The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth

 

Truth is such an abstract concept in life. An online discussion about the rights and wrongs of voting for UKIP highlights instantly how truth can vary from one person to the next. Even Joey Barton, the football player who once stubbed a cigar out in a team-mate’s eye, had his version of UKIP on BBC’s Question Time.

Truth for a writer is whatever he or she choses it to be. In the creation of a tale, or the adaption of a tale to cinema, the truth of the story becomes whatever is appropriate to meet the circumstances. For example, a bunch of adventurers meet a man on a sledge pulled by bunny rabbits in The Hobbit but this never took place in the book and, of course, it never actually happened at all. It was all CGI effects, there was no bunny sledge, and I know because I hooked up our eight buns to see if they could haul my gigantic frame across the lawn. They couldn’t.

That’s a lie, I never did that, I just made it up for effect. I took something and made it happen in my head and, in doing so, I’m thrown back to thinking about Stanton Glantz. Does he do this, does he take information and warp it to meet the agenda he has been contracted by the World Health Organisation to produce or does he actually, genuinely only see the dangerous aspects?

People do, people in society are very illiterate about science – to the extent that the Royal Society of Chemistry has produced a brilliant and highly readable document entitled Making Sense Of Chemical Stories. So brilliant and highly readable I suspect I’m the first non-member of the Royal Society to have read it.

“People are still being misled by chemical myths. This needs to stop. We urge everyone to stop repeating misconceptions about chemicals. The presence of a chemical isn’t a reason for alarm. The effect of a chemical depends on the dose.

In lifestyle commentary, chemicals are presented as something that can be avoided, or eliminated using special socks, soaps or diets, and that cause only harm to health and damage to the environment.”

And yet, if I were to read the whole thing to some of my friends in a dramatic voice (something halfway between Brian Blessed and Brian Griffen), they would respond with an “Ahh, yes, but they would say that wouldn’t they”. Their truth is features an almost genetically programmed distrust of scientists. In fact I get the notion that they believe all scientists carry out evil experiments in secret government-funded lairs. This upsets me because, as a Physicist, I was never given the opportunity to carry out evil experiments in a secret government-funded lair.

Stanton Glantz is often accused of cherry picking the bits of vaping science that match his argument and using them to construct something for public dissemination. Consequently I ought to go a bit easier on him.

My wife is going to question the volume of alcohol I place into my shopping trolley this evening to which I will respond with two selected quotations from the Royal Society’s booklet.

Firstly I will quote Sir Colin Berry, a pathologist, when he says: “One of the most poisonous chemicals that many people encounter is alcohol. However, even if you drink an almost lethal dose of alcohol (which I don’t recommend) your liver will clear it in 36 hours without any assistance.”

will then smugly point at her box of herbal tea and cite Dr Derek Lohmann, a research chemist: “If someone came into your house and offered you a cocktail of butanol, iso amyl alcohol, hexanol, phenyl ethanol, tannin, benzyl alcohol, caffeine, geraniol, quercetin, 3-galloyl epicatchin, 3-galloyl epigallocatchin and inorganic salts, would you take it? It sounds pretty ghastly. If instead you were offered a cup of tea, you would probably take it. Tea is a complex mixture containing the above chemicals in concentrations that vary depending on where it is grown.”

The truth will be that I will need a bunny sledge to haul my then swollen testicles back home after being rabbit-punched in them for my smart-arse antics.

Maybe I should just keep the chemicals between us.

 

*For anybody interested in reading further click on the link to: Making Sense of Chemical Stories.