Joe Jackson on A Billion Lives
Saturday, November 5, 2016 at 10:50 Thanks to those who responded to director Aaron Biebert's reply to my review of the pro-vaping documentary A Billion Lives.
Carl Philips provided his usual thought-provoking analysis and there were strong views from several others, many of which I agree with. I chose however to remain silent (I think I've said enough) and let others do the talking.
One commentator was Joe Jackson. Joe and I don't see eye to eye on everything but I consider him to be a great friend of Forest and I always listen to and value his comments, even the more critical ones!
If I get a moment this weekend I will post some pieces from his website where he writes beautifully and often very amusingly about his favourite music and musicians.
In the meantime here is his response to Aaron Biebert. It includes an amusing twist at the end:
Dear Aaron Biebert,
If Simon isn't ready to respond to your points, there are plenty of us who are. And plenty of us who defend smoking and smokers not because of a 'right to smoke', but because we are in the midst of a huge, well-funded, nasty crusade against us, and it's a crusade powered by lies, exaggerations, and misleading statistics.
Just to respond to a couple of your points: Statistics really are the issue here because that is what anti-smoking is built on - not on genuine science. Where you have 'lost the plot' is that you seem to think the war against vaping is dishonest and corrupt, but the war against smoking is pure as the driven snow.
You can't claim your movie is 'not about' smoking or the tobacco industry, since your whole premise is based on accepting outrageous antismoking propaganda as gospel. Why are people making a big deal about your 'Billion Lives'? Because it's the TITLE of your movie, for God's sake! You then back-pedal by saying 'so what if that's not the exact number? What's the right number?' That's just the point. THERE IS NO RIGHT NUMBER.
'70%' of smokers want to quit'. No, we don't. This is one of many antismoking 'soundbites' that are simply repeated over and over because they don't get challenged. Others include 'biggest preventable cause of death', and 'tobacco will kill half its users' - which I've watched rise from a quarter, then a third - not because of new evidence but because they can say anything they like and get away with it.
Infuriating when that happens, isn't it?!
This is just a blog post, so no room for lots of facts and figures, but there are many sources. All I can add is, if the work you've put into the vaping issue serves you as preparation for the real issue - which is that the whole damn antismoking industry is dishonest and corrupt, and that antivaping is just the latest offshoot of it - then your time and our time will not have been wasted.
On the other hand ... !
Just the existence of this movie is symptomatic of a growing interest in the issue of vaping, something that could turn out to be the 'game-changer' many of us hope for. It puts 'tobacco control' in a deliciously awkward situation. On the whole, they're anti-vaping, for three reasons: (1) ignorance and prejudice against anything that 'looks like' smoking; (2) neither they nor their supporters in the Pharma industry created it or profit from it, in fact it could mean loss of funding for them; (3) the more attention vaping gets, the more the rest of their lies and corruption could get exposed.
Update: In my introduction to Aaron Biebert's response I mentioned that A Billion Lives is due to be screened in Delhi on November 9, coinciding with the seventh session of the Conference of the Parties (COP7) to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) that takes place in Delhi from 7-12 November.
A key interviewee in the film is the former Winston Man David Goerliz who has worked for the tobacco industry and public health and is now an outspoken advocate of vaping.
Goerlitz was due to appear at the screening of the Delhi screening but Biebert last night announced that the Goerlitz has been refused, without explanation, a visa.
Funnily enough this reminds me of the hoops we had to jump through when attending the Global Tobacco Networking Forum (as it was known) in Bangalore in 2011.
I got my visa but I was advised not to say I was attending a tobacco industry conference.
Likewise, when we arrived at Bangalore Airport at 4.00am, tired and disheveled after an eleven hour flight, we were under strict instructions not to mention the reason for our visit.
"Don't mention the c-word," hissed one of the organisers as we queued to show our passports.
She meant "conference".
Finally, Lisbet from Norway tells me that A Billion Lives will be shown in London on December 12.
I assume she means central London (unlike the Greenwich screening that takes place on November 16).
When I get further details I'll let you know, if you're interested.
Update: Lisbet now says December 12 was only a rumour which means I have failed the first rule of journalism - always get your story corroborated by a second (reliable) source!!
LBC presenter Iain Dale offers a nice take on this here.
Reader Comments (10)
Joe Jackson has hit the nail on the head in every way! THAT is the nub.
So the more I hear about this movie, the more I am convinced it fails completely in the goal that the author stated in the previous post about it here, a serious analysis of the political situation. In the previous discussion, others and I mentioned interviewees Bates and Godshall. But those seem to be the exceptions, in that they offer two credible and educated opinions about the situation.
Now I see: "key interviewee in the film is the former Winston Man David Goerliz". WTF? If you were making a miniseries about this, perhaps you would bring him in for the amusement value. But I am not aware of him ever contributing knowledge. So if you are spending time on him, this must really be for amusement. Except, apparently, it is not amusing enough to sell tickets. This goes to my point about failing for every conceivable mission.
