The smokophobes don’t seem to be trying any more. I mean, what message is this even supposed to convey? That a lot of people do something the article’s author disapproves of? There is no other message that I can see. Well, there is one, but it’s not what the article claims it is.
A lot of people spit in the street. I disapprove because I don’t like it but I’m not going to rail against them, remonstrate with them or write articles saying how terrible it is and how they must all be rounded up and shot. Really, it doesn’t matter all that much, I just don’t like it, so I look the other way. Problem solved.
There used to be ‘no spitting’ signs on buses in the old days. I haven’t noticed any lately. Is it allowed now, or have they just been obscured by the five thousand ‘No smoking’ signs that seem to be on every bus? Actually, I have to agree with ‘no smoking’ signs on the new hydrogen-powered buses. That would put all the concerns over any kind of long-term effects right out of everyone’s head. Along with the contents of their heads. What, you think the Government will pay to have those tanks checked for leaks? The Hindenburg Bus is merely a matter of time. I just hope I see it from the outside.
Health concerns of spitting? Spreading germs? Nonsense. In the street you are breathing in what everyone else has expelled from their mouths, noses and other orifices, along with the shed skin cells of everyone who has passed you and whoever is upwind of you, the noxious fumes emanating from the nappy of that larval stage in the pram and all those lovely, healthy diesel particulates the smokophobes don’t want tainted with a bit of burning leaf. Spitting is, to me, disgusting and unsightly but in the open air it causes no real harm. The danger, if any, is as nothing compared to that posed by a passing moped, so I do no more than look away. That’s all it takes.
But back to the silly article and its pointless graph. One line stood out -
The World Health Organisation, America’s Centres for Disease Control and the Canadian Public Health Association created a new surveillance system to gather comparable data on tobacco use around the world.
ORLY? Do tell. They don’t, of course. I have a feeling this new surveillance system is based, in large part, on the old system of asking people if they smoke and how much. In fact I would strongly suspect it is exactly the same system but with a newer and snappier acronym attached. The ‘surveillance’ part is straight out of the world of Panoptica. You must believe you are being watched all the time, even though it is obvious that there are far more cameras than people available to watch them.
In Egypt, for example, hardly any women smoke. It’s predominately Muslim so if a woman admits to smoking she probably risks twenty lashes. Similarly in Japan, it’s culturally very naughty for women to smoke so most of those that do are likely to deny it. In the UK it’s the other way around; girls will claim they smoke when they don’t just because they know it’ll screw up the stats, and because it’s funny to mess with the system. I did it myself at school, years before I smoked my first Embassy.
The smokophobes will say ‘Aha, but all smokers stink, it’s easy to find you all.’
I was at a job interview yesterday. It lasted an hour in a small office. I won’t know the outcome for a couple of weeks because it has to go through a long and tortuous system. At the very, very end of the interview, the interviewer asked me if I smoked.
I have quite blatantly yellow fingers and had used them to hand over all the paperwork I was asked to bring and all the forms I had to fill in while there. I have not had to attend interviews for jobs for nearly two decades, so I was nervous, so I’d puffed down a few before the interview. My only suit is rarely worn so has hung unwashed for months (to clarify, it was clean when hung up and not worn since). If my home is saturated with my vile leaf-burning hobby, then the suit would be one of the most saturated items in my wardrobe. Even with all that, the interviewer had to ask.
I could have said ‘no’ and I’d have got away with it. I didn’t. I explained that I never smoke at work because the nature of the work I have done so far means that any hand to mouth action in the laboratory poses far more immediate dangers than anything the antismokers have made up. So if they don’t want me smoking at work, there is no problem. Smoking is a leisure activity anyway. It’s something that needs free time to appreciate properly and not something that fits in with active working. When I’m busy I don’t think about smoking.
Unless it’s writing, where smoking is an essential component of the process along with booze, especially if you’re Welsh. Ask Dylan Thomas. Oh wait, he died, but then he was so drunk he probably hasn’t noticed yet. His last words were apparently ‘I’ve had nineteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record’. I have a feeling my last words will be ‘Dylan Thomas? Pfft. Weak-livered amateur’.
