ANOTHER VOICE
Poor journalists, torn between the claims of bossiness and business
AUBERON WAUGH
Mr Humphrey Brooke, the 72-year- old former Secretary of the Royal Academy, is to be found among a number of intermittent pen friendships I have struck up over the years. They are mostly elderly people who see fit to give me the benefit of their experience or reflections on various topics. I am usually grateful to them, for the good reason that any experi- ence of life, at 47 or any other age, is necessarily restricted, and there are huge areas about which I know absolutely no- thing: sport, technology, modern art, southern India between the wars, Eskimo methods of contraception, etc. etc. Another area of almost total ignorance concerns big business, as I am slowly learning in my efforts to attract advertising to Literary Review at the unbelievably cheap rate of 1280 for a full page.
Last week Mr Brooke wrote to congratu- late me on having appeared at Bourne- mouth to address a meeting of 'Forest', the smokers' rights organisation which flourishes under the benign chairmanship of a particularly intelligent and agreeable former Air Chief Marshal called Sir Christ- opher Foxley-Norris, GCB, DSO. The Air Chief Marshal is not himself a smoker, although his wife has the occasional cigarette, but he feels strongly about other people's right to enjoy tobacco.
Forest makes no secret of the fact — and sees no reason to be ashamed of it — that it is supported in large part by voluntary contributions from the tobacco industry, although these would appear to be pitiably small when compared to the Government subvention received by its chief opponent — Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) the hysterically unpleasant near-terrorist organisation fronted by the weasel-like Duke of Gloucester. According to Forest, Ash receives £200,000 a year of taxpayers' money to support its busybodying activities — from the same Exchequer which re- ceives £4,000 million or whatever every year from tobacco duty.
Even so, I suppose it must be these contributions from the tobacco industry which explain why I was met at Bourne- mouth station — surprisingly but rather gratifyingly — by a huge Rolls-Royce, all white and Barbara Cartlandish, in which I was able to give the great and good Sir Peregrine Worsthome a lift to his well- deserved hotel. He had nothing to do with the Forest meeting: we travelled in the same railway carriage, and he happened to be bumming a lift. In a perfect world, of course, he would be met by a white Rolls-Royce wherever he went. The fact that we both chose to comment on our conveyance illustrates once again the yawning gap between journalism and big business which cynics and left-wingers find impossible to credit. In point of fact, the two worlds are so hopelessly separate from each other — at any rate in the realm of political and current affairs journalism, I cannot speak for the City pages or motor- ing correspondents — that one might easily accuse Britain's journalists of hopeless innocence in the matter.
That was my reaction to Mr Brooke's letter. He explains the whole hysteria against smoking in terms of pressure from the pharmaceutical industry. He points to an article in the Times of 3 October which shows how easily the pharmaceutical in- dustry can bribe doctors. He advances various lop consultants' who are prepared to testify that not one of the innumerable anti-depressants or tranquillisers on the market is either so safe or so effective as cigarettes. From his own acquaintance, he lists eight friends who suffered from recur- rent bouts of depression. The two who smoked are well; the other six — either non-smokers or persuaded by doctors to give it up — have either shot themselves or taken their lives in some other way. He can think of only one friend in his long life who smoked and also committed suicide, and that might have been an accident. He now calls for a scientific enquiry into tobacco, and at the same time an investigation into the drug trade's activities against it.
Fine, stirring stuff. I must admit that it had not occurred to me that the busybodies of Ash, the BMA and the DHSS were inspired by anything but simple bossiness. If enquiry reveals that smokers are signifi- cantly less prone to suicide than non- smokers — and I am quite prepared to believe that this might be the case — then one might proceed to ask whether smokers are also less prone to ask their doctors for prescriptions of Valium or whatever equivalent preparation is prescribed nowa- days. It is curious that years and years of cancer research have produced no proof of a causal connection between tobacco and cancer which might not equally well indi- cate a causal connection between the tak- ing of anti-depressant drugs and suicide — i.e. that people taking these drugs are statistically more likely to commit suicide.
However that may be — and possibly it is quite untrue that tobacco is of any significant benefit to manic depressives or neurotics — I can see no other explanation than the Brooke one for the new report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Alco- hol, Our Favourite Drug. This trots out all the usual bogus and tendentious statistics of the anti-alcohol brigade — 'alcohol misuse is annually associated with over 4,000 deaths, 50,000 convictions for drunk driving and 5,000 first admissions to psychiatric hospitals' — and ends up by mysteriously reducing the estimate of 'safe' alcohol consumption from four pints of beer (eight glasses of wine) to one and a half pints of beer (three glasses of wine) a day for a man, one pint of beer (two glasses) for a woman.
Four thousand deaths a year seems a small price to pay for the benefits of alcohol, even if there is any truth in the figure — particularly as we are asked to believe that many more people die from drinking too much milk (or polysaturated fat misuse, as we should perhaps learn to call this distressing habit). The 50,000 convictions for 'drunk' driving are evi- dence of no more than the campaign against alcohol in a country which has the lowest rate of fatal road accidents of any in the world, apart from Sweden. Similarly, there can be no doubt that alcohol drives a few people round the twist, but the number claimed — 5,000 a year — is infinitesimal compared to the numbers it keeps sane.
And there is the rub, so far as these wretched psychiatrists are concerned. Their choice of title for the report — Alcohol, Our Favourite Drug — acquires a new and sinister significance when one reflects that they are all waiting in their consulting rooms to stuff us with Valium, Largactil and a hundred other less favoured drugs. I may have been terribly wrong all these years when I assumed that the motives of the BMA in its hysterical campaign against smoking and drinking was idleness, that doctors resented the extra work that these indulgences brought them, at a time when nearly everybody else in Britain was crying out for more work. It now begins to look as if they would have more work, not less, if people stopped smoking and drinking. Their real motive may be greed.
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