Pubs Rebel Against Corporatocracy's Smoking Ban

national | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis

Friday July 09, 2004 01:56

by Watchdog

jejonik at juno dot com

Oppose the Next Plant Product Prohibition NOW.

News is all over U.S. media about Irish Pub Owners fighting the "smoking" ban. No current input on this at this site yet. Since this is not about health (except as packaging) it is hoped that toxics, consumer, environmental, health and other activists realise that this topic IS about their interests.

Here is a description of one news story (Associated Press) in the US about opposition to the seemingly wholesome "smoking" ban in Ireland.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Fuming over a smoking ban, some Irish pubs flout the law.
The smoke of rebellion rose across Ireland yesterday as a handful of pubs let customers puff away in defiance of a government ban."
( By Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press, 07/08/2004 03:01 AM EDT)

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/9102140.htm?1c
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you don't want to "register" at the paper's site, send e-mail and I'll forward the whole article.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some things to think about:

* Pub owners (and their lawyers) don't seem to realize
that they are unjustly made to bear the burdens of law and costs to "solve" a health problem that is and was NOT of their doing.
Those who did cause the problems, by adulterating tobacco with so many of the world's worst INDUSTRIAL substances and hosts of untested ingredients, are getting off Scot Free.

* Tobacco smoke, by itself (without the additives/adulterants) has not yet been shown to cause the problems cited as reasons for the smoke ban. No matter, officials persist in saying "tobacco" smoke and "tobacco" diseases. Why? It's better for them to blame a public-domain natural plant instead of displeasing (or indicting) the corporations that contributed to the toxic/carcinogenic nature of typical cigarettes. It's also better to blame the unwitting, unprotected, insufficiently-warnd victims...and pub owners etc.

* There have been urine tests of pub visitors that ony tested for nicotine. No tests were for increased dioxin levels or radiation levels. No. That would indict some big powerful industries...and their friends in gov't. Nicotine is about Mother Nature...who has no money to give to public officials.

* It's NOT about tobacco. It's about products adulterated with the psychopathic help of Big Oil, Pesticides, Pharmaceuticals, Chlorine, Radioactive Phosphate fertilizers, Burn Accelerants, Adhesives, Sugars, and a long list of (non-organic) agricultural products. We are talking about Shell, Uniroyal, Dow, Monsanto, Bayer, Novartis, Aventis, DuPont and on and on. We are talking about hundreds of tobacco pesticides and their residues. We are talking about DIOXIN, which, for all practical purposes, ONLY comes from man-made Chlorine...as found in cigarette paper and many pesticide residues. Ireland DID sign the POPs Treaty to globally ban dioxin, did it not? Why don't Irish officials start off by banning it in cigarette smoke? After all, most if not all "smoking related" disease are IDENTICAL to effects of dioxin exposure. Such diseases are IMPOSSIBLE to be caused by tobacco or any plant...even burned and inhaled. Case closed?

* Noting the drop-off of pub customers...take-out business notwithstanding...it's easy to imagine that this "smoking" thing is also about "Crack Downs" on drinking. This reeks of Insurance Industry ideas...to eliminate all possible harms done by individuals, while ignoring the massive harms done by corporate interests. The difference is...Big Insurers INVEST in the industries. It's not some moralistic fundamentalist Taliban coming into our lives...it's Bizness Uber Alles.

* No doubt, what many officials really want is to cut public health spending. This is why The WTO is all "anti smoking" too. They dare not do this by banning untested and known deadly cig adulterants, so...voila!... the "smoking ban". Officials COULD get billions for public health programs etc from the complicit industries in liabilities and penalties, but...well...those industries are their friends. Check their economic links if possible.

