Dear Glen Clark:

Thank you very much for your answer of March 24.

We do not doubt that hard-hitting television advertisement is an important component of the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry Responsible for Seniors' Tobacco Reduction Strategy.

Putting aside the VERY questionable name of the antismoking advertising campaign ("The Truth") for the moment, we are asking you for a simple answer to the following question: what is the educational value of portraying a dog pissing on a smoker? While we understand how difficult it may be for you and your government to give a straight answer to a straight question, please try.

It appears self-evident that the government of B.C. wishes to instill an attitude at least as much or perhaps more than it wishes to impart information. And that attitude is one of contempt and intolerance for a legal behaviour practiced by a segment of the population. If you do not see the potential here for creating the impression of a government-sanctioned "licence to hate", you are naive. If you do see this potential, then you are irresponsible - or worse - for sanctioning this type of approach.

As far as the effectiveness of the media campaign of intolerance goes, I am sorry to agree with you: it is very effective, I can tell by the level of intolerance -- even hatred -- I sometimes feel crackling around me when I light up in public. May I remind you that the Nazi's racial/cultural/health "education" was also very effective. I don't need to remind you of its consequences.

As far as your "concern" goes, Glen Clark, please do not patronize smokers. I chose to smoke long ago and the tobacco industry had nothing to do with it. I enjoy smoking, I don't intend to quit, I have my own dignity as a citizen, as a man, and as a contributor to your salary, and I neither seek nor accept your patronizing "compassion." I am not alone in my indignation over how governments have chosen recently to regard smokers. Our members and sympathizers - not all of them smokers - are concerned about the emergence of real abuses in the increasingly aggressive and high-stakes pursuit by governments of "a healthier society". We therefore do not accept the "smoker victim" routine. I just remind you that it is not possible to be intolerant of smoking without being intolerant of smokers.

Also, please break down the 1.5 billion dollars in "direct and indirect costs" in detail, or address us within the government to the office that can provide specific and detailed information about how those numbers are arrived at. We are entitled to this detailed information as citizens.

Last summer, Canadian news media and the B.C. government were giving $500 million as the figure for treating smoking-related disease in this province, roughly the same amount that the province pulls in annually in tobacco taxes. What precisely has been added in to boost the total? Frankly, we don't believe your revisionary smoking-cost numbers. Your Ministries seem to think that the bigger the lie, the more credible it becomes.

Mr. Clark, if your letter to us has done any good, it has demonstrated that a dialogue with your government is all but useless, for you seem determined to squash smokers and turn them into social pariahs. You want to make choice disappear, you want to condition our behaviour, and the behaviour of the next generation of British Columbians with the force of state regulation and false science. And you want to make us pony up to pay for it all.

If this is the case, we will do all we can do to fight you legally, morally, and with any other means we can scrounge as oppressed citizens.The fight for the freedom to smoke has become a fight for liberty, and resistance is building up everywhere, every day more, all over North America. Governments will not be able to abuse us, dismiss us or ignore us for much longer.

With U.S. federal tobacco legislation in the works, smoking may soon be unacceptably expensive for large numbers of people across the continent. This will trigger a big black market as people "vote with their feet" in a quasi-prohibition environment. Only then will governments begin to "understand" some of the arguments that we dissenters have been making. But by then, I suppose, you'll be out of office and someone else will be left to clean up the mess.

Sincerely,

Gian Turci
President,
FORCES Canada