David Hockney on the Anti-Smoking Lobby

[hibsbollah]

I love this article:greengrin

Thoughts?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/29/in-defence-of-smoking

Deborah Arnott is a professional anti-smoker (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/22/smoking-tobacco-display-ban). She makes her living from it. She thinks she can "save lives". Since we all get a lifetime and she is not offering immortality, what she means is you might have a longer life.
Given the choice of 50 years as a free person or 70 years as a slave, she would choose slavery. I wouldn't, and I suspect there are many like me, as most people seem to go for quality of life not quantity. Time, the great mystery, is elastic. Watch the kettle boil and it takes "a long time". Ten hours in a police cell might seem like 10 months. There are many jokes playing with this idea or observation.

This quantitative view of life seems dominant today among the medical profession and politicians – as though they can and should make these kind of choices for us. It seems a recent phenomenon, and not really very wise. On big issues it might be good, but on small ones it's tyrannical.
There are a lot of people who don't like smoke or smoking but there are a lot of people who do. Tobacco is a great calmer, it relieves stress, it can put you in a contemplative mood. Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Clement Attlee and Stanley Baldwin, with their pipes, don't look too stressed. I used to hitchhike in my youth with a pipe, counting on a pipe smoker picking up a fellow contemplator. It worked many times. If tobacco is taken away, something else moves in to replace it. We can now see in the US what this is. Television there is saturated with drug advertising painkillers and antidepressants and all sorts of other things, all on prescription. Just tell your doctor you need whatever the product is and you'll be fine. It's hardly an improvement.

I am hyperactive, I seem to have more energy now than I did 10 years ago, I am producing more work with a clearer head. I am aware not everybody is like this, certainly on the surface we are all different. I cannot drink alcohol – I am prone to pancreatitis, it knocks me out quickly and I'm in bed for three or four days. I gave it up 15 years ago. I have never had pancreatitis since. Others have a constitution like a horse and can consume large quantities of alcohol. It must be the same with smoking.

The madness of anti-smokers is not seeing this. Deborah Arnott, with her cold abstractions of statistics, says "half of all smokers will die from their addiction", but as we know the other half will die of something else (she's not offering immortality), most people laugh or shrug their shoulders. She seems obsessed with death and "saving lives". I don't suppose she's much fun or has much humour. She must think the late Keith Floyd (http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/sep/15/keith-floyd-obituary) was terrible, and I'm sure he wouldn't have thought much about her view of life. Just another boring busybody telling people how to live.

We don't have a very representative parliament. They seem to discuss trivia and nothing else. Because of technology we are probably moving into a period of chaos. Power is shifting, and I'm aware this has a great deal to do with images and their distribution. The political class is confused. There seems to me to be a growing madness, smoking is down, obesity is up; is there any relationship here?

Politics seems so dishonest. It is said smokers "cost" the NHS money. How, one wonders. They pay a lot of tax. If they die younger, as it says on the packet, one can only conclude that the government can't rip them off any more – a high cost, really?

I have thought for a long time that a political and media elite imposes things on us that people did not request. They must have a low opinion of most people who simply can't be trusted to keep things in order. The tax on cigarettes is raised at practically every budget. It is an iron law that as the tax rises, so does smuggling. It is now enormous.

Putting cigarettes "under the counter" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/10/tobacco-display-ban-misleading-figures) is now quite funny. That's where a lot of people buy them already, so this is just going to get bigger. It will mean non-smokers will pay more tax, as revenue still has come to the government. From where? This is never debated, because the press has the same agenda as the government. We'd all be healthier without tobacco. I, for one, just don't believe it. Like alcohol, it won't go away. People will make their own and to stop that will need a bigger tyranny than we have now. Deborah Arnott won't mind so long as it's "smoke free".
A far more lawless society will emerge, and the statistics might please her. Others will know they are not true.

[khib70]

I love this article:greengrin

Thoughts?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/29/in-defence-of-smoking

Deborah Arnott is a professional anti-smoker (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/22/smoking-tobacco-display-ban). She makes her living from it. She thinks she can "save lives". Since we all get a lifetime and she is not offering immortality, what she means is you might have a longer life.
Given the choice of 50 years as a free person or 70 years as a slave, she would choose slavery. I wouldn't, and I suspect there are many like me, as most people seem to go for quality of life not quantity. Time, the great mystery, is elastic. Watch the kettle boil and it takes "a long time". Ten hours in a police cell might seem like 10 months. There are many jokes playing with this idea or observation.

This quantitative view of life seems dominant today among the medical profession and politicians – as though they can and should make these kind of choices for us. It seems a recent phenomenon, and not really very wise. On big issues it might be good, but on small ones it's tyrannical.
There are a lot of people who don't like smoke or smoking but there are a lot of people who do. Tobacco is a great calmer, it relieves stress, it can put you in a contemplative mood. Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Clement Attlee and Stanley Baldwin, with their pipes, don't look too stressed. I used to hitchhike in my youth with a pipe, counting on a pipe smoker picking up a fellow contemplator. It worked many times. If tobacco is taken away, something else moves in to replace it. We can now see in the US what this is. Television there is saturated with drug advertising painkillers and antidepressants and all sorts of other things, all on prescription. Just tell your doctor you need whatever the product is and you'll be fine. It's hardly an improvement.

I am hyperactive, I seem to have more energy now than I did 10 years ago, I am producing more work with a clearer head. I am aware not everybody is like this, certainly on the surface we are all different. I cannot drink alcohol – I am prone to pancreatitis, it knocks me out quickly and I'm in bed for three or four days. I gave it up 15 years ago. I have never had pancreatitis since. Others have a constitution like a horse and can consume large quantities of alcohol. It must be the same with smoking.