* The claim of protecting workers' health is a sick joke...literally. Workers who are now nicely "protected" from "smoking" (even their own cigs!) are being DENIED compensation for maybe years of exposures to the secret parts of cigarette smoke...the parts that do not and can not come from tobacco. Workers STILL aren't told or warned about what's IN a typical cigarette. Workers are not even tested for dioxin or rad levels...which they could not get from beer fumes, but from contaminated cigarettes. Workers elsewhere are protected from almost nothing. Funny it's just in the "smoking" area. No protection from auto fumes, paints, solvents, industrial toxins, printing emissions, radiation, toxic cleansers, bio-organisms, etc. is done because THAT would burden the corporations. The "smoking" restriction just burdens the victims....the so far informationally deprived victims. Cig manufacturers don't really care; they are evading enormous liabilities, NOT for the tobacco, but for the TOXIC and CARCINOGENIC and addiction enhancing and burn accelerating things they viciously ADDED to the products, in secret from consumers. Whatever happened to Informed Consent?

* What kind of law is it that demands no proof of harm, demands no face to face confrontation with harmed accuser, and which fails to so much as DESCRIBE the alleged instrument of "crime"?

* Compare the fines for secretly adding known toxic/carcinogenic elements to fraudulently advertized consumer products....ZERO...to the fines for using the products or allowing their use in a pub....about $3000 [U.S.]. Justice?
Oh...and fines on Public Officials for allowing this? Also zero.

* This is a Golden Opportunity for Environmental & Toxics Activists to approach Pub Owners and...yes...even Evil Smokers, to talk about the industrial pollutants in cigs and elsewhere. Don't care for Big Oil's invasion of Iraq? One use for the oil is to make toxic and cancer causing tobacco pesticides. Big Oil has NEVER been even politely ASKED about this let alone being dragged into court.
Those who note big problems with pharmaceuticals re/ the costs, minimal and fraudulent testing, denial of AIDS medicines, and so forth ought have some interest in the fact that Big Pharma is PART of the so-called "Tobacco" indusry via tobacco pesticides AND cigarette ingredients. Pharms are ostensibly a HEALTH industry. Not so in many cases.

* Those who despise or are affected by the "war on pot" ought realize that this smoke ban thing is a virtual TWIN of "Reefer Madness" that got marijuana prohibition going...with all the devastating effects.

* Any laws or news stories that fail to qualify "tobacco" as being Industrially Contaminated Tobacco are fraudulent. Any talk about the harms of "smoking" without noting the extreme harms caused by Manufacturing Techniques is talk that blames the uninformed, secretly poisoned victims while ignoring the ones who did the poisoning.

Though even the purest tobacco, like everything, has some risk elements, it's quite another thing to intentionally poison consumers with known industrial toxins, to deceive consumers that they are just using tobacco,and to evade liability and criminal responsibility for doing so.

There are other "smoking" items posted at this site. Search them out with word "smoking". Google search terms like "smoking radiation", "dioxin tobacco", "tobacco pesticides", "cigarettes burn accelerants", etc. There's material enough to throw a good sized wrench...or spanner....into the corporate gears of this bogus "smoking" ban fraud. Let your pub owners know.

To your health.

save preference

Comments (26 of 26)

Jump To Comment:

Why are Pubs targeted?

Sat Aug 19, 2006 06:02

Pubs are prime targets for smoke bans, for one reason, because the enormous US pharma, Johnson and Johnson doesn't like booze any more than it likes tobacco. It probably doesn't even approve of sex.
J & J's funding arm, the Rob't Wood Johnson Foundation funds, besides MOST of the "anti smoking" crap, the group MADD...Mothers Against Drunk Driving...a group that has succeeded in imposing all sorts of privacy invasions and Draconian penalties and INSURANCE COSTS on US drivers...all under the un-opposable halo of "saving the children from drunks" etc.
Does MADD of RWJF say a WORD or do anything to promote more public transit to get foks off he road? No. Do they have any concerns about industrial products, and military weapons, etc that kill FAR more than all the drunks anywhere combined? No.
Does MADD utter a peep about chlorine and dioxin in light of how much chlorine is used by Johnson and Johnson and how much dioxin is theefore dumped into our environment and into our lungs and fatty tissues? Not a chance.

