Freedom is slavery

The latest hot take from the neo-prohibitionists... 

Smoking is slavery and against human rights, activists say

Smoking is a form of slavery and is completely incompatible with widely recognised human rights, activists against smoking have said.

I beg your pardon?

They also criticised the so-called novel tobacco products for muddying the waters with the claims of being “much less harmful”

 Er, OK. And who are these imbeciles?

“I am absolutely convinced that smoking is slavery and it goes against the human right for life and health. We should engage our work with activists in the human health field,” Francisco Rodriguez Lozano, president of the European Network for Smoking and Tobacco Prevention (ENSP) told EURACTIV.

You won't be surprised to hear that the European Network for Smoking and Tobacco Prevention is one of the EU's numerous tax-sponging anti-freedom outfits. Under their watch, there will be no smoking, regardless of how many people want to smoke.

They are now trying to turn their desire to remove your right to smoke into a rights issue. I guess their right to tell you what to do trumps your right to decide how you live your life.

Insofar as there is logic to this, it is that there is a right to health and smoking is bad for your health, therefore you are violating your human rights if you smoke. Aside from this being obviously nonsensical, the same could be said of any activity that carries a risk, of course, but the idea that people have competing goals and make trade-offs between their 'rights' doesn't seem to have occurred to these fanatics.

A right to health is not the same thing as an obligation to be optimally healthy. A right to life means that people aren't allowed to kill you. It doesn't mean you have to do everything within your power to extend your longevity.

In an effort to give their ridiculous ideas some legs, the anti-smokers held a conference in Romania recently. The Global Forum on Human Rights and a Tobacco-Free World was co-organised by the US branch of ASH. They, too, have stopped bothering to deny that they are prohibitionists.

ASH USA is run by Laurence Huber...

For Huber, measures such as tobacco taxation or advertising bans are steps in the right direction but are not enough.

Fancy that!

“Governments should also consider phasing out the sale of commercial cigarettes within a reasonable period of time and not allow the tobacco industry to highjack the ‘smoke-free future’ debate,” he added.

If that doesn't give you an idea of the kind of people we're dealing with, try this tweet from the conference...

"There has to be a red line about #tobacco just as there is one about not having sex with a 2 years old!" Clear& strong message from  @dinamired 👏👏👏#TobaccoViolation @AshOrg pic.twitter.com/DtmhcOh2aQ

— Raluca Zoitanu (@ralucazo) March 26, 2019

There was a time when that kind of comment would draw the attention of men in white costs. Nowadays it gets you a fat grant from the EU or an award from the WHO. Personally, I prefer the old days.