Is there a spin doctor in the house?
Tuesday, September 9, 2014 at 12:57 I have been reading with open-mouthed astonishment the tweets by Prof John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health.
Following a series of foul-mouthed, abusive tweets towards vapers (most of which he later deleted), Ashton yesterday tweeted:
I very much regret my choice of language to describe some vapers on Saturday evening and any offence caused.I am taking a break from twitter
— John Ashton (@Johnrashton47) September 8, 2014At least he had the good grace to apologise.
Since then however the public health lobby has attempted to spin his behaviour in a rather different light.
The Times today has a report by health correspondent Chris Smyth who writes:
Public health chiefs have accused e-cigarette users of a campaign of online abuse, saying that junior scientists are being scared away from research by explicit attacks from "vapers" on Twitter.
It reminds me of the 2012 Guardian report, Pro-smoking activists threaten and harass health campaigners:.
I don't condone abuse or intimidation on social media or anywhere else (it's one of the things I hate about the Yes campaign in Scotland), but there's a pattern emerging here.
Anti-smoking activists regularly dish it out, accusing smokers (and now vapers) of all sorts, but they're quick to complain when those same people fight back.
The Times, like the Guardian, implies that the consumer – not the public health campaigner – is the villain. Prof Ashton has merely "retaliated".
Frankly he should know better but he's not alone. The attitude and language adopted by the likes of Simon Chapman and other anti-smoking activists has often amazed me.
Reading their self-regarding and often abusive tweets is a fantastic insight into the minds of people who appear to have little or no empathy with ordinary people, many of whom they damn as slaves to addiction.
As Chris Snowdon comments:
You have to wonder how many people in the public health racket have the same mentality but manage - as Ashton did until Saturday - to keep it to themselves.
See 'The dark soul of Prof John Ashton' (Velvet Glove Iron Fist).
I also recommend 'The public health mask slips' (Dick Puddlecote).
The Times' report is behind a paywall but the paper does at least note that:
Professor John Ashton is facing an official complaint after he retaliated, calling one vaper a "c***" and another an "onamist".
You couldn't make it up.
PS. Something else that made me laugh was an item on the Jeremy Vine Show (Radio 2), above.
It featured John Ashton and Clive 'Superhero' Bates, former director of ASH, now a pin-up for every hot-blooded vaper, male and female.
Ashton has rightly been lampooned for declaring that e-cigarettes can make you go blind (I'm sure I could hear Jeremy Vine sniggering) but I can't tell you how ironic it was to hear Clive Bates fighting it out with an anti-tobacco campaigner.
I remember having not dissimilar battles with Clive on radio and television. In those days of course he was more than happy to interrupt me and make outrageous claims about the risks of passive smoking.
Those and other allegations eventually led to the smoking ban and all manner of abusive accusations against smokers and the "threat" they allegedly posed non-smokers in pubs, bars and now, it seems, outdoor parks and beaches.
Meanwhile the World Health Organisation wants to ban vaping in all enclosed public places. Clive objects – because it's quite plainly wrong – but thanks to the smoking ban it's a small (and in some eyes logical) step to ban the use of e-cigarettes too.
Oh, the tangled web we weave.
Reader Comments (5)
Clive fights for vapers because he hopes that smokers will one day be forced onto ecigs and tobacco companies will go out of business. He also wears that public health mask. He's a bigot as fanatical as any zealot smokerphobic in public health.
Thanks for pointing out how much abuse smokers have to take from public health, paid for with our own tax, which is often too readily accepted by those who should know better.
Frankly, the people who dish out that abuse should be sacked - or sent on courses where they learn empathy, common decency, and some manners.
Meanwhile, consumers are fighting back because the public sees no need for Public Health, the Nanny State or the fat salaried health obsessed zealots who seem to have degrees in how to bully, abuse and humiliate.
you might want to take a look at this, if you haven't already.
http://cagecanada.blogspot.ca/2011/02/inside-tobacco-control-industry-and.html
INSIDE THE TOBACCO CONTROL INDUSTRY AND THEIR DECEITFUL TACTICS
“Whether they are funded by the industry or not, to stay on top of any organized opposition sign up for their mailing lists, preferably using an alias. You can also search online for organizations that oppose your campaign and sign up to receive email alerts, preferably at a home email address or some other location that doesn't link you to your position in the coalition. Be sure to share these communications with your key coalition members so that everyone is in the loop and you can collectively decide how to counter the industry most effectively.”
The entire 101 page manual is a most interesting document that exposes the tactics of the anti-tobacco industry and we suspect that after they see us bringing this document to the attention of the public, it will quickly be altered or totally vanish. Not to worry we have made back- up copies in anticipation..........
