November 14 , 2003 - Public / Private; There Is A Difference - Those who favor smoking bans prefer to consider bars and restaurants to be public property simply because the public is invited to visit those establishments. However, opponents of smoking bans recognize that the invitations to the public are by the graces of the private owners, and the property remains private property.

October 6 , 2003 - New book fires up a crucial issue – are we victims or responsible agents? - Szasz Under Fire, a new book in which the distinguished and controversial American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz debates his critics, is now available for pre-ordering at Open Court Books.

September 22, 2003 - Drunk On Morality - Last May, a father was seen offering his curious 2-year-old daughter a taste of his beer at a ballgame in Orlando, Fla. The police swooped down and charged him with aggravated child abuse. Had the father instead strapped her to the back of his motorcycle and roared home, few would have noticed or cared.

August 19, 2003  - Avoiding The Diet Craze - There's an old conundrum, familiar to those who have viewed the clientele of health-food restaurants.

July 7, 2003  - Junking Junk Science – ‘ Enacted in December 2000, the Federal Data Quality Act (FDQA) requires that data used to support laws and regulations should conform to strict scientific standards. One of the first targets under this piece of legislation was the thoroughly discredited U.S. National Assessment on Climate Change, which relied for much of its alarmism on two climate models which were proven to have no more predictive power than tables of random numbers. As Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia put it, the assessment "breaks the cardinal rule of science: If a hypothesis doesn't work, throw it out. The Assessment can't pass the simplest of scientific tests." […] Yet now the junk scientists are fighting back. After years of seeing their claims of environmental health risks being ruled inadmissible owing to lack of statistical significance or other sound reasoning, they have taken to calling the Daubert ruling scientific censorship, with the added twist that they claim it aids "polluters." ‘

July 7, 2003  - Fun, an Endangered Concept – Interesting article on the culture of fear and paranoia that is filling the vacuum of values created by a generation that has demolished “what’s wrong” without the ability to replace it with a “what’s right" of equal or greater value. Like Monday morning quarterbacks, “public health” and “public safety” “experts” are very good at pointing out what is wrong and dangerous with the picture of life, and -- abusively using the force of the state -- ripping it out with junk science. But they are incapable of replacing what they have ripped out with something that can fill the void they have left behind. That is not just a fatal mistake, it's the best indication that they are not experts, for they have fully demonstrated their inability to understand the human equation, of which they can only see the negative half. There is no need to be an “expert” (paid with generous state funds) to figure that out -- everybody can do it. Indeed, convincing people that only an “expert” can see the obvious is the ultimate lie, the one that will eventually pull the rug out from under the feet of this era of institutionalised deception – at a very high cost for all.

...these bans are far more threatening than the prospect of inhaling a few stray whiffs of tobacco while waiting for a table at your favorite restaurant. The anti-tobacco crusaders point in exaggerated alarm at those wisps of smoke while they unleash the systematic and unlimited intrusion of government into our lives.

Although secondhand smoke as a hazard is a myth that grows increasingly threadbare, the march to impose smoking bans continues.  What once was justified as a health measure now is blatantly advanced as a means to coerce people into altering their behavior solely to satisfy the prejudices of a bossy elite.  The appropriation of private property that smoking bans necessitate would have caused a revolt even a few decades ago.  Now the populace chews its cud and vainly hopes that the next ax to fall won't fall on its neck.  Smoking bans, as we have noted, are only the beginning of a series of schemes that will eventually turn us all into infantile wards of the state, unable to make any decisions without the approval of a white-coated authority that has imprisoned us for our own good. 

