Er bestaat geen goed Nederlands woord voor. Je zou er een nieuw woord voor moeten uitvinden. In het Engels is het Health Fascism. In het Nederlands zou je kunnen denken aan woorden als gezondheidsgijzeling of -afpersing.
In ieder geval komt het er op neer dat je de gezondheid, c.q. het lichaam van een mens gebruikt om een bepaald gedrag af te dwingen: angst inboezemen (Health Scare) als middel om je zin te bereiken. Geen middel is daarvoor te zwaar.
In de VS is er één organisatie die als geen ander bedreven is in deze techniek: de Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Zij waren de eerste zware financiers van de hetze en nep-onderzoeken tegen roken en rokers. Zíj betaalden de lokale anti-rokengroepen in de VS om hun lobbywerk te doen en de roker zwart te maken.
En nu zijn alcoholisten en dikke mensen het volgende slachtoffer. Na de rookpolitie wordt nu de weg geplaveid voor de drankpolitie en de voedselpolitie. De honderden miljoenen dollars voor de campagne liggen al klaar.
Lees over hoe een ‘charitatieve’, met farmaceutisch geld gevoede organisatie zich opmaakt om de gehele bevolking in gijzeling te nemen. Want drinken, goed eten of roken doet iedereen wel.
Op weg naar de gemedicaliseerde samenleving! Kassa!
“Greetings, fat people,” writes Jack Gordon in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “It cannot have escaped your notice that you lately have been reclassified as not merely unsightly but an actual public health hazard and a menace to society.” The chunky among us, he continues, are now being blamed for “oppressing the innocent and the svelte by exerting upward pressure on their health-insurance premiums.” And America’s public health activists “intend to put a stop to you.”
How did we get here? Part of the answer can be found in Princeton, New Jersey, where the biggest health cop in the world, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), is headquartered. As we’ve told you before, RWJF is applying its anti-alcohol model to burgers, fries, and apple pie — even proclaiming that our love-handles are “forcing what may be a cultural revolution” in which “ideas to cut obesity that once sounded extreme are gaining public attention and moving into mainstream thinking.”
Thus far, RWJF’s biggest contribution to this “cultural revolution” has been two studies it funded, published last year in the journal Health Affairs. Not surprisingly, RWJF lavished Health Affairs with nearly $2 million in 2002.
The first of these RWJF-funded studies, conducted by Rand Corporation researcher Roland Sturm, concluded — through a tortured mess of statistical mumbo-jumbo — that obesity is more expensive for our healthcare system than either alcohol dependence or tobacco. It’s this kind of agenda-driven “research” that groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) seize on to justify “solutions” like fat taxes and lawsuits against food companies. And as The Washington Post made clear in 2002, Sturm shares CSPI’s agenda:
“Achieving lasting health behavioral change is difficult and rarely achieved by exhorting individuals to exercise more, eat healthier foods,” writes Sturm. It takes changes in the environment to discourage overeating, he says. The narrow focus on diets “is not going to work,” he says. “This is doomed to fail.” He points to the tobacco analogy. Smoking rates have dropped not because the surgeon general exhorted individuals not to smoke, but because of higher taxes on cigarettes, the establishment of smoke-free buildings and work sites, limits on tobacco advertising, the isolation of smokers in restaurants and other public places, a broad public education campaign on smoking hazards and, finally, a legal attack on tobacco companies.