The following are some of their other tactics and while they did not shock us as much because we had noticed them practicing these strategies since a long time, we are, nonetheless, surprised that they would be so arrogant and self-confident as to make their tactics public.
I found that I prefer my electronic cigarettes and I can't afford to smoke normal cigarettes any more, but when I'm on holiday (in places that are more lenient than the UK for smoking) I happily smoke 20 a day, and when at home I always keep a pack lying around for if I'm going to a beer garden or fancy going on a walk, because I don't want to be one of the sorts of vapers who can't bear smokers, and I also enjoy the look and rituals associated with "real" smoking.
I am very wary of vapers who bang on in comment threads about second hand smoke "killing" people etc and always downvote such comments and when possible, reply with links to things like the Forbes article about the latest in an endless line of studies STILL not showing that second hand smoke poses any health risk. These people don't seem to realise that similar "science" with a pharmaceutical and moral agenda will end up biting them very soon. Foolishness writ large. And I remain wary too of any "harm reduction" current proponents of electronic cigarettes who pedaled the "second hand smoke" myth as, at best, their science isn't up to much and, at worst, their hatred of smoking and the tobacco industry is such that they willingly allow smokers to be despised, persecuted and blamed for all manner of non-smokers' illnesses.
Chicago has just banned vaping in its public parks, and I believe they cited health concerns to nonvapers as one of the reasons, probably using exactly the same sort of pseudo-science that the Antismokers used for so many years in their own campaign.
One of the more recent concerns voiced in the new (and seemingly highly coordinated) WHO-related scare campaign aimed at vapers has to do with the "carcinogenic metals" found in some vapors. One poster who seemed to know what he was talking about noted however that the levels for nickel (?) were at 4.5 ng/g while the official level that OSHA feels is still "safe" for constant 8-hours/day exposure is set at 500,000 ng/g.
It's kind of like ranting and raving about getting skin cancer from starlight: after all, there are TRILLIONS of those carcinogenic furnaces up there in the sky at night, all pouring their deadly rays down upon innocent children here on earth! Remember: there is no safe level of exposure to radiation!
- MJM
A.Welsh, you wrote, "I am very wary of vapers who bang on in comment threads about second hand smoke "killing" people etc ... These people don't seem to realise that similar "science" with a pharmaceutical and moral agenda will end up biting them very soon."
Ann, very very true! A little while ago on Carl's antithrlies.com site, Jake Jacobsen pointed out a shoddy "study" titled "On the Hazards of E-Cigarettes" by Offerman et al in the ASHRAE.biz journal. ( http://bookstore.ashrae.biz/journal/download.php?file=2014June_038-047_IAQ_Offerman_rev.pdf will take you there but will also download the pdf immediately to your computer ) I saw the name and realized I'd taken apart a similarly shoddy study by him on ETS in TobakkoNacht. From p. p. 228:
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You may remember that at the start of this section I promised to look at two major studies, one by Offermann in 2002, and one by Klepeis in 2007. Many of the general limitations in these two studies have already been dealt with here, but there are still a few points to add. Offermann measured particulates in cars under several conditions, but gave, at least in my opinion, enormously undue emphasis to the unlikely “I’m gonna smoke up a storm with all the windows sealed up tight so I can suffocate Little Boozums In Da Bassinet!” scenario. Indeed, with the windows rolled up tight and the ventilation carefully shut off for maximum suffocation jollies, the PM 2.5 level headed up into the 2,000 ppm range for about three minutes.
Of course Offermann couldn’t totally ignore the fact that some parents might occasionally crack open a window while smoking so he also ran one version with the driver’s window opened three inches. In that scenario the air in the car headed up toward the 100 ppm range for five minutes. If that were done twice a day, every day with your little one by your side, they’d be getting, on average, an extra 1 ppm of particulate matter added on to the 50 ppm or so they’d be likely to be getting if they drove around a city with you all day anyway!
Offermann’s conclusion however, ends up being: “Indoor concentrations of ETS can be especially significant in automobiles due to the small indoor air volume,” while referring specifically to the windows rolled up scenario and confusing the minutes of exposure to 24 hours a day of exposure. Why would he do that? Impossible to say, although applying the same sort of lens we applied to Jones/Breysse might offer some insight: Offermann’s study was funded by the “Tobacco Free Project, San Francisco Department of Public Health, paid for by Proposition 99, the 1988 Tobacco Tax Initiative.”
Do you think the funding just might have played a role in how the study was structured and presented?
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Same games, just a new ballpark. Vapers need to study the history of the attacks on smokers through secondhand smoke and learn from them. We learned how to fight those attacks eventually, but usually too late to be effective. The Vapers have the opportunity to "learn from history," and they'd better take it or they sure as hell "will be doomed to repeat it."
:/
MJM