May 28, 2003 - Smoke-free and unsociable: New York loses its edge – Musician Joe Jackson writes this interesting piece on The International Herald Tribune, while thinking about packing up and leaving New York for good. The reason? The smoking ban was the last straw of a big haystack of impositions, regulations, taxations and controls that are incompatible with this once free city – and with any free spirit. The last straw is a fascist law based on a scientific fraud, with a stem of moralistic hypocrisy hiding under the white coat of “public health” -- because it does not even have the courage to show its black shirt, and the dry spike is empty rhetoric echoing in the hollow room of an idiotic and unverified “majority” piloted by pharmaceutical corruption. Antitobacco and “healthism” are the sad markers of a generation that has lost the sense of right and wrong, of fairness and liberty. Where science is decided in courtrooms and where old, underdeveloped children with white hair and too much power oppress one another with regulations, bans, rhetoric, slogans and junk science. Finally, where those who are oppressed, instead of rebelling, advocate oppression for those who are not yet oppressed, to reach a peculiar sense of equality under injustice -- a true marker of the loser and the desperate -- having lost any sense of justice, and hope for truth.

So, Joe may leave the Land of the Free for a freer land -- but a cell migrating to another part of a cancer-ridden body is not any safer. Unless there is truly a safe heaven, the cure is not running away, but to uproot the cancer itself.

May 26, 2003 - Trial Lawyers Get Spanked  - The case started off on a surreal note when Miami trial lawyer Stanley Rosenblatt and his wife, Susan, stepped forward to ask a Dade County court to designate them as legal representatives of every person in the country made ill by smoking--a "class" very few of whose members had sought them out as champions. Rather than collapse in helpless laughter, appellate judges allowed the husband-and-wife team to proceed, but narrowed the class to include Florida smokers only. Then there began a jury selection phase lasting three months, with 800 prospects being sent home in search of the perfect six. (If you took the view that smoking is a matter of individual responsibility, you got bounced.)

When the two-year trial was finally over, the six-member jury deliberated for a mere five hours before deciding that the tobacco industry should pay a sum more than twice the gross domestic product of New Zealand. (It also voted $12.7 million to the three individual plaintiffs.) The $145 billion was many times the tobacco companies' net worth, and thus (as the appeals court pointed out) in bald violation of state law, which prohibits punitive damages set so high as to bankrupt a defendant. Yet the verdict was soon hailed by such anti-tobacco stalwarts as Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) and even the American Medical Association, which seems to have trouble recognizing litigation excess when its own members are not among the intended targets.

Walter Olson, an attorney highly critical of the excesses of the profession, provides a concise history of the case and comments on the bogus racial aspect the Rosenblatts injected into the case.  He puzzles over why the media covering the appeal verdict, while noting the harsh comments directed towards the judge presiding over the original verdict, neglect to mention the scathing comments about the conduct of the Rosenblatts.  Both behaved atrociously and clearly perverted the system to reach their own ends.

Olson also highlights an important point that the appeals court addressed.  The original judge had forbidden the tobacco industry from arguing that the so-called tobacco settlement, in which the industry showered $266-billion upon the 50 states, and billions upon a handful of politically connected anti-tobacco lawyers, had already resolved the punitive damages issue.  By consenting to a lucrative settlement of those claims, the appeals court said, the attorneys general of Florida (and presumably the other 49 states) foreclosed further claims for punitive damages on behalf of the community as a whole over those pre-1998 offenses.  In other words that tobacco industry has already been punished enough.  Now that's a radical, and welcome, concept.

May 26,2003 - The Liberation Of Smoking - With regard to the last great persecution of the 20th century, is it possible that we are finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel?

The last great persecution experienced in this most repressive of all centuries is, of course, the hysterical persecution of tobacco. And the light that I hope we are seeing is the lighting of an elegant Marlboro poised on the lips of a sophisticated sybarite. Is it not about time that discerning adults be free to light up in a proper setting? In the land of the free and the home of the brave, I view cigarette smoking as a First Amendment Right.

The American-led persecution of tobacco is another blot on our history. Smoking was once championed by liberals, and though lighting up just anywhere is insensitive to the rights of non-smokers, lighting up in properly ventilated places is a right that all freedom-loving Americans should defend.

Nicole, I am with you. Let us sit down in a smart cafe, light up and talk things over. Writers and other members of the intelligentsia have long known the digitalis to the cerebral cortex that is supplied by benign nicotine. It quickens the wit, strengthens perception and expands memory. Civilized people have for over a century noted that tobacco was the sine qua non of every intellectual salon. The obvious dimming in what Jacques Barzun has called the House of Intellect is doubtless in part a consequence of the persecution of cigarette smoking.

