WHAT FRESH HELL is this? Via the ever-excellent Christopher Snowdon (whose book “The Art of Suppression” everyone should go out and buy), we learn that the World Health Organisation is pushing for a worldwide ban on electronic cigarettes, presumably because it has nothing better to do now that it has eradicated malaria and AIDS.

In a new report, the WHO claims that e-cigarettes – which are smokeless, tarless, non-carcinogenic plastic replicas that deliver small doses of nicotine to the user – “could undermine the denormalization of tobacco use” simply because they resemble cigarettes, and it urges countries to consider banning their use in order to “change the social norms regarding the consumption of tobacco”. Since the WHO has significant influence on national health bodies around the world, it is reasonable to guess that we will be seeing a lot more of this report as the bansturbators start clamouring for yet another avenue of pleasure to be closed off to us.

What the “something must be done” brigade will most assuredly not mention, as they fan out across the airwaves to bang the drum for yet more government intervention in our lives, is that the WHO report has absolutely nothing to say about the supposed dangers of e-cigs. Only four of the sixteen nations surveyed have done any research on the health effects of the devices, and not one – not a single one, including those that have banned them – provide any evidence whatsoever that there are any quantifiable risks to the health of those using them.

None of this, of course, will show up in the press releases sent out by ASH and the Department of Health, which will be recycled verbatim by overworked hacks and published on a thousand newspaper websites. Instead, the “evidence” will be held clearly to “prove” that e-cigs are a danger to health and should therefore be illegal. This will, simply, be a lie; a miasma of bullshit designed to obfuscate the truth. The language used by proponents of a ban is revealing; these devices must be banned because there is not yet enough evidence to prove that they are safe.

Read that again: they must ban them because they can’t prove they aren’t bad for you. It turns every principle of freedom on its head and treats you like the five year-old they believe you to be. And it makes this non-smoker mad.

Everywhere you turn these days, there's a fucker with a lab coat talking shit. Opening the health page in a newspaper these days is akin to turning a high-pressure hose full of diarrhoea on yourself. We're binge-drinking, chain-smoking, sedentary lardbutts, the nation's health is worse than it's ever been, we're told (unutterable horsecock; there's never been a healthier point in human history than right now, as you're reading this) and we face an obesity/cirrhosis/lung cancer/asthma timebomb. The end times are near.

Now, there's no doubt that all is not rosy where public health is concerned. Too many people *do* smoke their lungs to a cinder and drink themselves spastic on cheap rocket fuel, and this *is* going to cost a lot more in the future, because even if old Mr McGlumpher isn't getting pissed on your dime (which he usually is), when he's admitted to hospital with that persistent hacking cough, you’re still the one paying for the bedpan to get changed (which it usually isn't). Yet the way that our wise overlords choose to tackle this problem says a lot about their attitude towards their doughy, gin-addled subjects. Every bottle must be festooned with warning labels, every fag packet with snapshots of blackened lungs. Let there be a fat tax, a ban on cheap alcohol deals, a fruit and veg database to monitor our children and an inspection regime for packed lunches. Let a thousand admonitions bloom.

Again, the language in the WHO report gives the game away. Despite there being no known dangers from e-cigarettes, we are told quite explicitly that they must be banned because they could undermine the “denormalisation” of tobacco; not because they are bad, but because they look a little like something which is bad. These are the same spam-brained dickheads that got smoking edited out of Tom and Jerry cartoons because they thought it might make kids take up fags. (That Tom repeatedly gets fed through meat slicers and gets his brain bashed out with a mallet roughly twice per episode doesn't seem to faze these mouth-breathing fucktards.)

The truth about these thin-lipped busybodies is that they are the new Puritans of our age. It isn’t the health damage that really enrages them about tobacco, or alcohol, or fish suppers. What they hate, for lack of a better word, is the sin. If tests were to show conclusively and beyond a shadow of any doubt that these e-cigs were utterly harmless, these people would be horrified and the report suppressed, buried or simply ignored. If someone invented a synthetic alcohol which gave us the pleasure of a few pints without the hangover or long-term harms to our wellbeing, I genuinely believe that the nannying fucknuts at Alcohol Concern would be beating their fists on the wall in rage.

Pressure groups and do-gooders like ASH and the WHO are little more than monomaniacal fascists who seem to be labouring under the delusion that my lifestyle is any of their fucking business. It's not. End of story. And if that means I want to buy three bottles of wine for the price of two, or stick a harmless electronic replica fag in my mouth, or pour boiling chip fat down my throat, then I will damn well do so and fuck them all for thinking they have any right to stop me. I know I'm a fat bastard, and I know I drink too much. I don't need the state to hold my hair back while I chunder.

And as for the WHO: they can, with all possible due respect, fuck off.