The problem lies in what is understood by health.

Consider the World Health Organization’s definition of health instituted in 1948:
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health in its preamble as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being."

Notwithstanding a few questionable concepts such as “complete”, we can be sure that this definition was a direct result of the Nuremberg trials addressing the horrors of Nazi eugenics. Whatever was directed at Nazi eugenics was also directed at American eugenics. Eugenics is biologically reductionist or, as noted by the Nazis, “applied biology”. The WHO definition attempts to account for the fact that health is more that just absence of disease, more than just a biological phenomenon. It involves other dimensions such as psychological and social.

Given that this WHO definition was put into circulation by Brock Chisholm, the first director of the WHO and a eugenicist, there is always a suspicion as to how the WHO, a medical organization, could potentially warp this definition in the long-term. It could have been an “appeasing” definition, given the anti-eugenics sentiment of the time.

However, what should be noted is the limited scope of the WHO. It does not have a monopoly on health. Being a medical organization, it is intimately bound to the biological level. It is not really a world health organization but a world medical organization – a global medical headquarters. It would have to accept that there are aspects of health that are not its domain or jurisdiction. Just this idea, properly applied, should discourage potentially destructive ventures into social engineering as was seen in eugenics.

Yet with all this history, as we have seen over the last half century, particularly pertaining to antismoking, the WHO and the medical establishment generally, and contrary to the WHO’s very own definition of health, have deteriorated back into a biological reductionist view of health and ventures into social engineering.

(cont'd)

Over the last half century, health has been reduced to the behavioral dimension of eugenics – anti-tobacco, anti-alcohol, prescribed diet, and physical exercise. The WHO adopted antismoking as a societal ideal many decades ago (Godber Blueprint) and now most nations are signed-up to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. With this ideological stance comes social engineering, i.e., coercion to conformity.

We have seen smoking bans on hospital grounds where patients have to venture considerable distances in night-attire and in all manner of weather to have a cigarette. This becomes a psychological and social health issue. Indoor smoking bans with no prospect of accommodation have alienated particularly the elderly. This is a psychological and social health issue. Denormalization, a repugnant, vulgar concept very much identified with eugenics, has again come to the fore. Smokers have been incessantly slandered, ridiculed, and terrorized by official, government programs of denormalization. This is a psychological and social health issue. Many nonsmokers have been manipulated into irrational fear and bigotry to advance the ideological cause. This is an issue of psychological and social health. Smokers are being bullied out of normal social life on a purely ideological basis. This is an issue of psychological and social health. With this propaganda barrage, medical care professionals are demonstrating a cruel, bigoted streak – again - that can compromise the medical treatment of those who smoke. This is an issue of psychological, social, and physical health. Not only are psychological and social health issues important in their own right, but these can also have detrimental ramifications for physical health. Health has again been reduced to quantification, dollar cost-benefit analyses, another eugenics trait.

Everywhere we turn health has again been reduced to only a biological phenomenon (e.g., behavioral) and with the [eugenics] intent of social engineering. “Get healthy”, “he’s looking after himself”, “I work out” all pertain to physicalism. In the obsession with physicalism, psychological, social, moral, and ideo-political aspects of health have been brutalized and discarded - again.

For anyone interested in a brief commentary on the history of eugenics antismoking and its connection to contemporary antismoking, see following link with particular attention to the comments posted by “Magnetic”:
http://cfrankdavis.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/the-nazi-antismoking-legacy-1/

Gadphli, you needn’t bother. It will all seem like Gish gallop to you.

1.
Let’s say the government decided to accept some precepts of, for example, Mormonism. Let’s say it accepted the “no smoking” maxim. It is then declared that patients at mental health facilities will not be permitted to smoke indoors or out due to this Mormon leaning. There would certainly be outrage. It would be pointed out that one cannot force patients to accept ideological/religious precepts as a condition for medical treatment. Yet something of this order has been allowed to occur. The medical establishment has again dangerously deteriorated into the behavioral dimension of eugenics – anti-tobacco, anti-alcohol, dietary prescriptions/proscriptions, physical exercise requirements. The most virulent of these currently is anti-tobacco. Eugenics is a cultic framework with a peculiar world-view and an ideological agenda. It has infected government health bureaucracies – unelected civil servants – that have duped governments over the last few decades into accepting eugenics beliefs as societal ideals, e.g., anti-tobacco.

