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I have been asked on more than one occasion why I smoke cigarettes. The answer is all too simple. I smoke cigarettes because I enjoy smoking. No, I love smoking. I love the film-noiresque pose of cupping my hand around a lighter in a breezy street; I love the silky rolling comfort of the little cylinder between my fingers; I love the draw of tangy, rasping smoke into my lungs.
Let’s face it, smoking is sexy. The effortless self-assurance required to exude sex-appeal is precisely the quality required to look good with a cigarette. Healthy food is not, and will never be, sexy. Working out is not sexy either, regardless of the number of leotard-clad catalogue models prancing around aerobically to 80’s disco beats.
Smoking is sexy despite being dangerous. In fact, it is all the more arousing because it is dangerous. It is a daring and insouciant accomodation with a prowling, patient, predatory beast. For those of us who will never know the adrenalin rush of sitting in the cockpit of a Tornado or an F-15, smoking is a defiant dalliance with death.
For me, cigarettes are like a mad, unpredictable and fatally attractive mistress. Even though I know her wild behaviour, her endless painful taunts and unreasonable demands are both eroding my life-force and gouging out my bank account, I love her desperately and irrationally. And for all that she hurts me, I must have her in my life.
Until now, that is. Because I am in the process of ending this corrosive love-affair. Why? Because although I believe that the risks of smoking have been exaggerated for political reasons, even I can no longer ignore the symptoms of the harm being done to my respiratory system. Wheezing after climbing a flight of stairs is one thing but combine that with the trademark hacking, staccato cough I have now developed and that’s enough to set alarm bells ringing. I fear that if I do not end this relationship soon, then my mistress will do me some harm from which I will not have the option of being able to walk away.
So, as I type these words, it is now two-and-a-half days since I stubbed out what I hope will prove to be my last pleasure stick. Despite the nicotine patch on my arm, I am fighting the tickling, torturous craving that sweeps over me in savage, but mercifully brief, waves. Whenever they come they are accompanied by the roaring sound of my mistress banging frantically on my front door demanding to know why I have suddenly stopped returning her calls. Given time, she will tire, get the message and leave me alone. By my reckoning, after four days of this hell, things will get easier.
By this time next week, I hope I will have completely de-coupled myself from this harridan and although I know I will be a better man for being free of her tyrrany, I also know with doleful certainty that I will miss her forever.
I am a fairly regular reader of New Scientist for its take on fast breaking technological news. The magazine does have a downside though. It is very… well… representative of UK “liberal” politics.
I have just finished an item in the 29-Nov-2002 issue, “I see a long life and a healthy one…” about entrepreneurial companies making genetic testing available to the consumer. One would think a science magazine would be praising them for taking cutting edge science and bringing it to the consumer in an affordable and appealing way while potentially creating many high paying jobs for scientists in the UK, generating yet another path for massive capital infusion into genetic and health research and adding to UK exports to top it off?
Naaah.
I’ll let these quotes from the article stand on their own:
British regulators were caught on the hop when Sciona’s tests first went on sale. No one had foreseen that consumers would suddenly be able to learn something about their genes without a doctor’s agreement, or even knowledge.
Another option would be to return control of genetic testing to the medical profession, banning companies from providing tests unless requested by a doctor. Companies say this is a step too far towards meidcal paternalism, and argue that people have the right to obtain genetic information about themselves. But [Helen] Wallace [of GeneWatch UK] disagrees: “We need to ensure proper consultation through GP’s to ensure that people understand the implications of taking a test,” she says
What could I possibly add?
I’ve decided to reply to the responses on my previous article “in-line”. Issues of personal choice and personal liberty are at the very heart of libertarianism. It is not a matter of whether you agree with a behavior or not. A libertarian society removes from you the “right” to use force and coercion, whether by self or by state proxy, against acts you do not like. You may either mind your own business or you may spend your own time and money to advertise and campaign to change people’s minds one at a time. If you are Bill Gates or Ted Turner and spend every last pence you have to make people stop being part of Group X and all but one person does – that one person may still freely go about their business as before and there is nothing you can do about it.
You could be an Imam convincing everyone to accept Shari’a, and if one person doesn’t you are stuffed1. Tough. They can shoot back if you annoy them too much, and likely large numbers of others who agreed with your initial ideas will turn on you for breaking the Meta-rule of non-coercion.
There is no libertarian argument which could support the status quo of the Drug War. Drug usage – THC, Ethanol, Nicotine or stronger – are issues of personal choice. The results of those personal choices are personal responsibilities. If someone drinks themselves into a gutter, it is not the State’s responsibility to pull them out. If someone injects heroin into their veins and kills themself it is likewise not a public issue.
