What’s the point of a pro-smoking group in 2021?
Simon Clark vehemently defends people’s right to smoke tobacco. But with the practice in terminal decline, is there any point?
“There are many people who smoke for 50, 60, 70 years and don’t get ill,” says Simon Clark. “I mean, who knows why Keith Richards is still alive?”
You probably won’t have heard of Forest — the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. They are the only lobby group in the country devoted to campaigning for smokers’ rights. Simon Clark is the company’s director. When I meet him in a café outside the BBC, he admits that if the group were launching today they would never use such a “ludicrous” name. “It’s of its time,” he says, unwittingly describing Forest at the same time.
Clark, who wears glasses and a wry smile, is in his early sixties and has spent more than a third of his life defending people’s right to slowly kill themselves by smoking tobacco. Why?
In the UK, Forest are funded to the tune of £200,000 a year by the companies Japan Tobacco International, Imperial, and British American Tobacco. Their funding — which rises to £400,000 if you include their branch in Brussels — has been going down for the best part of a decade, says Clark, but for the last few years it’s been relatively stable. This plateau is a surprise, given the parlous state of smoking tobacco. In the mid-1970s one in two men smoked, and almost as many women. We can credit the 2007 smoking ban, the introduction of e-cigarettes, and greater medical understanding with bringing today’s smoking rate down to around 19%.
You would assume that the head of an organisation like Forest was a smoker himself and the organisation a passion project informed by a ‘Prise my cigarette from my cold dead hands’ mentality. Wrong on both counts. Clark doesn’t smoke. He didn’t found Forest. But he is driven relentlessly onward by a conviction that smokers have been relegated to a lower class of citizen. A Thatcherite who uses phrases like “the bully state”, he sees the stigmatisation of smokers as symptomatic of the government’s meddling in people’s private lives.
Given that it seems inevitable that smoking tobacco will die out in the years to come, what drives Clark — the only full-time member of Forest — to bother carrying on? He himself acknowledges that the group has lost virtually every battle it’s ever fought, and it doesn’t look likely that this will ever change. It’s all about personal responsibility, Clark says. One important question looms large over the debate: can people be trusted to look after their own bodies, or do they need help? Clark believes that we have created a risk-averse society and that people have become too sensitive to the possibility that someone’s smoke might enter their air space. “We can’t live a life where we take no risks,” he says.
Comparing Forest to the National Rifle Association in the US is apt because, as we have known for some time, smoking is deadly for not just the person holding the cigarette but also the people nearby. Passive smoking was one of the biggest talking points during the 2007 ban on smoking in enclosed work spaces in England. Clark concedes that they lost this argument but still believes that “junk science” was used to highlight passive smoking’s risks. “People see smoke and they think, ‘Well, if that’s potentially harming the smoker, it must be harming me too.’” (They are correct to think this. It is true.)
The World Health Organisation’s position on passive smoking is that “Every independent authoritative scientific body that has examined the evidence has concluded that passive smoking causes many diseases.” When I read this to Clark he doesn’t accept it. He claims not to know what the WHO are motivated by. “Improving people’s health?” I ask. He isn’t convinced. He cites James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat’s 2003 findings that among 35,561 people who lived with a smoker there was no evidence that regular exposure significantly increased their risk of heart disease or lung cancer. (This is the same study that was described as “gravely flawed” by the British Medical Journal and was part-funded by the tobacco industry. Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s former Chief Medical Officer, said it was “comparable to a research study on organised crime being funded by the Mafia”.) Clark will be aware of all this but, as the study is one of the only ones ever to have disputed the consensus, he is professionally obliged to bring it up.
Ultimately, Clark seems to believe that the anti-tobacco lobby is driven by politics, not by a desire to save lives. He thinks that some anti-smoking campaigns go beyond education, denormalising the consumer as well as the product. And he is deeply sceptical of experts. “Experts…they have opinions,” he says. “And experts are not all on the same page.”
The effort to defend tobacco smoking is all but lost. In the last decade, it has looked increasingly futile because of the emergence of e-cigarettes, to which tobacco companies like Philip Morris have shifted their attention. Forest are in favour of e-cigarettes but Clark believes that they have almost been taken over by public health, as opposed to being presented as a pleasurable alternative to tobacco. There are some in the vaping world who think that Forest should “keep out of vaping”, Clark says. “My argument is, well, get off your arse and get out there and defend vapers.” He doesn’t think Forest’s future will involve funding from the vaping industry but he isn’t sure.
For what it’s worth, I like Simon Clark. He gives me various bits of Forest paraphernalia when we separate, including a CD of smoking songs. But he seems like the victim of an elaborate game of Devil’s advocate that never came to an end: what if you had to defend one of the most morally vacuous industries on the face of the Earth? Clark has proved not only that he is up to the task but that he’s able to fill most of his waking hours with the effort. As he puts it, “There’s always plenty to do.”
