A Horseradish
Sunday 9th November 2014 10:51pm [Edited]
8,475 posts
Quote: Hercules Grytpype Thynne @ 9th November 2014, 9:48 PM GMT
Well that is certainly not what I intended, and can only reiterate.
Roy Castle died from lung cancer caused by passive smoking. OK but........
If that is the case, and his foundation are advocating this as a seemingly given fact, then why are there so many people* who have been exposed to large periods of passive smoking not been affected?
*And I'm talking about jazz performers here of course - people who spent most of their working life in one of the smokiest environments imaginable, and I would even go so far as to say far, far more exposure than Roy Castle who was an all round entertainer who primarily worked in theatres and latterly spent much of his working life on television.
Was he a smoker at some point? Was his lung cancer caused by other factors?
Some say he smoked the occasional cigar but frankly all of this is futile. I could write a long list of people who dropped dead from smoking related illness at a young age. Broadcaster Ray Moore did. A lot of the British kings did. So did many reggae stars but probably not because of cigarettes. On the other hand, Cleo Laine, 87, smoked until her sixties. The Queen Mother smoked until her eighties. Helmut Schmidt, 95, is still smoking and whatever the idiocy in his behaviour, he talks more sense than most politicians half his age.
Probably quite a bit of it is genetic. We all have weaknesses in some physical and psychological areas. Some of it will be linked to accompanying illness. Some people will have come through years of asbestos, DDT, e numbers, work stress, divorce or heroin, then decided rightly or wrongly that their ending was because of smoking cigarettes and absolutely nothing else. Scientists like to think they know it all. There are huge amounts that they still don't know. No one knows why why some dogs decide to attack just because they feel like it. Or why many wheeze at night and in the early morning but not at other times. Nor does anyone else know much. We don't know at what age Castle's parents died. We don't know the causes of their deaths. We don't even know why many studies show that schizophrenics tend to be very heavy smokers and that smoking alleviates their symptoms or what the negative impacts of bans are on their minds.
It seems to me that any feeling of blame or self-blame needs to be placed in those sorts of contexts. That there is considerable variation among smokers themselves so it would be irrational to think that there won't at the very least be variations in terms of passive smoking. Castle, who was always a little too holier than thou for my tastes, did the public a service and a disservice. In terms of moving policy towards greater freedom for non-smokers, his declarations were entirely positive. They may have been based on pseudo-science. They may have had inadvertent validity. Certainly what they never were was counter-intuitive. If more people are happy as a consequence of the changes, great. And more folk probably are more happy.
Whether it was right for there to be a blanket approach to banning in specific types of places is more open to question. It removed any decision making from owners of premises, ie pub landlords, so rather than giving everyone choices it gave new freedoms only to some. It took away freedoms from others, so far as people wanted to describe smoking as a personal freedom rather than a state of being enslaved. Furthermore, every other recent lifestyle policy change I can think of apart from the hunting ban has enabled activity that was previously banned rather than restricted what was permissible. None of it elides with the zeitgeist.
But in my opinion these things are largely internationally driven at Davos and elsewhere. The legalisation of cannabis everywhere - that is, everywhere - was agreed a decade ago, starting quietly in Uruguay or some such place, just as it was agreed centrally that everywhere would have gay marriage. Expect wars within a decade against all those "terrible illiberal" regimes which continue to ban the smoking of dope. Importantly, the main issue with cigarettes is that they are not mind altering in the sense that most drugs tend to be. The international authorities are more than happy for people to be on substances which impede their ability to challenge the system - they are more controllable - but less than keen on the legal ones in which people can keep their wits about them. Come to think of it, the banning in that context is thoroughly modern.
