Forest Eireann Blog

Like a pint? Get ready to be de-normalised

2012-05-23T13:56:51Z

The Puritans are on the march again, emboldened by the successes of their war on smoking.

If you like a sup of alcohol from time to time, get ready to be de-normalised. If you can still afford to buy a drink in the pub, get ready for that to come to an end.

We have referred to that woman, Roisin Shorthall, in these pages a few times before and her crusade to put the whole country on the dry. But the tactics in this kind of thing require foot soldiers, so step forward Brian O’Connell, a journalist and broadcaster, who wrote a book entitled Wasted: A Sober Journey Through Drunken Ireland.

When Brian was younger, he could not (by his own admission) take a drink without having twenty more. In his book he describes his former life as one long, nightmarish piss-up, so by extension, we are all exactly like him. And now that he has seen the light, each one of must see the light as well.

His op-ed piece in the Irish Times a few days ago reeks of the tactics of the anti-tobacco brigade, just with a different target in his case. In Brian's defence, he had a major problem handling alcohol, and he must be applauded for overcoming it and discovering a better way for himself.

But his logic has somehow departed him in the process, and he now views alcohol as a mortal danger for anybody who engages with it. We are all Brian O'Connell at heart, is his assumption, with his weaknesses, pre-dispositions and personality, and must be saved from ourselves now by the great man.

Ex-smokers can be like that. In debate with them over time, they trot out the same mantras, arriving always at the conclusion that as life now is so much better for them, I must follow suit. To their annoyance, I always point out to them that they had the choices. They chose to begin smoking and they chose when they wished to stop. Nobody forced them either way. And this is the key. When they smoked, cigarettes were a reasonable price, and they could smoke anywhere they wished.

Right now, alcoholic drinks are a reasonable price and there are few restrictions on where you can consume them. But, if like ASH and a host of others on tobacco, the likes of Alcohol Action Ireland and our Brian should get their way, this will change with a "war on drinking" being declared while the rest of us are out at the pub at the time.

The real-life effect on children

2012-05-21T09:11:52Z

I watched Professor John Crowne on the Late Late Show last weekend. He is the oncologist cum Senator who had proposed the ban on smoking in cars with children present.

He is one self satisfied, self righteous specimen and I found it difficult not to throw up as he spoke. If you took the €90,000 he gets as a Senator and added, I don't know, another €150,000 possibly from his oncology post, our John is hardly checking his pockets for coppers to buy the milk.

Asked if he would consider politics full-time, as a possible Health Minister, he smiled confidently and explained that he would look at 'Enda' and want to be the leader instead. So, he surmised that if the calling of public service became too strong to resist, he would have to start his own party. If he ever does, I suggest that he call it the "Bullies Party".

I have repeatedly said here and elsewhere that these rabid anti-smokers should be held responsible for starting the tobacco smuggling epidemic by their persistent lobbying to increase prices.

Then last week, in total contrast, a poor divorcee from Limerick has been jailed for two years for selling some of this contraband. We discovered that she is raising a young daughter alone. As sentence was passed she collapsed, crying out: "Don’t do this to me. Please, please she [the daughter] needs me. Please I beg you. She really needs me. I am very sorry, she has nobody to look after her. I beg of you, I will never come before you again, I promise."

Doubtless in John Crowne's Ireland, this poor woman needed money to raise her daughter and took an obvious shortcut to it. This public exhibition of misery in public, and the naked fear of the woman for the welfare of her young daughter, must be laid squarely at the door of those who contrived to create the environment where such a thing can happen. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and the opportunity for this kind of lawbreaking was contrived and created by the authors of the war on smoking.

Though I don't condone her actions, I can well understand them. My sympathy goes to the poor woman, but I have nothing but contempt for those who claim their anti-smoking actions are driven by concern for young children, such as this woman's.

The true costs of smoking

2012-05-16T12:19:31Z

Most people believe that smokers are a huge cost to the HSE, and indeed experts have speculated that the actual cost is somewhere between one billion and two billion euros. However, in the absence of hard figures for Ireland, these numbers have, until now, have been mere speculation, propaganda or outright lies.

By use of a policy of "Divide & Conquer", the anti-smoking movement has spent a lot of money to convince non-smokers that they are subsidising smokers because of their habit.

The tactic is to get two thirds of the population to resent the other one third. Those who instinctively dislike the traveling people are pre-disposed to believe that that community are costing them money, which fuels their hatred and offers them a rational reason for it.

