Tag Archives: WHO

FCTC (WHO’s anti-tobacco fanatic corps) are afraid of the people

Posted on 16 November 2012 by | 1 Comment

by Carl V Phillips

The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral and social being
- Thomas Jefferson

Well, if you have read any or all of my Unhealthful News series at EP-ology, you know that the press we have, as it reports on health science, is not “best” by any stretch of the imagination.  But there is no doubt that having the press monitoring those in power, rather than not, is an absolutely crucial minimal step toward ensuring rational and moral behavior.

With that in mind, I return to the topic of the FCTC, the meeting of unelected, mandate-less anti-tobacco extremist WHO operatives in Seoul.  In addition to their belief that they should have imperialistic control over the world, dictating tax and other national policies, they ejected the press from observing their discussions.  So, not only do they have no representation from the primary stakeholders in the matter (users of tobacco/nicotine) and explicitly forbid participation or even observation by the secondary stakeholders (the manufacturers of those products), but they also are working to prohibit the press from telling the public what they are doing.  (For more details, this has been covered in the original breaking of the story by Drew Johnson, and by Dick Puddlecote (who took the best title for a post on the topic) and others.)

This is nothing unusual.  It is just a particularly obvious manifestation of the cult of secrecy and isolation practiced by the anti-tobacco extremists (who are, of course, the predominant anti-THR liars).  These people are not interested in the truth — indeed, they are afraid of it.  Conversations make religious zealots nervous.  Moreover — and most of their useful idiots probably do not realize this, but those pulling the strings (and pulling in the money) know — when most people learn the truth, they rise up against these extremists.

Of course, that is not how they spin it.  Their claim is that the Giant Evil All-Powerful Tobacco Industry will somehow derail their plans if they deal with the world honestly.  But think about what kind of idiot someone would have to be to actually believe that rhetoric.  The tobacco industry has far less power and room to act than the tobacco control industry.  Which, after all, is not demanding an international excise tax be imposed on all the people of the world, and companies have six lawyers look over anything they say because they are afraid to speak up.  As further evidence it is only necessary to consider the scientific claims made by each:

Scientific research and claims coming out of the tobacco industry are scrupulously researched and very modestly reported — far more than, say, the average health science researcher working in other areas.  Indeed, in the entire realm of health science, the industry’s research may well be the only body of health science research today that fulfills those ideals of science you are taught in grade school about conservatism and complete reporting.  Indeed, it probably exceeds that idea and is far too timid to be useful.  Those of us outside the industry doing science in support of THR and general rationality are not so over-compensating, but we do tend to fulfill that ideal.

When the tobacco control industry seeks to attack the scientific credibility of the industry (or those outside the industry who produce science that supports THR or otherwise disagrees with the extremists), the single arrow in their quiver is to talk about the behavior of the industry in the 1970s or before.  (The world would be much better if the anti-tobacco people who actually remember the 1970s and think they are still living in them leave the discussion.)  They have nothing more recent than that which might tend to suggest that their opponents do dishonest research.  They certainly never dare try to argue about the research on its merits, which they would surely lose.

By contrast, the tobacco control industry knows that it can get away with spewing obviously false drivel, anti-scientific even by the standards of “public health”.  This is not the behavior of people who are afraid of being confronted by a powerful enemy.  It is the behavior of people who think they own the whole world, and have the monopoly on words that previous generations of imperialists had on guns (or horsemen or legions or phalanxes).

But like past imperialists, they know that their monopoly is tenuous because there are a lot more of “them” (those that prefer truth and freedom — i.e., us) out there.  Once the people are armed 1/10th as well as the imperialists, the latter’s ambitions do not last long.  So they have to keep us disarmed.  They have to keep the average person so ill-informed that they do not even know what is going on (thus the anti-THR — and anti-smoking — lies), and they have to keep those of us who would inform the people excluded and beaten down.

So as was noted in the comments to me on a recent post (and as, in fairness to myself, I actually did realize), I did not need to bother archiving a copy of what I was commenting on, because there was no chance that the liars (the American Cancer Society in that case) would attempt to cover their tracks.  They cannot.  They have cornered themselves.

Less than decade ago, the tobacco control industry would have been able to reign in their imperialism and negotiate an honorable sensible victory for health that would have made the world a better place.  But instead, they redoubled their misbehavior and extremism.  They have closed their ranks, increased their use of force, and launched an Inquisition.  They are cornered now and have to keep the people disarmed by lying and avoiding scrutiny.  They have reached the point where they win or they die (metaphorically, of course: their professional reputations die, they are remembered with all the fondness of those who gave us alcohol Prohibition, and they quite possibly take down their fellow travelers like ACS).

