You call this glamorous?!
Thursday, May 28, 2009 Anti-smoking extremists want to ban the display of tobacco in shops. According to ASH, cigarette packets "glamorise" smoking. Yesterday, in the Scottish Parliament, Conservative MSP Mary Scanlon held up a packet of cigarettes and pointed out that one side had the message "Smoking kills", while the other side had the warning "Smoking while pregnant harms your baby".
According to one report, she told Sheila Duffy, chief executive of ASH Scotland: "About three-quarters of the packet is non-advertising and a sick baby on one side and 'Smoking kills' on the other – do you really think that's glamorous?"
The answer, I think, is that the ant-smoking movement will use any argument, however ludicrous, to justify the war on tobacco. Hats off to Mary Scanlon for pricking their nauseating misrepresentation. Full story HERE.
See also: Campaigners claim Scottish public backs curbs on tobacco sales (Herald)
Reader Comments (10)
Are these anti smoking extremists lacking something in their lives, because i really think so. Gods sake wake up its only a bloody plant!!!
There are people dying of stavation and thirst in the third world and all these nutmegs think about is a bit of paper and crushed leaves wrapped up in a bit of compressed paper.
About time the funding ceased forthwith but it wont.Someones making the money!!
If Ms Duffy had any evidence to support her case for putting cigarettes out of sight and banning machines, why did she fail to summit that evidence to the committee?
It was good to see Mary Scanlon have a go at Ms Duffy for not bringing her evidence (if indeed she has any) with her, not to mention the grilling about ASH scotland using goverment funding for lobbying.
That bit was an absolute joy to watch.
Surely there must be some organisation where people can lodge a complaint about the obnoxious and disgusting pictures on cigarettes packets, like the one showing the rotten teeth, which made me feel so sick it turned me off my lunch when I saw it and I had to smoke a fag to calm down.
In this day and age of a thousand quangos, there must be some govt funded outfit out there that will champion our cause against advertisements that are psychologically and physically damaging to a persons health.
Maybe we should employ a PR guro that would cobble up the right words to get this message across in the best possible politically correct way.
Unfortunatley Ann, like many of the tv ads people have complained about regarding smoking, it seems that the end justifies the means!
As for trying to get ASA to withdraw the ads on the basis of lies and unproven science, that too seems to come under the same 'guidance'.
It is sickening - just as it is sickening that as smokers we seem to be the only group of people who can now, legallyl be discriminated against!
Oo-er. A politician with common sense - what ever next!
As the eternal optimist on the smoking ban, I just hope these are the last thrashings of a dead quango. Where can ASH go after this, especially in the light of the public purse to be tightened?
I know it is very easy to get carried away with authoritarian, fascist and Nazi analogies, of the anti smokers, running the risk of looking a tad hysterical. However the countries with the most liberal smoking policies include Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, The Czech Republic, Slovakia,Hungary, and Austria. You don't need a degree in history to work that one out.
Perhaps 21 years on we need our own Prague Spring.
Some of you may be interested in this FOI request.
http://tinyurl.com/oanvee
I mentioned it on my front page piece today. The answers from the gubmint are usually as interesting for what they DON'T say, as they are for what they do say.
Naturally, a government who ordered the pornography on the packets have no idea where the images came from, nor whether they actually are accurate depictions of the fabled "smoker related diseases".
Dave Atherton wrote: the countries with the most liberal smoking policies include Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, The Czech Republic, Slovakia,Hungary, and Austria. You don't need a degree in history to work that one out.
Indeed you don't. They were (except Spain) the Axis countries during WWII. But why do you think that there is so much resistance to smoking bans in Germany? Precisely because many people there can still remember the antismoking Hitler regime, and can see the bans in their historical context.
This is unfortunately something that most people in the one-time "Allied" countries can't see and don't know. Most people aren't aware that modern antismoking science started life in Nazi Germany, along with media antismoking campaigns and smoking bans, driven by a state-run public health agenda that was obsessively concerned with physical 'fitness'. Britons never went through the Nazi experience (well..., they are now!!), and so have no residual immunity to its antismoking healthism like the Germans do.
Idlex, my point about the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, was they were repressed by the communists. The common thread of course is tyranny.