Reversal of smoking ban criticised as ‘shameful’ for lacking evidence

New Zealand is repealing the world’s first smoking ban passed under former prime minister Jacinda Arden’s government to pave the way for a smoke-free generation amid backlash from researchers and campaigners over its risk to Indigenous people.

The new coalition government led by prime minister Christopher Luxon confirmed the repeal will happen on Tuesday, delivering on one of the actions of his coalition’s ambitious 100-day plan.

The government repeal will be put before parliament as a matter of urgency, enabling it to scrap the law without seeking public comment, in line with previously announced plans.

  • @Dasus
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    19 months ago

    You have to understand that there is a huge anti-smoking bias in top-level discussions.

    I can’t get over how hilarious you saying this is.

    Like, quite literally, you’re a textbook case of trying to copy 1950’s tobacco company rhetoric.

    So probably you’re doing it on accident, because you’ve actually bought into it, which is hilarious.

    So here’s something to enlighten you on the subject

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/

    Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics

    Abstract

    Confronted by compelling peer-reviewed scientific evidence of the harms of smoking, the tobacco industry, beginning in the 1950s, used sophisticated public relations approaches to undermine and distort the emerging science.

    The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creation of industry–academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harms of smoking.

    A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normative science. Claims of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibility for industrially produced health risks.

    ANY SYSTEMATIC INVESTIGATION of the modern relationship of medicine and science to industry must consider what has become the epiphenomenal case of the tobacco industry as it confronted new medical knowledge about the risk of cigarette smoking in the mid-20th century. This, of course, is not to argue that the approach and strategy undertaken by big tobacco are necessarily typical of conventional industry–science relationships. But the steps the industry took as it fashioned a new relationship with the scientific enterprise have become a powerful and influential model for the exertion of commercial interests within science and medicine since that time…

    Well, “rwad it yourself”, no point in me pastingthe whole thing.