Some supporters of THR believe that the best way to further the cause is to negotiate with the tobacco control industry, to beg for their permission to act and to concede that giving people freedom need not be a part of that deal.  They might want to review the history of what it took to bring about the retreat of empires that did not have to contend with a free press.

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How ignorant are powerful anti-THR people?

Posted on 14 November 2012 by | 2 Comments

by Carl V Phillips

I will break the antiTHRlies fast with an aside.  Currently the FCTC people — the UN (specifically the World “Health” Organization or WHO) organized, lavishly taxpayer-funded, most extreme and hubristic anti-tobacco prohibitionists — are meeting in Korea.  Snowdon tells more about that cabal, noting that they have lost all sense of reality.  They have twisted their war on smoking (defensible in principle due to the risks, though grossly indefensible in the details) into an (utterly indefensible) war on all tobacco regardless of the risk, a definitional example of anti-tobacco extremism.

But every bit as troubling as the FCTC people’s football-hooligan-level rhetoric of conflict and hate is what is supposedly the good news:  Tobacco Reporter reported that one delegate arrived bearing blog posts by Jeff Stier and Clive Bates about how delegates should reject the attempt to basically prohibit THR, which is on the agenda for the meeting.

The view of a bunch of self-appointed activists that they can prohibit things is kind of funny.  Already at the meeting, the delegates voted to prohibit black market cigarettes.  LOL.  I believe the WHO next plans to vote on banning polio and HIV.  But in the case of THR products, national bans can actually be quite effective at keeping people smoking, and while rich educated countries set their own agenda, a lot of countries that are poor or lack effective democracies blindly do what the WHO says.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the delegates reading Stier and Bates.  They are both spot-on supporters of THR (and, interestingly, represent extremes of the political spectrum among THR supporters, with Bates probably too sympathetic to prohibitionism for most THR supporters and Stier generally supporting positions of the American anti-government right).  The problem is that the delegate who brought these handouts believes, probably correctly, that a couple of 600-word overviews of THR will be informative to the other delegates at the meeting.  Those delegates are supposed to be experts on tobacco/nicotine use, after all.  They presume to be qualified to tell everyone in the whole world what they should be doing regarding tobacco.  Yet they are apparently so ignorant of the most important tobacco issue of the day that they have something to learn from a one-page summary of the topic.

It never ceases to be amazing to observe with how little wisdom the world is governed.

It turns out, however, that such profound ignorance of even op-ed level knowledge of the topic is the best possible spin.  The delegate who showed up bearing blog posts was assuming that his colleagues are trying to make sensible decisions that improve people’s lives.  But as Snowdon pointed out, once a movement has accomplished its main rational goals, it distills down to fanatics (and, I will add, people who are just in it for the money).  Nannying Tyrants speculates that some of them are probably driven by genuine mental illness.  It is good to know that there is one delegate at the conference who actually reads, if only at the op-ed level.  I wonder if he will be forcibly prevented from attending future meetings, as are all of the actual stakeholders in this process.  After all, it is not a legitimate political process, it is a rally — the type of rally that gives the neighbors good reason to board up their windows and hide inside in anticipation of the hooligans returning to the street.

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Gutka is not smokeless tobacco

Posted on 31 October 2012 by | 4 Comments

by Carl V Phillips

There is a popular oral dip product in India called gutka.  It was recently banned, in one way or another, across much of India, though it appears that this has had relatively little impact (other than perhaps raising the price to the extremely poor people who are most of the users).  Gutka is more popular in that country than is smoking, and is used by an absolutely enormous number of people.

Gutka, and the somewhat similar paan that is popular in Pakistan, appears to pose a very serious risk for oral cancer and other oral diseases, and perhaps other serious diseases.  The health consequences appear comparable to those from smoking, and might even be worse — in particular because, unlike with smoking, many of the serious effects appear to occur before old age.  (The “appear” caveats I keep repeating reflect the fact that most of the epidemiology about these products is so utterly lousy that precision is impossible — we had better quality information about smoking half a century ago.  But there is enough information that it is difficult to doubt that there are serious and high risks.)

