Can the Dutch Government Really Be Abandoning Smokers to Their Fate?

Let us hope they are. A wailing letter to the editors of the Lancet, signed by Stanton Glantz and other anti-tobacco fanatics, complains that the Dutch government “is all but closing down its tobacco control operations”. One can only hope this is the case and wish that other governments might follow suit. Apparently:

It would be a matter of no little shame to a country that prides itself on a compassionate and inclusive ethos if its government were to abandon smokers to their fate. Every death that ensued would not just be the responsibility of the tobacco industry, which continues to promote its lethal product, but also of every politician in the Dutch Government who chose to look the other way and allow it to happen.

Blood in their lungs and on their hands! At this rate of hyperbole, easing anti-smoking restrictions will soon be considered – by these goons anyway – akin to, I don’t know, failing to stop the Rwandan genocide or, more acutely in the Dutch case, the massacres at Srebrenica.

So what have the Dutch actually done? Chris Snowden explains:

Last year, it relaxed the Dutch smoking ban after a grass-roots campaign led by small bar owners. This year it decided that there are better uses for public money than funding anti-tobacco advocacy groups whose beliefs are fundamentally at odds with Dutch liberalism. STIVORO, the Dutch equivalent of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), received 2.7 million euros in 2011. By 2013, it will have to rely on donations from the public, which, in all likelihood, means it will have to close down. In addition, pharmaceutical nicotine products will no longer be handed out for free on the taxpayers’ shilling.

Just dreadful, you will agree. It remains a mystery, to me anyway, why it is considered appropriate to hand public money to pressure groups so that money can be spent lobbying the government to pursue policies favoured by said pressure groups. I’m relaxed about lobbying but think it a bit much for the industry to be funded by taxpayers. Let them compete for their money in the marketplace.

Sadly, if unsurprisingly, there seems little hope for a more sensible attitude towards tobacco issues in this country. The authors of this ghastly letter suggest that “The contrast with the UK could not be more stark”, applauding Andrew Lansley’s Big Nanny.

Meanwhile and at his own blog, Snowdon highlights two recent articles in the national press that should remind everyone that some slippery slopes are real and, damn it, the smokers were correct when we warned that the health goons would come after other pleasures once they’d dealt with tobacco. We told you so and we were right. First there’s Joan Smith in the Independent on Sunday arguing:

[I]t’s clear that many people find it hard to resist fatty food and cheap alcohol, which leaves government intervention the only serious option.

It’s worked with smoking, which used to be enjoyed by more than half the male population and has now dropped to a fifth. The success of campaigns against tobacco, from graphic health warnings on cigarette packets to high rates of tax and an advertising ban, provides an optimistic model of how self-destructive behaviour can be altered.

Emphasis added. She also says, bizarrely, that no-one has “the right” to “stuff their face with popcorn.” Secondly, there was some joyless authoritarian trading under the name of Dr Jonathan Waxman writing in the Times, making the case for government-decreed diets. Seriously:

The fight against tobacco shows that public health cannot be left to the individual*…

We need the same strength of public campaigning to prevent the coming cancer epidemic caused by obesity. Already a quarter of Britons are overweight — and the figure is rising…

So should the State dictate how many sausage butties I have for breakfast? Should the Health Minister be e-mailing me about my five-a-day broccoli and bananas? Yes and yes. 

All this is justified:

Because my “freedom” has repercussions, not just on my health but on the rest of us. Private lifestyle choices have a tremendous effect on the public purse.

As Snowdon observes, look how freedom is imprisoned by scare quotation marks. Sometimes, punctuation tells you all you need to know.

The right to your own body and to decide what to eat and drink ought not to be a left-right kind of divide. It does, however, sort the liberals from the authoritarians. And as we have seen – and as the control-freak lobby boasts – encouragement swiftly becomes coercion. Sadly, even enragingly, the British government (and its devolved subsidiaries) are happy to be on the side of the authoritarians.

*Actually, of course it can. But it isn’t.