PM Prayut urged to drop tobacco control bill

[h90]

The hell of it is that out in the villages (90% of Thailand) age limits mean nothing. I can send a six year old down to the corner to buy a bottle rice whiskey at any time of the day or night.

These restrictions are nothing but an inconvenience for law abiding citizens, like the no alcohol sales before 11 a.m. or after 2:00 p.m. It keeps me from buying a good bottle of scotch during those hours, but, again, I can buy the rot gut in the village 24 hours a day. And just where do you think the problem lies?

When I was young it was normal to send the kid to buy cigarettes and beer for the parents. And guess what there were less children/teenager who smoke or drink. You can't fix a problem in the society with laws.

Again and again some governments try to do it from Nazis to Communists all want to create the better human and it never worked.

[nisakiman]

Tobacco Control is the product of a prohibitionist mindset which uses highly dubious 'research' to justify its 'war on tobacco'. Their approach is the reverse of what it should be. Instead of 'evidence based policy' they have constructed 'policy based evidence'. They start with the conclusions they want, and then design research studies guaranteed to reach those conclusions. Most of the medical establishment actually haven't a clue, and don't question the mechanisms involved in smoking tobacco, they just parrot the line that was drummed into them at medical school. (I know this because I had a client who was a doctor, and when I sent him some links to original research and the actual, as opposed to cherry-picked, results, he was absolutely staggered). If you actually study the original research on which all the scaremongering about smoking is based, you will find that it is very, very shaky. To quote from an article by Richard White, an assiduous researcher and author of 'Smoke Screens':

3. Specificity: In other words, does the disease only affect the exposed group? The fact that there is no malaria without mosquitoes supports the theory that mosquitoes spread malaria. Asbestosis is entirely specific to people who have been exposed to asbestos. Is there the same specificity with smoking and lung cancer? The answer is no. People developed lung cancer before smoking arrived in Europe and nonsmokers still get lung cancer in reasonably large numbers. Other factors are involved—other forms of smoke, radon and several other risk factors. But, as Hill said, people can get scrotal cancer without being chimney sweeps. He continued: "If other causes of death are raised 10, 20 or even 50% in smokers whereas cancer of the lung is raised 900 – 1000% we have specificity – a specificity in the magnitude of the association."

But it’s only recently that smoking levels have decreased to a point that it can all be more accurately analysed. for some reason we always seem to just look at the 1930s onwards, but people have been smoking for millennia. Humans evolved in smoke-filled huts, by open-fires, tobacco-filled rooms. Tobacco has been used medicinally for thousands of years, and people have smoked for thousands of years. Only in the 1930s did we see a surge in lung cancer rates. To me, that’s very non-specific of tobacco being a causative agent and we need to look at what else happened in that time – how about the introduction of diesel? The Great Fire? Smog? Testing of the atom bomb? Also indicative of it being innocent as a causative agent is the fact that the Semai people start smoking aged 2, and in a study conducted in the 1970s, of over 12,000 participants not a single case of lung cancer was found.

4. Temporality: In other words, cause and effect. Does smoking cause lung cancer or do smokers happen to be people who put themselves at risk of lung cancer more than nonsmokers. This is a valid question that less scrupulous epidemiologists fail to ask. We know today that smokers are more likely to be in lower socio-economic groups. This is a major confounding factor. The fact that lower socio-economic groups are also more likely to end up in prison and are more likely to have a baby die in the first 12 months of life does not prevent junk scientists claiming that secondhand smoke "causes" criminality or cot death. But these associations are very weak whereas the smoking theory is strong. If there was a more significant risk factor for lung cancer that it associated with smoking, but is not smoking, we need to hear what it is. The suggestions put forward—such as vehicle exhaust, asbestos exposure or pollution—are not specific enough to smokers to explain the statistical association between smoking and lung cancer.

Doll himself acknowledged that the consumption of vitamin E, through proper diet, could offset (or drastically lower) the risk of lung cancer from smoking. In fact, diet has consistently been shown to have a massive effect on the risk of lung cancer.

https://cfrankdavis.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/catch-2/

Also there is a theory that governments saw smoking tobacco as a convenient red herring, which is why they encouraged and funded the anti-tobacco fanatics back in the 60s. Much cheaper and easier than being faced with multiple law suits over nuclear testing / diesel emissions or whatever. Personally, I'm dubious about the conspiracy theory side of it. We've always had prohibitionist nutters screaming about the evils of whatever they personally don't like, and unfortunately the current crop of fanatics managed to attract billions in funding from the government and the pharmaceutical industry, who have a vested interest in smoking restrictions. However, there is much to be considered about the government / nuclear testing theory when you see just how much radioactive fallout has been dumped into the atmosphere between 1945 and 1970, during which time cases of lung cancer exploded:

And if you're interested to know how the anti-smoking fanatics managed to turn a once social and socially accepted pastime into one where those who continue to enjoy tobacco are stigmatised and reviled by the indoctrinated majority, here's how it's done: