There is no logic to your argument.

Plain Paper packaging in no way removes the right of people to make their own health choices. It simply makes it much harder for the purveyors of a product known to cause death a lot harder.

Mark, care to comment?

According to the Tobacco Control Industry, The Children™ are attracted by the “glitzy” cigarette packaging, risking them becoming one of those “perverse, terrible” smokers. So, the cigarette packs must be hidden from display, lest The Children™ become overwhelmed with the desire to smoke. Now the TCI wants to remove all the “seductive, tempting colours” on the packs to further “save” The children™ – plain packaging draped with medical pornography.

Yet here we have The Children™ now smoking [more than cigarettes] a substance (marijuana) that isn’t on retail display, doesn’t come in glitzy packs (or packs at all) – I believe it comes in a small ball of [probably used] plastic cling-wrap, and ….dare I say it…. is illegal for children and adults alike.

And The Children™ think marijuana is safer than tobacco. Given decades of denormalization and inflammatory rhetoric surrounding tobacco, it wouldn’t be surprising if The Children™ thought that heroin and cocaine…… or even drain cleaner and sulfuric acid, or a petrol and broken glass cocktail (avec little umbrella)…. were safer than tobacco (and cheaper?).

Three cheers for the Tobacco Control “unintelligentsia”….. why….. let’s even give them an award.

<b>CDC: More US teens smoke marijuana than cigarettes</b>
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/06/08/cdc-more-us-teens-smoke-marijuana-than-cigarettes/print

A raw nerve, Mark? Ease up or you’ll blow an antismoking gasket :)

That’s right, Mark. It’s all just tobacco industry propaganda. Of course it is; how could I have been so blind! Only the moralistic proclamations of medicos and the Tobacco Control Industry are “truth”……. apparently. Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not interested in the tobacco industry. You can trash it all you want. My interest is in the damage that “society-fixer” fanatics/zealots can do in their social-engineering ventures.

So, Mark, let’s get serious for a moment. You say that the information is just “junk” from Fox News. Bad news. The story was picked up by numerous newspapers in multiple countries. And more bad news. It’s referring to a finding in the Centers for Disease Control “National Youth Risk Behavior Survey” (released June 8, 2012) which can be found here:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ss/ss6104.pdf

Mark, I take it that a researcher you’re not.

Care to comment in a more sane manner now? What’s attracting the children to marijuana? Is it the bland, crimpled, much-handled cling wrap?

Raw nerve? LOL. No, I just think you're silly

“I just think you're silly”

Careful, Mark. You just might be wrong…… again :)

Dear Rosemary, thank you for your reply. At least you didn’t accuse me of being a tobacco industry shill. You sound like a caring person. But I doubt that you’re familiar with the considerable history of anti-smoking/tobacco or dangerous zealotry. Many of the great catastrophes have been pre-fixed as attempts to “save lives” or “save the world”. Consider eugenics of early last century – which was physician-led, by the way, and was also anti-tobacco/alcohol. It was predicated on the promise that it was going to eradicate crime, poverty, and disease. It had wonderful-sounding names for organizations such as the “Human Betterment Foundation”. It was embraced/funded by the mega-wealthy and the “educated” classes. It was [erroneously] promoted as scholarly and scientific and had the ear of the legislature. Yet what it essentially did in America and then even worse in Germany was to accentuate already festering racism, bigotry, supremacism, discord, enmity, and social division. It even enabled “the mob” in America. An adage comes to mind: The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions.

Rosemary, I’m not sure how familiar you are with the current antismoking crusade over the last three decades. There’s plenty of information on it now, and it doesn’t look good. The current lot of fanatics are just like their fanatical predecessors, spouting much of the same rhetoric. They even take the same contorted paths. Just like their predecessors, the current crop will lie and manipulate information and people – particularly law-makers, to advance the “agenda”. If you’d like some examples, I’ve got plenty for you. And these fanatics are the ones that promote themselves as the “righteous ones” battling the “evil” tobacco industry. That sort of rhetoric is straight out of the anti-tobacco of America of a century ago.

Rose: “I don't know any public health people who receive 'obscene amounts of funding'.”

