Thank you Alex for your lovely
introduction. It is an absolute honor to
present this year's  Alison Chesney and
Eddie Killoran Memorial Lecture and thank
you to the City Health International
organizers for inviting me. First my
disclosures. I have never received any
funding of any kind from a tobacco or
vaping product company. Many years in the
past
I received consultancy fees from
pharmaceutical companies for on
cessation medications. My Center of
Research Excellence focused on
indigenous sovereignty and smoking is
funded by a grant from the Foundation
for a Smoke-Free World.
The content of my talk is solely my
responsibility and in no way should be
seen to be reflecting the positions of
the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World
First  and most
important questions that an indigenous
person asks when we meet another person
is  “Ko wai koe?” Who are you? but it's not
your name we are after, we want to know
what our relationship to each other is.
Are you friend or foe? Are we related? Do
we belong to the same tribe or tribes?
Importantly are you my senior ,a person I
should defer to? We look for a connection,
something we share. So to start with I
will just tell you a little bit about
myself picking out bits of my story that
helped me connect to the spirit and work
of Alison Chesney and Eddie Killoran. I
was born to fight injustice I think. On
my mother's side I am a descendant of
the biggest Māori indigenous tribe in
New Zealand who were the first to be
impacted by the colonizers. Some
of my ancestors protested and fought the
theft of land. The laws that forbid them
to speak their language and the laws
that banned their spiritual and heal
practices. The colonisation by the
British of New Zealand was a process of
theft suppression and violence that
resulted in the English settlers and
their descendants at one point being
able to boast that they were the
healthiest and lived to the longest
lifespan in the world. They achieved that
off the back of the indigenous people
and the land. The indigenous people
meanwhile were marginalized, belittled,
scorned and made into a dependent
working or even lower-class despite the
efforts of the colonizers to assimilate
Māori . Our indigenous knowledge, beliefs
rituals and practices were protected,
hidden if necessary and passed on
generation after generation have and
will continue to fight to reinstitute
our very different indigenous viewing of
the world. I'm telling you this because
we believe that a person's roots, their
socio historical background contributes
to who they are at a more personal level.
My father was from a working-class
English. His father was from England and
his mother was a fifth generation
English New Zealander.
Among many other things he was abusive
and violent towards my mother,
occasionally towards me and more towards
my immediate younger sister. I did what a
toddler does, what any young child can do
when the person in control of your world
is a tyrant. I comforted my younger
siblings. I feared for my mother.
I developed a deep sense of compassion
and a distrust of him and an abhorrence
of the abuse of power and I have ever
since waded into fights where physically
larger bully was as taking a smaller or
younger person.
Many times I've put myself at risk.
The most recent assault occurring just
two years ago when I tried to protect
some youth from some older men. They'd
been a car crash and the older man were
looking for retribution. One older man
rushed in to the crowd of youth and
punched one of the boys and I tried to
get a photo of him for evidence, for the
police he grabbed me around the throat
and slam my head down onto a rubbish bin.
So that was a physical attack. In my
older adult life I've been more usually
subjected to attacks that are from afar
and more stabbing in the back by
competitors in my area of research who
are intent on sabotaging my studies and
destroying my reputation and if they can
my will to carry on. That instinct to
rush in, to protect and defend people who
are being victimized, who are being
unfairly treated seems to be something I
can't temper and I don't think it's
right to whether it's a single person in
a position of power taking advantage of
a subordinate or a group who form a mob
to terrorize someone or a class of
people. Whether it's the government of
our day, the members of parliament who
seek to elevate their way of life, their
religion and their culture over all
others I'll stand up to any of them. One
of the things that has helped me survive
was my education .Studying psychology,
studying domestic violence, studying the
sexual abuse of children, colonisation
and racism - emotionally heavy and
upsetting topics - but I developed an
understanding and there's security in
that.
I get away from the heavier topics I
thought that focusing on helping people
stop smoking would be very worthwhile
and far less hard on my health and
it was for 20 years of my career in
tobacco control but the last seven years
or so have turned vicious. Some people in
the sector began lobbying to penalize
people who smoked with fines, to deny
them accommodation and employment
wanting to evict them from city centers.
They wanted to mark people, make them
carry papers, calls that should concern
anyone with a basic knowledge of the
historical oppression of people's. The
indigenous people of New Zealand,
Australia, Canada, the US, New Caledonia
I could go on for example have
disproportionately higher smoking rates
and I had to object because these
regressive deliberately damaging
policies would disproportionately hurt
my people and other groups with
disproportionately higher smoking rates:
people with schizophrenia and other
mental health conditions and the lowest
income group. Here we go again,
here's a group of mainly white middle
class well-to-does wanting to sock it to
them Black's, the poor, then who them
scary people with mental health
disorders, them homeless - ah so this isn't
about smoking I realized. They don't care
about these people, they don't like these
people and then along came vaping. A few
colleagues and I had already been
lobbying for Swedish snus - a greatly
reduced alternatives to smoking to be
made it legal in New Zealand but we hadn't
been having any luck and I just heard
last night that we still are not
going to get that even with the
legalization of vaping
however vaping here at last was a harm
reduction product that was taking off
among people who smoked regardless of
public health and regardless of tobacco
controls opinion or assistance. It was
great
but the slam’em harder bash them till they
quit mob had said no to harm reduction.
