Dry ice and CGI smoke are dangerous!!!!one

The latest in the UK Government's nanny-statism, this time pushing the myth of damaging non-first-hand smoke.

[Dry ice flowing over a sofa]

[Dry ice flowing over net curtains]

[Dry ice flowing over some child's bricks on the floor]

[CGI smoke wafting all over the room with a sleeping child in a baby seat]

[Closeup of child's feet, then hands, then feet.]

[Mum smoking by window while stood in the room]

Over 80% of cigarette smoke is invisible,[1]

[Mum now outside smoking][2]

so no matter how

[Mum back inside the room][2]

careful you are, they still breathe in the harmful poisons.

[Room without dry ice and CGI smoke showing the child again.]

If you could see what's really there, you wouldn't smoke.

Text invisible to 63818 for a Smokefree Kit.

[1] 80% of *smoke* is invisible? I'm sure it isn't.

[2] And I thought the continuity editors had it hard during films lasting 120 minutes or more - I can only imagine how hard it must be when you're doing a 30 second advert.

Quite why the government is persisting in stating that second-hand smoke is apparently, given the rhetoric, even more damaging to others than the first-hand smoke is to the smoker, despite there being little to no scientific evidence of said harm, isn't really a mystery.

We even have the Chief Medical Officer attributing middle ear infections (wot?), lung infections, asthma and 40 cot deaths per year to passive smoking and pushing for a ban on smoking in cars.

While smoke (or any other particulate matter in the air) may start an asthmatic off, I seriously doubt (nor can find any evidence of) passive smoking caused the asthma to start with.

Cot deaths, aka Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, is the name attributed to the death of a baby where the reasons are unknown. If 40 cot deaths were actually caused by passive smoking then they wouldn't be called 'cot deaths.'

And the money spent on this advert is on top of the ~£.5 million pounds of tax-payers money currently being spent by an off-shoot of the UK government in the South West of England to lobby other parts of the government for plain packaging while the government is in the middle of a 'consultation' over said packaging.

Smoking is no longer a health condition...

Via everyone's favourite toothless advertising regulator:

They added that as smoking was not a health condition, being asked if you were a smoker was, therefore, not a health question.
[...]
The ASA noted that Asda had followed the BMA and ABI guidelines in considering smoking to be a lifestyle choice

The ASA case in question revolves around whether Asda, in advertising life insurance with "no health questions asked" can get away with asking potential clients if they smoke or not.

Here in the real world, where smokers are regularly discriminated against on the basis of not only their own health (NHS costs,) but others (second hand and the fabled third hand smoke) it's hard to see how "do you smoke" cannot be construed as a health question.

One does, however, wonder what other "lifestyle choice" questions the nice people at Asda also ask, since the adjudication is strangely quiet.

• Have you had sex with a man, or anyone who's had sex with a man, in the past 60 years?
• Have you ever consumed excess ethanol?
• Do you religiously eat your five-a-day?
• Do you regularly use sun factor 5,000 when going outdoors in daylight?
• Do you own, or have you ever owned, a mobile phone?

I'm sure the list is, if not endless, quite large.

Well at least we now know you can tell your doctor to mind his own business when he asks how many you smoke, since it has no bearing on your health whatsoever; it's simply a lifestyle choice.