gdp's Comments

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Daniel Rossall Valentine: Banning menthol cigarettes is nothing to celebrate

Thu, 21 May 2020 09:00:54 +0000

The 1950's saw a big rise in lung cancer cases which required answers. . Around this time we also saw a huge uptake of tobacco smoking, nuclear testing, industrial pollution, and diesel engine usage. Tobacco became the patsy. "by 1954 the team had published a paper confirming the link." The studies of Doll and Hill confirmed nothing and only provided more questions than answers...eg...their studies showed that lung cancer was more prevalent amongst those who didn't inhale as opposed to those that did! Could it be that smoking actually had a protective effect? It may sound far-fetched (after years of propaganda and scaremongering by the anti-tobacco INDUSTRY), but just look at the figures today. Current smokers account for only 20% of new cases of lung cancer. 80% are non smokers of which 60% are ex-smokers. The vast majority of people today who get lung cancer are those who have quit smoking. To put it another way.... Roughly 4/5 people in the UK today are non-smokers. Roughly 4/5 cases of lung cancers in the UK are people who don't smoke.

Conservative Home : Simon Clark: If May really wants a fairer Britain, she should end the war on smokers

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 17:00:24 +0000

...And not only bacon! I particularly like this quote by Robert Nilsson, Professor of Molecular Toxicology, Stockholm University, Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Toxicology. "Looked at another way, a child’s intake of benzo[a]pyrene during 10 hours from second hand smoke is estimated to be about 250 times less than the amount ingested from eating one grilled sausage."

Conservative Home : Simon Clark: If May really wants a fairer Britain, she should end the war on smokers

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 17:54:37 +0000

From Bayer & Stuber “…..In the last half century the cigarette has been transformed. The fragrant has become foul. . . . An emblem of attraction has become repulsive. A mark of sociability has become deviant. A public behavior is now virtually private. Not only has the meaning of the cigarette been transformed but even more the meaning of the smoker [who] has become a pariah . . . the object of scorn and hostility.” This change from fragrant to foul has not come from the smoke which has remained a constant. The shift is an entirely psychological one. Unfortunately, the way the shift is manufactured is through negative conditioning. The constant play on fear and hatred through inflammatory propaganda warps perception. Ambient tobacco smoke was essentially a background phenomenon. Now exposure to tobacco smoke (SHS) has been fraudulently manufactured into something on a par with a bio-weapon like, say, sarin gas. There are now quite a few who screech that they “can’t stand” the “stench” of smoke, or the smoke is “overwhelming”; there are now those, hand cupped over mouth, that attempt to avoid even a whiff of dilute remnants of smoke – even outdoors. There are those that claim that, arriving from a night out, they had to put all of their clothes in the washing machine and scrape the “smoke” off their skin in the shower. There are even those that claim they are “allergic” to tobacco smoke. Yet there are no allergens (proteins) in tobacco smoke to be allergic to. And it didn’t stop with just the smoke. Cigarette butts – heretofore unheard of – suddenly became a “monumental problem” too – akin to improvised explosive devices, requiring drastic action. These are all recent phenomena born of toxic propaganda; it is an expanding hysteria. It says nothing about the physical properties/propensities of tobacco smoke. These people are demonstrating that they have been successfully conditioned (brainwashed) into aversion. They are now suffering mental dysfunction such as anxiety disorder, hypochondria, or somatization. Typical symptoms of anxiety disorder are heart palpitations, chest tightness, shortness of breath, headache, dizziness, etc. These capnophobics (smokephobics) are no different to those irrationally attempting to avoid cracks in the pavement lest their mental world come crashing down. Questionable social engineering requires putting many into mental disorder to advance the ideological/financial agenda. It's the antismoking fanatics/zealots/extremists and their toxic mentality and propaganda that have long been in need of urgent scrutiny.