Pubs, like that sinful tobacco plant (from those darn pagan American Indigenous peoples and all) are all Taboo things in the global corporate Taliban movement. Such things may cost insurers profits and/or may cost governments money spent on PEOPLE's health care instead of having that money go off to pals in private corporations. Since those insurers, which are ALSO huge investors, invest in and insure the harmful businesses, well...they aren't going to bust THEM. They prefer to bust us people, and things of nature in the public domain.

They, like all of the Corporate Security/Safety activists, focus ONLY on individual behaviors.

If you like the current cannabis prohibiton, which has filled US prisons to human-rights violating levels of horror, has led to even executions in other lands, has vastly intensified the street shootings, and has excused US interventions into all sorts of foreign lands...you'll love the virtually inevitable tobacco prohibition.

I'm not a psychologist but...I believe there are issues to address with folks who care more about,say, smelly hair or clothes, than the mass poisoning and even murder of millions of people via utterly untested or unlabeled deadly industrial substances slipped into what the manufacturers, AND complicit go'vt officials tell us is "tobacco". It's a lie bigger, and with more bodies and costs involved, than all the Blair/Bush stuff about Iraq.
That's like saying that a Mushroom Cloud is just an interesting weather phenomenon.

EX-PAT Love of Dogs

by Michelle Clarke - Social Justice Activist

Mon Jan 10, 2005 21:23

They taste like chicken.....What a weird sense of humour but then maybe that is the message I have given......!!!!!

It makes me think of a missionary cousin returning to Ireland in the 1960's and he looking at my Basset Hound. Yes, he did, he said that in Korea, my Basset Fred would make a really could meal.

Being only 8 I was very disturbed about the country he was doing missionary work in!

Back to pubs......there is more bleeting today about the Anti-smoking ban. Can't people see that this is an excuse, humans are a lot more adaptable to change.

Michelle

i love Dogs

by Ex-Pat Pat

Mon Jan 10, 2005 05:31

..they taste just like chicken.

Time to Embrace Change; and invoke humanity

by Michelle Clarke - Social Justice and Ethics

Sun Jan 09, 2005 22:53

Happy New Year Rooster.

I agree with you. Why the focus on smoking in pubs?

Maybe the Pub Owners and Licensed Vintners association ought to put in place a little reverse psycholoty - you know the kind of impact psychology used by Goffman and Anna Freud post World War II.

The saying goings 'Nothing stands still in time'.

Well that is surely true as demographics change and the move is towards an older market.

Some ideas that strike me (a person with disabilities) is the humane level of dealing with customers who visit.

I live in Dublin and have about 4 input hours a day. Winter time is difficult because darkness affects my sight; my balance; then my concentration within a very short walk. Lucky I live D with all accessible but then like the Poet Patrick Kavanagh suggests in one of his poems.......the canal walk becomes ones own personal garden, the weeds become flowers.

Chance gave me a wish - the dog I thought I would never have again.....From Animal Rescue, I have a friend, one of the first to enter into my life in a long time.

Pubs: Psychology: a little common sense. Why not be dog friendly as in the European countries and in the Eccentric US luxury orientated people market.

Why can't we in Ireland adapt to the new wave of European people entering Ireland and of course those from Asia?

Are we not listening to People yet again? Have we become to 'International' and Jet setting to open up homes; pubs; even coffee shops.

Why don't these so called Marketing people tap into Age Action; National Disabilities Authority;Vincent de Paul; Aware;

Are people aware that places like the Hospice in Harolds Cross have a resident Dog for patients and for visitors?

Are people aware that dogs are brought to certain psychiatric hospitals?

The Guinness Advert is excellant in the nostalgia it wafts but our Publicans still tend to bleet about smoking (a dying pass-time) and that the Marketing Departments of the Cigarette companies have moved ahead to China and Africa. There is a subtle message here surely.

My contribution is embrace change......but also revoke nostalgia.