No you quit our way or it's the highway.
Your choice is quit or die. This just
convinced me all or more that what was
happening was no longer about public
health. There was too much abusiveness
internally in the sector and towards
people who dared to disagree as well as
towards people who smoke to invade. The
people we were supposed to be trying to
help. This is another thing that helped
me stay resolute. If people have to use
abuse and attacks, if they defame you, lie
about you, if they manipulate others or
threaten others to silence dissent. then
you know what they're doing is wrong.
One of the spiritual resources
indigenous people had and still have
that colonizers needed to destroy was
our beliefs and practices that enable us
to discern right from wrong, truth from
lie, integrity from corruption. At the
beginning of my talk I said the most
important question we ask when we meet
someone is who are you? This is just an
everyday example of one of the ways we
seek to discern and friendly from
someone out to steal from us or hurt us.
Meeting face to face was another
important practice because it gave us
the opportunity to get a better sense of
a person. We call it their "ahua" -
their character. Face to face you have
more clues to watch out for and
spiritually there are more
signs you know the feeling you get when
your instinct about a person kicks in. We
had a lot of cultural and spiritual
protocols and practices that helped us
protect ourselves and our families and
our culture. An important piece of advice
that helped me along the way was up hold
your own tikanga. Tikanga are tribal protocols
or you could say principles values. It's
like your system of ethics. Firstly you
have to know what your tikanga is.
You have to have some principles and
ethics and after 30 years almost in this
business of public health I'm sorry to
say some people in public health have no
ethics when it comes to what they are
willing to do to people, to bend them to
their will, to make them obey. Science is
a system of ethics.
There are research ethics, there are
professional ethics and rules of
behavior and when professors do not
obeyed by those ethics for example
sexually harassing a student that's a
breach of professional ethics.
Deformation is a breach of professional
ethics. Appropriating science for example
conducting a non-scientific opinion
survey of a  sample of your
colleagues and writing it up and
presenting it as a scientific work with
the intent being only to manipulate
policy analysts and politicians -this
isn't science. It's not evidence, it's
simply a lobbying tactic it used to be
called propaganda. One of the negative
consequences of this kind of advocacy
research we call it, these so called
studies or market research that written
in the language of a scientific study
but methodological are flawed is that
science itself gets eroded.
Student should be taught to discern
between a rigorous study and a piece of
work
that sounds like it's research but so
much of the shoddy not science has now
been published that it's normalized the
new genre and the new generation of
scientists are not questioning the lack
of rigor, the glaring researcher bias.
Well it's okay as long as they write
what the limitations are in the paper,
right? We are well into an era now of
over connectedness. The Internet of all
things having public profiles on several
professional and social media platforms.
There has been an equalizing effect now
anyone regardless of qualifications or
experience can blog about any topic. This
has worked well for the vaping community
who via face-to-face and online peer
support have largely driven the mass
exodus of peoples's from smoke
tobacco to vaping. The greatly reproduced
nicotine e-liquid but poor old public
health stuck in the past can't get a
word in.  I've been collecting tobacco
control papers over the years that
discuss how it was getting harder and
harder to get the message across. There
was too much competition. How do you get
cut through? What do you do when the media
is sick of the same old smoking kills
message. The authors recommend getting
creative using street drama ,recruiting
community based people to voice the
message mostly pre-prepared scripts or
better yet get children to read them - an
exploitation I really have never been
able to stomach. We had to get louder, be
more shocking, use blood and gore. Show
people with their throats half eaten
away with cancer,
we had to exaggerate the ill effects of
smoking, we had to come up with something
new all the time electron to topical
events like recently like Covid, somehow
get your message attached to these
whatever's getting coverage, create days
like world smoke-free day. We had to
become celebrities in our own right,
celebrity scientists. We had to get on TV
we had to get X XK plus numbers of
followers on social media. For some to
pursuit of sainthood or celebrity and
fame has become more important than
whatever reduction of disease they
originally signed in for. Just as an
example one prominent Anglo eastern
professor of nutrition in New Zealand
likened himself and his colleagues to
Mahatma Gandhi. As the messages became
more exaggerated we moved further and
further away from the truth but the new
generation of smoke-free workers didn't
know the messages were exaggerated. Did
we need them to know? No because we need
them to come across as authentic, right?
