Standing on principle

The current (August) issue of Tobacco Reporter includes an article about last month’s Forest Summer Lunch.

The event included a short Q&A with me and Mark Littlewood, director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and in view of yesterday’s incorrect and lazy labelling of Forest as ‘pro-smoking’ (see previous post) it’s worth quoting the following:

Clark said that for him, Forest had never been just about smoking, a point that is hinted at in the first two words of the organization’s full name, Freedom Organization for the Right to Enjoy Tobacco, and that is underlined by the guest lists of Forest events, which comprise mostly people who can be described loosely as libertarians, some of whom are smokers.

“It’s always been about personal choice and personal responsibility,” he said. “They are the principles that we have been fighting for, and those principles don’t age. And that is why I think there will always be a role for a group like Forest, even if it has to change its name in the future because there are so few actual tobacco smokers. It’s all about choice and personal responsibility, and we need to put those issues, those principles, higher up on the political agenda because in recent decades, politicians seem to have forgotten about them.”

The article, by Tobacco Reporter’s George Gay, also features my response to the recent Khan review and the Government’s ‘smoke free 2030’ target:

Speaking during an after-lunch Q&A session conducted by Mark Littlewood, the director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Clark said he was opposed to targets such as the smoke-free 2030 goal. Forest had no problem with the falling smoking rates of the past 50 years. Society had changed, he said. People now knew about the health risks associated with smoking, and many were choosing to switch to products that were less risky than cigarettes.

But Forest believed that decisions about quitting smoking should be made on the basis of choice and personal responsibility. It was against people being forced or coerced into giving up smoking, which was a possibility given that the “ludicrous” smoke-free 2030 target could not be achieved on a voluntary basis …

In addition, Clark expressed concern that even if the government achieved its target, those opposed to tobacco would not be satisfied. At the moment, many of them said that vaping was a good alternative to smoking, but their long-term goal was not smoke-free - it was tobacco-free and nicotine-free. “These people will never stop, and we have to stand up to them,” he said to loud applause from guests who listened to Clark throughout with respect, interspersed with whoops of delight and cries of “hear, hear!”

You can read the full article here.

Thanks, btw, to Tobacco Reporter for consistently giving a voice to those of us who still defend the right to smoke which is significantly different from being ‘pro-smoking’.

Although the magazine has fully embraced new nicotine products (as it should) you won’t find it turning on users of combustible tobacco.

See, for example, ‘Back choice, beat prohibition’ (January 2020) and ‘Rebel with a cause’ (December 2017).

In the current climate, and even for a magazine called Tobacco Reporter, that takes some courage.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

Some people get it, some don't - especially after quitting smoking or switching to something else.

One thing that I don't get is how can smoking be a trivial or "less serious" issue when defending the right of tobacco consumers to be left alone without harassment and yet so damn serious Government feels obliged to chuck billions of hard earned tax payers'money at measures designed to force people to quit?