Whisper it: non-smokers die too!

Monday February 11, 2008

The anti-smoking movement is fanatical and dishonest, says BAFTA award winner Ronald Harwood

We live in an age of extremism. It manifests itself in every walk of life – religion, most obviously, but also in politics because politicians, our elected representatives, have a savage impulse to control and they have taken this impulse to extremes.

Control is the modern politician’s watchword. It is a form of extremism not much different from any other because extremism produces fanatics and fanatics are a curse on all the peoples of this planet. Communists, fascists and Nazis were also fanatical in their desire to control. Believe me, I do not overstate the case.

To the introduction of the smoking ban, there is another element to be identified. Hypocrisy. I first saw it manifested years ago in Los Angeles. I was waiting for some friends in a hotel lobby. In those days there were smoking areas and there I sat puffing away, waiting happily. Suddenly I saw a huge man, at least six foot six and built like sumo wrestler, descending on me. He was somewhat unsteady on his feet and he glowered at me as he approached.

Apprehension

My apprehension grew because I could see that his gaze, also unsteady, was fixed on my cigarette. He reached me and lent over. His breath smelt of alcohol. He said in a desperate whisper, “Say, buddy, could you let me have a cigarette?” Much relieved I offered him one. Then he said, “And if you see a blonde dame coming out of the ladies, tell me. That’s my wife. She’ll kill me if she sees me smoking.”

And indeed, when a blonde, as unsteady on her feet as her husband, emerged from the lavatories, I warned him. I’ve never seen anyone drop a cigarette so fast. The two of them tottered off towards their table. Yes, drinking’s all right, but smoking is a no-no. And when has anyone heard of one human being killing another while under the influence of a cigarette?

It also used to amuse me in Hollywood when well-known actors would object to my smoking while they sported two broad white lines from their nostrils running down their upper lips. Cocaine, like drink, was fine, but tobacco? Forget it. And just the other day a friend told me that she now always takes an extra packet of cigarettes to parties so that the “non-smokers” can help themselves without having to keep bothering her. Hypocrisy and extremism are bedfellows and I’d love them to do what bedfellows do to each other in bed.

Ridiculous

And what about these ridiculous notices on cigarette packets? There must be an army of petty bureaucrats in Brussels working day and night to produce dishonest slogans such as SMOKING KILLS and SMOKING HARMS THOSE AROUND YOU. An American comic I saw held up a packet of cigarettes to his audience and said, “You see this? It says SMOKING LOWERS YOUR SPERM COUNT! That’s the one I’m lookin’ for!”

The public smoking ban is also, in part, an act of revenge by the extremists, for which we smokers must bear some responsibility. We have puffed perhaps a little too indiscriminately and doused those nearby in an odour they find unpleasant. I for one would willingly accept as punishment to be confined to an area where only I and my fellow-smokers were allowed. But that is not be contemplated. And why? For the answer, a little bit of history.

The first national government ever to introduce a ban on smoking was, yes, you’ve guessed, the government of Adolf Hitler. It was the Fuehrer’s man, Dr Fritz Linkint, who, on the basis of what – in the context – Americans hypocritically call junk science, first came up with the idea of passive smoking (passivrauchen), and on the basis of no evidence at all. Smoking, Dr Linkint said, was masturbation of the lungs.

And it’s interesting to note that when the founder of the American anti-smoking organisation, ASH, the lawyer John Banzhaf, was asked why people shouldn’t be allowed to smoke where they want, he responded by saying, “Why shouldn’t people be allowed to masturbate where they want?” The ideology is pervasive. The Nazis said smoking was a relic of a liberal lifestyle. And so, I suppose, is masturbation, thank God.