The madness of anti-smokers is not seeing this. Deborah Arnott, with her cold abstractions of statistics, says "half of all smokers will die from their addiction", but as we know the other half will die of something else (she's not offering immortality), most people laugh or shrug their shoulders. She seems obsessed with death and "saving lives". I don't suppose she's much fun or has much humour. She must think the late Keith Floyd (http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/sep/15/keith-floyd-obituary) was terrible, and I'm sure he wouldn't have thought much about her view of life. Just another boring busybody telling people how to live.

We don't have a very representative parliament. They seem to discuss trivia and nothing else. Because of technology we are probably moving into a period of chaos. Power is shifting, and I'm aware this has a great deal to do with images and their distribution. The political class is confused. There seems to me to be a growing madness, smoking is down, obesity is up; is there any relationship here?

Politics seems so dishonest. It is said smokers "cost" the NHS money. How, one wonders. They pay a lot of tax. If they die younger, as it says on the packet, one can only conclude that the government can't rip them off any more – a high cost, really?

I have thought for a long time that a political and media elite imposes things on us that people did not request. They must have a low opinion of most people who simply can't be trusted to keep things in order. The tax on cigarettes is raised at practically every budget. It is an iron law that as the tax rises, so does smuggling. It is now enormous.

Putting cigarettes "under the counter" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/10/tobacco-display-ban-misleading-figures) is now quite funny. That's where a lot of people buy them already, so this is just going to get bigger. It will mean non-smokers will pay more tax, as revenue still has come to the government. From where? This is never debated, because the press has the same agenda as the government. We'd all be healthier without tobacco. I, for one, just don't believe it. Like alcohol, it won't go away. People will make their own and to stop that will need a bigger tyranny than we have now. Deborah Arnott won't mind so long as it's "smoke free".
A far more lawless society will emerge, and the statistics might please her. Others will know they are not true.
Not often I say this about a Guardian article:wink:, but this is a powerful and well-written argument which I totally agree with. Health fascism is rampant these days, and it seems to me that a society which has failed in so many other ways to protect people or improve their lives is desperately trying to prove its usefulness by dictating lifestyles instead, with the cooperation of the media and the medical establishment.

[--------]

I'm never quite sure why Hockney's work is OK'd by the London artistic establishment and Jack Vettriano's isn't. I think that it maybe supports my suspicion that we have far to many 'opinion mafiosi' and 'people who know better than other people' around these days. I agree that there's nothing more irritating than an 'expert' forcing his or her opinion upon other people regardless of those other people's right to make their own decisions.

I also remember an elderly gentleman I met in Tiree who smoked at least 40 Capstan Full Strength a day, and had done for most of his life. His wife was insistent that he should stop as he was shortening his life. One day I called on him and she started off, demanding that I, as "the minister" should "speak to him".

She left to go to the shops.

Colin looked at me.

I looked at Colin.

"Just as a matter of interest," I said, "how old are you exactly, Colin?"

"Well," he said, grinning, "I'm 91 next month, God willing, but if I hadn't started smoking these things (waving his cigarette at me) I suppose I'd be about 150 years old by now..."

I don't smoke, and I find it very hard to tolerate a smoky atmosphere. There are folks whose health WILL be damaged severely if they smoke tobacco, and these folks should leave tobacco severely alone. Unfortunately many of them will only discover their vulnerability after they've become ill - often with terminal or life-shortening incurable illness. That's the nature of tobacco.

To smoke or not to smoke MAY be a choice we make when we start. Nicotine, however, is an extremely addictive substance and it is VERY difficult to come off it once we're addicted. And the tobacco companies know this, and their production methods and publicity and advertising policies take notice of it - get people hooked when they're young, and you have them as customers for life. People find it very difficult to stop smoking, not because they're wimps, but because nicotine is very hard to give up.

And I do believe that private freedom to do as we please has to be balanced against other people's right not to be harmed by our exercise of that freedom. Which is why I would support a ban on smoking on public transport.

And a law enforced to make sure that other public places - cinemas, restaurants, sports arenas, theatres, bars, etc make proper provision for non-smokers.

If that means a general ban, so be it. I don't see that saying "Sorry, you can't smoke in this space or on these premises or in this sort of facility" equates to "slavery". "Slavery" isn't about whether we can light up in the pub or the theatre or wherever. "Slavery" is a lot more serious a matter than that.

Besides, I could say that I object to being forced into the "slavery" of breathing David Hockney's used tobacoo smoke and other emissions.

Where I do agree with him is where he points out that a smoking ban doesn't actually solve everything for everyone.

It may solve some problems for some people - for instance, as a non-smoker I can now feel much more relaxed watching a film in a cinema knowing that someone isn't going to light up a pipe right next to me, and I can travel by bus or train without experiencing the nausea that tobacco smoke induces in me. And as someone who inherited slight heart problems from my father - who smoked heavily in spite of frequent serious warnings from his doctor - a smoke-free atmosphere brings me more radical and significant benefits than the mere absence of discomfort.

But addiction seems to me to be the unholy marriage of a substence which is addictive and a person who is susceptible to addiction. Take away the substance without dealing with the susceptibility, and I suspect that the addict will either go back to his/her original addiction, or find something else to be addicted to.

I agree that government priorities need sorting. I agree that politics and politicians seem to be more about knee-jerk reaction to events - a mother kills herself and her and daughter after years of harassment and bullying, and the Prime Minister immediately promises a 'new law to stop that kind of thing'. Except that the laws are there already - what's needed is for those laws to be enforced. And yes - that IS more immediately urgent than a by-law to ban smoking at the dog-track. And human freedom within the reasonable bounds of social living is a fundamental concern. I'm not sure that smoking/non-smoking is a valid battleground, that's all.

Gone on too long already. Apologies. Shut up, Doddie. :devil: