Under the heading of, “See, I told you so,” I bring news of the next step in the global fundamentalist movement toward Prohibition. On the heels of the anti-smoking controversy at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Scottish legislators now going after alcohol.

No Scotch in Scotland?

Impossible?

No.

The first steps have been taken, and they are following the pattern used to successfully ban smoking as their playbook. The details are below the fold.

[more…]

From Rich Perelman at Cigarcyclopedia:

Tim Luckhurst’s editorial on the debate in Britain’s House of Commons that appeared in the London Times last Tuesday is important and worth repeating, so here goes:

“As MPs choose today between partial or total bans on smoking in public places they must ask themselves whether lying to promote a cause is ever legitimate.

“The question is urgent because the claim that secondary smoking kills is alchemy, not science, and honest anti-smoking lobbyists know it. The theory that cigarette smoke kills non-smokers was dreamt up 30 years ago by anti-smoking activists; only after inventing it did they attempt to prove it.

“Dozens of peer-reviewed scientific studies have followed. All point to a compelling consensus that there is no casual link between passive smoking and fatal illness. One of the most comprehensive studies was published in the British Medical Journal in 2003. It concluded: ‘The results do not support a causal relationship between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality.’

[more…]

There is a very interesting post up over at Our House Blog by David on the comparative health risks of smoking cigarettes versus smoking cigars.

It is a good post, with links to some information from the National Cancer Institute and also has some quotations from FDA spokespeople and the New England Journal of Medicine. Anyone who smokes cigars will want to read it.

The information in the article is an anti-smoking crusader’s worst nightmare.

Why?

[more…]