Joe Jackson

Joe Jackson is a professional musician, who is a vocal pro-smoking campaigner and columnist for The Free Society. ^{1 2}

Forest Supporters Council

Jackson is a member of the pro-smoking group Forest‘s high profile Supporters Council. According to his biography on its website:

Joe Jackson lived in New York for 20 years until 2003 when the smoking ban was one of several factors that drove him back to Britain. Discovering Forest was, he wrote, like finding “a light in the darkness”. Since then Joe has written an acclaimed essay (The Smoking Issue), several articles for national newspapers including the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, and given numerous interviews on the subject of smoking bans.³

Jackson also wrote the foreword for a report on smoking and privacy by Privacy International, which was produced and paid for “at the request” of Forest.⁴In this he accuses “health authorities and lobby groups, lavishly funded by governments and pharmaceutical companies” of exaggerating health risks and of spreading “fear and intolerance on the basis of the most atrocious junk science”. He adds that, “The worst example of this is the myth that ‘second-hand smoke kills’, which does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny”.⁵

Blogs and Articles

• Joe Jackson, “How killjoys colonised Britain’s public houses”, Spiked Online, 10 August 2009 ⁶
• Blogs by Joe Jackson at The Free Society: http://www.thefreesociety.org/Columnists/Joe-Jackson