Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon I must confess to feeling a bit ambivalent about Dr Nkosazana Zuma’s latest anti- smoking crusade. As a three-years-on ex-puffer, my wife assures me I have all but emptied my well of self- righteous reformist zeal. I now tend to let people get on with their tobacco undisturbed by pious sermonettes and narrowed eyes.
Unlike Chris “Scoutmaster” Gibbons of the SABC 3 television newsreading department, I don’t mind if someone occasionally lights up in my home. I sit near the window but that’s about all. Gibbons was interviewing Dr Z on telly last week and, in another of his frequent displays of manliness, the Sparks woggle-boss assured Dr Z that if anyone even suggests having a smoke in his house, he immediately hurls them into the garden. He then called her a nanny.
Dr Z adopted that look she favours whenever anyone questions her wisdom.
A mixture of bemused aggression and commiserative patronisation. It has served her well. She has unfolded the identical grim visage in her sturdy defences of Cuban doctors, the shattering of pharmaceutical drug monopolies, Virodene, the ejection of Olive Shisana, closing down hospitals, the dismantling of the Medicines Control Council, withholding funding from leading-edge medical research, conscription of newly qualified medical students and that trusty old standby, Sarafina II.
This is starting to resemble a television column and I am paid by another f ine publication, in the shape of the Financial Mail, to do those. I’ll go on without mentioning Noddy Gibbons again.
A doctor herself, Zuma will know the meaning of the term iatrogenic. It means a disease or affliction caused by the treatment. Like when the doctor cut s off your leg for an ingrown toenail he thought was a malignancy.
Most of the controversies which surround Zuma are iatrogenic. No one ask ed her to set Mbongeni Ngema to work on Sarafina II. It was her total misdiagnosis of how to address the HIV problem. Iatrogenic politics.
One can’t blame Zuma, though, for taking on the tobacco giants when reading a letter – published in the same excellent Financial Mail recently – the managing director of the British American Tobacco Company (SA) shovelled up a vast mound of industrial strength bullshit in justification of his outfit’s products. Steven R D Jurgens is his name and he was again espousing the company’s founding ethic – Hooking ’em Up Division. This states that BAT tobacco advertising is, never has and never will be designed to tempt people – especially children – into taking up smoking. Cigarette and other advertising is only there to better inform already addicted smokers as to which brand of toxin will be the most pleasant.
Jurgens says that adult smokers should be given the right to make an “informed choice” about which brand of cigarettes they smoke; invaluable information to help them make difficult decisions like by the assistance of which brand they want to acquire chronic obstructive airways disease, circulatory collapse and carcinoma of the lungs.
Which is a bit like giving a convicted murderer the right to select which brand of rope he prefers to be hanged with. “Try Hempen Products Pure Toasted Virginia Rope. Trusty ultra- light well-seasoned fibres that will tighten around your upper neck with far less friction, snap your little old odontoid process with a snick you won’t even feel. After action strangulation. HEALTH WARN ING: NURSING MOTHERS PLEASE PUT THE BABY DOWN FIRST.” (NB Feminists. The use in the previous paragraph of the hurtful and insensitive gender-specific term “he” is intended to imply womenkind as well.)
Jurgens goes on to say that any power- crazed notions the likes of Zuma might have about banning tobacco advertising “undermines” the comapany’s right of commercial expression.
Looking through Jurgens’s letter, I have to say I don’t blame Zuma for getting huffy. If smoking is stupid, then letters from corporations who make zillions out of selling cigarettes must, by extension, be even stupider.
Whether Zuma will succeed with similar schemes when it comes to the advertising of that other addictive product, alcohol, is another matter. A far greater percentage of people – including research scientists – drink than smoke . That’s why so far no one’s really examined the dangers of passive drinking, like having some juiced sot drive into the side of your car, or at great length relate the story of his life before he vomits over you in the non-smoking section of the aircraft.
Go for it Dr Z. Don’t take any notice of all the stomping liberals who call you a nanny. With the possible exception of Louise Woodward, nannies are nice safe things to have around.