One of the things I learned when I was
briefly working in the field of domestic
violence is that if there is no negative
consequence for an act of violence the
abuse usually escalates. That's what's
happened in public health. There's only
been encouragement to do more louder go
further, be harsher. There's no break on
the train, there's no accountability.
People seem less willing to protest now
and risk losing their job or being
stabbed in the back defamed exiled and
blacklisted from working in the sector,
like what's happened to me in New
Zealand. If public health keeps on like
thus like a runaway train where will it
end?
I wondered well now we know public
health has reached the apex of its power.
I hope it's the apex, they have so much
power, so much influence. They have
managed to convince governments around
the world to quarantine their whole
nations not just the people who are
infected or at risk of being infected,
they quarantined the well. They
quarantined the people not at risk of
illness they sometimes with force or
threat of enforcement locked people in
their homes or elsewhere. The damage, the
loss of businesses jobs housing, the
increase in deaths due to suicide and
delayed surgery is yet to be calculated.
This is another breach of ethics the
treatment should not do more harm then
the problem you're trying to alleviate.
Laws passed under urgency during
lockdown have handed police unfitted
powers to come into our homes without a
warrant, to stop question and detain
anyone anywhere. Even in a supposedly
democratic society like New Zealand many
of us have felt a chill run down our
spine especially those of us who know
what it's like to live in fear of a
tyrant or the police or an authoritarian
government, who do not care about people
at the bottom.
Mistake we've been making I think for
decades is to think that the war on
drugs is about drugs and the more recent
war on nicotine is about nicotine. It's
not about nicotine. Some people in public
health and in tobacco control, those
holding the reins at the moment are
waging a war on people, people they don't
like, people they believe they are
superior to. They will weaponize anything
to brand people "wrong" be it the color of
your skin, your sexuality, your religion
or ethnicity. Oh and if we outlaw
discrimination on those grounds then
they will just switch to something else
that isn't illegal like discriminating
against you on the basis of your body
shape or size or weight, your lifestyle
that you smoke, drink alcohol or eat junk
food. Public Health are constantly now
marking people it's like that schoolyard
or workplace prank when someone sticks a
sign on your back saying kick here. It's
government sanctioned bullying, no wonder
our bullying rates and our suicide rates
are so high in New Zealand and Australia.
The way to stop this is diversity to
elevate and demand inclusion of a
diversity of views, a diversity of
scientific opinion. A diversity of
experts need to be involved in
deliberating decisions and policies and
consumers and the people who will be
disproportionately affected by policy
decisions must be heard. Then nothing
about us without us must be honored but
it has to be real
not just the
tick the box performance like the New
Zealand government health slick
committee who made us all submit to them
while in lockdown
about the vaping legislation here only
to have them change virtually nothing,
nothing, they prohibitionist minds were
made up. Valuing diversity needs to be
real not the roll out the brown carpet
token if it it is now. Roll out the brown
carpet is as saying we have for example
when the white professors employed one
brown person to front recruitment of
brown people for their study. Oh and
they'll make sure they get someone
junior, someone who doesn't realize
they're being used against their own.
There must be Tikanga,
there must be effects, sitting
behavioural boundaries and to prevent
abuse and corruption and scientists
corrupting the process should be
sanctioned. There needs to be
consequences for abusive X with the
myths that sciences in we need more open
processes like consensus seeking
conferences not the echo chamber,
back-slapping rah-rah meetings that
tobacco-control conferences have become.
Research results should be free and
openly available to the public and all
other scientists. If even one
professionally upstanding scientists,
such as myself the most qualified and
most experienced indigenous expert on
reducing smoking among indigenous people
in the world is blacklisted, as I have
been by the New Zealand government
Ministry of Health, you don't have
science, you don't have freedom you have
tyranny.
If they will do it to one person, they
will lose no sleep over doing it to ten
or a hundred or a whole nation. I wish
more people would battle for justice and
stand up for people being exploited and
manipulated like Alison Chesney and
Eddie Killoran did and like I do. It's no
good saying anymore as Shakespeare wrote
"that the truth will out, that the truth
will prevail". Times have changed,
the liars are winning, the anti-vaxxers
are winning, the anti vapors are winning.
Democracy is fragile, it is not assured.
The atrocious and unscientific abuse of
power
many of our governments have just
exercised should be all that evidence
you need to question more critique,
so-called scientific claims, help restore
our right to debate without fear of
abuse, help restore my right as a
scientist and therefore everyone's right
to conduct our research and publish our
research results. Yes the prohibitionists
are prohibiting journals from publishing
my work. Vaping is not controversial, it's
simple, it saves lives,
it's harm reduction. The corruption and
suppression of science, manipulating
politicians lying to the public that's
what should be controversial, thank you
very much.
