This Article was written in 1995, and first published in ‘Cigar World’ the trade magazine of Hunters & Frankau Ltd.
It is reproduced by kind permission

The Case For Tobacco

Conscious that the Press has not been too kind to tobacco recently, Cigar World invited one of the country's leading journalists and independent thinkers, Lord 'Woodrow' Wyatt of Weeford, to pen his views on the subject

The anti-smoking campaign has no scientific basis and is mob driven.

The emotions aroused are akin to those which fuelled anti-bomb marches, sit-ins at Aldermaston, demonstrations against the USA in Vietnam, poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square, attacks on Jews as enemies of the state in Nazi Germany and other similar irrational mob behaviour.

I was in the Commons in the 1945 Parliament. In those days a proper breakfast was served in the members Dining Room during all night sittings.

I would watch Winston Churchill, in opposition, ending a substantial meal; in one hand a glass of whisky, in the other a large cigar intermittently puffed joyously.

At a distant table might be Clement Attlee, pipe in fullsmoke. Then no fanatics warned them against damaging their own or others' health. Not that they would have taken any notice; Churchill died at 91 and Attlee at 84.

In 1901 males on average could hope to live till 45½ and females till 49.

By 1991 the average life expectancy for men had risen to 73.2 and to 78.6 for women.

Those 90 years must have been the most intense period of smoking in history, as women increasingly lit cigarettes in public and growing prosperity led to volume smoking throughout the population

SMOKING AIDS LONGEVITY

Play statistics the same way anti-smokers do and you could say this proves persistent smoking aids longevity.

Very probably it does. Smoking is a stimulant to the nervous system intellectually as well as emotionally. It offers breaks and renewal of energy at work.

Smokers are less prone to intestinal cancer, Parkinson's disease, heart failure and diabetes.

Miners and asbestos workers who smoke get lung cancer less than those who don't. Nine out of ten smokers never get lung cancer but many non- smokers do.

Tobacco smoke is visible and it smells, making badly ventilated rooms stuffy.

Anti-smoking fanatics, encouraged by trendy doctors armed with no scientific evidence worth the name, claim they are thus victims of passive smoking.

Serious studies show that non-smokers need to be surrounded by smokers in a confined space for many days before achieving the effect of smoking one cigarette.

Fanatical anti-smoking USA Surgeon Generals have had a murky part in the debate.

One, ignoring the Framingham study which showed beyond doubt that there was no relationship between heart disease and smoking, claimed exactly the opposite.

The Japanese, the world's fifth biggest smokers, have the longest life expectancy in the world and a very low rate of lung cancer and respiratory diseases.

Greece, the heaviest cigarette smoking nation in the world, has the longest life expectancy in Europe plus a very low rate of cancer and of respiratory diseases.

FAMOUS STUDY THAT STARTED PANIC

Sir Richard Doll & Hill's famous study which started the panic, has been described as used in a famous epidemiologic exercise "where (it) serves as (an) example(s) of what can go wrong" (Professor Vandenbrouche, Leiden, American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol.135, No.5, p.427). The Doll study has been very severely criticised by eminent scientists.

Far more important as causes of unpleasant diseases like lung cancer and so forth are things like the noxious fumes coming out of motor vehicles, factory chimneys, etc.

Also owners of buildings, particularly hospitals, have been among the worst offenders in not keeping their air conditioning or ventilation systems in good order and clear of bacteria which have no smell.

Many who went into hospital with some comparatively not serious complaint have been wheeled out in their coffins having got legionaires disease through utter carelessness.

ANALYSIS THAT IS EXTREMELY FLIAWED

Sir Richard Doll's analysis, taken from the alleged experience of selected doctors, is extremely flawed.

It doesn't say how much these doctors smoked, how far down the cigarettes they smoked, whether they continually relighted them or not, whether they inhaled or not, whether the alleged victim would have died of something else or got lung cancer anyway.

This disease mainly afflicts people over 60. When the expectation of life was much shorter they would already have been dead of something else. You have to die of something.

The medical profession, en mass, usually wrong about everything, has taken no interest in recent reports of a genetic link in cancer. This was put forward in the fifties by Fisher, and by others, notably Eysenck, since.

A MORE PROFITABLE LINE OF RESEARCH

It could be said that the decision to blame lung cancer, and much else, on smoking may have held up what seems to be a more profitable line of research.

There is also the virus theory, as successfully demonstrated by veterinarians who vaccinate chickens and cats against cancer.

The same happened with tuberculosis. The infectious link was recognised by individuals at least two centuries before the medical establishment came into line.

The public will be furious if it were proved that they, like the chickens, could have been immunised against cancer since 1975 if the medical profession had not committed itself so passionately to anti-smoking policies.

Carry on smoking, especially cigars, and have no guilty conscience.

It is conceivable, though not proven, that smoking may accelerate the progress of cancer or heart diseases if continued, but it can never have caused them.

Matters of science cannot be decided by majority vote. Remember Galileo. The anti-smoking mob is being rumbled and eventually sanity will return.