This interesting history of smoking bans published by Sad Ireland is the subject of our analysis today.
We read: “Throughout history smoking bans and prohibitions introduced by despots and totalitarian regimes have come and gone. … Despite some harsh punishments throughout the decades for those disobeying smoking bans including death, smoking and smokers have continued to thrive. Below are some of the failed smoking bans and prohibitions introduced throughout the ages including the proliferation of bans revoked after the failure of prohibition in America.”
What is said is true, but it may lead to conclusions that are as instinctive as they are incomplete. For example: “Given the history of smoking bans, the current trend to repeat them will fail too.” Or: “Smoking in post WWII Germany reached higher levels that those prior to the ban.”
One cannot disagree with the fact that history repeats itself in the ups and downs. But one must never underestimate his enemies – and the scale of this prohibition is unprecedented. Also unprecedented are the economic colossuses that back it because of a direct vested interest – first of all Big Pharma, the most powerful industry in the world.
Tobacco abolitionists HAVE learned from history — so that they can repeat prohibition without making the mistakes made by earlier attempts.
This time the installation of prohibition focuses on the educational, with false information, approach rather than with direct prohibition all of a sudden. Antitobacco has learned that prohibition cannot sustain itself unless people BELIEVE that it is good for them. Before acting on smoking bans and on eventual prohibition of tobacco, therefore, they took care of all the bases. Having neutralised the tobacco industry first, they also infiltrated institutions and slandered the scientists who opposed their frauds and exaggerations. At the same time they also worked on the jurisprudential side (see the Precautionary Principle, for example) and especially on the mass media.
In short, they created a formidable system for the epidemiological fraud to be steadily sustained and passed as science while using the mass-media as carriers. The aim is culture modification.
When there is cultural support and the industrial resistance is neutralised, not only does prohibition come, but it comes to stay. That was the fate of marijuana (effectively forbidden in the US with the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937) for example. As in the current case of tobacco, that de facto prohibition was based on trash science, plain scientific falsifications, exaggerations and hysteria. The Act took the identical approach taken today against tobacco: there was no legal prohibition — it was just too risky and too expensive to commercially sell marijuana. Unfortunately, those who have faith in the demise of prohibition (and find in it a justification for doing nothing) always bring up alcohol, but they seem to forget that marijuana is still prohibited after seventy years, the MTA having "evolved" into mere possession resulting exceedingly severe punishment.
To have a dimension of the devastating penetration of the antitobacco myths, all we have to do is check any marijuana/drug legalization movement, where the reduction of the number of smokers in the US is touted as an example of what “education” can do as opposed to prohibition – too bad that the education is false. Pro-legalization activists are the first ones who failed to learn from history – thus most of them would be only too happy to swap prohibitions instead of fighting the institutional fraud that led to the prohibition of their beloved grass in the first place. In fact, they themselves advocate multifactorial epidemiological junk science (only the one that is in their favour, that is) to legalize marijuana again.
Antismokers know better. While the eyes and hopes of all are on the history of alcohol, they use a coherent and steady flow of false information to make tobacco go the way of marijuana. The actual prohibition of tobacco, therefore, will be just a formalization of the culturally engineered rejection of the habit that has taken place. That is the plan, anyway. The model is already followed for food and alcohol and for the neutralization/circumvention of constitutional guarantees if they are in the way of "public health" interests. And since health affects all aspects of life, constitutional guarantees end up being in the way of "public health" quite frequently.
This time prohibitionists have the means and the technology to achieve their goals – including a network (the public health care system) that provides them with constant feedback by monitoring behaviour at capillary level, as it is in direct contact with the individual. That tells them, among other things, how much of the opposition they can squash, when, how and where. None of that existed in any other period of history. That capillary control also enables them to: a) selectively blackmail groups of citizens by withholding medical care, for example; b) as the selected groups are small, that prevents the violent, physical reaction that would break the back of antitobacco in the same way it broke the back of alcohol prohibition.
That is why they are trying again – and, also, why there is no assurance that they will fail.
Regardless, the failures of prohibitions of the past occurred because someone actively fought against the prohibitionists.
Sitting and waiting for history to repeat itself without making it repeat itself only guarantees that a new history will be written – a history that you will not like at all.
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