The loose bottoms of Michael McFadden’s thrift-store jeans are tucked into long, red socks as he hobbles around a slippery Boston Market restaurant in West Philadelphia. Garbaged tray in hand, his pigeon-toed walk and unbalanced shoulders grab the attention of an employee as he looks around for the nearest trashcan so we can leave. She tells him to just leave it on the table. She will clean it up for him.

We’re headed to one of Philadelphia’s “smoke easies,” as he calls it, for some cigarettes and beers in the peace and quiet of a bar unlike many these days, one that reeks of tobacco ash. Everything, from the arcade game in the front, to the logo-embroidered mirrors, are stained various shades of yellow.

McFadden asks the bartender to put his half-drunk Boston Market milk in ice for safe-keeping.

The bartender obliges, and the old man takes out a pack of hand-rolled cigarettes, and lights up. There’s a horse race on TV and we both order our respective drinks: Me, a Budweiser; him, a vodka and soda. This is how the West Philly resident spends much of his time. This, and writing.

For the last few weeks, this scrawny, wrinkled man has been e-mailing me about the dangers of “antismokers” in Philadelphia, the greater United States — and the planet. He lays a manila folder, a self-made and printed pamphlet bound by a plastic report cover and white slip-on binding, on the bar and, underneath, a self-published paperback book. The book, Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains; and his next, Tobacconaucht; are McFadden’s life work. And he’ll be damned if someone tells him he’s wrong about where the prohibition of smoking indoors is leading the world.

A Gallup poll released last year shows that just one in five adults in the United States smokes—an all-time low. And with that decline, local, state and the national governments have taken to avert new smokers from popping up. In Philly, ex-Councilman Michael Nutter had actually sponsored the first viable anti-smoking legislation that passed through Council (and was signed by then-Mayor Street) and has since, along with mayors like New York City’s Michael Bloomberg, created more incentives to quit smoking and discourage it in public. The private sector has quietly followed. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has put premiums on smokers to increase the pressure of staying healthy. McFadden has essentially dedicated his life to fighting this. And he’s losing.

Pennsylvania Vice

McFadden remembers his first local loss like it was yesterday: In 2006, Philadelphia finished a six-year debate over smoking when officials banned it in most restaurants and bars for the greater health of the city. According to reports at the time, some thought the ban meant a death knell. Bars would leave and profits would send local restaurateurs into the poor house.

Two years later, it didn’t. So, on June 10, 2008, Gov. Ed Rendell signed a statewide smoking ban that mirrored Philadelphia’s—no lighting up in businesses and restaurants that make more than 20 percent of their profits from food, except for private clubs.

According to the Pennsylvania Alliance to Control Tobacco, which is run by the American Lung Association, up to 3,240 “adults, children and babies” die each year in the commonwealth from secondhand smoke and pregnancy smoking. The Surgeon General has warned that Secondhand smoke contains more than 250 chemicals known to be carcinogenic, including formaldehyde, benzene, vinyl chloride, arsenic, ammonia, and hydrogen cyanide.

Children who are exposed to secondhand smoke, as anti-smoking advocates tell it, are inhaling many of the same cancer-causing substances and poisons as smokers. A new ad campaign recently hit Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority buses, which claims children of smokers are more likely to develop ear infections if their parents smoke—a stat backed up by the Center for Disease Control.

And in Pennsylvania, legislators like state Rep. Mario Scavello have launched an all-out effort to stamp it out completely. The Monroe County Republican sponsored legislation that would close all loopholes in the Pennsylvania’s anti-smoking law, called the Clean Air Act.

“Right now, [the rules are] so deceiving,” he says. “If you make under a certain amount of business in your bar and you’re not considered a restaurant, you can smoke … And, it’s very hard to enforce the law. I think the time has come, you have less and less smokers, the time has come—like New York City [to ban smoking in all businesses]. It hasn’t hurt their restaurants or their bars.”

Scavello has worked with the ALA and the American Cancer Society on such legislation. And so has state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf (R-Bucks), who’s been working closely on the issue with the American Lung Association and others.

“There’s probably close to anywhere between 2,700 and 3,000 exemptions that we know about [in the law],” says Deborah Brown, CEO of the American Lung Association of the Mid-Atlantic, which includes Pennsylvania. “If you own a private club, you don’t have to submit an application, so we don’t even know how many of those are out there that might not submit an application.”

