The war on smoking was one of the most successful public health campaigns of all time. Its success in reducing catastrophic levels of smoking-related cancers is undoubted. But, in many ways, it was a Pyrrhic victory. That’s because, in a long-reaching, debilitating turn for science, medical scientists became activists.
That’s when the rot began. For an activist, a problem solved is an existential crisis.
Having won the important battles, an activist faces two choices: close up shop and get another job. Say goodbye to the attention and funding they’ve become accustomed to and find something else to do.
Or, they can keep on fighting against a foe that has all but ceased to exist. Overreach becomes the rule. More and more ‘problems’, real or imagined, are dredged up to keep the activism going. The revolution becomes a crushing totalitarianism, complete with lying propaganda.
I stopped giving money to Cancer Research UK (CRUK) years ago when it became obvious that they were prepared to abuse people’s trust in their brand by using dodgy claims to lobby for stupid policies. I suppose you have to expect activists to gild the lily somewhat, but there’s gilding and there’s gaslighting.
Having learned nothing from the attempted prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and the ongoing prohibition of other drugs, the ‘public health’ lobby has set its sights on completely banning tobacco. The public aren’t falling for it, either: just six per cent of the UK public support such a ban.
So, like all authoritarians, the first resort is lies.
CRUK announced on Tuesday that “the number of cancer cases caused by smoking in the UK has reached an all-time high”.
Does anybody in their right mind find this remotely believable? Smoking rates in the UK peaked at around 60 per cent in the 1950s. By 1990, they had halved to 30 per cent. They have since more than halved again, to 13 per cent. It takes a while to develop cancer, of course, but it doesn’t take 70 years. If it did, you might as well smoke.
If the lag time between smoking and smoking-related cancer was equal to or more than the median lifespan, there would be no point in quitting. You’d die of natural causes before the cancer got you.
No one believes such obvious bullshit.
In truth, epidemiological studies find that lung cancer mortality (the most common smoking-related cancer) lags about 20–30 years behind smoking rates. If smoking peaked in the 1950s, you’d expect related cancers to start dropping around the 1980s. Which is exactly what we find.
So how does CRUK try to explain away such embarrassing facts?
Promoting this ludicrous factoid on the Today programme was a woman from CRUK who claimed that the counterintuitive rise in smoking-related cancers can be explained by the fact that the population has grown. There are, she said, still 6.4 million smokers in the UK.
Which is still far fewer than there used to be: 10 million in the 1990s, 20 million in the early ’70s. So, that claim is simply bullshit piled on bullshit.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, CRUK have so far refused to release their research.
According to CRUK, there are 16 types of cancer that are “smoking-related” (they added breast cancer to the list on Tuesday for good measure). CRUK used to say that one in three of us would get cancer at some point in our lives. These days, they say the figure is one in two. It is one of the paradoxes of public health that as people lead healthier lives they become more likely to get cancer. That is because age is the biggest risk factor for most cancers.The Critic
So, yes, more people will be developing cancer as there are more people living longer than ever before. They just won’t be getting “smoking-related cancers” – because most of them have never smoked.
So, it’s not like the boffins at CRUK will have to find honest work any time soon. The mystery is why they prostitute themselves out so assiduously, when we can all see what they’re up to.