In reality, here in Ireland, there is no official register of who smokes and who doesn't and hospitals do not keep a record either, never mind an HSE central register or database. So, there is no hard evidence of any above average illness among smokers. As a third of the population smoke, you might expect a third of those in hospital would be smokers also. And there is no condition exclusive to smokers, so who is to know what is smoking-related and what is not. If a smoker were to get lung cancer, can the oncologists state with certainty that it would not have happened had the patient never smoked? The answer is, no he could not, because it is impossible to isolate a single cause for most conditions.

So where do the health cost figures for smokers come from? I believe that they are made up for propaganda purposes in Ireland, so I looked elsewhere.

A research project for the NHS in the UK, carried out by Scarborough & Bhatnagar in 2011, and published in the "Public Health Oxford Journals", gives an accurate figure for the UK. Over there, smokers cost £3.3bn, or about €2.7bn in Euros.

Given that there are ten times more smokers in the UK than in the Republic of Ireland, it would be reasonable to believe that Irish smokers cost the HSE a tenth of the UK figure, or around €270 million a year. While this appears high on the surface, the combined Excise & VAT on tobacco products is €1,500 million a year. The UK study was funded by their Heart Foundation so you might expect the paymasters to prompt the researchers to ensure their numbers should be on the high side, but I was shocked at their results.

It would appear that smokers cost one sixth of what they contribute to the Irish economy. What brought all this to my attention was a consultation paper from our Department of Health. In it, they use this UK research project extensively in support of their arguments for preventative medicine.

What is truly telling, however, is the sneaky way they present the cost of smoking. According to their web page, "Estimates from the UK applied to Ireland surmise that the smoking cost was £3.3 billion". How's that for sleight of hand? Not only do they leave the amount in sterling, they put the full UK cost down and without actually saying so, they imply that this is the number for Ireland. And this is on a Dept. of Health consultation paper!

Other sources suggest a cost to industry of one million euros a day due to smokers' downtime. I have worked for forty years and never called in sick because of my cigarettes. Numbers like these are pure speculation but they have a nasty habit of turning into fact in the collective mind. So, I urge you, when in company with non-smokers, point out to them that you and over a million like you, are subsidising their families healthcare via your habit.

Does pain cause addiction?

2012-05-15T11:42:34Z

The Irish Pharmacy Union held its annual knees-up in Galway a couple of weekends ago, and they had plenty to say about addiction.

So, you are thinking, yet another go at the smelly smoking addicts. But no, dear reader. we didn't even get an honourable mention.

Instead we learned that "thousands of people are in the grip of a silent addiction to painkillers". How's that for a sick addiction? Those hopeless, weak, lily-livered junkies who suffer constant pain, are popping pills to ease it. I never heard the likes in all of my life. "Hangin's too good for 'em".

Delegates at this bash heard that "medicines that contained high levels of codeine or morphine had the potential to become addictive. People at risk include cancer patients, accident victims, or patients with chronic back pain or migraine".

And I know one of these addicts. A friend of mine who broke his leg in a sporting accident went straight to a doctor to have it put back in and then hobbled to a pharmacy for prescription painkillers directly afterwards. And he got away with it too!

Speakers at this conference warned that "red flags to look out for include seeing a patient coming in for prescriptions with higher dosages of the painkiller, or a shorter interval between them filling prescriptions".

In a previous blog I questioned the belief that smoking is an addiction for just this reason. As a smoker, have you ever found yourself scouring the shops asking "have you got 100% pure nicotine in a syringe by any chance, and could I have two hundred of them please, I'm going away for the weekend?" Hey, if you have been smoking for a couple of years and are truly an addict, you should be asking for those syringes like that by now.

However, I can understand the pain thing. Every so often, we all suffer little pains. A wasp sting, stubbing a toe in the dark, or the classic hammer hitting an exposed finger. While the pain can be intense at the time, it does pass off. But just imagine persistent pain that never goes away. I can see the logic when you discover a little pristine white tablet that actually does seem to ease it for a while. And any tablet brings with it side-effects. It is true of any tablet, that as time goes on, the body develops a tolerance to it and the doctor must increase the dosage to get the same effect. Though it does beg the question, is one of the side effects of some prescription drugs, addiction to them?

But what is the alternative, I ask, if you are in constant pain? If you smoke, you have a choice. I don't make light of how difficult that it may be for some to quit, but there are more people who have done so than people who have not. I believe smoking is a choice, whereas painkillers for persistent pain is not.

I know little of addictive illicit drugs but a friend explained to me that the first dose is heaven, though I admit that I don't understand how that can be. Subsequent doses produce a similar euphoria, but soon enough the dosage has to increase to get the same 'buzz'. This is a search for a high though, whereas the painkillers seek relief. The motivation and effects are entirely different, so I suggest that, like smoking, the word ‘addiction’ is a mis-diagnosis for long term sufferers of constant pain.