The minimal libertarian position is the Minarchist state. One which is responsible for Defense, Police and the Courts – killing terrorists, shooting down nuclear missiles, rescuing hostages where possible… and finding, trying and locking up snipers.
There is no room in that description for “outlawing a behavior of Group X that Group Y does not like or that Group Z thinks is unhealthy”.
In a free society, you do what you want so long as you don’t directly harm others… and the consequences of those actions are fully your own to deal with, whether it be getting laid and having a great time or morphine addiction, lung cancer and liver cirrhosis.
T’ain’t nobodies business but your own.
1 = For some Imams in certain Medieval nations, the very ideas expressed here are a heresy. That’s why we leave the Minimal State with Defense. So we can get them first if they try to “Kill Infidels in the Name of Allah”. A liberal society assumes everyone accepts a very minimal social pact of non-coercion.
A US court has ruled Ashcroft’s storm troopers can no longer hound doctors and threaten license revocation if they prescribe weed for pain.
Grass is legal for medical purposes in a number of States – notably California -and effectively decriminalized in several. Unfortunately the Feds believe they can override state laws at will.
Libertarians long have played a prominent role in legalization campaigns. One former National Chair also spent time as a major player within NORML.
“Come the Revolution”, the DEA will be one of the first organizations to go. I’d suggest they all keep their CV’s current, but I’m not sure what sort of productive jobs they could get. There’s not a lot of call for their skillset in a Civil society, and I don’t believe Saddam will be hiring after this winter.
Russell Whitaker sees sections of the medical profession’s distaste for accessable services for what it really is
From the “I saw this on Fox News several weeks ago but just got around blogging about it now” department, comes another tale of indignation, this time from the medical guild.
In an article transcription of a TV news feature featuring an adversarial interview of obstetrician Dr. Leon Hansen, founder of Fetal Foto versus Dr. John Hobbins, one of a stable of media medical expert witnesses who hew to the usual AMA trade unionist line.
Fetal Foto is a shopping mall medical imaging service. It’s apparently harmless, and lets prospective parents get a real head start on boring their friends with their family photo albums. Dr. Hobbins is incensed that Dr. Hansen is providing it on the cheap:
The high-tech scan, which isn’t covered by insurance, costs $60 at a Fetal Fotos facility and $280 at his doctor’s office, according to Hansen.
But the trend has angered the FDA and other critics, who argue it’s exploitative and dangerous and is commercializing a sensitive medical procedure.
“Here’s a group that’s using this wonderful technology to put bucks in their pockets,” said Dr. John Hobbins, head of obstetrics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
What really angers Dr. Hobbins and his cronies is that the bucks are lining someone else’s pockets, and in a shopping mall of all places. As Fetal Foto’s Dr. Hansen notes:
“Twenty years ago, they felt it was inappropriate to have a pregnancy test available to the general public,” he said.
Other shopping mall boutique medical success stories include adult whole-body imaging service AmeriScan, which rightfully claims to have contributed to the saving of a number of lives through early diagnosis of various ailments, e.g. male colon cancer.
The Fetal Foto business model explicitly excludes medical diagnosis – it most vehemently is not in the diagnosis or treatment businesses, by charter – but this is not what bothers the boys in the AMA.
No, what riles the unionists is that they have no control over the use of an interesting medical procedure used for non-medical purposes. They’re embittered by the fact that, after all, medical people provide services that people want, and some people are willing to take those services to what they and other “public health” gatekeepers revile as among the worst venues in the capitalist world, the modern bazaar of the American shopping mall.
After all, it boils down to tired arguments of guild protectionism and class warfare with these people. Long live the crass temples of capitalism!
Russell Whitaker
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the government agency trusted with making sure that we, the people of the United States, don’t come down with the plague is ramping up an advertising campaign. Is it focusing on the threat of smallpox, anthrax, or any other bio-terror threat? How about Ebola, West Nile, or even maybe Hong Kong chicken flu?
No, the CDC has more important things to worry about. Specifically, fat kids. That’s right, American tax dollars are being put to use, in time of war, to tell kids to get in shape. Kids ages 6-17 are being bombarded with a media buy of nearly $3 million dollars (not to mention the cost of creative, the PR agency they hired, additional advertising agency fees, or the costs associated with the on-site events) between now and next July.
As a conservative guess, I would say that the CDC, while being faced with threats to real live national health, are going to be spending somewhere near $15 million dollars putting on a program dedicated to telling fat kids to shape up.