Having accepted anti-tobacco as a societal ideal, government has determined that smoking will not be permitted indoors or out at, in this case, State mental health facilities. This places smoking patients who are not permitted outdoors or beyond facility grounds in a nasty predicament. They will be forced to quit smoking for the duration of their stay which may be days, weeks or months. They are being forced to accept an [eugenics] ideological precept as a condition of treatment. The circumstance is not only untenable, it is extraordinarily perverse.

As indicated in the article, a stay in a facility produces many of the reasons why people smoke, and most probably even magnified. Understandably, just the prospect, let alone the actuality, can cause great distress to smoking patients affected. In chasing deranged ideology – the smokefree “utopia” – the medical establishment and governments are jeopardizing patients’ immediate psychological health: They are putting ideology before patients’ health.

2.
The current antismoking crusade was put into motion in the mid-1970s under the auspices of the UN agency, the World Health Organization (see Godber/WHO Blueprint www.rampant-antismoking.com ). A small group of unelected people operating under the auspices of an organization with no jurisdiction determined for the whole world that tobacco-use should be eradicated. Over the ensuing three decades these “representatives” have managed to manipulate governments around the world to adopt the cultic belief of antismoking as a societal ideal; most countries are now signed-up to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. In the 1970s this group was already speaking of denormalization/stigmatization of smoking/smokers and of indoor and outdoor bans years before even the first study on secondhand smoke. The Godber/WHO Blueprint is an ideologically-driven global tobacco-use eradication program.

The Blueprint discusses indoor/outdoor smoking bans at medical facilities. It also recommends the employment of only nonsmokers in health care, i.e., employment discrimination, so that health-care providers present as “exemplars” of healthy living, a sort of medical “priesthood”. Apparently, doctors and nurses can be bigoted, incompetent, adulterous, overweight, etc. These are inconsequential. It’s their antismoking stance that distinguishes them as “exemplars of health”. And the expectation was that this would set a good example for other industries to follow suit.

There is now all manner of discrimination directed at smokers as a consequence of the government-supported, eugenics propaganda onslaught. We now have indoor smoking bans and a growing number of outdoor bans, e.g., parks, beaches, entire university campuses. There are compounded extortionate taxes on tobacco. There are growing instances, particularly in the medical establishment, of employment discrimination against smokers: Since early-2000s, WHO employment policy is to refuse employment to smokers. There are growing instances of smokers being denied medical treatment and housing. And all of this discrimination is progressive coercion to conformity – quit smoking or the State will make life very difficult for you.

3.
Godber was not an avowed eugenicist. [The term “eugenics” has not been used post-WWII. The current term is “healthism”, i.e., eugenics by another name] But Godber’s view of smoking and what should be done about it was very much in the eugenics tradition. The Blueprint involves the same eugenics personnel – physicians, biologists, pharmacologists, statisticians, behaviorists. It involves the same eugenics “behavior” obsessions, e.g., anti-tobacco (negative eugenics). It involves the same repugnant eugenics methodology, e.g., propaganda/denormalization. It involves the same eugenics aspirations to societal rule, i.e., fascism. It involves the same destructive consequences.

So the circumstance of mental health facilities needs to be understood in the greater context of a well-funded, government-supported, global eugenics assault on tobacco-use. In mental health facility, this deranged ideological antismoking stance has produced a tormenting (even torture) of patients who are already vulnerable, a subgroup of staff who irrationally believe they are in “danger” from SHS – even outdoors, a subgroup of staff with bigoted tendencies towards patients who smoke – which can further compromise patients’ treatment, and a subgroup of staff that have maintained their sensibility, can see the damage being wreaked, but feel powerless to do anything about it. Unfortunately, this is what deranged ideology and fanaticism produces. And eugenics already has a track record of producing this sort of damage and far, far worse. And all of this distress and dysfunction could be easily alleviated – remove the ban. Then, remove the people who instituted/supported the ban and remove all government support for ideological antismoking before any further damage is done.