How a climate-denial editorial might read if the same thinking were applied to smoking

We at this publication, along with cool-headed thinkers all over the world, welcome a new poll which proves that the public are rejecting the alarmist nonsense that is touted about smoking.

New research shows that up to one in four smokers believe the health impact of cigarettes has been exaggerated. We agree and we applaud them, though we wish the number were far higher.

For fifty years now, we have been told that smoking causes everything from cancer to heart disease to gangrene. If there were any credibility to these warnings, surely market forces would have stamped out cigarettes long ago without any involvement from the Nanny State.

Fact: Cancer does not cause heart disease. Fact: Heart disease does not cause cancer. Fact: Gangrene doesn’t cause cancer or vice versa.

Yet these so-called “health experts” expect us to believe that smoking causes all of them. I am not a doctor but this just doesn’t add up. Next they’ll be telling us smoking is to blame for broken arms, short-sightedness and hangnail too.

We suspect that whenever a “doctor” finds a condition he can’t explain, he just blames smoking as an easy scapegoat.

I’d like to introduce some of these so-called “doctors” to my great grandfather who started smoking a pipe when he was seven and died a mere ninety years later.* Or to our board member who is in her 80s and smokes every day.* Those poor doctors would feel pretty foolish then.

No-one can conclusively prove that any smoker who happened to develop cancer wouldn’t have gotten it anyway. You will never hear that from the cancerist lobby.

We are not suggesting that smoking is good for you. We are no less concerned about public health than others about it. However, any fair-minded person should be concerned about the exaggerations over smoking. Such alarmism by cancerists has the potential for a devastating impact on jobs, from farms to manufacturing to retailing. So we lose jobs and increase the power of the medical lobby as it sells us snake oil in the form of “nicotine replacement.”

We also wonder what the cancerists have against our beloved Aussie smoko. Do they want to abolish break times altogether? One has to wonder if the cancerist lobby is socialism masquerading as health care.
  
 
*Actual examples