It's human nature surely.

Last luxury goes up in a puff of smoke

2012-05-11T09:51:21Z

Calling fellow smokers and filthy smelly addicts everywhere!

If you missed this in the Sunday Independent (29-4-'12), take the time to enjoy it now!

Smoking: habit or addiction?

2012-05-08T05:15:13Z

In radio debates with some high profile anti-smokers recently, they used the caricature of the poor addict to degrade the smoker to second-hand citizenship, so justifying all of the moves to restrict and over-price smoking for the users’ ‘own good’.

It is this argument more than any other which gets public support. As an ordinary decent smoker, if you heard a lecture on the extremes of heroin addiction, replete with all of the crime and extreme behaviour it can quickly induce, and then a caring voice said "We have a duty to intervene to help the addict", you might just agree with that.

To simplify the concept for the ignorant public, the anti-smoking lobby have very effectively spread the idea that nicotine is both addictive and dangerous. Funnily, they see no danger now with pharmaceutical replacement products which seek to pump nicotine directly into the bloodstream, and they actively promote these without irony.

Medical papers consistently outline the fact that smoking excites the pleasure receptors in the brain. In other words, it is a pleasurable thing to do, and the deeper explanation is that the smoker becomes addicted to these pleasures. In other words, it becomes a physiological addiction. The anti-smoking lobby would never broadcast that smoking is enjoyable and they may lose their audience by explaining the physiology angle, so they trumpet the dangers of nicotine instead. And this is factually incorrect, as well as wholly mis-leading.

I have drawn your attention in the past to the study by Dr. Reuven Dar, of Tel Aviv University, which found that the intensity of cravings for cigarettes had more to do with the psychosocial element of smoking than with the physiological effects of nicotine as an addictive agent.

This study was commissioned by a cancer society there, worried at the low success rates of replacement products. Try as they might, they could find no logical reason for the failure rates of nicotine replacement on smoking addicts. It was not until they went back to basics and asked the question ‘What if it is not an addiction?’ that they made their breakthrough. If it were, in fact, merely a strong habit, that would explain the high failure rates of replacement therapy. This led to their final finding which is that smoking is a psychosocial habit and not a physiological addiction, or to put it more simply, it is a habit and not an addiction.

A habit is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. It is true also that a strong habit is very hard to give up. Chocolates and coffee fall into this category, whereas cocaine, for example, does not as it is addictive. One of the basic rules of addiction is that the substance induces mind altering and behaviour altering mental states, and the addict loses self control. Drunkenness and chemical highs certainly fulfil these criteria, while tobacco smoking does not. Also, persistent use of the addictive substance makes the addict more tolerant to its effects. This then leads the addict to seek larger and purer forms of the substance to achieve the same effect. Patently, this is not the case for smokers either. I know a woman who smokes one cigarette a day, and has done for fifty years. The most conclusive proof, though, is that there are more ex-smokers in the world today than there are smokers. This is not true of addictions unfortunately.

The big question though arises with state intervention into personal freedoms. There appears to be support for addiction interventions when the substance involved renders the user an immediate physical danger to those around him or her. Whereas an illicit drug user might mug or even kill you for the money to feed his habit, a smoker never will. This necessitated the need for the invention of ETS to justify the dangers of the smoking addict.

It is an insidious campaign against smokers, based on fabrications and an extreme phobia that has an irrational fear and hatred of smoking at its centre. And yet the medical evidence I have read suggests that the reason some decide to smoke and others do not is down to a genetic pre-disposition. Simply put, you like the idea of it and others do not, and it’s down to your DNA make-up.

So, habit or addiction, you can make up your own minds. I know I have.

Normality in an abnormal world

2012-05-07T09:10:00Z

"Denormalise smoking," our Minister for Health, Dr James Reilly, says. Apparently the mere sight of someone smoking in a public park or beach sets bad example to children.

This stance begs two very serious questions, though. For one, what exactly is normal today? And two, what else in our society gives bad example to children?

Being of an age where I can compare today with many years gone by, I would argue that very little today is "normal". Our society did not become abnormal overnight, though. It has been creeping up on us, I would argue, since the turn of the new century.

In the Nineties the increasing wealth of the country was real. It was based on the balance of our imports to our exports, with the latter being far larger than what we bought in. This is the definition of international wealth in fact, and is the basis of Germany's strength. The Germans produce stuff that the rest of the world wants to buy and it is that earned foreign income that makes Germany one of the richest countries in the world.

