All nicotine is evil except ours
I came across an item yesterday.
Christopher Snowdon wrote about The Irish Cancer Society's hard sell.
There is little I can add other than to say that next time the ICS come rattling their boxes looking for your money, just remember that they are little more than a shopfront for Big Pharma.
How they can call themselves a "charity" is beyond me.
Over the six months I have been vaping I have gone from a pack of cigs a day to about a pack every week and a half to two weeks. My next step is to stop the cigs completely. I have weened myself down to the smallest amount of nicotine that one can get in E-juice
Stop the cigs then stop the vaping should all come together this summer…
but of course Electro fags don't work.
Fucking morons!
According to O'Meara and her "study" you have to be wrong. E-cigarettes are only making your addiction worse so you must be on at the very least ten packs a day? The only type of nicotine that is non-addictive is the stuff in those lovely patches that the nice people in Big Pharma make.
Unless of course, O'Meara's "study" is a steaming pile of horseshit? Nah! Couldn't be…..
work your magic please…
I thought for a moment you had nothing to say.
Magic worked, though if I showed the image embedded, it would either be too small to read or so big it would smash the page. Also I took a copy of the image a) in case the original disappears and b) I don't want to overload a stranger's site with thousands of visitors from here. [*cough*]
Cheers. I figured ss might appreciate it.
I see that while it was supposed to happen in 2009, the Irish government pleaded poverty and only got round to setting up a proper public register of charities last year, after some scandal about huge amounts of money and a disability charity. I also see it's taking so long, and some charities are dragging their feet so much, that you still won't be able to check out basic details about charities for a year or two yet.
When you can – and even if it works as they say it should – I would predict two things.
Firstly, you'll find that charities like the ICC get something like 80% of their money from government and large companies, both of whom expect a lot in return if the UK model is anything to go by.
Secondly, you should expect to find that the ICC is giving less money to cancer research & the like than you'd expect, but is underwriting 'education' and stop smoking campaigns of the kind you'd think public health departments should run if there's a case for them. Again – look at any big UK cancer charity.
Don't think this is what decent folk putting their change in the bucket expect to pay for, and maybe, you shouldn't just ask what it does before you give to street collectors, you should also be asking government what they're paying the ICC to do.
My philosophy now is to never give to any charity unless I know precisely where the money is going. The case you mentioned above [the Central Remedial Clinic] was a real eye-opener with the heads getting massive six figure salaries and bonuses. It transpired that this practice extended to other charities as well, and my attitude is that there is no way any fat cat is going to get a cut of my pension. All my donations now go to small local affairs where I know the money is desperately needed and there are few or no staff involved. ICC are now top of my fuck-off list.
In Ireland we're easy targets for the soft touch. We have a national knee-jerk reaction to news about disasters overseas, although this is often mitigated by "compassion fatigue", and frenzied fundraising after overseas famines, earthquakes and tsunamis undoubtedly diminishes the fundraising efforts of domestic charities. We have weak laws governing the registration and accountability of charitable organizations. Some charities behave like corporations in terms of high-salaried professional staff, fundraising procedures and advertising campaigns. The volunteer aid workers who give up a couple of years to placements in feeding camps, refugee camps, rural development programmes and medical service in underfinanced clinics and hospitals do the actual charity work on the ground. I have become a tad cynical about professional executives working for some high profile charitable organizations. I tend to donate modest sums of money to small-sized entities and hope they spend smaller sums of money on smaller projects in a more personal and cost effective manner. I never turn away from my doorstep schoolkids selling raffle tickets for the local school. I never miss a local cake sale or jumble sale.
We seem to have this reputation as a very generous contributor to overseas charities. As you say, it's more a reflection on us being a soft touch. How much of that money actually reaches the ground where it's actually needed? My guess is very little.
As you say – local charities run by local people.
And ASH of course. [I mean the ASH up on my sidebar, not those Anti-Smoker bastards.]