The next time you read the propaganda of Health Canada about the ‘reduction’ of the number of smokers thanks to the fraudulent ‘health campaigns’ promoted by the M. of H., think twice before believing them.
The cigarette black market is simply going wild in Canada, as this article from the Globe and Mail demonstrates. That means that all those smokers do not buy legal cigarettes, thus they cannot be counted. Believe it or not, the shysters of Health Canada use that to “demonstrate” that their “denormalization” programs and their propaganda on the effects of smoking on health work on the presumed “weak minds” of Canadian smokers!
At this point it may be useful to explore another tobacco control fraud in the constellation of lies of the antismoking movement, because it is closely related to the issue of the article.
How do you know how many smokers there are in a country? You take the known, total number of LEGAL cigarettes sold or produced in the country and divide it by an ASSUMPTION, so that the resulting product is an assumption with a true component in it, which makes it more believable. Assumptions are the secret ingredient of all and every number you see in the propaganda against smoking. For example, you assume that each smoker smokes 20 cigarettes a day. If one billion cigarettes a day are sold in the US, based on that assumption you can say that there are 50 million smokers.
If you are an anti in need of grants for your next Mercedes (oh – sorry – we meant the next good deed for "public health"), you must say that smoking is going up to push the panic button and get the grants. Simply by changing the base assumption to say 19 cigs a day, the smokers "become" 52.6 million, and you can claim a 5% increase due to evil "tobacco advertisement" – although if you are a fine con man you use a smaller percentage to be even more credible.
Conversely, if you have to show that your previous BS campaign was successful to get the next Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, then a new, slight adjustment of the assumption will help you a lot, and you can imagine that each smoker smokes 20.5 cigs/day, which brings down the "number" of smokers to 48.8 million: in that case you can claim that your campaign has reduced smoking by 2.5% – or "saved" 1.2 million lives from "death"!
…But the number of daily cigarettes sold is still one billion, isn’t it?…
Now, where and when did the general public ever get to check:
What is the base assumption?
What is the methodology actually used?
Whether the assumption is being (or has been) changed?
Did the “health authorities” or other antismoking crooks ever bother to make public the methodology used to “calculate” the number of smokers? Certainly not. Does anybody have to wonder why?
It turns out that the number of cigarettes produced is, therefore, the only reliable indicator for smoking in general going up or down. However, even in that case:
Do all manufacturers cooperate by reporting accurate numbers?
Are all data from manufacturers in, and verifiable?
Are all data concerning legal import of cigarettes verifiable and available?
Lastly, there are incommensurable variables such as:
Contraband.
Legal intestate/inter-provincial commerce.
Pipes and cigars, as many smokers smoke a combination of those with cigarettes – and that combination is never a constant, although this variable is small.
Roll your own – a rapidly growing market. RYO cigarettes may contain far more or far less tobacco than a standard cigarette.
Internet purchases.
Very much like smoking-and-cancer, there are confounders serious enough to make the measure very difficult – if not impossible; while we can see the total effect of the phenomenon (number of cancers, or cigarettes produced) we cannot track back to the specifics (what caused the cancers or the change in the number of smokers), and we have no way to measure unknowns such as contraband.
That, of course, opens the doors to all kind of "creative interpretations" for propaganda purposes; but since the number of smokers is now almost incompressible (all the gullible ones have quit already), it follows that the success or failure of a campaing can be measured only by small variations – those very small variations that are not quantifiable in the first place because of those variables that cannot be measured! But many still naively gobble up the "interpretations" because spoken by “authority”, without observing that the "authority" is self-referencing, so the public does not get to know the fraudulent methodology at the basis of assertions that “leave no doubt”.
No one can know the actual number of smokers, not even the shysters of antitobacco. On the other hand, Big Tobacco cannot be trusted as it is a circumspect and demonized industry. No one can know the number of smugglers in large federations such as United States and Canada, due to interstate legal and illegal commerce. This article confirms not only the accuracy of what stated above, but also and foremost the stupidity of “tobacco control”, that creates real problems in exchange for the fake solution of fake ones.
So, what have we got?… closet smokers and impressions. Happy Indian smoking!
A trunkload of cigarettes. For one they get
thousands go through.
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