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Here is Michael McFadden’s summary of the TICAP (The International Coalition Against Prohibition) conference. For those who don’t know, McFadden is the author of Dissecting Anti-smokers’ Brains and he was also fortunate enough to edit my book ;) Check out his website at www.antibrains.com
March 16, 2010
The Conference was a great success! We had participants from Pennsylvania and California, and from Wales, Scotland, England, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, France, and perhaps one or two other countries I’ve lost track of.
The facility was impressive and sported high tech video cameras that automatically zoomed in on people as they spoke. The courtyard outside was reserved for our breaks and was surrounded by towers from, I believe, the 16th century. The tea and coffee service was superb… although the tray of crackers left a bit to be desired… at least to my tastes (There were NO chocolate cookies!) The room was perfect: we had planned to be comfortable with anywhere from 25 to 100 and we ended up with about 50 which fit comfortably and allowed for inter-session discussions which were productive without being overwhelming!
From 8:30 to 9:30 conference participants were warmly welcomed by the Chairman of TICAP, John Gray. We started up promptly at 9:30 with Mr. Maessen delivering the Welcome Address with a PowerPoint presentation. Michael Marlow presented an incredibly detailed presentation also assisted by PowerPoint on the economic effects of bans and covered some of the twistings and turnings of antismoking propagandists with regard to the after-ban health claims they like to conjure up with cherry picked studies. Patrick Basham followed with a carefully prepared spoken presentation showing the dangers ahead for the hospitality industry after their fall to the smoking bans and demonstrating why this particular fight is so important to wider freedoms everywhere. Maryetta Ables was faced with the daunting task of trying to summarize a detailed 21 page report on threat of UN and WHO “advisors” as they relate to individual governments that seem to have been all too willing to give up claims to fundamental principles of sovereignity in signing the FCTC (Framework Convention on Tobacco Control) treaty. While they would never have signed away such rights on issues like arms control or fundamental human freedoms, the “tobacco issue” appeared harmless enough to them that they opened their doors to a future where many of them may be sadly surprised. Maryetta boiled her 21 pages down to a well-organized extemporaneous presentation that included having a few conference participants come up front to link arms in various positions showing the growing influence of international interests over national directions. We had a welcome unscheduled addition to the conference after Maryetta in the person of Gawain Towler, press officer of UKIP, who offered his strong support and belief that our work will pay off legislatures around the world.
Their presentations were followed by a lively question and answer session and then a lunch break at a wonderful outdoor cafe where we were all trying to order in different languages while bicyclists pedaled by. While it’s a bit uncertain whether we all got what was ordered, everyone seemed happy when we arrived back at the conference.
The afternoon session started out with a prensentation by a Dutch MP of the VVD, Halbe Zijlstra,
a spokesman for their Public Health and a nonsmoker who nonetheless sees the threat to our freedoms as being worthy of more concern than whatever slight or imaginary threat may be posed by wisps of smoke in businesses that desire to allow smoking on their premises. Zijlstra was warmly applauded and was then followed by a 20 minute pre-recorded video by Dave Goerlitz, “The Winston Man” who once worked for Big Tobacco, then worked for the Antis, and then left the Antis when he got disgusted with their interest in money more than the kids he was trying to communicate with. Dave had been hit by debris from a truck in a highway accident early this year and had just had an unexpected operation that kept him from coming to the conference but he made a noble effort to boil his ideas down into a video presentation and I believe he was successful and appreciated. Dave was followed by a detailed presentation from Kamal Chaouachi on how the hookah culture has been unjustly attacked and on the corruption of science by Antismokers hell-bent on stamping out ALL forms of smoking… even if they have to discredit legitimate research and researchers while creating brand new excuses to lump hookah smoking in with their arch-enemy of cigarette smoking. Kamal was followed by myself with another PowerPoint presentation with my main thrust being the need to hit the Prohibitionists at their weakest point: their lies.
After a break we came back for a final Q&A session chaired quite ably and helpfully (as was the first) by author-historian Christopher Snowdon. Some interesting questions were asked and answered and several of the day’s presenters added a bit to their formal presentations. As the day’s session ended Maryetta Ables gave a warm eulogy for Gian Turci, remembering his history and efforts, perfectly capped by his success in bringing about the creation of TICAP and the first TICAP conference held last year in Brussels. Gian worked tirelessly for no gain in any personal sense at all other than satisfaction in knowing that he was fighting against something that was huge and was wrong. He was a Don Quixote fighting against truly dark windmills that were fueled not by breezes but by immense amounts of money, and TICAP is carrying on his vision in our fights around the world!