Rose, I’m not as familiar with Australia which is more guarded about funding sources, but look at the article –
“It is part of a comprehensive approach that includes $100m for media campaigns, a ban on internet tobacco promotion, additional funding for quitlines and cessation supports, increased funding to states and territories for their programs, A$125m for programs on Indigenous smoking, including the Tackling Indigenous Smoking initiative, the 2010 budget’s 25% increase in tobacco excise, the 2012 reduction in tobacco duty-free allowances, increased penalties for tobacco smuggling and financial support for international action on smoking.”

That’s $225,000,000 there. Where is it going? Rose, maybe you’re not in the payment network :) Then there’s the loads of money being made from essentially useless nicotine replacement products by pharmaceutical companies. And I would think there’s also pharmaceutical funding of at least some activists/organizations because they tend to promote the NRT.

Rose: “It's hard to believe anyone is as bitter as you sound.”

Rosemary, you may be reading too much into it. I’m more bemused that this shameless self-promotion is still occurring without question.

But while you’re here, Rosemary, tell me if you see anything wrong with the following “developments”:

Here’s a brief history of the antismoking madness over the last few decades.

The first demand for a smoking ban was in the late-1980s concerning short-haul flights in the USA of less than 2 hours. At the time, the antismokers were asked if this was a “slippery slope” – where would it end? They ridiculed anyone suggesting such because this ban was ALL that they were after.
Then they ONLY wanted smoking bans on all flights.
Then the antismokers ONLY wanted nonsmoking sections in restaurants, bars, etc., and ensuring that this was ALL they wanted.
Then the antismokers ONLY wanted complete bans indoors. That was all they wanted. At the time, no-one was complaining about having to “endure” wisps of smoke outdoors.
While they pursued indoor bans, the antismokers were happy for smokers to be exiled to the outdoors. Having bulldozed their way into indoor bans, the antismokers then went to work on the outdoors, now declaring that momentary exposure to remnants of smoke in doorways or a whiff outdoors was a “hazard”, more than poor, innocent nonsmokers should have to “endure”.
Then they ONLY wanted bans within 10 feet of entrance ways.
Then they ONLY wanted bans within 20 feet of entrance ways.
Then they ONLY wanted bans in entire outdoor dining areas.
Then they ONLY wanted bans for entire university and hospital campuses and parks and beaches.
Then they ONLY wanted bans for apartment balconies.
Then they ONLY wanted bans for entire apartment (including individual apartments) complexes.

On top of all of this, there are now instances, particularly in the USA, where smokers are denied employment, denied housing (even the elderly), and denied medical treatment. Smokers in the UK are denied fostering/adoption. Involuntary mental patients are restrained physically or chemically (sedation) rather than allow them to have a cigarette – even outside.

At each point there was a crazed insistence that there was no more to come while they were actually planning the next ban and the brainwashing required to push it. There has been incessant (pathological) lying and deception. Many medically-aligned groups have been committed to antismoking – their smokefree “utopia” – since the 1960s. They have prostituted their medical authority and integrity to chase ideology. All of it is working to a tobacco-extermination plan run by the WHO and that most nations are now signed-up to (Framework Convention on Tobacco Control).
We can see the pattern here. The concocted SHS “danger” concerned a minute statistical risk of entirely questionable causal basis for LIFELONG (30, 40, 50, 60 years) exposure to SHS from spousal smoking. Around 99.9+% of those exposed to SHS over a lifetime have NO elevated statistical risk of disease. Yet with the propaganda promoting the idea that SHS is bio-weapon-like, unlike anything else on earth, we now have many delicate and dainty nonsmokers “running the gauntlet” of smokers at entranceways, hand cupped over mouth, terrified that they might inhale a whiff. This is the promotion of mental dysfunction (e.g., anxiety reactions, hypochondria, somatization). And the irrationally terrified then demand “protection”. It is fully to be expected as a result of incessant inflammatory propaganda. And this is typically what happens when the medically-aligned Public Health goes on its social-engineering, deranged ideological crusades. The fanatics will keep pushing as far as society allows them.

This has all happened in just 20 years. If it was mentioned 20 years ago, or even 10 or 5 years ago, that smokers would be denied employment and housing and smoking bans in parks and beaches, it would have been laughed at as “crazed thinking”. Yet here we are. It’s all happened before and it has all been intentional, planned decades ago. We just don’t learn or we’re going to have to learn the very hard way because it has to do with far, far more than just smoking.