Tantrums and tobacco: the ugly face of public health
Thursday, October 24, 2013 at 18:20 Last night's tobacco control debate in Dublin had enough fireworks to light up the Liffey.
My colleague John Mallon was in the audience and he has posted an account on the Forest Eireann blog. Here's a taste:
If Chris Snowden, Jeff Stier or Dr Axel Klein are reading this, please accept my apologies for the appalling bad manners of my fellow-countrymen during your visit to Ireland ...
It was most embarrassing as an Irish citizen to have witnessed the ugly contempt shown to the three visitors and in the cold light of day I feel a sense of shame. If any good has come out of it then it can only be that they can finally understand just how extreme the spokespersons for tobacco control have become in Ireland.
Full post: Thanks to Senator John Crown I was embarrassed to be an Irish citizen.
In a separate email to me this afternoon, John wrote:
I'm just back from Dublin and I must say that I am deeply embarrassed by what I saw there.
[Prof] Crown had apparently insisted he should go first and he launched into a tirade against the IEA and the College of Physicians for hosting the event.
He shouted several times, mouthing the usual statistics, quoting from his experiences as an oncologist, and generally hamming it up.
It was a frightening spectacle. He finished by saying he intends now to turn his attention to the tobacco lobby in Ireland.
But that's not the half of it, reported John:
When [Crown] finished speaking he didn't return to the table [where the other panellists were sitting]. He came down to the front of the hall and sat sideways, never once looking up at any of the other speakers.
He produced a smartphone or iPad and proceeded to use it for the remainder of the evening, never acknowledging comments by either Chris, Axel or Jeff that were directed at him from the podium. It was the most arrogant, bad-mannered display I have seen in years.
When the speakers had all finished, Kathleen O'Meara of the Irish Cancer Society arrived. The debate was just being thrown open to the floor and the chairman, Ivan Yates, immediately deferred to her. She spoke for several minutes, then picked up her handbag and left.
John added:
In the context of the evening and having heard what was said, I took the microphone, introduced myself, and said I was a smoker. My main point was that activists like John Crown are not talking to me or any smokers out there.
They are talking 'at' us and as a result they were not being heard by the very people they claim to be trying to reach.
Sounds like quite an evening. Sadly I'm told there were no journalists present to witness Crown's behaviour.
Not that it would make any difference. They would probably shrug their shoulders and say, "John Crown? He's a character!"
Reader Comments (5)
I have just posted this on Forest Eireann.
Hi John as the Americans say the anti smoker crowd really did let it all hang out. I am reminded from 2 years ago I spoke at the British Medical Journal's "Is smoking a disease or a habit" debate and with other contributors had dinner with Professor Luke Clancy of ASH Ireland.
Before hand we did a run through of our speeches and Clancy kept interrupting me as he wanted to censor what I had written. I was talking about the the junk science of second hand smoke (SHS) in passing.
After he was told to be quiet we then went to dinner. We were having a generally polite conversation, I think he comes from Limerick. I made the point that on the science of SHS and I said many tobacco control activists had not done their research and there are people who have are wilfully and knowingly misleading us.
Clancy exploded. In front of the my fellow diners and 100 people in the restaurant he shouted out I was a “liar” and proceded to make a complete spectacle of himself by publically insulting me at volume 11. The host had to quiten him down.
Then there was my appearance on CNN with Deborah Arnott. After doing the interview, I was literally taking a first sip from a glass of water after returning to the green room and she launched into a tirade into the fact that I was “not an expert.” Spewing vitriol and bile from every orifice. She had turned up with her husband and obviously felt safe that she could give me a piece of her wisdom.
The producer button holed me and said she was not doing her cause any good. That is the polite analysis of what she said.
The hemetically sealed world of Tobacco Control does not deal with honest debate, free speech and evidenced based science too well.
I suspect that Crown was reacting to the fact that Snowdon wrote a very accurate and very damning blog post prior to this trip and rather than face a fact based debate he chose to behave as he did. He sounds like a deeply unpleasant man but I struggle to think of anyone who combines medicine and politics with either grace or elegance. As for the "charity" woman, she is hardly atypical either. Big charity contains many people of her ilk making it increasingly awful to do business with. I suggest that people switch their support to non-political charities staffed by decent human beings who know how to behave in public.
Nothing about us without us.
They,re now of course bringing up links to the Tobacco industry.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/tobacco-lobby-link-to-debate-in-rcpi-1.1572497
Since Crown appeared out of the blue on the Irish media scene after returning from America where he was a big fish in a small pond in some backwater hospital where he acquired some 'experience' in oncology, he set himself up as an expert on everything.
With his booming voice and american accent the down trodden paddies thought he was great and when he told us, among other things, that he was going to take on the health service and sort them out they made him a Senator and now he acts as if he's God almighty who seems to have focused his one obvious talent which is stamping out smoking and stamping ON smokers.
Every talk show he's on, and he's on a lot of them, his voice increases in volume to deafening proportions when the subject matter is about smoking, that annihilates any opposition.
Personally I think he's a big fraud.