Frank Davis

Frank Davis is a pro-smoking blogger in the UK whose banner headline reads “banging on about the smoking ban.” ¹. Davis is a smoker who disagrees with the smoking ban in indoor public places that was introduced in 2007. He has denigrated public health advocates with particularly aggressive language:

“We Must Destroy the Tobacco Control ‘Nazis'”

In response to a post by Forest’s Simon Clark that pro-smokers were losing the argument by calling the public health community “Nazis”, Davis replied:

My view is that these people must be called Nazis. Anything else is actually dishonest. They must have respectability withdrawn from them, just as they have themselves withdrawn it from others. They must be treated with the contempt with which they treat other people …. What we have is a state of war. And the sooner that people like Simon Clark recognise it, the better. We must set out not to debate with these people in a civilised manner, because that is impossible. We must set out to defeat them, and to destroy them, and destroy everything that they stand for, everywhere in the world. ²

Attack on Linda Bauld

The Letter to Linda

Davis penned a “letter to Linda Bauld” including the lines: “Those nasty emails and phone calls you’ve been getting weren’t organised or planned by anyone. I shouldn’t worry about them too much. It’s just the trailing edge of the swarm, like the zephyrs on the perimeter of a hurricane. But they’re not going to stop. They’re going to become more and more frequent. You should start worrying when bricks start getting thrown through your window, or messages daubed on your door. They won’t be planned or organised either. They’ll just happen.”
“Better still would be to leave the country .. That way you’ll be out of the country and maybe even living under a new name when your old university department gets torched, and your old colleagues are strung up from lamp posts.” ³
The article, which was also emailed to Bauld by mummybest see Anonymous Tobacco Trolls. For more on this see also:

• Letter to Linda
• Linda Bauld

Comments on Davis’ blog by others in response to this article

“You didn’t really think you could continue forever kicking people in the face with unanswered blows did you? No more hiding behind your protected academic immunity status while raining gutter level vitriol down on right decent folk. All the while you sit back reading and drooling over all of the ‘you stink’, ‘you’re filthy’ and ‘good riddance’ comments you’ve purposely incited. You love it, you cold blooded, majorly-credentialled snake … The dam is about to burst. You have no idea of how much pent up hostility is going to spill over the top when it finally breaks.”

Another posts a link to the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, saying “There are more than enough Tobacco Control “researchers” who may be feeling left out of this controversy and wondering why they have not been contacted.”
Another commentator translates it to German: ” Even if most Germans never heard of Linda Bauld, we have our own “Linda Baulds” who need to read something like this. :-)”
And one says: “It does not surprise me that the quack physicians and the quack professors involved in the Stirling Uni thing are horrified. Their whole cosy universe is about to be blown apart.”
Another says simply: “Need a Rope!”

“Zealot”

This was not the first time Davis had criticised Bauld. In March 2011 he wrote:
“This report is by an anti-smoking zealot called Linda Bauld, and was no doubt conducted by a whole team of similar zealots, who were always going to find that the smoking ban had had next to no social adverse effects.” ⁴

Attacks on Deborah Arnott

Davis’s blog has attacked Deborah Arnott of ASH on more than one occasion:

“I Would Bludgeon her to Death”

Discussing a TV debate between Deborah Arnott and Dave Atherton from Freedom2Choose, Davis commented that “to be quite honest, if I’d been in Dave Atherton’s shoes, I’d have had a hard time preventing myself from strangling Arnott on the spot and on camera, or bludgeoning her to death with a microphone stand. ⁵

“Weaving Fiction” and “Hitlers”

In April 2012, Davis wrote: “And it’s why Deborah Arnott’s experience as a TV director or editor matters: as director of ASH, she’s just as much weaving a fiction as she ever was when she worked for ITV … The Deborah Arnotts (and also the Hitlers) of the world believe that Orson Welles had discovered a way of controlling and directing people”. ⁶.

“Put a Bulls-eye on her Forehead”

One comment posted in reply to Davis’ blog stated: “I just had a brainstorm regarding cigarette cases. My first instinct was to put Arnott or Glantz on the front with a bulls-eye on the forehead and then I thought – wait.” ⁷