So, gutka and paan are, indeed, nasty.  But what they are not — contrary to the typical portrayal — is tobacco.  Gutka does contain tobacco, and paan sometimes does (but not always), but it is not the first ingredient and may not even be the second.  The first ingredient in gutka is areca nut (also known as betel nut), and other ingredients include catechu (a derivative of the acacia tree), various flavorings, and calcium hydroxide (aka slaked lime, or just lime).  The ingredients in the one packet of it that I have that lists the ingredients (most do not) are “betelnuts, tobacco, catechu, cardamom, lime, menthol, natural & artificial flavors”.

So this is tobacco only in the sense that a Big Mac, fries, and Coke is lean beef, potatoes, and water.  The latter are major components of those products, of course.  But if they were all that was consumed, while it would not exactly be healthy eating, but it would not be all that bad.  But a funny thing happens when you consider everything in the foods (various unhealthy fats, high glycemic carbohydrates, carcinogenic products from cooking, etc.) — the meal becomes rather unhealthy.  This is a nearly perfect analogy to the deadly implications of calling gutka “tobacco”.

Something in gutka is pretty clearly quite unhealthy.  Lime is a good candidate — it is quite caustic on your skin, as you might have experienced, and is even worse for your oral mucosa.  It has fairly obvious and rapid negative effects.  But it might be that holding areca nut or catechu in your mouth for a long time is quite harmful too.  The one thing that we can be pretty sure is not causing most of the harm is tobacco.  Why?  Because it is the one of the ingredients that has been extensively studied, as an oral dip exposure, and has been found to produce minimal risk.

To be precise and careful (quite unlike most of those who write about this topic), it is possible that the interaction of tobacco with the other ingredients causes more harm than the other ingredients would cause if the tobacco were absent.  It is also possible that because of the way this particular tobacco is processed, it causes harms that American and Swedish style smokeless tobacco do not.  (There is a plausible but unsubstantiated hypothesis that the much higher concentrations of nitrosamines in some non-Western and archaic products could make them much more hazardous, though there is no evidence that it would be anywhere close to as bad as gutka is.)  Thus, we cannot conclude that the role of the tobacco is benign, but it is clearly wrong to suggest it is the main source of the problem.

Who suggests that?  Pretty much everyone.  The impetus for me writing this post was running across this newspaper story about how the gutka ban is failing due to the black market, with a headline that refers to it as “chewing tobacco”.  But it is not just bad reporters and casual observers who make the mistake.  The packets of gutka I have all display the mandated statements “tobacco kills” and “tobacco causes cancer” and what I assume are their Hindi equivalents.  I do not know whether current products still have those statements (once you ban something, it is difficult to enforce labeling regulations, after all), but the point is that the government’s official statements describe the product as “tobacco”.  This is probably the fault of the World Health Organization, since India’s policy is pretty much “do whatever WHO tells us to do”, but I actually do not know the story.  (Anyone know?  Please let me know.)

But it gets even worse than that.  The anti-THR liars have made a concerted effort to trick Westerners into believing that the apparent harms from Indian “tobacco” are relevant to Western products.  The classic example of this IARC Monograph 89, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer — a unit of WHO that primary is known for its science-by-committee declarations, and is mistakenly seen to be an authoritative and apolitical research organization.  The authors of that document — including longtime professional anti-THR activists like Stephen Hecht (already represented in this blog), Scott Tomar (who got a passing mention but seems to have disappeared), and Deborah Winn (who will likely make an appearance) — tried to bury the fact in their 626 pages that their conclusion that smokeless “tobacco” causes cancer was basically based just on studies of gutka and paan along with a single old study of an archaic American product.

I realize that this post leaves the reader with many points of curiosity that call for more information.  I will try to circle back to these sometime.  But I will conclude by creating one more:

Why did I say it was deadly to refer to gutka as tobacco?  THR in the West is about replacing smoking with smoke-free alternatives.  But in South Asia, there is a lot of room for something else that could be called THR:  The replacement of gutka and paan with smokeless tobacco (snus).  Western-style smokeless tobacco could be made domestically (and thus be affordable, though perhaps more expensive than the current products — I am not sure) and it would presumably have about the same unmeasurably low risk as snus.  Given that the impact of the local dip products is similar to that from smoking, this has similar potential to Western THR.  But — as with Westerners who think that “tobacco” or nicotine is the problem rather than smoking — this is very unlikely to be pursued so long as everyone thinks that it is the tobacco that is the problem.

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