February 19, 2003 - OK folks, the international health gangs are meeting in Geneva this week under the pharmaceutical banner of the World Health Organisation to further advance the frauds concerning smoking, and to impose prohibition/taxation galore – not to mention the orgy of revolting gratuitous paternalism. The countries that protect with their constitutions freedom of advertising and information (Germany, United States, and so on) are promptly accused of being puppets of the tobacco industry; those who respect the freedom of choice to smoke in public, such as France and Switzerland, are attacked by the head honcho Gro Harlem Brundtland herself: "I know that both in France and Switzerland there is smoking in restaurants — I don't like it at all," states the boss of the organisation. Who cares if you don’t like it, Gro? Really -- WHO do you think you are? Let us light one up to your mental health although, really, we doubt that lighting up the entire yearly stock of Philip Morris could correct that situation.

In the meantime, the figure for the global “mortality” of tobacco has been touched up again – not that the media parrots dare to notice, mind you. No more than 15 months ago the statistical “victims” of tobacco were 4 million per year, expected to rise to 10 million a year within 30 years. Even assuming that this statistical con work was real, simple arithmetic indicates that the increment should be 200,000 per year, so now the figure should be at most 4.4 million. Instead, now we hear the figure of 4.9 million. What the hell, it is certainly more alarming than 4.4!

In the last few years we have heard that tobacco “causes” the following death figures: 3 million in 1998, 3.5 million in 1999, 4 million again in 1999, 10 million by 2010, but also 10 million by 2025, however, 100 million in the next 30 years and, finally, 1 BILLION (maybe 750 million) in 2050 – give or take a few hundred million statistical corpses. Those figures don't come from the National Enquirer; they come from “public health”, and no insult to the National Enquirer is intended.

Where is this coming from? Moral and pharmaceutical motivations aside, how does the WHO get to con the entire planet? How does it justify the figures? The genesis of the fraud lies, of course, in statistical junk science – which has nothing to do with real science. We are talking about epidemiology, which is statistics; and statistics are not science – although most media are hell bent (because of incompetence, moralising or advertising payola, depending on the case) on making us believe that they are. When you hear that science has established that XYZ “deaths” are “caused” by smoking, simply don’t believe it – as you should not believe in the deaths “caused” by food, air pollution, electromagnetic radiation, and so on. Why? The Scientific Method tells us how to do science:

• Step 1.   Observe some phenomenon in the universe.
• Step 2.   Develop a tentative explanation, or hypothesis, for the phenomenon.
• Step 3.   Test the validity of the hypothesis -- e.g., do an experiment or otherwise collect relevant data.
• Step 4.   Refine the hypothesis on the basis of the results of the test.
• Step 5.   Repeat Steps 3 and 4 until the hypothesis fits the phenomenon. If the hypothesis does not fit the phenomenon, it has not been proven, and a new hypothesis is to be formulated.

Where is the difference between real science and the junk science of the WHO, and of antitobacco in general? Junk science imitates the Scientific Method -- but with an important and fundamental difference that starts in Step 3: it cannot perform a physical experiment, and/or the methodology used to collect the data is inherently invalid, because it is not possible (due to hundreds of concomitant causes and nearly endless possibilities for error) to collect data with any remote chance of precision. Thus, it is impossible to know what has been measured. That invalidates the steps that follow -- thus any and all conclusions of the research. Nevertheless, junk science proceeds to Steps 4 and 5 as if Step 3 were reliable and acceptable. The WHO and antitobacco make the phenomenon fit the hypothesis, and rely on massive propaganda and false/biased information by authoritative sources to confuse the population, and to build consensus on their political agendas as if the "science" was real. Needless to say, today's "public health" never mentions this fatal shortcoming, and it continues to con the population using the population's own tax money.

The undisputed king of Junk science debunking, Steven Milloy, superbly explains the mechanism of the colossal numerical fraud concerning mortality "attributions" in his book Junk Science Judo.

“Body counts” are a great way to grab the public’s attention. The bigger, the better. Smoking kills 400,000 per year. Obesity kills 300,000 per year. Secondhand smoke kills 50,000 per year.  (…) Epidemiologists estimate body counts by using the formula for “attributable fraction” (AF)

Without even understanding the formula or actually working through an example, you should already see what the problem is – reliance on relative risk. The attributable risk formula pretends that relative risk indicates risk. As we know, relative risks can be used only for statistically associating an exposure with a disease ^[*]. The greater the relative risk, the more confident we may be that there is a real statistical association between exposure and disease. But relative risk does not prove that a cause-and-effect association exists. The attributable fraction formula simply ignores the inconvenient fact. (…) Attributable fraction and attributable risk – the number derived by applying the attributable fraction to the number of deaths – is statistical abuse squared.”

* [and they concern only the examined groups, usually extremely small next to the entire population]

Can we really believe that of all those big doctors, health activists, and ministers of health no one knows about this? Is the WHO that incompetent? Of course not. And that is the reason why good faith is to be completely ruled out – except, perhaps, in the case of some incompetent politician -- which leaves us with one possible explanation: this is a fraud knowingly perpetrated by “public health” for the purpose of population control, and to advance pharmaceutical agendas on a global scale; it is a coup d’état by real fascists who do not hesitate to destroy science and liberty to impose their unilateral, totalitarian concept of order and health – which is what FORCES has said all along.

We do not dispute that there are, out there, many passionate people who truly believe that tobacco is evil, and their cause holy. But they are also aware that moralistic agendas cannot be proposed and frankly identified as such in times where "conventional" morality is unfashionable. So the moralists hide behind the finger of a scientific fraud. But frauds are crimes, and that turns even convinced people into criminals hiding behind the banner of apparent good deeds. The final product of this complex process is the tobacco control treaty: a gigantic effort to overwhelm once and for all personal and constitutional liberties on a global scale, and to impose corrupt “science” as a global standard to open the road for an endless series of new frauds, abuses and "alarms" that keep billions of public and private dollars coming. Finally, the people at the top of this disgrace hope to prove that arrogance, demonisation, intimidation, repression, taxation, propaganda and corruption are the most effective means to govern populations and to impose "correct" behaviour -- as long as a white coat is worn.

The whole affair makes us face two things that are very uncomfortable: the falling of key health institutions into the unethical hands of gangs who managed to creep to nearly absolute international power, and the fact that we are too chicken and too confused to do something about it. It's much easier to whine with our neighbour about these abuses while smoking one with him under the rain, having been kicked out of our own property, as our children are intoxicated with psycho-drugs while being told that smoking is evil and that dad is an idiot because he buys cigarettes.

Gian Turci
FORCES Italiana, president
FORCES International, C.E.O.