Conservative Home : Simon Clark: If May really wants a fairer Britain, she should end the war on smokers

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 17:45:53 +0000

In 2008 the Dutch government looked into the cost of treating people from the age of 20 to death. They had three categories, the healthy, obese and smokers. The results were not what the health gurus were looking for. The lifetime costs were in Euros: Healthy: 281,000 Obese: 250,000 Smokers: 220,000 It really is quite dishonest of the anti smokers to say that smoking is a burden on society.

Conservative Home : Simon Clark: If May really wants a fairer Britain, she should end the war on smokers

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 17:39:18 +0000

Well George...whilst your drink is on the table in front of you, it is releasing carcinogenic toxins into the air (in far greater amounts than SHS) to be inhaled by everyone else in the room. Maybe YOU should go stand outside with the smokers! After all, fairs fair.

Conservative Home : Simon Clark: If May really wants a fairer Britain, she should end the war on smokers

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 17:29:36 +0000

The most important regulatory obstacle for many pubs in recent years has been the smoking ban which, unlike that of most other countries, allows no exemptions whatsoever for the hospitality industry. The UK’s draconian smoking bans correlate more closely with the collapse in pub numbers than any other factor and it is now widely acknowledged that the ban has damaged many pubs. 4 pubs per week were closing before the 2007 ban. Immediately following the ban this figure rose dramatically. The peak in pub closures came in 2009, with 52 pubs shutting down each week...and are still closing at a rate of 31 a week now. according to the Campaign for Real Ale

Conservative Home : Suleman Khonat: The war on smokers is a war on freedom

Thu, 2 Jun 2016 17:43:44 +0000

TotalitarianAlex...Pubs, clubs, restaurants and bingo halls are not public places They are private businesses and as such, any rules should be down to the owner of said establishments.

Conservative Home : Suleman Khonat: The war on smokers is a war on freedom

Thu, 2 Jun 2016 17:37:27 +0000

...you mean like alcohol and diesel fumes?

Conservative Home : Suleman Khonat: The war on smokers is a war on freedom

Thu, 2 Jun 2016 17:34:53 +0000

'No positive benefits'...You sure about that?. Just because the main stream media won't say anything positive about tobacco because it aint PC, doesn't mean that smoking has no benefits...Here's a few for starters. Smoking lowers risk of ulcerative colitis http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20143... Smoking lowers risk of skin cancer http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/... Smoking lowers risk of Thyroid Cancer http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11000579 Smoking lowers risk of breast cancer http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/1998/pr125.... Smoking lowers risk of Alzheimers http://www.forces.org/evidence/carol/carol16.htm Smoking lowers risk of Gout http://www.renalandurologynews.com/news-in-brief/... Smoking during pregnancy reduces the risk of preeclampsia (one of the leading causes of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity worldwide) by up to 50% http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17127256?dopt=... Smoking lowers your risk of joint replacement surgery http://douglassreport.com/2011/07/31/lifelong-tob... Smoking lowers risk of Parkinson's disease. Smoking lowers risk of obesity. Smoking lowers risk of death after some heart attacks. Smoking helps the heart drug clopidogrel work better. Smoking lowers risk of knee-replacement surgery. http://www.livescience.com/15115-5-health-benefit... Smoking increases work capacity http://dengulenegl.dk/English/Nicotine.html Children of mothers who smoke at least 15 cigarettes a day tend to have lower odds for suffering from allergic rhino-conjunctivitis, allergic asthma, atopic eczema and food allergy, compared to children of mothers who had never smoked. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11422156 P.S Did you know that the only two people to get to blow out 120 candles on their birthday cakes were both lifelong smokers?

