Smokers get a patron saint.... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Saturday, June 14, 2008, 03:29 (1800 days ago)

Dear all,

Well it seems us, poor, oppressed smokers of the world have a new patron saint. Guess who?

For the full story that accompanies the above photo go read: http://derekclontz.com/?p=184

And, here, on behalf of the oppressed smokers of the world I present my own theological defence of smoking (Yes, you are allowed to smile)…

The chorus has gone up again from what has become the vested interest of the health care lobby to place another great slug on cigarette smokers. When is the penny finally going to drop in society about the enormous con that has been perpetrated on the public? Suicide rates have climbed in an horrific way since our friends started their campaign to tax smokers into their graves if not into poverty.

In the news at present we are constantly hearing stories of a mental health crisis and the public health system is unable to cope.

While it is undoubtedly true that cigarette smoking can contribute to various forms of cancer and other diseases, what is it going to take for society also to wake up that tobacco has been a cheap, readily accessible drug that has kept many people alive? When is anybody going to undertake that side of the research of the beneficial effects of tobacco smoking? Cigarettes have also played a valuable role in society as a cheap, readily accessible form of self-medication that enables people with high stress levels to self-regulate their mental and physical health.

Those of us old enough can remember when all this started and the tobacco company multinationals were targeted as the "big bad bogeymen" in modern society — conniving in rigged research and all sorts of dubious cons in pursuit of their profits. Those same arguments today ought be directed at the health lobby who benefit from the enormous revenue sucked out of the economy in support of their own now very one-sided research. In the meantime, mental health in this nation is in crisis and our politicians and well-healed "health professionals" feed at the public trough while the poor, who are without any effective lobby groups to speak up for their interests are left for dead.

Our politicians have been sucked in by the propaganda — and the media also. Curiously enough journalism was one of the professions which once had a higher proportion of smokers than most other professions. The reason: journalism has long been viewed as a stressful occupation and again ready access to the cheap drug of nicotine enabled people in these sort of high-stress occupations to easily regulate their stress levels without being an enormous burden on the public health system. But the media proprietors struck a deal with the health professionals and the politicians, didn't they? In exchange for ending cigarette advertising governments promised great truckloads of publicly-funded advertising. It's been "money for jam" for the great media conglomerates. Cast Philip Morris and British American Tobacco as the rogues and "bad corporate citizens" killing the population at large but we'll also stick our necks into the trough of public advertising of the pet projects of politicians. It extends way past the original anti-smoking ads which were the original "carrot" held out to the media proprietors in exchange for their support in giving up the income they were deriving from the 'Tobacco Multinationals".

This week we have watched the high profile case of television journalist, Charmaine Dragun, and her problems with stress levels. How many unreported stories are there of the journalists who "fade away" in quiet desperation? Let us have some objective research into the situations of people employed in high stress occupations, like journalism, where tobacco smoking may well have been as much saviour of lives as killer of lives.

Smoking is an affliction of the poor in particular because poverty brings with it increased levels of stress. Has anybody ever asked honestly, why? Our health lobby is so one-eyed that the research has never been properly funded which might show that smoking actually does prolong as many lives as it might take via cancers. The true picture is that cigarette smoking actually does have some benefits to both individuals and to society at large. When are we going to find true "professionals" in the health industry who will undertake objective research? Where can the poor go today in search of objective journalists who will examine this whole "con" far more objectively than what society has been subjected to for the past few decades?

What a farce this has all become? How are all these people — the anti-smoking lobbyists — going to look in another 50 or 100 years time when the objective, balanced research is done that shows why the suicide rates escalated so dramatically in Western society, when the mental health system finally teetered over the edge?

The new taxes proposed on cigarettes are a very unfair tax imposed on the poorest sectors of Australian society effectively by the fat cats in the health lobby who benefit extraordinarily in their well-funded laboratories and public relations offices.

Is it not time that we collectively "grew up" and started looking at this entire situation a heck of a lot more objectively? I don't want to see these "health professionals" tarred with the same brush they tried to tar the Tobacco Multinationals and Conglomerates all those decades ago — I never believed they were half as bad as they were made out to be — but they are heading in the right direction if they eventually want to see themselves cast as the public pariahs of 21st Century society.

Is it not time for our politicians, and our media, to start examining this whole phenomenon far more objectively? Your constituency is the public interest, not the private vested interests of lobby groups who have benefited from the enormous con that has been inflicted on modern society.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]