A New Year Toast

Last night, shortly before midnight (UK time), I met up with Brigitte in the Smoky Drinky Bar. And then, in the space of the next few minutes, Gary K in Illinois appeared as well, and then RdM in New Zealand, and finally Emily in Boston, Massachusetts. And then at midnight someone – Brigitte, I think – suggested we drink a toast to The Complete Destruction Of Tobacco Control. And so I did the honours, and lifted my glass of whisky as I called for “The Complete Destruction Of Tobacco Control in 2018,” and everyone else did too (although RdM raised an imaginary glass, because he didn’t have a real one at hand).

I don’t actually think that we’ll actually see the complete destruction of Tobacco Control in 2018, but I think we’re going to start to see the wheels beginning to come off this particular monstrous juggernaut. And maybe next year there’ll be 10 people drinking the same toast, and the year after 100 people, and the year after that 1000 people, and so on.

For, as I see it, Tobacco Control is an organisation that is fighting a phantom enemy. The zealots in Tobacco Control have magnified a single plant – the tobacco plant – into something more dangerous and threatening than cannabis or opium, and perhaps even more dangerous than flu or Ebola or Zika, and maybe even more dangerous than all of them combined. And in the process of fighting this imaginary enemy, Tobacco Control is doing colossal social, economic, and political harm to millions of people, with next to zero attendant medical benefits.

It’s crazy. It’s utterly crazy. And the craziness has already led to the destruction of cultural institutions like pubs and clubs where people used once to be able to meet and talk and smoke and drink, but can now no longer do so. And yet this isn’t enough for these zealots. Having banned smoking in indoor public places, they now want to ban smoking in outdoor public places, and they’re also looking to ban smoking in indoor and outdoor private places. For Tobacco Control abolishes the difference between indoor and outdoor, and between public and private: they want smoking banned everywhere, and the tobacco companies closed down, and they will also want every single tobacco plant in the world uprooted and burned. They never stop. They never, ever stop.

And so I think that more and more people, non-smokers as well as smokers, are beginning to see that these people are insane. And they will see that they are dangerously insane, if the senior ranks of the WHO can hold closed conferences on the Final Solution to the Tobacco Problem, while diseases – like Ebola, Zika, Black Plague, and now maybe Influenza as well – multiply out of control.

The medical profession is no longer doing the job for which it was created: the care of the sick. It’s now full of mad people like Sir Liam Donaldson, fighting imaginary medical threats (tobacco smoke) rather than real ones (Ebola, Zika, Plague, Influenza). One might compare them to researchers in a laboratory, who, distracted by some fly that is buzzing around inside it, set out after it with fly swatters and sprays, and end up smashing up the entire laboratory. For these zealots are destroying the medical profession, by bringing it into disrepute. And it seems to me that at some point governments everywhere are going to have to start realising that Tobacco Control is a disease of the medical profession, that seems – like dementia – to only affect the central nervous system of the profession, which is located in organs like the WHO or BMA or RCP.  And I think that they are also going to start realising that the medical profession is incapable of curing itself of the mental disorder of Tobacco Control, and that it will require direct intervention by government. The medical profession will have to be brought under direct government control, and all the mad doctors – the Liam Donaldsons, and Sally Davises and George Godbers – at the top of it driven out, and replaced by junior doctors recruited from the saner regions of the medical profession, if there are any.

After all, much the same has happened in other professions. Prior to WW2, Stalin purged the Soviet army of almost all its senior generals. And perhaps he knew he needed to, if the Soviet Union was to win any war it should ever need to fight. No doubt he had to promote junior generals to replace the ousted older generals Sometimes things like this need to be done.

Of course, it is to be hoped that it won’t actually be necessary to shoot the Liam Donaldsons, and Sally Davises and George Godbers, and that it  will suffice to simply remove them from any medical offices they might occupy. The harder task will be to find doctors who have not yet contracted the Healthist Mental Disorder to take their places. Candidates for the post of Chief Medical Officer will need to be asked questions like:

Rank the following in their order of danger to public health. 1) Bubonic Plague, 2) Influenza, 3) Ingrowing Toenails, 4) Cigarettes, 5) Chocolate Sponge Pudding.

Anyone who ranked cigarettes or chocolate sponge pudding as the greatest threats to public health would not get the job. For one of the principal characteristics of Healthist Mental Disorder would seem to be a propensity to maximize minor health threats, and minimize major health threats.

The newly purged and reformed medical profession would then be subjected to a civilian supervisory body (no doctors allowed) consisting of ordinary men and women from all walks of life who would monitor the medical medical profession’s internal discussions and recommendations, raising the alarm whenever doctors started exhibiting symptoms of new forms of lunacy.

It might also be necessary to consider breaking up the medical profession into separate sub-professions, for example hospital medicine, general medical practice, and such like, so as to prevent any one form of medicine gaining supremacy over all the others – which is something that seems to have happened with Healthist Preventive medicine.

I think something like this, along with the de-funding of NGOs like ASH, will soon have to be very seriously considered.

In the meanwhile, a toast to all my readers as I once again call for the Complete Destruction Of Tobacco Control.