The incident that prompts Emmett Tyrrell's paean to smoking as a torch of liberty was last week's ludicrous hyperventilating over actress Nicole Kidman lighting up a cigarette at the Cannes film festival.  The nanny brigade was in high dudgeon that the hussy had the brass to puff away while news cameras where humming.  Taking off from that incident Tyrrell celebrates the prospect that the end to the Puritanical era may be ending.

And that is the power of the new study by UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom and State University of New York epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat.  Their conclusion that there is no significant association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and heart disease and lung cancer is not radical or outside the mainstream.  The "mountain of evidence" that anti-tobacco refers to constantly to justify imposing prohibition doesn't show any real association either.  What is different is that Enstrom and Kabat are dryly reporting their results while other studies reaching similar conclusions are spun to bamboozle the public.  Left to the public relations magic anti-tobacco resorts to, this study could have easily been cited as one more proof that smoking must be banned.  

What does seem to be changing is that scientists are losing their fear of the anti-tobacco goon squad.  For far too long those whose agenda trumps scientific integrity have called the shots.  Those who speak out are demonized.  The McCarthy-like era of scientific corruption and intimidation is being to crumble. 

May 8, 2003 - Flimsy ETS Theories Don't Stand Up To Scrutiny - The flimsiest of theories about secondhand smoke are guaranteed immediate currency, but those who dare question them are usually subject to ad hominem allegations that they are linked to "Big Tobacco" (LaRue, Letters, 3/10).

It's been over a decade since scientific research funded by a cigarette maker has gotten any press, because nobody would believe a study funded by a company that markets nicotine to children and adults, right? Wrong.

Our public officials are actively promoting such studies, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation is the public affairs/research-grant arm of drug giant Johnson & Johnson, distributors of Nicotrol inhalers.  These smokeless nicotine delivery devices have been advertised on TV as a means to habitually use pharmaceutical nicotine ... as a lifestyle choice.

The foundation gives multi-millions in grants to sympathetic academics around the country for studies about secondhand smoke, which are then used as ammunition for enacting smoking bans - which in turn expand the market for nicotine inhalers.

Hallelujah.  FORCES has been saying for years that smoking bans are not about health.  Jim St. John not only skewers the shoddy junk that promotes the fraud that secondhand smoke is harmful to nonsmokers but unveils the financial motives of the businesses that profit from prohibition.

As an air quality engineer and former member of Washington's advisory committee for indoor air quality, St. John proposes that the current system statistical manipulation be replaced by verifiable workplace air analysis.  Anti-tobacco is adamantly opposed to research that can actually improve indoor air quality.  It's obstinacy is understandable.  Taking a sober look at the air we all breath will reveal that the obsession with secondhand smoke is a red herring designed to obscure actual hazards and enrich the pharmaceutical nicotine peddlers.

April 28, 2003 - Dying for a cigarette - Joe Queenan on the terror, misery and lunacy that have followed the smoking ban in New York New York - Excellent piece by Joe Queenan published in the last issue of The American Spectator. Here are just a few teasers: “There are several ways of looking at the Bloomberg ban. One is that the municipal insanity that gripped New York City during the stock-market bubble of the late Nineties has been rechannelled directly into Bloomberg's head. Bloomberg may well have a few screws loose; he may simply be a man who is out to a rather long lunch. This, by the way, is the charitable view … A second, even more charitable, view is that the mayor is merely being trendy. … A third view is that Bloomberg thought his smoking ban would provide him with an easy victory … that the smoking ban is an idiotic attempt to correct a problem that does not actually exist; a cure far more malignant than the disease it was designed to correct.”

