Lewes Forum thread

My daughter has just come back from Lewes car boot sale, behind Waitrose with Golden Virginia tobacco that her 15 year old friend bought from someone with a blue car. He has smoking products such as lighters, papers etc on show outside and sells tobacco that is hidden in his car. The packaging is all wrong and it smells disgusting. This is most probably fake Chinese tobacco full of god knows what, rat poo, sawdust etc. He is selling this to kids. God help him when I get hold of him.....

Have you reported it to the police, snowie? Take a note of his reg number and take a photo if you can, rather than confronting him directly. He needs to be taken out of circulation rather than getting a telling off from you!

Not yet Southover Queen, unfortunately my daughter and her friend cannot remember any more details about his car. I shall go down there next Sunday and take photos if he is there again.

Hes been there for years doing it... Very reasonable as well

hes ok great bloke

Whats wrong with a bit of free enterprise? Leave him alone. And so what if he is selling it to kids? they will just get it elsewhere if you stop him. live and let live

What's wrong with it?

1. No quality control: anything could be in those packs, including poison.
2. Even if it's not knocked off rubbish swept off the factory floor, tobacco kills.
3. Your cheeky free enterprise mate is illegally selling a poisonous carcinogen to underage kids. He's not paying tax on that stuff either, so denying the exchequer significant tax. He's a criminal, pure and simple.

You'd probably support the lynching of "benefit scroungers". You probably spit at the disabled because they must be faking it. But it's absolutely fine to poison teenagers, apparently.

hes do a public service selling goods at a nock down price . We all love that

And when the Tories and their Lib Dem pals have finished with the NHS you'll probably find a 'doctor' at the boot sale selling quack cures.

tories only the other day where say how can we get things more again. Well let pepole have more money in there pocket low the taxes to start . all the goods we buy are tax so hight . then mr tobacc man would not be so cheap then

most of us smokers get our tobacco at knock down prices so leave him alone it's no different to people buying cheap alcohol from supermarkets and most of your teenagers do that i bet you dont go moaning and taking photos down there

I bought baccy from Boot sales for years.
Then I was bought a 'Denicocea' tar catcher.A silica gel capsule which is inserted into an Audrey Hepburn type ciggie holder (but much smaller)
It was very apparent that boot sale baccy has twice as much tar as bacca bought from a shop tax paid.
The silica tar catcher was gunked up big time in half the time as my more expensive tax paid baccy.
I suppose that if you buy from a source that comes from say Belguim the risk is less...
But Booty baccy is often a bit iffy.
Don't buy cheap baccy. It is well known to be fake....

Bill- Income tax was massively lowered in 1970 from 42% to30%, by the Tories under Heath. It moved up and down a bit but the basic rate was down to 22% by the end of the Thatcher years.
So the people who work do have more money in their pockets these days. The trouble is they tend to spend more, and so end up no better off.
The three main "luxury" items- drink, tobacco and petrol- are actually now cheaper in real terms than they were some years ago.

i dont agree with selling to kids but i wouldnt be too high and mighty about it your daughter and her friend bought it, you can't sell if theres no buyer !

Quite right Helen. Parental responsibility etc. springs to mind.

You lot really do take the biscuit.

How would you feel if he was selling illicit booze that makes you go blind? Or peddling crack cocaine or heroin to your kids? Presumably you'd want to tear him arm from arm.

This is exactly the same: nicotine is extremely addictive and extremely harmful. It's only legal because it's been used since Francis Drake brought some back. The only reason you think it's acceptable is because you cretins think you're getting a bargain and that's all that matters, isn't it? The reason your kids think it's okay is because of the example you set them.

Snowie is doing exactly what a responsible parent should do - making sure that people know about it and reporting it to the authorities. Let's hope they act on that knowledge.

People - please be careful when smoking this rubbish - it is really nasty stuff. I am a smoker and was buying imported stuff cheap, but was put off when I found out that the levels of lead and other toxins are really dangerous - in some cases if you smoke 20 counterfeit cigarettes this is equivalent to 600 genuine - it's a proven fact!!
I am on a low income and understand that shop brought baccie and fags are TOO EXPENSIVE - but surely your life and health is more important??
BUT if you choose to smoke it then of course that is your decision - it should not however be sold by these people to kids - THAT IS WRONG!!

This thread is hilarious... smokers arguing over how toxic different tobaccos are. Sheesh

And the thread above this one is about going to the gym, bit of a contrast !

For those thinking about giving up, how about popping down to the stop smoking clinic at the Phoenix Centre, it's every Thursday 5pm to 7pm, no appointment needed just drop in. It worked for me, I've been off the weed for a few months now.
Give it a go :-)

After watching my father (a smoker) die from COPD (look it up), heart problems & cancer all over his pelvic cavity, I have kicked the habit after 20 + years of serious smoking.

I think I have said this before. I stopped smoking about 15yrs ago and am pleased that I did. My father was a genuine chain smoker, only one I ever knew, and must have smoked about 60/80 Player's Weights each day. He always lit his cigarette from the one he was about to throw away. He did that for all of his life that I can remember, certainly for the best part of fifty years. When he died in his late 70's the cause was not in any way connected to smoking.
We grew up very poor and he always said it was his one pleasure in life, (a Labout Health Minister also said that, I think it was Reid) so if it was going to kill him so be it, which is why I never bitch about those who smoke, it is their choice. In fact I have two ash trays at home in case a smoker visits, I would not banish them to the garden.

Blimey jrsussex, you're going to have to stop writing posts that I completely agree with. I seem to remember we've had some good sparring sessions here in the past. My grandmother drank like a fish (Guinness and port chasers were a particular favourite) and smoked Senior Service until she was in her late 60s. Then she gave up and lived to 96.