And just to make it better, they are also refusing to discuss the threats facing our nation when it’s been requested for interviews. No questions about smallpox vaccinations, the spread of West Nile – all fat kids, all the time.
And the campaign itself – VERB. That’s right, VERB. As in ‘RUN’, ‘SWIM’, ‘MASTURBATE’1, etc. Here is a list of events:
- Wild & Crazy Kids – Live staged version of the Wild N’ Crazy Kids series, pitting audience members against each other in larger than life stunts.
- Having the kids ‘SIT’ and watch other people be active. Good start. How well do you think the fat kids will do in these stunts?
- MTV Experience Tour – Interactive ‘day village’ that will encourage teens/tweens to experience VERB through a variety of current and relevant booths themed around MTV’s franchises and music.
- MTV. A TV channel. I guess ‘WATCH’ is the message they are trying to get across here.
- Paint the Town – Identify a mural, water tower or other highly visible figure and paint it to resemble a VERB activity. (e.g. Paint a water tower to look like a soccer ball with ‘KICK’ across it).
- ‘VANDALIZE’ will go well with most of the programming on MTV.
- Treasure Hunt – Kids stop at local places to pick up fun merchandise such as hats, t-shirts, etc. Tie-in with radio station, or existing promotion.
- ‘PURCHASE’ will go well with ‘DRIVE’, getting the parents involved.
- Parent Media Tours – Celebrity couple to speak with local media about the importance of getting kids involved in positive activities.
- Back to ‘SIT’ and ‘WATCH’ as celebrities get kids involved in ‘positive’ activities. Are “get busted for drugs” or “sleep with director” considered positive?
- Step Club – Online clubs for kids to participate in programs to increase positive activity by using a pedometer to measure daily steps for a chance to win VERB merchandise.
- ‘CLICK’ is now a way to get thin? Kick ass, office work will be taking on a whole new light now!
Now, I’m not a completely cold-hearted bastard, but this just seems to be a little bit over the top. Besides, most fat kids either have a genetic pre-disposition that won’t be fixed through this program, or they lose weight when they get to college or high school. In fact, this program will do nothing more than give athletic kids a chance to show off, and fat kids something to feel bad about. I understand that weight problems abound, but there have always been fat kids, there will always be fat kids, and nothing in this pork barrel will change that.
So why, at a time when we are faced with so many external threats, are we spending a lot of time and money cross-promoting MTV with taxpayer dollars?
Be sure to check out www.verbnow.com if you think I am kidding about any of this.
1 = Ok, masturbation was left off the list. Just like the state to leave out activities the kids will actually enjoy.
The image above, which I took about an half an hour before writing this article, shows an employee of Britain’s premier cancer hospital, The Royal Marsden, standing by the front door having a cigarette. This is a man who works in a cancer hospital and comes face to face with the savage realities of what his habit vastly increases his risk of contracting, on a daily basis.
This picture says something very profound about human nature. One thing is for sure, it says more than any lengthy exegesis I could write about the futility of trying to use the violence of law to mandate behaviour the state feels is in the regulated person’s “best interests”. Ponder that.
On the Libertarian Alliance Forum there’s been a lively debate, among several, involving Chris Tame and (make that versus) Dale Amon, among several, on the rights and wrongs of alternative medicine, sparked by some vile Transnazi scheme involving the control of vitamins by the World Health Organisation or some such in a way that either protects or threatens the US vitamin industry – I couldn’t work out which in the time I had to spare for this.
I mention this argument because I spotted a fine soundbite in among it, which I think deserves wider circulation, from Kevin Carson:
In the 1830s handwashing was alternative medicine.
Perry doesn’t like us to end our postings with quotes, so I won’t and don’t, but to this gem I don’t want to add anything.
Yes, that is right. Regardless of the facts presented about how nationalised industries fail in every other sector, the moral (it is funded by theft) and intellectual (it makes no economic sense) arguments against a socialist health service that is based on force backed appropriation has fallen on deaf ears in Britain.
So how about a purely utilitarian analysis based on life and death? The NHS is institutionally incapable of not perpetrating horrors like this. If you pay taxes in the UK, that is what you are paying for. On nothing other than utilitarian grounds based on self-preservation, do you still want the NHS to survive?
I occasionally use the NHS myself under the logic as as the state forces me to contribute to it regardless of alternate arrangements I might make, I may as well use it to recoup at least some of my own money. In fact I am going to submit to its ‘tender cares’ tomorrow. Wish me luck!
