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| "There will be no more smoking!" |
1916
Lucy Page Gaston of the Anti-Cigarette League launches the slogan 'A smokeless America by 1925'.
1984
Surgeon General Koop launches the slogan 'A smoke-free society by the year 2000'.
2015
The Lancet: 'Experts call for a tobacco-free world by 2040'
Prohibitionists are nothing if not ambitious. Maybe this time will be different. There are plenty of starry-eyed zealots goose-stepping out the universities who would like to make it so, but I doubt it. Something that has been smoked for thousands of years is not going to disappear in 25 years. It could only happen if everybody decided they didn't want to smoke but, as Dick Puddlecote illustrates with a graph that says a thousand words, that ain't the case.
It certainly isn't going to happen if the authors of the Lancet fantasy get their way. They think too much time has been spent trying to reduce demand when they should be reducing supply. Reducing supply without reducing demand, what could go wrong?
I think it's much more likely that everybody will have seen through the 'public health' scam by 2040. The very term 'public health' will be something akin to a swear word and the handful of 'public health professionals' who are not dead or in prison will have invented some new euphemism for authoritarian prodnosery. They will be treated with mixture of pity and contempt, but mainly contempt.
Now there's something to work towards.
