This sure makes me mad!!!

Smokers are now beset by kickers and spitters. Why? A psychiatrist I know suggests that people are projecting their fear and hatred of cancer onto smokers. I’m more inclined to think there is a lurking need in society to have some minority to beat up on, and feel superior to, now all the other minorities are out of bounds. Whatever the reason,

it’s open season on us, and no gratuitous restriction or insult is considered out of bounds. One British newspaper columnist recently described smoking as ‘masturbating in public’. Even the dead are not exempt from abuse. When Leonard Bernstein and Johnny Carson died of lung cancer, aged 74 and 79 respectively, they were cruelly taken to task by the rabidly antismoking New York Times for depriving their fans of a couple more years of their presence. The chain-smoking Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was excoriated as a ‘bad example to youth’ when he died aged 92.

One of the meanest myths of all, in my opinion, is the one that smokers are putting an unfair burden on health services because our diseases are ‘self-inflicted’. Think about this for a minute. Just about every disease you can think of could be said to be ‘self-inflicted’. What about AIDS? What about people who have heart attacks while jogging? This argument can be extended ad infinitum, and indeed this is already happening, with people being discriminated against for being overweight, and health authorities seeking more power to enforce what they consider to be healthy lifestyles, and to actually withhold treatment from those who don’t comply.

Anyway, these are the same people who tell us that smokers die younger, in which case we’re saving the state money. And finally, are we forgetting how much smokers contribute in taxes? In the UK, this amounts to roughly £10 billion a year. Smokers are not a burden but a benefit.

But the sheer nastiness towards smokers on the part of the antismoking movement and its corporate and media bandwagon-jumpers is one of the things that made me suspicious of them in the first place. If a medical authority advises me that smoking may be bad for my health, it could be argued that they’re just doing their job. When they start calling me stupid, pathetic, antisocial, filthy, stinking, etc, then something else is going on.

Taken from Joe Jacksons' excellent brochure on the subject.