South over queen you old bag liven up!!!!

I have absolutely no idea what you mean, Holley.

I really don't get this, it seems that the majority of people on this thread are saying that criminal activity is now ok in Lewes. I've always wanted to try burglary to make a bit of extra money so I might as well give it a go. Any suggestions for the best areas, will Neville be any good ?

JRS, afraid I can't agree with Clifford about your post. First, your father beat the odds. It's as simple as that. Hundreds of thousands of smokers each year pay for their addiction with their lives. And smokers are drug addicts who lose their genuine freedom to choose very soon after starting, usually as children too young to make an informed choice in the first place. The pleasure smokers get is just their regular and constant withdrawal symptoms being relieved by feeding that habit. You say you were a very poor family. I don't know any smokers who smoke instead of other expensive habits or hobbies, It's just an extra cost on top of what they'd be doing anyway. In fact your previous campaigning against smoking bans was based on the connection between smoking and drinking. At current prices 60-80 cigarettes a day would cost around £7-10,000 a year. Would have been less then, but that's a lot of food, clothes, rent, holidays, books, toys etc that almost literally went up in smoke. This thread started as a warning about someone selling cheap counterfeit tobacco to children, your post makes it look like you don't have a problem with that.

I'm baffled too, Rods Tiger. When you do start your burgling career, remember that the kid whose bike you steal only has himself to blame for even possessing it.
Independent thinker: I agree. Some people beat the odds as far as smoking goes, but most don't. Even if smoking isn't the cause of death, it will probably have contributed. I know how hard it is to stop - I used to be a smoker. It's a strong strong addiction.

Which is why any minimally intelligent person would (a) try to prevent children picking up the habit in the first place and (b) condemn anyone willing to sell them tobacco. It seems many of the contributors to this thread fail the minimally intelligent person test it represents...

I'm not sure jrsussex was actively advocating smoking - I know I wasn't. I gave up four years ago and am pleased to have done so on both health and financial grounds. I think the point is that persecuting smokers and seeing smoking as some kind of moral failing isn't the way to deal with the addiction. We all enjoy the feeling of moral superiority - in fact, in can become an addiction.

I agree, Clifford, and I'm very carefully not condemning the smokers. I am having a go at the morons who've posted here suggesting that we should turn a blind eye to the activities of a tobacco bootlegger because he provides them with cheap supplies of their chosen poison, and then bizarrely suggest that the children he supplies to are somehow complicit in his criminal activities. That's what most of the thread has been about after all.

JRSussex's post did suggest that smoking wasn't deadly for his dad, and went onto invite the inference that some/many might escape its effects. I don't think that's terribly helpful: smoking's never going to be a good idea, is it? If it doesn't kill you it will empty your pockets...

Just to be clear, I don't feel morally superior to smokers. Precisely because I don't believe they have true freedom of choice about their habit. It's powerfully addictive and they almost certainly started as children (when did you last see an adult take up smoking for the first time?). They deserve the same sympathy as heroin addicts and alcoholics, and every step should be taken to help them stop. I do, however, feel nothing but contempt for those who promote and encourage smoking, like the tobacco companies and their lobbying organisations like Forest. Tobaccos is the only legal product I can think of that when used precisely as intended, kills and maims huge numbers of its users.

I can't help wondering if the claim that bootleg tobacco is full of lead or other toxins is one of those scare stories the big tobacco corporations push out to defend sales of their own product. Let's face it, its not the most unethical thing they've ever done.
And can we be quite clear about statistics and 'beating the odds'? In a 2006 European study, the risk of developing lung cancer was:
0.2% for men who never smoked (0.4% for women)
5.5% for male former smokers (2.6% in women)
15.9% for current male smokers (9.5% for women)
24.4% for male “heavy smokers” defined as smoking more than 5 cigarettes per day (18.5% for women)
So 1 in 4 heavy smokers get the big c. I know that's still a pretty poor survival rate and it only relates to lung cancer, but survivors are not the statistical freaks we are led to believe.
I reckon the answer is to increase the minimum age every year, such that the only people who can smoke in the future are the ones that can now. Smoking will then be illegal within a century, but nobody will be forced to give up. (If anybody wants to promote that idea, can I suggest the date of the annual increase is my birthday, 1st march?)

Two things jump out at me from that, Expat. The first is that a "heavy smoker" equals someone smoking more than five per day (!!!) and that *even so* nearly a quarter of men will contract lung cancer. That's a huge percentage.

The second thing is that smoking is now implicated in far far more than just lung cancer. For instance, rates of bladder cancer are strongly linked to nicotine, and mouth and vocal tract cancers also connected to smoking. In fact, it's easier to name the cancers which aren't related to smoking, and that's because smoking interferes with healthy cell division.

Additionally, it's not just cancers: respiratory diseases and cardiovascular disease, obviously, and probably many others in which smoking is a factor.

So the picture for lifelong smokers is much less clear-cut really and those whose habit does not adversely affect their health even if it doesn't kill them must be very few.

I don't think anyone's really arguing that smoking is a clever thing to do though, but I know how readily a smoker will seize upon "evidence" that his or her habit isn't as deadly as everyone says.

I like the idea of increasing the minimum legal age a lot. I'm not sure you'd get it past the likes of BAT (Ken Clarke's old employer?) though...

And while we're at it, let's ban cars as well. At least smokers choose to smoke. We don't choose car exhaust.
'Exhaust fumes from diesel engines do cause cancer, a panel of experts working for the World Health Organization says.
'It concluded that the exhausts were definitely a cause of lung cancer and may also cause tumours in the bladder.'

And barbecues, some sources suggest inhalation of barbecue smoke (charcoal not gas) is equal to smoking 20,000 cigarettes.