How about licensing smokers?

Good day all. Our “Betters” in Academia have come up with another “Brilliant” idea. How about mandatory licenses for smokers? If you want to light up, you have to have a license.

No, I’m not joking. Some moron came up with this idea and wrote it up in the PLOS Medicine medical journal. Here are the details on the proposal from CBS DC:

A public health proposal suggests that tobacco smokers should be required to apply and pay for a “smoker’s license” in order to continue buying cigarettes.

In this week’s PLOS Medicine medical journal, two leading tobacco control advocates debate the merits of the smoker’s license. Simon Chapman, a professor at the University of Sydney, proposes that users would have to apply and pay for a mandatory license in the form of a smartcard that would be shown when buying cigarettes.

I looked up the University of Sidney and as I thought, it’s in Australia. So, we have yet another social engineering totalitarian moron who thinks he knows what’s best for the proles ((Prole)). Of course, it’s “For the children.”

Dr. Chapman wrote that it could discourage young people from picking up the habit.

Now I don’t smoke and I think it’s a really stupid thing to do. However, I really detest some jackass trying to tell me how to live my life when I’m not hurting anyone else. (And don’t give me any crap about second hand smoke. I grew up with smokers in my home) Oh, and if you think it stops with preventing children from smoking only? Think again!

In a controversial move, the smartcard would allow the government to limit how many cigarettes a smoker could buy. Professor Chapman suggests 50 per day averaged over two weeks to accommodate heavy smokers. The anti-smoking activist told the Daily Mail that the sale of tobacco is currently subject to trivial controls compared to other dangerous products that threaten both public and personal safety.

Well, I can see that Herr Doktor Mengele Chapman believes in personal freedom and responsibility. Oh wait, I don’t think he does. Of course, like any Nazi Communist Totalitarian statist, he prefers to use the forces of evil government to “help” people. Not everyone agrees with this idiot.

Arguing against the smoker’s license in the journal is Jeff Collin, a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Collin wrote that it would shift focus away from the real vector of the epidemic—the tobacco industry—and focusing on individuals would censure victims, increase stigmatization of smokers, and marginalize the poor.

Professor Collin sort of gets it right. This isn’t about convincing people to stop smoking, it’s about controlling people “For their own good.”

Professor Collin believes that limits to personal freedom will doom such legislation.

“The authoritarian connotations of the smoker’s license would inevitably meet with broad opposition,” Collin told the Daily Mail. “In the United Kingdom, for example, successive governments have failed to introduce identity cards.”

Chapman doesn’t let a little thing like freedom and liberty stand in his way of course.

Citing future scientific benefit, Prof. Chapman wrote that the information collected from smartcard applications could be used to formulate better smoking prevention strategies.

“Opponents of the idea would be quick to suggest that Orwellian social engineers would soon be calling for licenses to drink alcohol and to eat junk food or engage in any ‘risky’ activity,” Dr. Chapman told the Daily Mail. “This argument rests on poor public understanding of the magnitude of the risks of smoking relative to other cumulative everyday risks to health.”

This clod seems to have missed the last 50 years of anti-smoking information that’s been available to everyone. Even in dictatorships, people could get information on the negative health effects of tobacco. Fat lot of good it’s done. In fact, our favorite evil person of all time, Adolph Hitler was opposed to smoking. It was Germany that discovered the cause and effects to a persons health from smoking. Here is what Wikipidia has to say on the Nazi anti-smoking campaign.

Adolf Hitler was a heavy smoker in his early life—he used to smoke 25 to 40 cigarettes daily—but gave up the habit, concluding that it was a waste of money. In later years, Hitler viewed smoking as “decadent” and “the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor”, lamenting that “so many excellent men have been lost to tobacco poisoning”. He was unhappy because both Eva Braun and Martin Bormann were smokers and was concerned over Hermann Göring’s continued smoking in public places. He was angered when a statue portraying a cigar-smoking Göring was commissioned. Hitler is often considered to be the first national leader to advocate nonsmoking, although James VI and I of Scotland and England has a better claim to that title by three hundred years.

Hitler disapproved of the military personnel’s freedom to smoke, and during World War II he said on 2 March 1942, “it was a mistake, traceable to the army leadership at the time, at the beginning of the war”. He also said that it was “not correct to say that a soldier cannot live without smoking”. He promised to end the use of tobacco in the military after the end of the war. Hitler personally encouraged close friends not to smoke and rewarded those who quit smoking. However, Hitler’s personal distaste for tobacco was only one of several catalysts behind the anti-smoking campaign.

Even the Nazi’s didn’t ban smoking outright, although if they had won the war, Hitler and his thugs probably would have done so. (And to the cheers of Dr. Chapman no doubt if he had been there at the time)

Now, just suppose we actually did impose licensing on smokers? How would it work? Well, first you would have to go to the Department of Tobacco Inhalation and apply for a learners permit. Then you would need to take classes in how to smoke. These classes would probably consist of:

1. The differences in cigarettes, pipes and cigars
2. Opening a pack of cigarettes.
3. The care and maintenance of a pipe.
4. How to light a cigar.
5. The safe use of matches and lighters.
6. How to cup your hands to light up in a windy environment.

Then there would be the different levels of smoking licensing, similar to that of drivers licensing.

1. Smoker. Allowed to smoke filtered cigarettes.
2. Advanced smoker. Allowed to smoke unfiltered cigarettes
3. Cigar Smoker (NH). Allowed so smoke cigars but not to inhale.
4. Advanced Cigar smoker. Allowed to inhale
5. Pipe Smoker.

Once you have completed 500 hours of smoking instruction, you would then need to take both a written and practical exam. The written test would be 50 pages long and consist of multiple choice questions. The practical test would consist of lighting whatever tobacco product you are applying for and demonstrating competence in the proper procedures in it’s use. There would also be tests in emergency procedures, such as how to put out a fire in bed, what to do if the ash tray is full, how to dispose of used smoking material in such a way that you don’t set a forest on fire.

Yes, this is all nonsense of course, but not to the likes of this clothead Chapman. I don’t know anything about him, but I would not be surprised if he is a tenured professor and has never done a lick of work outside of the academic environment. In other words, he has no real world experience.

Now as I mentioned, smoking is bad for you. Everyone knows it’s bad for you. If you smoke, you should quit. However, trying to license people in order to smoke will fail just as badly as any other attempt at social engineering. Perhaps Dr. Clothead Chapman might want to look at just how successful banning alcohol was in the United States. Oh wait, that was a dismal failure. Maybe if Chapman spent his time trying to explain to people why smoking is bad, he wouldn’t be treated as a complete buffoon. (Which he obviously is)

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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