I enjoy reading Iain Murray’s blog The Edge of England’s Sword but I fear he comes a cropper in his anti-drug legalisation screed today.
He attempts to refute the idea that the War on Drugs is every bit as big a disaster of social policy as Prohibition was back in the 1920s.
Excuse me, but the parallels between Prohibition and the War on Drugs are striking and compelling evidence in my view that the current approach to drugs needs to be changed. Criminalisation of drugs has swelled the ranks of organised crime, corrupted law enforcement bodies, artificially driven up the price of drugs to levels so high that addicts commit crimes to fuel their habits, and apart from anything else, is an assault on the core liberal idea that our bodies are our property, not that of the State.
In one paragraph that stands out, Murray writes:
“In any event, the main difference between the two is that society has decided it prefers alcohol legal (there are no polls about restoring alcohol prohibition because it’s such an outlandish suggestion), but is more convinced that drugs confer more harm than benefit overall.”
I love that use of the word “society”. In one fell swoop, logic and evidence are brushed aside. “Society” has “decided” booze can be legal but cannabis cannot. The argument seems to be that because we have had centuries of booze and developed customs to civilise its consumption, we can stick with the current approach, while drugs are relatively new and therefore easier to ban. Even if this were broadly true, longevity is not logic. Alcohol arguably causes far more damage to the fabric of “society” than drug use. Consider the amount of assaults perpetrated by people who are drunk, for example. Consider also issues such as worker absenteeism, chronic ill-health and premature death. Consider how once-brilliant athletes are turned into shells of their former selves through drink.
There is one issue which also comes into play here – The Welfare State. I have no doubt that much of the harm caused by drugs of all kinds is magnified by welfare dependency and the loosening of self discipline that goes with it. I am one of those libertarians who are wary of legalising drugs without first replacing State welfare with a more benign variety.
Mad cow disease (vCJD), foot-and-mouth, MMR, salmonella in eggs… the list goes on and on. The reality of life is that no one has a monopoly on insight, intelligence and information. Yet the state would have us believe that in their case when they say something, is somehow of a higher order compared to any other institution or individual. After all, it that was not the case, how could the fact the state backs its views with the threat of violence be justified?
Yet time and time again we are told in patronising tones that the state’s experts know best, to the extent the state is prepared to after our body chemistry regardless of our individual wishes. We are told for years “Of course British Beef is safe to eat. Our scientists tell us there is nothing to worry about and reports to the contrary are just scare-mongering”… only to discover it can in fact kill us in the most ghastly manner by boring holes in our brains .
Likewise, the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is still foisted on people by Britain’s national Health Service in spite of worries about potentially horrendous side effects. Fortunately, the culture of deference to authority has been breaking down for quite some time as the state finds itself dis-intermediated from the flow of information to people. As yet more information casting doubt upon the safety of MMR comes to light, those who decided to shun the state’s advice and err on the side of safety for their children are shown the wisdom of their ways.
Yet the important issue here is not ‘if it better to fluoridate water’ or ‘should I eat more folic acid’ or ‘should I immunise my children with single jabs or the three-in-one’ or ‘should I wear a seat belt’?’… but ‘Why do I tolerate the state and the experts on its payroll overriding my views on issues which relate directly to my body?’
The fact is fluoride probably does make for better teeth, folic acid for better health, MMR is usually safe and seat belts often save lives. But why on earth entrust these decisions to such a demonstrably fallible institution like the state? We all make mistakes, but the price of individual error is largely confined to the individual making the error or at least to his immediate family or associates… the price for the state making an error however is far wider and much harder to mitigate. When the advice the state gives us proves to be flawed, that can be disastrous, but they it actually makes its views on health as a force backed mandatory law, that should be regarded as intolerable.
In the case of MMR, single vaccines are privately available off the NHS, yet due to the fact people have their money appropriated to fund the NHS regardless of their wishes, the state reduces their ability to actually make meaningful choices independently. In much the same way, you make correctly deduce your children would be better educated either at home or at a private school, yet because the state takes your money and pours it into funding state schools anyway, it greatly reduces the real choice of less wealthy parents to actually opt out.
We are told we have all manner of free choices in the wonderful ‘representative’ democracy in which we live (pick any western country), yet as long as the state appropriates such a large chunk of the money we earn and depend upon to actualise our wishes, the reality is that for many, choice is an illusion as they struggle to manage what remains of their unapproapriated several property.
Related articles
It is a matter of private choice, not a matter of ‘public’ health, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Libertarian ‘Public Health’?, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
The totalitarian mindset, Sunday, June 16, 2002
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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