"Smokers of all countries, unite!"

Our opening fanfare is a text by Guenter Ropohl, an outspoken critic of “health fascism”. Professor Ropohl has a Ph.D. in engineering (same as the infamous Stanton Glantz, ironically) and later specialized in sociology and philosophy of technology. He has written a couple of excellent pieces on junk science and smoking bans.

The following call, which we wholeheartedly support, is a part of his website translated into English.

Smokers of all countries, unite!

Millions of our people are being deprived of fundamental rights, on a worldwide scale there are hundreds of millions. They are refused the right to enjoy tobacco in public buildings, transportation, and places like restaurants, pubs, and bars. So their basic right to social interactions expressing their own personalities and choices is drastically restricted. This will certainly not stand up to judicial review by supreme and constitutional courts.

This violation of basic human rights is justified by the claim that a higher ranking value is at stake, the health of nonsmokers. The environmental air, it is said, is polluted by tobacco emissions which, involuntarily (“passively”) inhaled by nonsmokers, will cause lethal diseases.

This claim, invented in the USA some 30 years ago, has been examined ever and again. Most of the studies it is based on, however, are nothing more than statistical estimates. The results, inconsistent and highly debated among scientists, are not able to demonstrate causal evidence for the alleged health dangers of environmental tobacco smoke. Activists of public health, however, vehemently maintain the contrary and seek to abolish a basic human right just because of scientifically questionable speculations. To control an unproven hypothetical risk they fight against real freedom.

The smoking bans offend against a fundamental principle of legislation: the principle of appropriateness.
(1) Smoking bans are not a suitable means for establishing an additional protection of health. If environmental tobacco smoke really does not harm people’s health, smoking bans are not only unsuitable, but do not make any sense at all.
(2) Smoking bans are not required. Even if they may be suitable to protect a minority of sensitive nonsmokers against annoyance, there are measures more moderate that would obtain this protection goal. In public places, separated nonsmoker and smoker areas may be set up, so that everybody has a free choice. This had been successful in railway trains for years, until total smoking bans now are introduced that clearly have no basis at all.
(3) The disadvantages of general smoking bans are out of proportion to very questionable benefits. Millions of people have their participation in public sociability and mobility strongly interfered with. In work places, long distance trains, hospitals and retirement homes they are forced to painfully refrain from enjoyment. Finally tens of thousands of restaurant and bar owners are threatened with the loss of their business, and traditional pub and tobacco culture is being destroyed.

The managers of airlines, transport services and public buildings misuse the baseless fear of tobacco smoke as a cover-up for saving money on cleaning and ventilation through smoking bans. Yet the smokers enrich public finances through enormous sums of tobacco taxes. The basic right to full personality and social development is to be sacrificed on the altar of misplaced stinginess.

Managers and organization persons belong to the so-called ”higher circles”, and among those people smoking has come out of fashion. The “higher circles”, however, exercise the power in society. What they on their part, more or less voluntarily, are refraining from, they try to forbid others: the hairdressers and the lorry drivers, the office employees and the workmen, the shop assistants and the labourers, in a word, the “ordinary people”, who cannot stand up on their own.

The fight against smokers is a novel class struggle, a class struggle from the top. Health fanatics and managers form an alliance against the smoking third of mankind to deprive them of freedom and life enjoyment. Just as in former times the labour movement had to fight for their rights by forming powerful organizations, nowadays the smoking people have to resist growing suppression attempts. Smokers of all countries, unite!

Guenter Ropohl (Professor Emeritus of General Technology at the University of Frankfurt on Main, Germany)