Dr. Michael Siegel is worried. He’s concerned that “the anti-smoking movement is increasingly becoming more extreme” and “getting out of control.” And he’s started an organization to counteract it.
Due to the new law of anti-smoking many people have been switching to the products that are being sell at
Don’t think that Siegel is pro-smoking. He’s not. According to his website, the Boston resident has “published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on the health effects of secondhand smoke” and that his articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and other prestigious publications. No, it’s precisely because he’s anti-smoking that he’s worried about misrepresentations of science by anti-smoking organizations. He’s afraid that the public will not take anti-smoking campaigns seriously if organizations keep exaggerating health risks and playing to people’s emotions.
Thus, he has founded The Center for Public Accountability in Tobacco Control. He says he “became disillusioned by the direction in which the anti-smoking movement is going.”
The Center for Public Accountability in Tobacco Control is dedicated to ensuring the ethical and honest practice of tobacco control by anti-smoking organizations in the U.S. It aims to help ensure that efforts to reduce tobacco-related morbidity and mortality are sustainable by a movement that can remain credible and effective into the future. Its premise is that the anti-smoking movement is increasingly becoming more extreme, getting out of control, going too far in its agenda, and losing its solid public health basis. The tactics being used by many anti-smoking organizations have become questionable, including misleading and deceiving the public, improperly attacking individuals, and improperly using kids to promote a political agenda. The agenda itself has become less and less public health-based; it now include [sic] efforts to deny employment to smokers, treat smoking parents as child abusers, and ignore basic issues of individual privacy and autonomy to coerce smokers into adopting healthier behavior.
In order to restore the movement, the Center for Public Accountability in Tobacco Control hopes to highlight the tactics currently being used, bringing these tactics to public attention in order to hold public health groups accountable to their primary constituency: the public.
If you visit his site, you’ll see example after example of inaccurate health claims and misleading statements published by anti-smoking groups. In particular, he takes on statements made by Americans for Non-Smokers’ Rights (ANR) and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, two organizations that are heavily relied upon by Smoke-Free Illinois advocates.
Siegel thinks the health risks are compelling enough without exaggeration, but apparently the public didn’t, which is why these other organizations felt the need to resort to hysterical rhetoric and heavy-handed tactics. It’s good to see an honest physician speak out against such abuses.
If I want to smoke it should be my right as an American citizen.
Why not get at the gangs who kill many more people than us smokers who are old enough to choose to smoke.
All these people who complain allot of them are drunks, junkies and some worse.
This country is going no better than Nazi Germany.
It’s a disgrace to all the soldiers dying in the different countries as they say for ‘Our Freedoms”. Hell we don’t have freedoms no more
Can’t afford to lose those tobacco taxes to subsidize those tobacco farmers….