Indonesian Smoking Baby Sparks Outrage (2 year old smokes 40 sticks a day !)

A two year old child in Indonesia has incited worldwide outrage. A video showing the toddler smoking a cigarette popped up on the internet site YouTube. Little Sumatran Ardi Rizal is addicted to the cancer causing sticks claims his father. His father Mohammed Rizal claims the baby throws a fit if he does not get a cigarette.

The elder Rizal says he gave his son his first cigarette when he was just 18 months old, and he has been smoking ever since. The little guy is up to 40 cigarettes a day, more than an average adult would normally smoke. Rizal goes on to say his son looks healthy, so he does not see the harm in allowing him to smoke. However, the so-called healthy child is unable to run with other children. Officials in the small fishing village where the Rizals live has offered to buy the family a car if they will make the baby stop smoking.

According to the boy's parents, he goes through two packs a day and throws temper tantrums if he's not allowed to smoke.

His father apparently got him down the road to becoming a severe smoker after letting him take his first puff at 18 months.

Smoking is very popular in Indonesia and children are not exempt from the habit. Nearly 3 percent of 5 to 9 year old children are smokers in the small country. 25 percent have smoked at some time between 3 and 15 years of age. The head of the Indonesian child protection commission blames tobacco companies for the excessive advertising. Benny Wahyudi, an official at the Industry Ministry says the government has taken steps to reduce the number of smokers in the country. One step was to reduce the number of cigarettes produced from 245 billion per year to 240 billion per year.

The story is not all that unusual for people in that region of the world. In 1970s there was a report in British Medical Journal [Dr. G.Y. Caldwell "Natural curing of tobacco and lung cancer", BMJ Feb 26 1977, v1. p580] about Semai people of Malaysia where children start smoking at age two, as a rite of passage from nursing. To the complete shock of the medical researchers, the full medical examination, including chest X-rays, of all 12000 Semai found them in a remarkably good health and could not find a single lung cancer.

Interestingly, in our western world during the golden age of British Empire, smoking was compulsory for the students of their elite boy schools (for refs see "The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking" by J. R. Johnstone (PhD), P.D.Finch, (Prof. Em. Mathematical Statistics, Monash).

If you wish to follow this white rabbit a bit deeper and get a glimpse at the upcoming smoking heresy, there is much more info with numerous scientific references in a recent thread in imminst.org forum (life-extension, nootropics, health) titled, of of all things:

"Smoking is good for you"

which I started. As expected, the pandemonium broke lose when all these medically and scientifically well educated health fanatics jumped in to refute the claims (many members are grad students & researchers in biological & medical fields).

Each paper they brought up in support of their antismoking position either backfired (showing upon closer inspection that the findings were exactly the opposite than what they appeared to be from the paper abstracts) or it didn't show anything at all (the usual antismoking junk science). Watch them squirm as all the hard science (experiments, lab analysis) kept going the "wrong" way.

Here are some highlights of the "debate" (no contest actually, it wasn't even close; I post as "nightlight"):

1. Dogs exposed to radon or radon+smoke: 5% of smoking dogs and 37% of non-smoking dogs got lung cancers.

2. Massive National Cancer Institute sponsored experiments that backfired terribly, setting back the NCI's workplace smoking bans agenda for more than a decade.

3. The crowning experiments of six decades of antismoking "science", the pinnacle (2004, 2005) -- again backfired badly, as they always do -- at the end, more than twice as many smoking animals alive than non-smoking ones.

4. Self-medication with tobacco

5. Common genes for lung cancer & smoking

(Fisher suspected this to be the case in 1950s, he also suggested self-medication possibility, see page 163, where he compares taking cigarettes away from some poor chap to taking the walking stick from a blind man.[pdf])

6. Hazards of quitting (triggers lung cancers in animal experiments)

7. Emphysema/COPD - smoking protective rather than cause

8. How does antismoking "science" lie with stats (or how to scientifically "prove" that -- Prozac causes depression -- using the master method of antismoking "science")

9. Heart attacks from SHS myths (a 'friend saying Boo' is more "hazardous" for your heart than SHS)

10. Glycotoxins/AGE in tobacco smoke -- backfires badly

11. Smoking protects against cancers (reversal of values in cancer state and another common sleight of hand), Smoking vs Caloric Restrictions (and on fundamental wrong-headedness of C.R.)

12. More on anti-carcinogenicity of tobacco smoke and how to translate Orwellian antismoking "science" to real science

13. ** why take a chance

14. Smoking and diabetes, insulin sensitivity -- another "proof" backfires

15. How to prove that 'Lifting weights is harmful for muscles' - pinhole vision sleight of hand of antismoking "science" illustrated

16. Oxidative stress, breast cancer, "randomizing non-randomized variables" sleight of hand -- more antismoking junk science claims turned upside-down by facts of hard science

17. Can one replicate the health benefits of tobacco smoke (the short list given) using supplements and pharmaceuticals? Even if it were possible, can one do it for < $1 day (cost for a pack of roll-your-own cigarettes with natural, additive free tobacco)?

18. Who knows more about biochemistry of life and its molecular engineering -- one little cell in your little toe or all the biochemists and molecular biologists in the world taken together? Is "Sickness Industry" good for your health?

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