Make pubs dog friendly; older people and people with disabilities friendly; enhance the lighting so people can have a drink a read; reduce the noise to take account of people with hearing problems; look to models in Scotland; those that are traditional as distinct from Psudo; time for the barman to have interaction with the publican; bring back Poetry readings for 1 hour, as someone who frequents the bar; they may only be too glad... note the respect of silence.

Rooster, I reckon you would enjoy being able to bring in another Rooster and discuss Indymedia articles. The publican may even spend some money and use the Broadband and the computer to enhance communication. You might even be able to take you little Rooster and me my little dog and motivate people into Change and social inclusiveness.

Michelle

passive smoking

by rooster

Sat Jan 08, 2005 01:21

has been proven to cause lung cancer, thats good enough a reason for having it banned!

Nothing is Perfectly Good For You...

Fri Jan 07, 2005 01:48

No....I did not say that tobacco smoke (even if from the gardens of Eden) is good for you.
What is good for people is a Proper Amount of the smoke from the tobacco plant.
It's been used for over 10,000 years for
* Stress Relief
* Appetite Suppression
* Alertness
* Digestive relief
* And, more recently, it's been shown to be a symptomatic reliever for Parkinsons and Alzheimers and a few other mental pathologies. (No Wonder Pharms want to get tobacco into Controlled Substance categories...so they can either eliminate it or use it for personal profit.)
* Personal observation is that it also keeps biting insects at bay because it, like a lot of things in plants (like hot oils in peppers, for instance), is a form of natural pesticide.

Some folks don't like Pagan, indigenous, natural, non-corporate pharmacological substances...but that they often prefer to trust the criminal petrochemica/pharm corporatocracy that's currently running (and ruining) the world tells us where they are coming from.

The purest water can be harmful if A) it's over your head or B) if you drink too much. You can die. Look up this fun fact.

It's about degree. Current manufactured cigs are designed to promote overdose...and not just overdose of plain old tobacco (like in the Peace Pipes of Am. Indians) but also overdoses of industrial pesticides, chlorine (with its accompanying dioxin), radiation (from phosphate tobac fertilizers), sugars, and a misamic host of untested often toxic non-tobacco stuff.

To blame "smoking" or "cigarettes" (whatever those words mean) for evident harms is as baseless as blaming a "sandwich" or "eating" for killing someone...without noting that the sandwich may contain nuclear waste sludge and rusty nails.

Smoking on a SUV tailpipe would be inevitably harmful...but there are no studies anywhere (that I can find) of plain, unadulterated tobacco smoke. NO studies make any distinction between tobacco and adulterated, spiked tobacco. Perhaps ZERO people have died from tobacco smoke, as none have died from marijuana smoke. Yet it's tobacco we're told (by the corporate media and corporate-serving officials) to hate.

There's a scent in the world of fundamentalist hatred of all things natural. Opposition to "smoking" and drinking and sex
and even open speech is rampant. Perfect time for the corporate Taliban to get itself off the cig ingredients liability hook by pretending to be "concerned" about our health to remove yet another public domain natural plant product from the earth.

watchdog, your a chimp and your thread is crap

by ROGER

Mon Sep 13, 2004 00:42

Tobacco smoke, by itself (without the additives/adulterants) has not yet been shown to cause the problems cited as reasons for the smoke ban.

So your saying smoking is good for you? Or even passive smoking is good for you? What crap, ban all intakes of drugs which produce poisonous smoke, and do it NOW!

rainbow

by tyrone

Thu Jul 15, 2004 01:18

I.G. Farben, the Nazi chemical cartel, through it master chemist, Lazlo Jamf, developed Onerine as the perfect addictive substance. Now their progeny, BASF, produces it for inclusion in the cigs of all of the world major manufacturers. In china, India etc they use a cheaper naturally occurring analogue called, 5HTP. Smokers are hooked in the greatest criminal conspiracy since the 000001.

there something in this

by paul c

Wed Jul 14, 2004 19:54

i think there is something in what you are saying it was mainly that somehow the one big busines was screwing another big business that people off...

altougth the run of jokes was LOL hilarious though and a point to them too

The Cause is Based on a LIE.

