Freedom to Choose Launch New Forum

By Colin Grainger

It gives me very great pleasure to announce the launch of our new forum which can be found here: www.freedom2choose.info/forum

The old forum, known to many as The Big Debate, was due to expire and we had trouble contacting the site owner so we had to make arrangements to move house. It was a fantastic opportunity to start afresh, build a new, more organised forum that members could navigate with ease, quickly find information on the fraud surrounding second hand smoke, and keep up with the daily news from our (one-sided) press. At the time of writing we have around 750 members, but, to be honest, we could do with a few more. Around 14 million would be nice. 30 million would be better.

Far too many of you good people, smokers, and tolerant non-smokers alike, have been hoodwinked. For almost five decades the anti-smoker zealots have ruled the roost. We have had enough. We say, “No more. We are fighting back”. We caved in when they “just” wanted flights of less than two hours to be smoke-free. We caved in when they wanted cinemas to be smoke-free. We caved in when they wanted trains to be smoke-free. We caved in when they wanted buses to be smoke-free. We caved in when they wanted offices and almost all work places to be smoke-free. And why not? We are nice people. We are friendly people. We are laid back people. We were happy to compromise with their reasonable demands.

Then they came for our pubs.
Then our clubs.
Then our restaurants.
And our bingo halls, our taxi’s and our cafe’s.
Now they want our cars. Now they want our football stadia. Now they want our parks. Now they want our beaches. Now they want our homes.

Being reasonable, being nice, being friendly, was our undoing. We caved in once too often and they took advantage. They lied to our government, and in turn, our government lied to us. Successive polls showed that 67% of people wanted restrictions, not an outright ban. HMG ignored the polls. They listened instead to the poison being whispered into their ears by liars who were paid to do the whispering by pharmaceutical companies. Incidentally, pharmaceutical companies are the only entity to gain from a smoker ban. Check their stocks. Sales of useless nicotine replacement therapy products rose by 285% in the two months following the ban. (For interest, these products have a documented long-term failure rate of 94%). The government didn’t even give us a fair hearing. They debated the smoker ban for less than three hours. Three hours! They debated the Iraq War for thirty hours. They debated the fox hunting ban for over four hundred hours. When asked, and believe me, we have asked plenty of them, your average MP has absolutely no idea what any of the junk science means. They don’t know that there has never been a single recorded death due to second hand smoke. They don’t know that the two biggest studies in the world have declared second hand smoke to be grossly exaggerated. They don’t know that of 75 original studies 51 say that there is “no statistically significant risk from second hand smoke”, and that the remaining 24 say that there is “a protective effect”. They certainly don’t know that 74 of these 75 studies were bought and paid for by the (so called) good guys. Only one was sponsored by a tobacco company. A shocking dereliction of duty, in my humble opinion. They leapt on a band wagon and they had absolutely no idea why, or what harm it would do to business, and to the social fabric of this nation. It was simply another law to add to the 3,000 they had enacted during ten years of Labour government. Just one more control mechanism. If you think for even one moment that your government would not lie to you, I would say, “Think Iraq. Think WMD”.

At this point you may be asking yourself what you can do about it. You can come and join us at the Freedom to Choose forum. Once there, you will be able to study the science we have amassed, at your leisure. You can attend protest marches. You can attend peaceful demonstrations. You can assist with our fundraising efforts. You can learn the email (or postal) address of every one of those bone idle MP’s who couldn’t be bothered to look at the science before hurling 14 million smokers and their friends out on the streets. You can sign our petition. You can get involved. You can DO something. You can fight back! You can help us to end or amend the ban.

Help us to restore choice. Help us to get our senior citizens back inside, where they belong. Help us to campaign for Regulated Indoor Air Quality Standards. Help us to prevent more kids from smoking by getting smokers back inside. Where they belong. We are human beings. We do not deserve this treatment. It is barbaric. We will not compromise on this. In short, we have had enough. The War on Smokers will end. We will make it so.

I look forward to welcoming you to the Freedom to Choose Forum.

Colin Grainger
Chairman
Freedom to Choose