“Where is the humility? The implicit disapproval and
sense that the views of users are worthless comes over quite strongly in the works of this faction in public health.”
I can answer that. There is no humility, because an embattled righteous minority (imagine Crusaders besieged in some Krak in the Middle East while Saracens rampage around them outside) can’t afford humility. Perhaps these people did have humility (as well as courage and determination) when they set out from somewhere in Western Europe, long ago; but now, backing down would mean admitting the whole thing was a disastrous idea from the start. And the Saracens are _really_ angry by now, so retreat doesn’t look too safe.
E-cigarettes are suffering from a
tobacco Control insanity that was already well-developed long before e-cigs emerged. The development (not necessarily chronological) goes like this:
1. Start with grandiose ideas of liberating the _whole world_ from the scourge of cigarettes. Not, NB, merely reducing smoking rates as much as possible (which might lead, in time, to 0% prevalence); no, this is a splendid dream of global liberation.
By this yardstick, nothing short of entirely stamping out smoking can count as success. (The framing of smoking as some kind of infectious disease, transmissible not only by the inhalation of one molecule of nicotine, but also by sight and thought, is a direct and absurd result of this all-or-nothing mentality).
2. Provide extensive education and public information about how bad smoking is for. Provide many alternative ways out of smoking (NRT, Champix, Alan Carr etc).
3. You know what? The ....... Saracens are still smoking! The barbarians! After all we’ve done for them, a significant percentage of people are just carrying on smoking as if we didn’t exist! And claiming it’s their “free choice”!
4. All right, gloves-off time. Since these savages clearly don’t know what’s good for them, let’s start laying down the law. Laws against smoking here and there. Inflated propaganda about SHS, to make them feel dirty and guilty. Laws that make smokers visually obvious as people smoking, rather than people getting on with their lives and, incidentally, having a smoke. That way we get them all in one place, to be pointed at and decried by the virtuous.
5. Now they’re complaining that we’re attacking the smoker personally. How can this be justified? Easy. Smokers’ “free choice” is an illusion. There are no consumers of
tobacco products – there are only victims or addicts. We’re not actually attacking people or peoples’ free choices, because smokers – by virtue of being smokers – are not actually fully-realised autonomous people.
This is an easy move to make, because many smokers _do_, personally, find smoking difficult to give up; because smoking _is_ addictive. It’s all too easy to stretch this fact – based in a rich context of personal experience, which also includes enjoyment of smoking and a social use for smoking – and assert that all and any reported experience by a smoker is fully explained away by the radical Mind Control that the Addiction exerts over them.
The righteousness and messianic hyperbole of Tobacco Control’s (failed) appeal to all the people of the world to stop smoking, and the insidious, unprecedently infinite evil of the Big Tobacco/Nicotine/Addictium Mind Control that opposes it, are mutually supporting and explanatory.
The end result is that there are no people in this picture. Empathy and humility are not appropriate where there are no people involved. Anti-smoking campaigning has degenerated into a squabble between Tobacco Control and an imagined “Big Tobacco” for the seat at the controls of the Mind Control Machine. The targets of the Machine are not people but pawns: empty vessels, with no autonomy, to be filled with the “right” messages, like golems awaiting a text.
It’s ironic that Tobacco Control posits the people it’s supposedly trying to help as infinitely pliant, silent, compliant and receptive to manipulation, while accusing Big Tobacco of exploiting exactly this.
This started long before e-cigarettes came along. E-cigarettes have merely blown it up so that it’s now obvious. We do need anti-smoking campaigners to have more humility and empathy; ironically, having a bit more humility would allow them to step forward and claim some of their undoubted successes, rather than holding out for the great smokeless Rapture which will never come. But I wonder whether their lack of humility and empathy isn’t too long-entrenched; whether, ironically, they might be ADDICTED to their dream of changing the whole world.