Essential

Passive smoking is essential to the anti-smoking cause. And here’s the first clue to the deceit and dishonesty that has taken place in this regard. As early as 1975, at a UN World Conference on Smoking and Health, the British doctor and public health official, Sir George Godber, suggested that, in order to eliminate smoking “it would be essential to foster an atmosphere where it was PERCEIVED that active smokers would injure those around them, especially their family and any infants or young children who would be exposed involuntarily to environmental tobacco smoke”. Without passivrauchen there could be no ban and so the research began, not to discover the scientific truth but to support a lie or, more commonly, spin.

The California smoking ban – the one that started the whole thing – was based on a study by the US Environmental Protection Agency which was such a travesty of science that it was declared invalid and thrown out by a federal court.

Virtually all environmental tobacco smoke studies are produced by groups with an avowed antismoking agenda, and are mostly financed by pharmaceutical companies, which have a vested interest in getting us all off cigarettes and on to nicotine patches and anti-depressants.

Computer projections

Estimates of thousands of deaths from environmental tobacco smoke are based on statistical computer projections. But there is not one death certificate, anywhere in the world, citing ETS as cause of death. There is not even one documented case of death proven to have been caused specifically by ETS. Anti-smokers have been challenged over and over again to produce one, and have declined every time. They now simply say that their position is ‘proven’ and refuse to debate it any further.

Experts proclaim that 63,000 Americans are killed annually by secondhand smoke. That’s more than the victims of AIDS, drunken drivers, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina put together.

Here is a good example of all this. In 1998, the vehemently anti-smoking World Health Organisation published a large study on secondhand smoke. In their introduction to the report, the researchers said, “An important aspect of our study is its size which allowed us to obtain risk estimates with good statistical precision.” Without going into the statistical details, it was generally accepted that all the results signified absolutely nothing.

Panic

When the study results were leaked to the Sunday Telegraph in March 1998, the newspaper headlined its story, PASSIVE SMOKING DOESN’T CAUSE LUNG CANCER – IT’S OFFICIAL! The World Health Organisation was thrown into a bizarre panic, to put it mildly. They issued a press release. SECOND HAND SMOKE DOES CAUSE LUNG CANCER, DO NOT LET THEM FOOL YOU! and gave the explanation that statistically significant results might have been achieved had the study group proved larger. Hullo!

Wait a moment. Didn’t the researchers themselves say an important aspect of their study was its size which allowed them to obtain risk estimates with good statistical precision? Would I be wrong to accuse the WHO of lying? Would I be unfair to accuse them of spin? Would I be unjust to accuse them of extremism and hypocrisy? I think not.

The anti-smoking movement is fanatical and dishonest. And, as usual, truth is the victim as it was in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I do not exaggerate. The extremists have won. And one would think, as the American author Sydney Zion pointed out, that the wild assertions of the anti-smoking lobby would be derided as quackery by the scientific establishment, the medical community, the media and even the man in the street. Instead, with very few exceptions, the scientists and doctors have remained silent.

Silent

As for the media, God bless them, fearless in exposing the private lives of public figures, courageous in their examination of government reports, even in some cases doubting the statistics for global warming and climate change, the media has remained largely silent. Journalists have retreated in the face of the onslaught by the fanatics. The only equivalent I can think of is their cowardice to refrain from publishing anything critical of Islam. Their pusillanimity disgusts me.

Our simple pleasure of having a cigarette after a meal with a cup of coffee is denied us. The delight of enjoying a cigar in a private club is no more. And I remember my friend, J B Priestley, when he was rather old, looking lovingly at a Partagas No2, the sweetest cigar in the world, and saying, “You see this cigar, Ronald? It was rolled on the inside of a Cuban woman’s thigh. That’s the loveliest part of a woman, the inside of her thigh. If I remember correctly.”

But there is good news, no, wonderful news. And it is this incontrovertible statement. I urge all to remember it. I urge all to shout it from the roof tops. NON-SMOKERS ALSO DIE – AND NOT FROM PASSIVE SMOKING!

Ronald Harwood won an Oscar in 2003 for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Pianist. In February 2008 he won a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for which he has also been nominated for a second Academy Award. He is a member of Forest’s Supporters Council.