So, assuming (and I’m betting I’m right) that the best these antismoking morons could come up with as a ‘new system’ was to give the old system a new name, then all a smoker has to do is say ‘no’ when asked ‘Do you indulge in the vile and filthy habit of burning tubes of leaves and blowing cancerous smoke into the faces of the cheeeldren?’
Plus, of course, anyone buying from Man with a Van or growing their own or taking a trip overseas to stock up will never appear in the official record of tobacco sold in that country and is even more likely to say ‘No’ or ‘Get stuffed’ to any official prodnose.
Which makes the results meaningless, pointless and along with the rest of the article, a complete and utter irrelevance.
Other than that little subliminal message: ‘We are watching you’.
Straight from 1984, that one.
Ignore it. They have no idea who we are. What they are doing is phishing for a response.
“The smokophobes will say ‘Aha, but all smokers stink, it’s easy to find you all.’
Slightly tangential, but I had to laugh at one of the official excuses given for banning e-cigs: i.e. that staff could not determine whether they were e-cigs or cigarettes. In other words they were saying they couldn’t even smell burning cigarettes in their places!
Leg, I was just looking at a US smoking rates graph at
http://www.gallup.com/poll/156833/one-five-adults-smoke-tied-time-low.aspx
Note how smooth the graph is for the 50+ years from 1944 through 1998 in the US. 1999 was when the 800 million dollar a year level of antismoking funding began flooding the public consciousness. Note how the figures bounce WILDLY from year to year after that. Are people’s smoking habits REALLY changing that wildly? Or is it simply that the surveys are reflecting the momentary whims of each new blitz of antismoking commercials and stories designed to make smokers reluctant to tell an interviewer they smoke?
- MJM
Try running a survey on how may people admit to taking cocaine or heroin. Then guess how many were lying. When you make smoking denormalised, fewer and fewer people admit to it. So it looks like smoking rates are going down.
And then you bring in plain packaging because that’s worked so well with heroin and cocaine…
It’s self-created nonsense and at some level, even the antismokers must know this. They don’t care as long as the numbers fit what they regard as reasoning.
I saw an e-cig system today that was pretty much indistinguishable from a pen. Stainless steel metal barrel, transparent liquid reservoir and a mouthpiece. If the manufacturers had thought to stick a biro on the other end a vaper could easily be mistaken for someone lost in thought while doing a crossword.
I’m beginning to get the impression that in the same way that early cars looked like carriages and modern ones look like nothing on earth, e-cigs are going to move rapidly away from their initial form to something new and wonderful.
I have yet to touch a cigarette, but I’m certainly beginning to wonder if e-cigs could have a beneficial impact on my weight and concentration.
You could stick a biro in the end. I have pen-shaped multitools with a short biro in the end.
Take out the thickening agent and there isn’t even visible steam. I have an Electrofag that looks like a USB stick, they can look like anything.
You don’t even need nicotine in there. I know there’s at least one reader here who is a non-smoker but uses a no-nicotine Electrofag just to go outside with his mates.
It needn’t even taste like tobacco. I have coffee, apple and absinthe flavours and there’s even a roast-chicken flavour that actually does taste like roast chicken! Yes, I have smoked roast chicken.
So you can get the smoker relaxation with no trace of tobacco or nicotine at all, and not even he risk of the picograms of deadly things that you’ll get far more of when walking along a typical high street (even then it doesn’t kill all that many).
With the thickening agent though, you do get to blow smoke rings. Even if it’s not real smoke.
I would have said no at the job interview. If you actually want the job. As that was the desired answer. Not the truth….
I won’t lie to get a job. Aside from the fact that they could dismiss me at a stroke the first time they saw me lighting up, I refuse to play the part of the oppressed. As Popeye said, ‘I yam what I yam’.
Besides, it isn’t a problem. I’ve spent most of my life working with dangerous bacteria so at work, no smoking is normal. Putting anything in your mouth in that kind of work is a far greater risk than smoking. So they don’t want me to smoke during an 8-hour shift, it’s no problem at all.
Years ago, when I smoked far more than I do now, I survived a 20-hour non-smoking flight to Beijing. Eight hours is a doddle.
Of course, when I got to Beijing, everyone smoked everywhere
One highly educated commentator on that article opines:
“In Europe the demographics appear different. In my experience women smoke more than men. (Anecdotal data from my place of work: About 5% of the men smoke and closer to 20% of the women. The smokers also have less education than the non-smokers.)”
