Tag Archives: tobacco

Smoking guns and slippery slopes

smokingbandits Posted on by

In my previous effort, I made comparisons between smokers and the LGBTQ+ community to make the case for us to have our own establishments in which to socialize. Now I’m going to make a comparison with what is commonly termed “the gun culture.” As almost everyone is aware, gun violence is at an all-time high in the United States.  There are mass shooting events on the average of one per day and it’s no longer news that pre-empts everything else that someone has opened fire in a school, house of worship, movie theater, shopping mall, etc., for no discernable reason. … Continue reading →

Frank the Thinker

smokingbandits Posted on by

Frank Davis, the blogger, the fighter, the polemist was, first and foremost, a thinker, a philosopher whose ideas have shaped the world. The infamous Tobacco Control (TC) industry, greedy for money and power, might have hoped to bludgeon that world into total submission, but it so happened that one man suddenly became a moral leader and the global symbol of resistance to TC, and look now – its evil empire is still far from victory. How did he do it, that man? He did it by becoming a thinker, formulating ideas in a way that galvanized us all. Let me … Continue reading →

“We’re gonna take it”

smokingbandits Posted on by

New York State just legalized possession and regulated sale of cannabis, joining at least 14 others where it’s completely legal. Most US states have at very least decriminalized marijuana; others have legalized medical marijuana. The Drug Enforcement Agency of the Federal government continues to consider it a “Schedule 1” substance, ranked with heroin as among the most dangerous. The details have yet to be worked out, but I am not optimistic.  Someone once posted “A Sentence for each State in the Union”. The sentence was supposed to encapsulate the character of the state it was about. My personal favorite was … Continue reading →

Smoking on U.S. university campuses

smokingbandits Posted on by

I was extremely fortunate to be a college student in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. It was the heyday of freewheeling student life in the United States. After the campus protests and unrest of the 1960’s, students were allowed a great deal of freedom and autonomy once things settled down. Things differed from campus to campus, but when I arrived at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1978, it was quite the swinging place. The legal drinking age was 18 and there were frequent parties, especially on Thursday evening, as many campus residents lived close … Continue reading →

The virus, the distance, the smoke

smokingbandits Posted on by

I was fortunate to have been able to squeeze in one last congenial visit to my favorite Manhattan smoking bar, Karma, on March 14, the Saturday before everything shut down due to the Corona-virus.  I cut it even closer with my last haircut, making it into the barber the last day before New York State declared all “non-essential” businesses closed.  They had the great wisdom to designate liquor stores as “essential.” So thereafter all actual social life came to halt.  People stayed home and worked from home if they could.  Others, who were in essential sectors did work, while a … Continue reading →

Legalise Cannabis?

smokingbandits Posted on by

It seems people are tripping over themselves to legalise cannabis these days. Everyone is talking about it and efforts to do so are well under-way. So why is another plant, tobacco, still considered to be the most dangerous drug known to man? The Government get a lot of money from tobacco; £13 billion per year currently. Anti-tobacco groups also get a lot of money from tobacco. The Government pays them with our taxes to do a job. That job is to tell the Government what it wants to hear; that the general population want to be controlled more. The Tobacco … Continue reading →

If smoking had been invented only today…

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The anti-tobacco industry tell us that if smoking had been invented today, it would immediately be banned outright. With the health, safety, food and drug laws we have in place, coupled with what we now know about smoking, there is no way any Government would allow smoking, or the sale of tobacco to be legal. “If smoking was unknown to us and someone invented it today, it would never be allowed”. That’s what they tell us, but I dispute it. Imagine a world where smoking had not been invented, where tobacco was simply a plant that nobody paid much attention … Continue reading →

Where are the proud smokers?

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June is pride month and all over the world, many localities will explode with rainbow flags and parades of scantily-dressed people celebrating the struggles of the LGBTQ community. It commemorates the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, when members of the gay community fought back and demanded their right to be who they were and enjoy themselves publicly as they saw fit. And it started at a drinking establishment: the Stonewall Tavern in New York. At the time, gay bars couldn’t legally exist, so those that did were secret, illegal affairs, controlled by organized crime. Bribes were paid to the police … Continue reading →

Smokers of all countries, unite!

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Prof. Dr. Günter Ropohl (1939-2017) was a Professor Emeritus of General Technology at the University of Frankfurt on Main, Germany. He was an active member of Netzwerk Rauchen. Tomorrow would have been his 80th birthday. We honor his commitment against discrimation of smokers and the passive smoking fraud by publishing a text of his from the past decade. On a worldwide scale hundreds of millions of our people are being deprived of fundamental rights. They are being refused the right to enjoy tobacco in public buildings, on public transport, and places like restaurants, pubs, and bars. So their basic right … Continue reading →

Vaping vs Smoking?

smokingbandits Posted on by

The “electronic cigarette” has quite a history not many people know about. It was invented in the 1920s and proved to be a commercial dead end until the year 2000. “E-cigarettes” were introduced to European and American markets in 2006/07, after the decades of anti-smoking measures and anti-tobacco rhetoric had borne fruit. With high tobacco taxes and increased denormalization of smoking, vaping became an object of commercial value. Tobacco Control, notoriously pushing it’s pharmaceutically produced nicotine replacement aids and other smoking cessation medicine, as well as the anti-smokers in general, had not anticipated the electronic cigarette’s increase in popularity and … Continue reading →