After the formal conference we retreated to one of The Hague’s “Dens of Defiance” where participants were able to exchange thoughts and camaraderie in a more informal atmosphere well into the evening.
To the future… We have the truth and the facts on our side, while the power of the antismoking industry is based only on money and lies. We CAN beat them! Keep on fighting!
Michael J. McFadden
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”
Mid-Atlantic Director, Citizens Freedom Alliance
Board of Directors, The International Coalition Against Prohibition
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Dr Michael Siegel has made an offer of $200 to the first anti-smoking organisation who reports on the two year data on Scottish heart attacks. The official data, released by the government, showed that heart attacks in Scotland have risen since last year, for the first time in ten years.
Dr Siegel has stated the rules on his website (http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/):
1. To be eligible, an anti-smoking organization must have previously issued a public communication (including a web site posting), press release, or media statement in which it publicized the results of the Scottish smoking ban study (either the original press release before the study was published or the results of the published paper in the New England Journal of Medicine) and communicated to the public the conclusion that the smoking ban in Scotland led to an immediate, dramatic (17%) decrease in heart attacks (or acute coronary syndrome) in Scotland.
2. The organization must issue a public correction of the conclusion of the study, either through a press release, web site posting, or other major public communication, based on the complete two-year follow-up data, which demonstrate no significant effect of the smoking ban on admissions for acute coronary syndrome in Scotland.
Dr Siegel makes the admission that he cannot afford to give the money away, but has proposed the challenge because he is so convinced that no organisation will take the offer up. He states:
“…I have learned, these anti-smoking groups aren’t truly interested in getting out the facts. They are interested in putting out information which is favorable to their cause. The goal is not scientific accuracy or integrity. It is putting out information to support the agenda. If that information turns out to be premature or wrong, so what? It’s all for a good cause anyway, so there’s no real harm in a little bit of premature or false information. After all, the movement is saving lives.”
“Now some might argue that there is nothing wrong with anti-smoking groups being biased and even inaccurate in their reporting of the science because this is what partisan advocacy groups do. I disagree, however, because I view anti-smoking groups as part of the public health movement and because they have put themselves forward as being a credible source of scientific information. In other words, these groups have taken on a responsibility to the public by virtue of their putting themselves in the position of advocating for policies to improve the public’s health.”
The offer is extended to no less than 18 anti-smoking groups, including ANR, Campaign for Smoke-Free Kids, and ASH UK.
We will have to wait and see to find out if any group does take the money and report on the truth, although I am in agreement with Dr Siegel that they will probably do no such thing - instead rejecting the offer to continue with their own agenda. After all, they are earning more than enough money doing what they are currently doing.
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To those of you who do not know who Michael Siegel is, he is a prominent anti-smoker who wholeheartedly agrees with bans and other tobacco control. Unlike the rest of the anti-smoking brigade though, Mr Siegel speaks out against ridiculous lies and notions put forth from the movement, such as a new outcry over the labelling of ‘slim’ cigarettes - where the anti’s claim that this will lead women to think of the cigarettes as glamourous in lieu with the media fascination of women having a slim physique. The mind truly boggles.
On November 18th 2008, Michael Siegel wrote on his website how he had been attacked by an anti who wrote a “blatantly inaccurate and distorted biography” on SourceWatch. The author of the biography goes under the screen name of “truthteller” - ironically enough - and said Mr Siegel’s primary role is to campaign against tobacco control measures, that he issues “tobacco-industry soundbytes” and that he aides with the “tobacco industry’s efforts to create a ‘doubt’ campaign” and assisting the tobacco industry in it’s fight “to return to smoky areas”.
Anyone who knows anything about Mr Siegel will know this is as far from the truth as it can get - he and I most certainly differ in our opinions of smoking and tobacco, and he believes the habit is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in America annually, and causes disease in countless others. Clearly, then, not a person who particularly likes Big Tobacco.
I found his article interesting because it shows that the anti’s not only attack anyone who is pro-smoking or, indeed, not anti-smoking, but they also attack anti-smokers who do not agree with everything they claim. As Mr Siegel himself stated of the movement “It continually fascinates me how there is no room for nuance in tobacco control. Everything is black and white. Either you approve of all tobacco control measures or you are a traitor to the cause. Either you approve of all tobacco taxes or you are working to promote the tobacco industry. Either you support all smoking bans or you are trying to return to smoky areas. Either you support every scientific statement that tobacco control groups make or you are participating in the tobacco industry’s doubt campaign.”
