Comedy gold
The latest issue of Irish Pharmacist (nope, me neither) has devoted its editorial to Forest Ireland.
A recent press release criticising the Irish Government’s plan to ban tobacco vending machines prompted an outburst of mirth from editor Pat Green.
Under the headline ‘50 Years Go Up In Smoke’, he wrote:
Many press releases darken my inbox each month relating to devastating illnesses and the myriad failings in our healthcare system, but rarely one lands in the inbox that is jaw-dropping and hilarious in equal measures.
Green then outlined our concerns including the financial cost (to hoteliers and publicans), the loss of jobs (at vending machine companies) and the inconvenience (not great, admittedly) to smokers.
[Forest] also describes the proposal as a “nanny measure” that is “designed to reduce adult freedoms that will do nothing to protect children from taking up smoking, nor will it reduce the number of adults who smoke.
Instead of offering a cogent response to even one of these arguments, Green commented:
My first reaction was to check that I had not unintentionally subscribed to the satirical news outlet The Onion.
The real ‘comedy gold’, he added, was our statement that ‘many people choose to smoke because they enjoy it, not because they are addicted’:
Suddenly, I had a Rambo-style Vietnam flashback to America in the 1950s, when doctors, pharmacists and even Santa Claus were used to promote the ‘benefits’ of smoking.
How droll.
If anyone deserves to be ridiculed it’s Pat Green whose holier-than-thou attitude says far more about him than it does about us.
As well as inviting him to read ‘The Pleasure of Smoking: The views of confirmed smokers’ (Centre for Substance Use Research, 2016), I’d love him to meet a smoker such as Pat Nurse (of this parish).
Or Joanna Lumley. Asked by a journalist in 2015 if she still smoked, Lumley replied, only partly in jest:
‘Plenty! I put a whole packet in my mouth and light 20 at a time. No, I don’t, darling. I just smoke. I haven’t had one today, for instance. That reminds me, I ought to smoke. I try to smoke. I’d very easily give it up. It just slips away from you and I think: “Damn, I ought to be smoking!” I do like it - and you’ve got to die of something.’
Understanding the many reasons why people still smoke, decades after the health risks became widely known, should be a prerequisite for people like Pat Green.
Instead he prefers to mock and misrepresent our position as antediluvian. More fool him.