Above and beyond the excellent considerations of this article, the paramount, most disturbing issue is always the same: that all the terror, the misery and the lunacy Queenan is talking about come from a plain scientific fraud, perpetrated by an incredibly corrupt “public health” for power and control, and fuelled by pharmaceutical multinationals, to the interests of which “public health” has become nothing but a pitiful servant. But even beyond that consideration, here is the chilliest of them all: a large part of the public does not care that conmanship has become the way of a key institution such as “public health”; that people who belong in jail for fraud are allowed not just to be free, but even to sit in the executive chairs of ministries of health, or “cancer” societies, and to lecture people and politicians while making millions of dollars and commanding and conning millions of people -- or billions, if we talk about the WHO -- as the passive smoke fraud is to become the new, absolute truth, imposed with laws and violence. Why? Simple: because a large part of the public does not like smoking - thus institutional corruption is OK because it is to its advantage – and this plain explanation is the simple, ugly truth. Is this reality irritating you enough? Yes?... Well then, what are you prepared to do, other than whine?

April 18,2003 - Cigarette Taxes, Black Markets and Crime:  Lessons from New York's 50-Year Losing Battle - New York's high cigarette taxes have spawned a massive black market that has diverted billions of dollars from legitimate businesses and governments to criminals.  More troubling than the financial losses is the crime associated with the city's illicit cigarette market.  The enormous profits that can be made smuggling cigarettes into New York have lured smalltime crooks, mobsters, street gangs, and terrorists into the racket.  Those criminals have engaged in a host of violent activities, including murder, kidnapping, and armed robbery, to earn and protect their illicit profits.  Such crime has frustrated law enforcement efforts to curtail it and exposed regular citizens, such as truck drivers and retail store clerks, to violence.

No, these words are not written by "pro-tobacco lobbyists".  This comprehensive policy analysis on the harm high tobacco taxes does to society is the work of Patrick Fleenor, whose previous positions include chief economist of the Tax Foundation and senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.  Instead of being a panacea for cash-strapped states and localities, the sky-high cigarette taxes are boomeranging on the citizenry in ways that the greedy politicians didn't foresee.

April 17, 2003 - Some Problems with Treatment for Addiction – ‘...In all the glib talk about “treatment” as the best way to tackle addiction and the “drug problem,” few people face up to the implications of the fact that “treatment” is nothing other than psychotherapy, and psychotherapy means talking to people in an attempt to change their values, goals, morality and behaviour. In other words, “treatment” is not a medical question, but a question of ethics and religion.’

Dr. Jeffrey Schaler, member of the FORCES International Honour Committee, explains why the large majority of addiction treatments do not work. Because there is nothing to treat – except, perhaps, the fundamental error in assuming that it is the substance that “grips” the “patient”, instead of the individual choosing to use the substance. This issue is far from being just academic hair-splitting: it has very tangible effects with legal substances in the form of multi-billion dollar liability lawsuits against alcohol, tobacco and food manufacturers “hooking” people, rather than being the people who choose to use their products -- and having to face their own responsibilities. But Dr. Schaler’s adult perception of reality is carefully avoided by government, lawyers, and “health” advocates (who have found in addiction a goose of endless golden eggs) – and even by the “victims,” who are often only apparently willing to free themselves from the “addiction”. Playing victim, in fact, shifts the moral and legal responsibility from the user to the supplier, while enabling the “victim” to claim that he “can’t help it.” Thus the "victim" can keep indulging in his choice with some level of social tolerance, while dodging the persecution of the do-gooders to an extent. The do-gooders, in turn, use the “victim” to further their political agendas by squeezing money from the suppliers -- but appearing as defenders of the "victims" instead of the extortionists they really are. What a nice, dirty vicious circle; it is all a matter of intellectual honesty after all -- isn’t it?

April 11, 2003 - Justice, Tobacco, and Retroactive Law – “…John Ashcroft's minions are trying to gain a new source of government revenue by again looting U.S. tobacco companies—and further destroying the U.S. Constitution in the process. It is not enough for the U.S. Government to be waging war against Iraq; it must also continue to war against Americans as well. The newest demands from the DOJ accuse "Big Tobacco" of engaging in fraudulent schemes, yet, from our vantage point, the only entity that presently is committing fraud is the DOJ itself. […] Yes, the tobacco companies are unpopular, but that has never been illegal—at least until now. No doubt, the tobacco companies will settle with the federal government, the bill ultimately to be footed by tobacco users, but that will only further the injustice in this case. […] Like previous administrations in modern America, the Bush Administration has openly declared itself an enemy of the rule of law.”
A great piece from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Truly, a recommended reading.