So then I go look at who has been listed as appearing in it (I am sure I missed some). It includes Hon Lik. Again, this seems like pure entertainment value. He has no expertise on the supposed mission of the video. That said, I would truly love to interview him for an article. I have two questions that actually might inform history (which presumably were not asked or answered in the video): 1. "Given that you have nothing to lose in answering this, since your IP claims have not held up, when you "invented" the e-cigarette and filed for patents that did not cite the prior art about when similar devices had already been patented, were you genuinely ignorant and really did rederive this from scratch, or were you trying to obscure your sources?" 2. "You adopted a business model of just shipping the products to the U.S. and elsewhere, in fairly clear violation of various regulations, managing to fly under the radar for long enough to get them established. This move, rather than creating a new device, was your actual contribution to history. Was this done out of ignorance -- you just did not know it was against the rules -- or did you know you were trying to get away with something? If the latter, can you explain your thought process?"
But I digress.
Continuing the list of interviewees, we have two of the architects of the FCTC (and none of its contemporary opponents on the list I have seen) who since realized it was a disaster. Those are interesting voices, but does Biebert understand the nuances of exploring people whose most impactful act of their lives turns out to have been terribly destructive, and they know it, and are savvy? Oh, and they have continued in lucrative careers as "fixer" type political operatives who thus need to maintain a particular persona. Gee, how do you think they are going to spin things? What should an interviewer do about that if he is trying to create knowledge rather than mere entertainment?
I can answer that pretty easily, as I suspect you can, Simon. Someone more skilled as investigative journalist could undoubtedly do better still. But most people probably cannot. I expect that Biebert falls into the "most people" category. Indeed, I would guess he did not understand that some of his subjects had axes to grind and spin to sell, and thus could not just be seen as public-spirited conveyors of The Truth. (My reason for suspecting that: He did not even seem to know that some of his subjects had no particular knowledge to contribute.)
I have been trying to come up with an analogy, along the lines of "if I decided to write a major work exposing the atrocities of the Yemen war -- something that bothers me but I am not expert in -- and I just decided to start tomorrow with no further background research...." But I cannot do it. As an expert on the act of research itself (which is a separate skill from just knowing about the particulars of a topic) I am pretty sure that even with that naive start, I would end up figuring out what paths to explore. Even if I never became expert enough to know who to believe among competing seemingly-credible commentators, I would identify and present them, as well as weeding out the completely non-credible ones, or at least portraying them as what they are. I suppose it would be more like "I am setting out to do that, and I will only interview and read the people who I can list based on my next hour of research, no matter what else I might learn as I go."
Anyway, I now really want to see this video, once it is published and not inaccessible to me due to a very high geographic paywall. The reason being that I always like to check my assessments made based on the available epidata (=the partial information that bubbles up "above" the actual data, such as a research paper) against what I can learn from the data, if I can get it. (Note that my assessments based on epidata tend to be very good. That is really my intellectual specialty.)
Why are people making a big deal about 'A Billion Lives'? It's only a movie title, for God's sake!
And if You choose to believe that smokers don't want to quit .. well that's on You.
We all relay on not only stats from others but even what we experience ourselves. I have tried to get rid of my habit since 1982. I got rid of it by swithing to vaping.
In these three years that have gone by since i switched, i have been member of vape groups here in Norway. My experience is just this: Most people want to quit smoking.
After vaping became known & available a lot of people have made the switch both in the UK, Norway, US and the rest of the world. Tobacco sales are declining and have been for some years.
And yet You still seems to believe that most smokers do not want to quit? That makes no sence at all. Wake up!? :-)
@Carl V Phillips:
What is the supposed mission of the video really?
Liisaausnorwegen, I surmise from your other comment that you are not the type of person who does the reading before commenting. So I suspect you will find the answer you are missing in the referenced previous posts and comments on them.
well Carl, I tried and trie dto read Your english WOT and found little to explain my wonderings. Thats why I asked You.
As You understand, english is not my native language :P
Liisaausnorwegen, please follow the links back through Simon's recent posts on this topic, particularly the one where the author asserts what he says is the purpose of the video, and then see my comments on that one dissecting whether it achieves that (or any other possible goal).
Liisa - if you choose to be blinkered and refuse to accept that are millions of happy smokers who enjoy every cigarette, many of them lifelong from childhood to grannyhood like myself, then that's down to your own narrow mind.
I don't find from experience that all smokers want to quit nor that those who do can't quit without ecigs. But then why let facts get in the way of whatever vapers want to say is true about smokers despite the fact they were always the sort of people who hated themselves as smokers and the type who led us to this point by shafting their own.
Stick with your own small minded community of vapers and leave smokers alone. You don't speak for them. You are a vaper and vaping, as most smokers know, is shite.
@Pat: i never said i didn't believe it - i only pointed out that there are actually a lot of people wanting to quit smoking that are not able to as well.
This fact they seem to ignore, but as You said "that's down to their own narrow mind".
You seem stuck in a no return path.. I can't help that.
Nevertheless: We DO have an actual fight against smoking and smoking related disceases to fight in this world. There is no doubt about the cancer rates as well as other disceases such as COPD, Asthma, Alzheimer and so have been rapidly increasing in the last 50-60 years - ever since the tobacco industry started to put all the chemicals, toxins and radio active stuff in the tobacco.
How do we fight this for those who actually do want to quit smoking?
and sorry, i forgot to comment on this one:
"You are a vaper and vaping, as most smokers know, is shite."
1. BS
2. BS