The Anti-Tobacco Crusaders
These activists have abandoned logical reasoning and replaced it with faith and passion. Anything goes when it comes to pursuing the triumph of their such “good cause’’, and “white lies’ are a perfectly acceptable tool. Any open debate and any valid scientific research is therefore precluded. We do find of course some pure idealists, survivors of former “virtuous movements’’ among them. Be that as it may, there are unfortunately a great number of self-interested do-gooder apostles fueling and exploiting to their advantage this blind militant force in an effort to assert their own power and fame, not to mention more tangible benefits.
For these knights of purity, tobacco is the absolute evil, the devil. It must be eliminated, eradicated. At the very least, it must be hidden or sold “under the counter’’, much like porn magazines (sic). The tobacco industry is diabolical. It must be destroyed, made to disappear, bankrupted through litigation.
The problem is that if the tobacco industry exists it is because it responds to a demand. If tobacco has spread around the world since Christopher Columbus, during an era when there was no other means of advertising than word of mouth and when tobacco was cultivated by primitive means, it is because there is something attractive about the product that causes people to crave for it. The industry responded to the demand, it did not create it. If the industry were to disappear, the demand would remain and would require to be fulfilled. And it would be fulfilled. Multinationals would be investing their money in tax havens, where they would fund an offshore production in some underdeveloped nation. Cigarettes would be distributed through organized criminal networks, fueling underground commerce and auxiliary crimes in the process. No quality control could ever be achieved. Control could only be dealt with through the police and corruption would inevitably creep in. For these reasons, the fundamentalist anti-tobacco crusaders are a true danger to social balance and public health.
As for the smoker, he is seen as someone possessed by the devil. He must be pursued, hunted down to his last hide-out, even in his own home. The smoker loses the ordinary rights of ownership and freedoms within his own home. Already in the U.S. smokers are increasingly denied rental housing. Moreover, in the spirit of good Judeo-Christian morality, he must be punished by where he has sinned. Let his vice cost him and ruin him. Let us therefore increase the price of cigarettes and rolling tobacco. For decades, we have been served a lie, with no tolerance for any criticism or challenge, namely: that the only effective method to reduce smoking prevalence is to increase the price of cigarettes. But since it does not work, they allege that it is because the increases are neither high enough nor frequent enough! But just as with their tactic of stigmatization of smokers, the high-price policy does not work.
That is where the real failure lies. One could always be tempted to defend such a policy if its success outweighed its serious adverse effects. Effects that destroy the individual, the HUMAN-slave to cigarettes. It sinks him into poverty and social exclusion, pushing him into more dangerous smoking behaviors. But it does not exorcise the demon of addiction.
They attempt to justify these dehumanizing policies by referring to large statistics with abstruse mathematical models [7]. However, if any of these policies were truly effective one would think that after 30 years of applying them worldwide we should be noticing their effects. Smoking prevalence should be lower in places where the prices are high. Comparing the 27 countries of the European Union for smoking prevalence according to price, and after adjusting for purchasing power, we should be able to calculate a significant regression line with a nice negative slope. I drafted this graph based on 2009 [8,9] data. The result is not debatable. We observe a cloud of dots, there is no significant correlation, and to add mockery to injury, the calculated regression line shows a positive slope! (Figure 3)