What else I found interesting about the article is that Mr. Siegel also states how the tobacco industry have only ever attacked him not only publicly (in courtrooms) but also on facts and in a manner that he may respond - in other words, not a sly, back-stabbing way.
If the members of the anti-smoking brigade can’t keep it together enough to respect each other and that other people have differences then it certainly won’t be long before it crumbles on itself. Once a group starts to rot from within the end is nigh, and when it’s own members and supporters question the motives and claims then something is very, very wrong.
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This article was written by Michael J. McFadden in his book “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”. His website is www.antibrains.com
The Chemistry of Secondary Smoke
As noted earlier in the chapter on Language, about 90% of secondary smoke is composed of water and ordinary air with a slight excess of carbon dioxide. Another 4% is carbon monoxide, a gas that can act as a poison when in sufficient quantity by reducing the amount of oxygen your red blood cells can carry. The last 6% contains the rest of the 4,000 or so chemicals supposedly to be found in smoke… but found, obviously, in very small quantities (1989 Report of the Surgeon General p. 80).
Most of these chemicals can only be found in quantities measured in nanograms, picograms and femtograms. Many cannot even be detected in these amounts: their presence is simply theorized rather than measured. To bring those quantities into a real world perspective, take a saltshaker and shake out a few grains of salt. A single grain of that salt will weigh in the ballpark of 100 million picograms! (Allen Blackman. Chemistry Magazine 10/08/01).
To refer back to our earlier example of arsenic, a nonsmoker would have to work with a smoker 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, for well over a hundred years to be exposed to a quantity of arsenic equal to one grain of salt. While a lot of waitresses and bartenders may feel as if they’ve worked a hundred years at their jobs, there really aren’t too many who actually have.
And, again as noted earlier, far from all 4,000 of those chemicals are normally labeled as toxic in the first place, with the 1989 Surgeon Generals’ Report only noting that “some” are… without reference to how many or to what amounts would be considered toxic. One of the most basic principles of scientific toxicology is that “The Dose Makes The Poison.”… a fact always ignored by Crusaders.
When speaking of secondary smoke many Antismokers will also refer to the “40 carcinogenic compounds” it supposedly contains. In reality only six of those have in fact been classified as “known human carcinogens” (1989 Report of the Surgeon General. pgs. 86-87). Most of the rest of the 40 compounds have shown insufficient evidence of being human carcinogens and many are commonly found in foods, coffee, and the general environment (Science, 258: 261-265 (1992). The exposure of nonsmokers to the six actual human carcinogens is usually so minuscule as to be almost imaginary in nature and is sometimes far less than other everyday environmental exposures.
Secondary smoke is the mix of all of the smoke that enters the air in a room where someone is smoking, both the smoke exhaled by the smoker and the smoke coming off the tip of the cigarette. You’ve heard the claim that secondary smoke is twice as bad as what the smoker gets? In a way this is true: if you held your nose a quarter inch above the burning end of a cigarette and inhaled a slow deep breath through your nostrils you’d be getting a concentration of smoke and its chemicals twice as great as what the smoker is pulling into his or her mouth.
In the real world no one does that. Even the most hardened of smokers would generally be reduced to paroxysms of coughing from such concentrated inhalation. The secondary smoke that a nonsmoker comes in contact with is usually an extremely diluted mixture of exhaled smoke and the smoke produced directly from the cigarette’s tip.
Something that’s usually forgotten in the rush of concern about the nonsmoker is that the smoker is also breathing all the secondary smoke produced, and, given the closer proximity to the source, the smoker is inhaling it in far greater quantities and concentrations than most nonsmokers ever would! If the concerns about the dangers of secondary smoke were really true it would make perfect sense for a smoker with a smoking guest to insist that the guest go outside to smoke even if they were both smoking at the same time. Indeed, smokers would want to rush outside themselves out of fear of their own secondary smoke!
The exact chemical composition of secondary smoke depends largely upon how many seconds it’s been in the air. Just as happens in the case of most combustion products, the chemicals change and break down very quickly, and some elements will tend to settle toward the floor or deposit themselves on walls or curtains. In pursuit of some arguments Antismokers want to assume from the start that secondary smoke is carcinogenic: this is when they will claim that it’s chemically very similar to mainstream smoke. However, when they want to argue that comparing secondary smoke exposure to “cigarette equivalents” is unfair (This method generally produces very low measures of exposure… sometimes as low as six cigarettes per year even for bartenders), they will claim that it’s chemically very different than mainstream smoke and can’t be compared in that way!
