Health Fascists
Response to the NHS survey on cigarette pack labelling.
Sirs,
I am an Health and Safety professional. I have never smoked and I have relatives in nursing and the NHS. However, I believe that the way the NHS and anti-smoking charities and pressure groups are going about their message is wrong. I don’t believe that shock tactics and graphic images should be used for anti-smoking campaigns. I have no desire to watch TV adverts which if on a regular television programme would be censored. I do not want this invading my living room.
If people want to smoke, then they should be able to do so. The message that smoking kills and causes disease and wastes money for the NHS is already out there. I do not believe that the vast majority of smokers are unaware of the effects of smoking. However, the state and the health professionals have taken their remit much too far. There is too much interference in what can and cannot be done by people and about the choices that people make.
Yes, people should be made aware of the consequences of their actions, but the concepts of hazard, risk, risk perception and acceptability of risk are very poorly understood. Smokers are now pariahs of society, or at least the “society” that is currently defined by the state.
We should be educating people about consequences and the difficulties of “giving up”, but people should not be forced to give up smoking or have to suffer upsetting pictures when they reach for a pleasure. Freedom to choose to smoke or not, or to drink or not, or to hunt or not, or to eat meat or not, should be enshrined in the British way of life. We are a long way from this.
The next logical steps are to paint scenes of maimed people from car accidents on the sides of cars and on beer bottles.
These pictures frankly disgust me and are a long way removed from the genuine warnings that should be present. There is no option in your survey to state that "none of these warnings should be present", as it is intimated tha this is not a "correct" view to hold.
I realise that I am a long way from the prevailing opinion, but I suspect I am not alone in these views.
Yours,
Jonathan Hall (Dr)
Sirs,
I am an Health and Safety professional. I have never smoked and I have relatives in nursing and the NHS. However, I believe that the way the NHS and anti-smoking charities and pressure groups are going about their message is wrong. I don’t believe that shock tactics and graphic images should be used for anti-smoking campaigns. I have no desire to watch TV adverts which if on a regular television programme would be censored. I do not want this invading my living room.
If people want to smoke, then they should be able to do so. The message that smoking kills and causes disease and wastes money for the NHS is already out there. I do not believe that the vast majority of smokers are unaware of the effects of smoking. However, the state and the health professionals have taken their remit much too far. There is too much interference in what can and cannot be done by people and about the choices that people make.
Yes, people should be made aware of the consequences of their actions, but the concepts of hazard, risk, risk perception and acceptability of risk are very poorly understood. Smokers are now pariahs of society, or at least the “society” that is currently defined by the state.
We should be educating people about consequences and the difficulties of “giving up”, but people should not be forced to give up smoking or have to suffer upsetting pictures when they reach for a pleasure. Freedom to choose to smoke or not, or to drink or not, or to hunt or not, or to eat meat or not, should be enshrined in the British way of life. We are a long way from this.
The next logical steps are to paint scenes of maimed people from car accidents on the sides of cars and on beer bottles.
These pictures frankly disgust me and are a long way removed from the genuine warnings that should be present. There is no option in your survey to state that "none of these warnings should be present", as it is intimated tha this is not a "correct" view to hold.
I realise that I am a long way from the prevailing opinion, but I suspect I am not alone in these views.
Yours,
Jonathan Hall (Dr)
posted by Jonathan | Tuesday, July 04, 2006
1 Comments:
how about health warnings on Party Political Broadcasts -
"The following travesty is completely fictitious and causes advanced cynicism"
Or
"The following broadcast is entirely fictitious. Any similarity to actual facts is entirely co-incidental"
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