Two great pieces this week from Prof. Pierre Lemieux, member of the FORCES International Honour Committee.

April 9, 2003 - Zündel's Crimes of Opinion - ' There are many cases where expressions of opinion are, or can be considered to be, hate propaganda. Libraries and bookstores are full of statements by famous authors that fall foul of hate laws. […] Perhaps Zündel's neo-Nazi sympathies show up most clearly when he talks about smoking. Today's tobacco industry spokesmen, he writes, "should have consulted the Fuehrer." He explains, approvingly, that "Hitler youth had anti-smoking patrols all over Germany, outside movie houses and in entertainment areas, sports fields, etc., and smoking was strictly forbidden to these millions of German youth growing up under Hitler."  I am not necessarily suggesting that Zündel would make a good consultant for Health Canada or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but that, however repulsive his opinions are, he should not be persecuted for expressing them.'

April 9, 2003 - Taxpayers' money up in smoke - The $200-million spent on anti-smoking efforts would allow 400 CAT scanners to operate – ‘…These beneficiaries include public-health bureaucrats and subsidized "non-governmental" organizations. For example, in fiscal year 2000-01, the Canadian Council for Tobacco Control received more than $400,000 from federal taxpayers and the Non-Smokers' Rights Association more than $100,000. No doubt all these people are well-intentioned and it is only a coincidence that they put their good intentions where their money is. As Public Choice economics shows, the taxpayer loses, special interest groups win. […]a memorandum I obtained under the Access to Information Act reveals the Quebec government has been diverting money from breast cancer diagnosis to the enforcement of its 1998 Tobacco Act.’

April 9, 2003 - Segregation - "I have walked into restaurants, shopping malls, hospitals and yes now even bars only to find out that there is no place for my kind, or if there is I ‘am promptly led to a small section in the back of the building where I’ am forced to sit with other members of my kind. This is of course if I'am lucky enough that they even have a special section for my kind, usually I’am told I have to go outside, and make sure I walk anywhere from 20 to 200 feet away from the entrance to join my kind."

April 7, 2003 - Cancer Risk?  Nicotine replacement therapy may do smokers more harm than good - The ink is barely dry on the New York Smoking ban and, as Forces reported to its readers April 4, 2003 when we posted a link to "City Pitching In With `The Patch", New York City has spent $2.5 million to buy pharmaceutical nicotine patches to hand out as free samples. At least tobacco companies paid for their own free samples. It appears that anti-tobacco has raised nicotine peddling to a new art form: why not have the taxpayer pay for distributing free samples of what they describe as and stridently claim to be an addictive substance, nicotine?

But what about Stanford School of Medicine research that describes unique health risks of nonsmoked nicotine, risks that do not appear in cigarette smoked nicotine? What about a recent National Cancer Institute study that concluded nicotine in patches and gums may increase risks of cancer? And where does the department of health disclose to consumers that now more than 50 studies show the nicotine replacement products they are promoting are 85 percent ineffective in helping people quit smoking at one year or more?

We note with concern that neither New York Newsday nor the New York City Department of Public Health have disclosed to date those known risks of pharmaceutical nicotine as documented in credible medical studies. We observe anti-tobacco advocates engaging in the same behavior they have accused tobacco companies of doing: aggressively promoting addictive nicotine consumer products without disclosing known health risks of using them.

We now understand with clarity that Mayor Bloomberg's smoking ban is not, and cannot be, about public health. As we have said for quite some time, in the final analysis smoking bans are a brute intrusion of special-interest political clout into public policy to mandate a coerced consumer choice of inferior pharmaceutical nicotine products over competitive tobacco nicotine products.

Why should New York tavern and restaurant owners, as well as New York taxpayers, subsidize such a transparent sweetheart deal for Mayor Bloomberg's special-interest drug company cronies?

We post a reprint of Norman Kjono's feature Op-Ed article as published in the lawyers newspaper The Los Angeles Daily Journal January 29, 2003.