Tobacco Control is an army of utter bastards.
Which is why Tobacco Control must be destroyed. It must be completely annihilated.
The really sickening thing is that because they claim to be “helping” to protect people’s “health”, these bastards can get away with murder. And lots of them are doctors, like Harold Shipman. They are trusted implicitly. But they are wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Yet there seems to be a point where some doctors somehow flip from saving lives to taking lives.
It really ought to be a matter of primary importance to argue that not only are these people liars, fraudsters, and swindlers, but also that they are not only not doing any good, but instead doing a tremendous amount of harm.
These are not good people. They are profoundly evil people. And it needs to be said over and over again, with examples of just how evil they are. And what they’re doing with mental patients is an example of it.
Frank Davis 
Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.
Geneva Convention: Prisoners of war must be allowed to use tobacco. (Convention III, Art. 26)
Tobacco must be available to prisoners of war at canteens. (Convention III, Art. 28)
Similarly, tobacco must be available to internees. (Convention IV, Art. 87)
Hear, hear! I fully agree with your analysis. Persecuting smokers is evil. Persecuting the mentally ill by denying the ability to smoke when they are institutionalized is fundamentally cruel. There is no risk to others from second hand smoke. Support for smoking bans has only been achieved through fraudulently manipulating data and disseminating that concocted data through relentless propaganda. Therefore it is essential that we expose the harm caused by these draconian and punitive bans.
The really sickening thing is that because they claim to be “helping” to protect people’s “health”, these bastards can get away with murder.
And my overriding thought is – how the hell can we stop these people?
O/T Frank, I hate to whine, but can something be done about those adverts at the bottom of your daily entry? They’re loud and annoying, it seems to be a new thing – and the first one has no pause-button.
I always look at your page early in the morning, and those ads make me jump – they also wake up my wife. And I’d rather keep my main volume-control turned on, don’t wish to scramble to silence it every day.
Download and install the Adblock Plus plugin for your browser. I doubt that Frank can do anything about the ads.
That’s interesting. WordPress have been telling me for some time that they might add adverts at the foot of my blog, but I’ve never seen one. I hope they’re not Quit Smoking ads.
There is nothing I can do about it, because cfrankdavis.wordpress.com is a free blog: I don’t pay WordPress for it. If I want to stop them, I’ll have to move to one of the paid options, which I don’t really want to do at the moment. You could try using adblocker.
Has anyone else been seeing them?
No, I don’t get any ads, but I have Adblock Plus.
I read recently that Facebook are going to start using software that gets past adblockers so they can bombard you with ‘targeted’ advertising. Fortunately I don’t use Facebook apart from reading pages like Audrey Silk’s and Iro’s. But this will be a trend in the future, I’m sure. I often land on pages that won’t give me access unless I disable Adblock.
It’s understandable, since the ads provide them with a revenue stream. It’s just unfortunate that the vast majority of advertisements are offensively juvenile, over-loud (although I have a separate speaker system that I only turn on when I need it, so I’m mostly unaffected by that), and of no interest to me whatsoever.
Re Yesterday’s photo or Hil using steps to get into the Suburban.
I am no fan of hers; but, you have to step up 24 inches to clear the side of the damn thing.
It would be much less awkward for a little old lady to use steps.
I have one of those things, I am 6 ft tall and it is a bitch to get into.
I am not very limber anymore.
Google ‘Alt Rehse’, in case you don’t already know what went on there…
O/T
German Vice Chancellor (the rotund chap who’s one heartbeat away from the top job) states the blinding obvious about Brexit
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37210138