This "moral" crusade against the "many and awful sins" of Big Tobacco
Friday, February 15, 2013 at 19:30 My pre-recorded interview for BBC Scotland at the RTE studios in Dublin last week resulted in a 12-second soundbite.
The report, broadcast on Politics on Sunday Scotland ahead of the publication of the Scottish Government's new tobacco control strategy later this month, also featured an equally brief comment from ASH Scotland CEO Sheila Duffy.
It was followed by a live interview with Professor Gerard Hastings, founder/director of the Institute for Social Marketing, Centre for Tobacco Control Research, at Stirling University.
Hastings was also the lead investigator for Plain Tobacco Packaging: A Systematic Review, an allegedly "independent scientific review" published by the Department of Health as part of the consultation on standardised packaging.
'Independent' clearly doesn't mean 'impartial' or 'open-minded' because here's what Hastings had to say on Politics on Sunday (or should that be Sinday?!):
"What does strike me listening to that report is that this is a very good news story for Scotland ...
What we do need to focus though on is young people. Bear in mind that adults do not take up smoking, so when Forest talk about adults enjoying their smoking it gives the lie to the fact that, first of all, most adults regret ever starting, but mostly that this is a paediatric phenomenon.
Questioned about the next steps – gruesome health warnings, for example – he responded:
"We already have some gruesome pictures on [the pack] but, yes, the pack should increasingly be seen not as a marketing tool of the industry, and remember this is about a multinational industry that is exploiting young people.
"It kills one in two of its loyalist [sic] customers so this is a pariah industry and Scotland should be rightly angry about it exploiting young people."
Invited to comment on the 15-fold increase in spending on tobacco control since devolution, Hastings referred to the cost of incapacity benefit and implied that much of this was due to smoking-related illness.
"[Smoking] is causing an enormous fiscal drain on our country. We need to do something about it."
"But my argument would not be fiscal. It is moral. It is simply wrong that children are pulled in to an industry that addicts and then kills.
We would not allow it in any other part of our lives so we should not allow it here.
Citing the link between smoking and deprivation, he concluded:
"It is a very, very regressive industry, one of its many and awful sins."
The six-minute report starts at 1:18:00 but it's only available for another 24 hours.
Reader Comments (6)
Three items of junk science still being touted as fact in the preamble (the Pell 17% among them); conflation of smoking harm with passive smoking myth; quick quote key word agenda-laying by Duffy; the addiction propaganda exercise by Hastings; his double emphasising 'for the children'; and his use of fiscal criteria in his favour, with quick distancing as he knows fiscal criteria can be used against him.
This is an object lesson in both BBC incompetence/bias/advocacy (delete as applicable) and anti-smoking sound bite tactics.
Someone should pinch the clip for YouTube. It is the full Monty of anti-tobacco hypnotism.
Yes they have not changed, much, eh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGrq1l22Fqk
There is a huge, enormous lie. Children <I>do not</I> start smoking as children. They may try the odd one for devilment, but they <I>do not</I> start SMOKING. Thoe only start SMOKING when they can afford to, which is when they start earning.
Doll's Doctors Study found that doctors started to smoke, on average, at the age of nineteen and a half. Therefore, tobacco companies DO NOT cause <I>children</I> to become addicted.
Further, Hastings knows full well that tobacco smoking does not fulfil the criteria for addiction.
He is a propagandist, pure and simple.
More on plain packs and ' cheeldren '
Cigarette packets with two cigs in have been sent to every British MP to emphasise the slick designs and colourful packaging that it claims children and young children find so appealing.
http://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/10233330.Monmouth_MP_hits_out_at_fags_sent_out_by_cancer_charity/
So , I started smoking Habanos and a pipe when I was a kid, did I?
That welsh ad with the cheeldren made me want to puke. And they say smoking near children is child abuse!