June 27, 2005
The International Smokers Rights Conference
Dear friends,
Although I’m unable to be with you in person at this conference, I am with you in spirit today. I hope that this meeting may mark an important shift for the smokers’ movement and hopefully for our times. In consideration of the multiplicity of tasks of this meeting, I will try to be quite brief.
I have no doubt that the social, moral, economical and philosophical inversion that has afflicted smokers and tobacco industry will extend to other industries and other target groups in society. We already see it with the food industry and with the overweight, who are taking their due place in the ranks of social pariahs beside the smokers; we see it with the alcohol industry; we will see it with almost every other consumer and industrial categories, because it is INEVITABLE. Why?
Because the so-called “health authorities” have embraced the Therapeutic State, a dark mentality considering everyone sick and in need of some “therapy” – to “prevent” him from becoming “cost to society” when compared with the model of the perfect human of the statistical Garden of Eden. These fanatical “health experts” do not proceed from conventionally religious convictions or morality, at least not exactly. Nor do they proceed from some sort of culturally neutral vantage point that rejects the morality of our religious heritage. Nor is traditional public health practice what they have in mind, because they want to go much further than that. Instead, they offer us an unhealthy brew of medicalized secular Puritanism disguised as common-sense modern public policy, and try to sell themselves to us that way. In doing so, these authorities present a distorted blend of the political, the secular and the religious, which does justice to none of them, but creates a justification for all kinds of intrusions into people’s lives.
Ours is an age where societies and people are no longer defined by what they do and accomplish, but by what they DO NOT DO. It’s like trying to define a hole: when you try you can’t – because you can’t define what is not there, but only what IS around it. A good example of this inversion comes from the country where I live, Italy. Our former minister of health, G. Sirchia, defined his idea of free and mature man as follows: “A REAL man is he who DOES NOT smoke, DOES NOT drink, and DOES NOT do drugs”. Later he added that a “real man” is not fat, either. I don’t know how he would define a real woman, but if men and women are defined by their differences, perhaps the gentleman is hiding a secret preference for really fat, drunken, smoking WOMEN!
Mr. Sirchia is certainly not an isolated case, but the typical representative of this obscurantist mentality. The Precautionary Principle increasingly adopted by the countries in the West for health and environmental matters in general puts it in black and white: “There is NO NEED to scientifically demonstrate that something is dangerous for the authorities to forbid, restrict, tax and regulate: SUSPICION is enough”. Furthermore, it states that those who are accused of causing harm to health and to the environment have the burden of demonstrating that their activities DO NOT cause that harm – conveniently reversing the burden of proof on the accused -- as has happened in the darkest moments of human history. With this mentality in place and new generations trained to think in these terms by public schools and public health propaganda, the step from its application in sanitary and environmental codes to criminal codes is a very short one. Perhaps, in the future, and in the name of prevention, we may arrest people with troubled childhoods IN CASE THEY MIGHT COMMIT A CRIME, because statistics actually show a CORRELATION between crime and troubled childhood. This is already happening in England, where it is claimed that criminal behaviour can be detected FROM THE AGE OF THREE, and that children are taken from the custody of parents “at risk” since that age and raised by what are appropriately defined as “children farms”; Orwell was indeed an optimist. According to the Therapeutic State, any citizen anywhere is a patient or a criminal waiting for a place to happen, thus “prevention” is to be unbounded, paramount, and unlimited.
To fight this perversion, it is necessary firstly to understand who and what we are fighting. We have to make others understand that smoking is just the tip of the iceberg. And we have to stop seeing smoking bans as local issues, for they are NOT. Even when the small restaurant association manages to stop or slow down a smoking ban, we know it is a pyrrhic victory, for the antismoking zealots will come back, and back, and back again until they get what they want. Why? Because THE PROBLEM IS NOT ADDRESSED AT THE ROOT – and the roots are:
1. Junk science on smoking in general and on passive smoking in particular.
2. The corruption of institutions, who abuse the already questionable Precautionary Principle.
3. The lack of public education about junk science and its political uses.
4. The fear of authority, and the fear of challenging health authorities to DEBATES where they have to SCIENTIFICALLY AND PUBLICLY DEMONSTRATE the solidity of their assertions – and use their frequent refusals to do so politically.
5. The lack of a robust, non-partisan POLITICAL MOVEMENT that puts ORGANISED pressure on politicians of all levels and on the media, transforming the endless whining of smokers into POLITICAL ACTION with the necessary IMPACT to make politicians understand that – even regardless of the junk science – ATTACKING SMOKERS MEANS LOSING POLITICAL GRIP.
6. Last but certainly not least, the understanding and the acceptance that ANY legal action that does not address the BASE SCIENFITIC FRAUD on passive and active (yes, active!) smoking is destined to either fail right off, or have short-lived effects. This is because, in today’s society, health (or just the perception of it) has become by leaps and bounds the paramount value of society – far more than economics, liberty, justice, and entrepreneurship. To health, all these value must unconditionally surrender or take their place in the background. It is right and moral to distort and lie on the facts, to control and suppress information, to slander, backstab and turn to subterfuge – as long as it is in the name of health. As long as that last, JUST THE PERCEPTION that smoking may harm others is sufficient to justify all prohibition – even if it is “just in case”. That is why it is FUNDAMENTAL that the frauds on smoking be defeated. But the only place to achieve victory today is in COURTROOMS, because only there one can still procure the scientific evidence THAT UNQUESTIONNABLY DEMONSTRATES THE FRAUD in an orderly and clear way that cannot be fuzzed by bias and political propaganda.
To do all that it takes MONEY – to organise, to DEVELOP INDEPENDENT MEANS OF MASS-COMMUNICATION AS WE CANNOT RELY ON THE MASS-MEDIA, to educate as well as to spread hope, and to give back to smokers, drinkers and eaters the dignity, the power and the rights they deserve as citizens AS THEY ARE – not as the contrite or obstinate secular sinners depicted by “public health”, which seems to grant dignity only to those who comply or fit with its contemptible agenda of state control.
I believe that it is important that all those who are here today accept that to get REAL results, it takes REAL MEANS, and that each one of you takes on the responsibility not only of spreading the word of FORCES on junk science, but also to contribute with organised and RELIABLE work to its mission and its development along with other groups, and to help raise the sizeable economic means that are indispensable to stopping a wave that, at the moment, has virtually unlimited funding.
However, we all have already demonstrated by our mere existence that we can be more efficient with a penny than antismokers are with a dollar – but we have to really understand that THAT PENNY IS NEEDED – because Liberty never came by itself and never came for free -- and when we stop believing that, it is exactly when we lose it.
Thank you for your attention.
Gian Turci
FORCES International Chief Executive Officer