We shall start today with a quote from NYC Councillor James Gennaro, taken from an interview in which he sought to justify a ban on using an e-cig in public spaces in NYC. It’s lengthy but worth reading through in its entirety.
Thinking back to the original smoking ban you referred to, a lot of that was driven by employees of bars, employees of restaurants saying we do not want to be subjected to the smoke. are they now saying the same thing about these vapors? not so much. I mean, when we did the first bill, which based on — which had to do with indoor spaces, it was all based on that.
Then we did more measures to take them out of public spaces, to take them out of outdoor spaces like parks and beaches. And so what we’re doing — and those second set of measures were more about sociology and denormalizing than they were sort of hard medical science. We thought it was important to make sure that smoking was completely denormalized.
Gennaro was speaking in an interview on CNBC, and you can watch James’ valiant but largely unsuccessful efforts to group words into coherent sentences here if you’re of a mind to.
But I didn’t come here today to denigrate the good councillor’s public speaking prowess. Because Gennaro has now admitted in public something that we have known all along.
Denormalization has absolutely nothing to do with public health.
So what is it if it’s not about health?
Let me just say that I’m going to discuss denormalization in the context of smoking, because let’s face it that’s the flawed and pointless model that tobacco control are using for e-cig denormalization.
Denormalization is a weasel word used by the people who would unleash it upon us in an attempt to conceal the moral, ethical and intellectual bankruptcy of their thinking and methods.
They are telling us that because they dislike something, they have a right to engineer a society in which it becomes unacceptable. As a quick thought exercise, take the phrase “denormalization of smoking” and replace “smoking” with a word or phrase of your choice from the following list;
Islam
Judaism
Homosexuality
Not being white and middle class
Women
Disability
Belgium
Those bobbly blue ones in a pack of licorice allsorts
It doesn’t matter which word you chose, or even if you supplied one of your own. The exercise serves to demonstrate that to remove something from the fabric of everyday life, based purely on the fact that you dislike it, is morally indefensible. Perhaps with this in mind, the people who dedicated lucrative careers to denormalizing smoking told us that their vicious personal crusade was based upon science.
Gennarro has rather generously admitted that in this instance, science was not a factor. This is all about social engineering; an effort to remodel their environment to suit their own ideals and to hell with anybody forced to share it with them. Like I said, morally indefensible.
Sweep it under the carpet, why don’t you?
Tobacco control often likes to point to the denormalization of smoking as a major factor in reduction of smoking prevalence. In fact denormalization is a mere bit-player in their pantomime of deception.
Smoking prevalance has fallen because the general population is better educated as to the consequences of using lit tobacco. Just because people aren’t seen smoking in public (and in fact they are, but that’s an inconvenient truth) doesn’t mean that other people don’t know that smoking exists.
To put it as delicately as I can, it would be highly unusual for me to step outside my house and find people engaging in bedroom activities in the street. But I know very well that people do those things. They just don’t do them, for the most part at any rate, in public spaces. Although your own experiences on that may vary widely from my own.
What this tells us is that you don’t control a behaviour merely by concealing it from view. By doing so, you may succeed in engineering an illusion of your own perfect little environment in which nobody does things you dislike. But rest assured, they are still doing them. And everybody knows very well indeed that they are doing them. Add “pointless exercise” to “morally indefensible”.
It’s more than just a waste of time…
This massive social engineering effort is not only ultimately pointless and immoral, it takes resources away from potentially useful activities that may genuinely improve public health.
Activities such as educating people on the effects of smoking. Activities such as ensuring that people understand the range of alternatives to lit tobacco available to them.
Alternatives such as the e-cigs that, with absolutely no justification, are seeing vast quantities of scarce and expensive resources ranged against them to denormalize them. Scarce and expensive resources that SHOULD be brought to bear upon genuinely improving public health and education.
Sadly though, denormalization is often seen as the jewel in a tobacco control crown. It is the very justification for its deceptive existence. It gives tobacco control something to point at, and proclaim loudly that smoking has been eradicated when what they really mean is that it has been moved from their sight.
It’s not about health at all. It’s about self congratulation, self justification and deception. Deception that provides a foundation from which they seek to achieve control of an environment they refuse to share in a fair and equal fashion.