Is there a difference between having less education and being less educated? Where do I apply for a grant to conduct the research?
I smoke, and I have a PhD. So there’s datapoint one for your study!
I have quite blatantly yellow fingers and had used them to hand over all the paperwork.
Which reminds me, Nature has heard the silent prayers of the secret smokers of New Zealand.
Giant pumice island floating in Pacific Ocean
“A GIANT floating island of pumice was created when a previously dormant volcano erupted amid more than 150 earthquakes over two days last month, scientists say.
The eruption of the Havre Volcano, about halfway between New Zealand and Tonga, is believed to have caused the 7500 square kilometre pumice “raft”, which was encountered by a New Zealand navy ship last week.”
“De Ronde said the pumice island was so light that it had floated several hundred kilometres from the volcano when it was encountered by the HMNZS Canterbury, which took samples last week.”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/giant-pumice-island-floating-in-pacific/story-fnd134gw-1226449354594
If it hits New Zealand, it’ll probably rub the whole country off the map. The drones will believe it if you tell them with a straight face
I think the reported prevalence of smoking in UK is a long way from reality. I mentioned on FD’s blog that where I live, I see many Brits on holiday in an environment where smoking is accepted as the norm. In bars, restaurants, wherever. No disapproving glances, no wrinkled noses, just clean ashtrays provided with a smile. Smokers can actually relax and enjoy a ciggy without feeling guilty about it. And my guesstimate from what I observe is that about 60% of the holidaying Brits are smokers.
Very unscientific, I know, but if 25% is a true figure, then all the non-smokers must holiday elsewhere, and only smokers book to come here.
Somehow, I find that unlikely.
Interesting observation. I live in Norway, the overwhelming majority claim they are non-smokers (although many use snus), but at parties and social gatherings at least half of the adults can be found outside during the course of the evening having a “social” cigarette or cigar. So for me non-smokers are now defined as people who don’t pay for their tobacco.
A while ago, there were some scientific papers published that really, truly upset every single government wonk that read them. The researchers had, you see, worked out that pretty much everything you put into a human at one end some time later comes out the other end. Cocaine is no exception to this, and the metabolite that a user’s body turns the stuff into is apparently fairly distinctive, quite stable and isn’t produced by any other substance.
So, to test how much cocaine is going up noses and so on, test the sewers to see how much is being peed out again in metabolite form. As one might expect, the sewage concentrations peak at weekends and public holidays, and drop much lower mid-week. People are taking cocaine mostly because they like it and not because they’re addicted to it, hence most use is at a weekend as a pick-me-up and so on. This isn’t the contraversial part of the study, although there’s enough implied free will there to get the average bansturbator fuming.
No, the bit that really got the Government people fuming was that the scientists were able to run actual quantitative estimates of the total amount of cocaine being used in the cities where the tests were run (Rome first, then London and other places). These estimates were rigorously checked for all possible biases, partly to divert criticism and mostly because the estimates several times the official estimates; these findings were true not only of cocaine but of most other common drugs as well. Europe as a whole uses about 350 kg of cocaine per day, averaged over the week.
The take-home message is actually really simple: humans like drugs. We really, really love mind-altering substances and most people are pretty adept at coping with and moderating their intake of these substances, to the extent of doing themselves very little harm. Furthermore, banning assorted mind-altering substances has very little effect on their availability.
It does, however, have a considerable effect on their tax production. The sooner the government loses that tax take, the better, in my view.
I have heard that spitting was not allowed on public transport chiefly because of the risk of TB transmission, when TB was still a big killer, I have even seen old street views with fingerboards on lamp-posts saying “NO SPITTING”.
After TB was eradicated the notices became redundant.
Unfortunately TB has made a comeback and is on a new World Tour at the moment, courtesy of Labour and now the Torydim Party.
Bacon and also eggs are now supposed to be ‘as bad as smoking’. Oh and red meat and anything else you can get down your neck two times out of three. I sometimes think that if you believed the results of all these studies you might just as well take up <a href="http://boingboing.net/2005/06/17/worlds-worst-excerpt.html"Breatharianism.
I really hope people can learn to live on sunlight and air becasue those are the only things they haven’t worked out how to tax yet.
Shit imagine if you put brown sauce on your fag as well, you’d be dead in seconds