Tue Jul 13, 2004 19:22

The original posting was not about Smoking vs. Fresh Air. It was about the massive crime of secret product poisoning and even murder...mass murder at that.

It was about the LIE that typical cigarettes are just tobacco..and that the plant, not the many industrial and other contaminants, is responsible. Many of the so-called "smoking-related" diseases are IMPOSSIBLE to be caused by tobacco smoke or smoke from any plant. BUT...they ARE diseases already known to be caused by dioxin and radiation, two things we aren't told about in smoking products. One needs to know that fully NINE of the 12 worst Persistent Organic Pollutants from industry are or have been tobacco pesticides/cigarette contaminants. To blame tobacco for effects of this is an insult to nature and a grave disservice to victims.

This is scapegoating. Who are perfect scapegoats? Well, those darn dirty , foreign, lower-class, bohemian, and rude smokers are good targets...and so are Pub Owners in their dens of iniquity and demon rum. Injustices are ALWAYS most successful if they are dumped on those who many find unpopular or unlikable. How easily we fall for it time and again.

The workers that are supposedly "protected" are being screwed out of adequate information AND compensation for maybe decades of being sickened by not tobacco but by the whole vile typical concoction.

One can complain about smoke being blown into one's face...but that very narrow complaint pales next to what OUGHT be our complaint against the cig makers and suppliers of pesticides (big oil and pharms), the radiation (from fertilizers), chlorine and its dioxin by-product, adhesives, flavorings, burn accelerants, scents, addiction enhancers, fake tobacco filler material (if legal in the UK) and all the rest.

Our complaint OUGHT to be against the paid off public officials who allowed this for so long...and against the corporatized media for keeping us so uninformed and deceived.

Writer John le Carre wrote this in explaining why he picked "Big Pharma" over big oil and one other of the top three worst corporate entities for topic of his "The Constant Gardener":
" I might have gone for the scandal of spiked tobacco, designed by Western manufacturers to create addiction and incidentally cancer in Third World communities already plagued with AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and poverty on a scale few of us can imagine."

Please note the words "spiked" and "designed". He did not say Plain tobacco...or Grown by manufacturers. This makes all the difference in the world.

If you don't want to refer to cigs as "Spiked Tobacco'" try "Pesticide Pegs", "Dioxin Dowels" or "Radiation Rods".
If you have no complaint against the involved industries, just do what they do...use meaningless, unqualified words like "smoking", "tobacco" and "cigarette".

organic tobacco? roll and grow your own

Tue Jul 13, 2004 00:57

i wonder what yas think of this ? another angle

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/07/292440.shtml

you can choose

by jeff

Sun Jul 11, 2004 16:39

to wear, either, the basket ball runners with the jeans, or the leather Italian shoes. If you want.

live here from Der Nederlands

Sun Jul 11, 2004 16:37

you can smoke some good weed.When I return from here, I will sell to pub owners some good pornography magazine vending machinens. This is just, right now, a groet ider I got while smoking this weed Mary Harney sees we should not.

Also,when I get bick, I will lead the campaign for the encouragemnt for the Irishman to wear the mullets, the golden ear ring, and, very much, lots of the gold chains. With sports sweater.And the tight excellent stone washed jeans.

Goed

fuck pub owners

by gehskhgjd

Fri Jul 09, 2004 19:05

Publicans are basically legal drug dealers, making a profit out of a major problem in irish society, ie. alcoholism.

Why the fuck should any of us care about their profits? We should kick the petite bourgeois scum while they're down, not say things like "Pub owners...are unjustly made to bear the burdens of law and costs to "solve" a health problem that is and was NOT of their doing"

Yea cos alcohol peddlers have always looked out for our health. Fuck 'em. Drink is the curse of... etc.

government vow to beat smokers into a pulp.

by -

Fri Jul 09, 2004 15:14

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Pubs Rebel Against Corporatocracy's Smoking Ban

Comments (26 of 26)