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ : Time to stub out smoking - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

Thu, 1 Aug 2013 19:32:19 +0000

The evidence of serious harm from smoking is actually rather tenuous. There have been thousands of published papers, of which I’ve read a substantial proportion, that claim harm. All these papers rely on correlations derived from observational studies. Empirical scientific studies do not support them. For example, toxicological and intervention studies. If there really was strong evidence then tobacco companies would have been sued out of existence decades ago, as happened with asbestos companies. Look up the McTear vs ITL court case for instance, where the top tobacco control ‘experts’ had to produce evidence in court and singularly failed.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ : Time to stub out smoking - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

Thu, 1 Aug 2013 12:30:03 +0000

You then quote a soundbite straight from the anti-smoking industry manifesto..."Thousands of people die every year due to smoking-related diseases." This is one of the antismokers’ cleverest inventions. To say that a disease is ‘smoking-related’ is not the same as saying that it is directly caused by smoking, or that there is any actual proof of anything. It means simply that someone has decided that smoking MAY be a factor in that disease. Over the last couple of decades, more and more diseases have been added to the list, often with very little evidence. Heart disease was one of the first, even though it has something like 300 risk factors, and some major studies have shown not only that the link with smoking is weak, but that moderate smokers have less heart disease than nonsmokers. More recently it has become fashionable to blame smoking for just about everything, from ‘clogging up’ of the arteries (which happens to everyone as they get older) to blindness (well, they can’t blame masturbation any more) to AIDS. It has also become fashionable, every time a smoker dies, to try to find a way to blame their death on smoking.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ : Time to stub out smoking - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

Thu, 1 Aug 2013 12:22:51 +0000

...‘Addiction’ also works to further stigmatise smokers by portraying us as contemptible junkies. Of course, if you’re smoking out of pure compulsion and aren’t even enjoying it, I would say you might as well quit. After all, if you’re going to do something which not only has potential health risks but increasingly gets you treated like dirt, then you may as well at least get some pleasure from it. But many thousands have quit of their own accord, and many others are smoking moderately, or only at certain times, or switching to cigars. I meet these people all the time, but according to antismokers they don’t exist. I personally only smoke when I’m having a drink. Perhaps I don’t exist either.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ : Time to stub out smoking - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

Thu, 1 Aug 2013 12:22:29 +0000

You start by saying "...but I do enjoy smoking." Antismokers tell us that people only smoke because they are ‘addicted to nicotine’, and that most smokers actually want to quit. But most smokers enjoy smoking, and few people want to quit something they enjoy. Nag and frighten them enough though, and you can certainly get them to believe that they should. ‘Addiction’ is not a clearly-defined scientific term, and it’s very hard to separate ‘addictions’ from habits. Antismokers have to keep pushing ‘addiction’ since they either cannot believe, or cannot admit, that people not only freely choose to smoke but enjoy it....

Platform [OLD] : Henry Smith MP:

Mon, 27 May 2013 10:18:44 +0000

These conclusions are deliberately slanted to prove a point that reinforces the opinions of those in the anti-smoking movement. For example, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) put out a report claiming that smoking causes 400,000 preventable deaths a year. But upon closer examination we find that: (1) the “victims” lived longer that the general non-smoking population by two years; (2) over 70,000 died “prematurely” at ages greater than 85; (3) only 0.5% of the smoking population died at ages less than 35...whereas 8% of the general population is dead before age 35. I'm sorry...but this is just more of the same anti-smoking scaremongering claptrap...."Oooh...it's for the children!" “The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf 1943.

Platform [OLD] : Bob Blackman:

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:57:44 +0000

Actually George, only 20% of new cases of people diagnosed with lung cancer are current smokers, 60% ex-smokers and 20% never-smokers...or to put it another way, EIGHTY PERCENT OF NEW LUNG CANCER CASES ARE NON-SMOKERS. http://lungcancer.about.com/b/2012/11/29/why-anti... Infact, scientists are so alarmed about these figures, they're actually doing studies to see if quitting smoking actually triggers the onset of lung cancer! If this turns out to be the case, those in the 'quit-smoking brigade' will have a lot to answer for. http://www.data-yard.net/science/dangers_cessatio...