We also were heading in that direction and the standard of living was rising accordingly all over Ireland. What went wrong then was greed by the banks and the property sectors on one side and the Government's mishandling of the national finances on the other. That started the abnormality.

I remember applying for a business overdraught of €10,000 and being turned down by my bank. A week later they sent me a loan application form, filled out by themselves, for €60,000. The covering letter invited me to sign it and the money would be put into my account that afternoon. I remember thinking at the time, "This is not normal". It gave me a wider uneasy feeling and I began to wonder just what the hell was going on.

The property boom was falsely manufactured to increase the profits of all of those involved, especially the banks. They fuelled it all with cheap borrowed money from European banks, which was never a normal part of banking anywhere. The idea of normality of any kind became what you could get away with.

When the smoking ban came in my first thought was that it is not normal to have a pint without a cigarette. Never before the ban did I buy a pint, leave it on the counter to go outside a smoke, and come back to it later. It was abnormal but it was the law. So instead it became normal to see crowds outside the pub and huddled smokers outside their places of work everywhere. That was not normal.

Then we learned that our banking system was on the verge of collapse, and after years of hearing about their record profits and bonuses that did not sound normal either. Then Brian Lenihan guaranteed their debts on behalf of all of the Irish people and that certainly has never felt normal. And it became apparent that those debts were to corporate investors who gambled other people's money on our banks and lost, and the ordinary citizen who had been losing to the Banks for years, was going to pay these strangers back. Normal?

And all through those years a sizable section of the population, those who choose to legally smoke tobacco products, continued to be treated abnormally. The fine for being caught smoking in a pub was set at €3,000, an abnormal amount in the extreme, given the offence. The unsuspecting publican too faced a fine of €6,000 on top of that. Utterly abnormal!

We have been told all along that smoking outdoors was perfectly safe and normal and we were just to get used to it. Now they want to ban us smoking outdoors too because they can't stand the sight of us, and the Minister intends to introduce a law along those lines, making it normal to hate the sight of someone smoking.

So, I ask my readers, do you strive to be "normal".

And if smoking in public sends a message to a child that smoking is normal, doesn't the sight of an overweight person tell them that overeating is normal too? The sight of adults wearing pajamas in public must also send them a message. Mom sipping a glass of wine at home is hardly a good message to send to children. Adults arguing has got to become abnormal as well surely. What bad example is that?

And the sight therefore of an overweight politician, a Health Minister who is also a doctor, must absolutely become outrageously abnormal on the television at any time. Think of the awful example that that sets for our precious children. Obesity is an epidemic now and children must be protected from the sight of their fat parents in the home too. It must be the most normal thing in the world to protect our precious children from all bad example, mustn't it?

What a sick society we have become!

Don't let the bullies win

2012-05-03T17:11:00Z

April has been busy month for Forest Eireann and we need to review the restrictions on our habit to understand just where we are at right now.

It is against the law for you to smoke in your workplace, even if you occupy your office alone, and this also extends to your solo runs in a company vehicle. If you travel to and from work on public transport you may not smoke either. If you stop off for a drink on the way home you may not smoke there either. You cannot smoke in the cinema or the playhouse if you take in a show in the evening. You cannot smoke in hospital, nor indeed in the grounds of the eleven HSE hospitals. Many of your friends probably also forbid you from having a smoke in their homes and are being urged to do so.

Now moves are afoot to ban you from smoking on public beaches and parks, and even in your own car, so far only under certain conditions. The Minister for Health has issued the most stringent insult to smokers when he declared the very sight of us enjoying our habit is bad example to children. During a debate with me about smoking in cars with children, Dr John Crown, who wants to ban this practice, said they had actively considered adding your home to the above list.

Now if that is not a litany of state force, marginalisation and darned right coercion, I do not know what is. It is raw bullying at its worst, and an open and dishonest attack on personal freedom. I hold nothing but contempt for the bullies behind these moves and I despise their exaggerations and lies. Their beliefs and actions are extremist and the phobia that drives them is akin to a sickness.

On Monday, out of the blue, I was asked to appear on RTE's Prime Time to debate directly with Dr Reilly, the veracity of an outdoor ban. Unfortunately the time allotted was too short to actually have a debate and because Dr Reilly is the current Minister for Health he was always going to be given twice as much speaking time as I got. You may consider that unfair or unbalanced, but it is a reality for the public broadcaster.

As such, you could assume that the anti-smokers won that one, and having watched a recording of it, I would tend to agree. But something else is going on as well in the wider Irish society. There is a strong and hard-to-deny perception out there that something very wrong is happening and the people themselves are being mistreated by the rich and powerful.

