Control By Government

For approximately the past twentyfive years governments in general have discovered that inventing some great 'fear', one to the detriment of humans, offers a form of control that can be exercised quite legitimately.

Witness today, as if by coincidence, the re-hashing of the 'second-hand smoke' fake science being regurgitated in The Times today - with an article, plus a letter from twenty of today's 'most senior doctors', the latter calling for a complete ban on smoking in cars and even in parks and playgrounds. The letter calls for more anti-smoking legislation to address the serious health problems caused by passive smoking.

In their book "Scared to Death" Christopher Booker and Richard North write, on pages 269-270: "What the campaigners against 'second-hand smoke' were not entitled to claim, however, although it was their most constantly repeated boast, was that they were saving thousand of lives which would have been lost through passive smoking itself. Despite their tireless efforts, they have not been able to produce a single, genuinely scientific study that proved beyond doubt that second-hand smoke was actually responsible for killing people. Hundreds of studies had tried to establish this point, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and pounds. But for all their researchers' ingenuity, not one had produced evidence which in reality was objectively convincing or, under the strictest rules of science, 'statistically significant'."

To my knowledge the lack of proof, about which Booker and North write, is still lacking today. Yet still the anti-smoking brigade repeat their mantra about 'passive-smoking' and still do not quote any studies or proven figures to back their statements. Neither is there, again to my knowledge, any autopsy procedure that can identify a death caused by passive smoking. If there is no known data that proves beyond doubt that second-hand smoke is actually responsible for killing people, HTF can doctors state "About 40 sudden infant deaths are also caused by passive smoking annually"; and more importantly - if one can digress slightly - HTF does a supposedly respectable newspaper blithely repeat such a statement without question?

If 'government' were able to eradicate smoking it immediately begs the question (a) how do they plug the massive hole that will appear in Treasury 'earnings' from the loss of tobacco tax; (b) how much has actually been spent funding fake charities to 'pontificate' on the dangers of smoking, coupled with the costs of research into the 'dangers' of smoking; and, (c) what does government do with all the people who will then be unemployed by their success in eradicating smoking? Of course, what we are talking about here is 'government economic planning' - and that is a 'science' which has been proven not to work!