In terms of rights and responsibilities, the majority of people now have only the minority of opinion. Somehow, by sleight of hand, the ordinary citizen has been given the bad debts of private banks and must by law repay them. This has been forced on us as the new "normality" and anyone who opposes it is shouted down and vilified by the bullying shouts of authority.

Laws are being passed that penalise the innocent and reward the guilty and a massive transfer of wealth is taking place that sees the rich getting richer and the middle-classes getting poorer. Our great leader told the whole of Europe that the Irish will pay their (banks) debts while we, who are being forced to pay those debts, do not agree that we should have to do so.

But the Government don't want to hear a word from us, even though this situation is totally, morally wrong. And it is my observation now that the great non-smoking community are feeling the force and coercion that we smokers have felt for years and it is making them (and us) very uneasy.

Simply put, our society in Ireland is critically out of shape. There is little or no faith in the weasel words of our political masters. We neither believe them nor respect them, and by extension we do not respect their laws either. This is why I have had such support for the Forest stance on outdoor smoking. It is not because the majority out there want to protect the right of the smoker to light up outside but, rather, they see now what Government can and will do with any group if they want to, and all of the people are feeling the heavy hand of the state in their own private lives now.

In that context the Minister on Prime Time, showed himself to be a bully, like the rest of his Government, and will do as he pleases despite any opposition. And he believes that everybody should now believe that this is the new "normal". Any viewer then could assume that they can be next, on a whim from those in power, and that is a dangerously uneasy feeling to put out into the general population.

Many opposition groups are springing up on a variety of issues such as the water tax, the household tax, the turf ban and many others. The day of the protest groups fighting for their rights is upon us, and Forest is right in there too. So, maybe the bullies won't win after all!

Child v parent

2012-04-25T09:42:52Z

A tactic used increasingly by the anti-smoker lobby is to deploy children as a weapon to induce additional guilt on the smoker and outrage on the general public.

We are told that smoking in cars, and increasingly in the home, jeopardises their health. That branding on cigarette packets cruelly induces them to smoke. And that vending machines, displays and even the example of adults smoking in public entices them towards the evil weed.

This could have important implications. What we’re really hearing here is that adult behaviour affects children. Nothing new there. But if adult behaviour is in some way ‘wrong’, then we must intervene to prevent it influencing or damaging kids.

This drives a wedge between parents and their children. A mother feeds her kids fizzy drinks and pizza. A dad smokes and drinks while watching sport in his living room. Parents swear at each other. They are unfit.

Must the state intervene in all these situations? It may seem far fetched to imagine Orwellian intrusion or surveillance in the home, with children acting as agents to report on their parents behaviour. But it’s difficult to see where else these trends are heading.

Imagine smoking is banned in private houses. Little Johnny, at school, is lectured on tobacco abuse. The teacher hears him say, half boasting, half sanctimonious, that people were smoking at home while watching the football. The police are called…

In the child's interest?

2012-04-19T09:47:11Z

Last week, I had the dubious pleasure of locking horns with a Prof. John Crowne on live radio. We debated (if that's the word) twice on two different stations, and both he and I were quoted elsewhere also.

The topic, of course, was the man's burning concern for precious children all over the land. Prof. Crowne is consumed with a passion for the health of all Irish children under the age of eighteen, and indeed, to listen to him, there was no doubting that he was going to make things better for them, by stopping their parents smoking in their cars for starters.

So, catching up on the newspapers on my return, there is a major story breaking of interest to all of us. "Schoolchildren are going hungry in Ireland, with 21 per cent either going to school without breakfast or going to bed without a proper meal", a major new report launched by the Health Minister reported.

I read the account of this 'horrific abuse' in the Examiner , then poured over it again in other places also, thinking this would be a plum topic for the good Professor to get his teeth into. Protecting our precious children from their errant parents is right up his alley.

Sadly, John Crowne 'doesn't do' hungry children. It would appear that his actual concerns stop at the car window. Perhaps, as they might say in his circles, his expertise does not extend to hunger. The obesity lobby were notable by their absence too, and in fact there was only one lone voice speaking up for the hungry urchins.

Emily Logan, The Ombudsman for Children's Office (OCO) is here to make sure that the Government and other people who make decisions about young people really think about what is best for young people, and she had a thing or two to add on the kid's behalf.

But, when smoking in cars was all the rage last week, Emily was conspicuous by her absence. I can only assume that Emily is a practical woman who sees the priorities as they are. You can make your own assumptions about Prof. John Crowne.