There are a large number of people, she says, who are not protected from second-hand smoke. “If someone works in a casino or a private club or a bar, they are still being exposed to the horrible pollutants in second-hand smoke, and we need to make sure we protect every person who has a job and works here in the commonwealth from those hazardous pollutants … and we also need to protect those who frequent those facilities.”

Among other anti-smoking legislation in state government: state Rep. Peter Daley’s “Protecting Children from Secondhand Smoke” bill, which would make it a secondary offense to smoke in cars in which young children (those under 8 years old, or 80 pounds) are being transported. That means a $100 fine the first time you’re caught, and $250 thereafter—and there are expanded local efforts around the state to stop smokers from lighting up in parks and playgrounds.

Mayor Nutter in Philly proposed a tax of $2 per pack on cigarettes this past spring, to help pay for schools. He also pushed for a companion bill to raise the liquor tax. In mid-May, anti-smoking groups gathered in Harrisburg to call for “No more excemptions” in the original ban.

To put matters into perspective, Philly City Council pushed the tobacco tax bill forth almost instantaneously, with a vote of 16-0. The liquor-by-the-drink tax didn’t even get a vote.

“That’s politically interesting,” says Zach Stalberg, CEO of the Philly-based good government group Committee of Seventy. “When they’re taxing cigarettes, the view is they’re penalizing some big company somewhere else. And, whereas, essentially it’s local restaurants and bars that fear they will take the heat from the liquor tax.”

The other obvious reason: It gets people to think twice before they light up.

The problem: you can’t rely on taxes to keep coming in on a product that kills people—especially when that tax and a subsequent government-funded ad campaign are inherently designed to make people stop using such a product.

Long-term, it just doesn’t work. And even if it does, those paying the tax are dying.

The Smokers Club

Michael McFadden, photo by J.R. Blackwell

McFadden coughs a lot. His coughs are wet, phlegmy and sick. He tells me about his spine, which, since he was a child, has forced his left and right shoulders to stand uneven and his seated position to be a perch instead of a comfortable lean-back.

If there’s anything the 62-year-old isn’t, it’s a clean bill of health. And he talks a lot about weakness.

“It’s always amazed me how Hitler was able to move the general population of Germany,” McFadden tells me in the bar, which he asked I not name. “Germans are good, ordinary people. But he used the power of propaganda and played on the weaknesses we all have—mainly, that we’re protective of our children.”

Despite his odd physical appearance, McFadden is extremely friendly and knowledgeable in person. I like him. He’s generous and seems to genuinely care about the people around him. So, his meek talk of conspiracy theories seem to go on longer before I realize what he’s actually saying:

Every time you or I say we’re glad there’s no more smoking in bars, our clothes don’t smell, our eyes don’t sting: we’re helping them. They’ve worked tirelessly for 40 years across the world to make smoking a four-letter-word. They re-directed the news the night of the Iowa caucuses in 2012, making sure former Texas U.S. Rep. Ron Paul didn’t win. Because if Paul won Iowa, he would have gotten the nomination, McFadden says, and they can’t have that.

That said, the smoking gun pointing directly from one to the other? It doesn’t exist.

Here’s what he does know: The line’s latest incarnation begins at the 1975 World Smoking Conference, where Sir George Godber, Chief Medical Officer of England from 1960-1973 and chief architect of that country’s socialized healthcare infrastructure, told an audience of world leaders that in order to ban smoking everywhere (second-hand smoking studies did not exist yet), it would be essential to “create an atmosphere in which it was perceived that active smokers would injure those around them, especially their family and any infants or young children.”

And then the world got to work.

“When they first created this lie, they had no evidence at all to support it, but began pumping money into creating what they needed,” McFadden says. “Today, billions of dollars later, they can point to a pile of very equivocal studies, ignore their failings, and simply claim they all prove the need for smoking bans.”

The Associated Press reported it in 2011 that the Food and Drug Administration will spend $600 million over the following five years to anti-smoking advertisements; estimating about 443,000 people die each year from smoking. And much of that money comes from tobacco companies’ “user fees” (taxes, forced donations to anti-tobacco groups, etc.) that are expected to grow to $712 million in 2019.

That’s why the tobacco companies are already getting involved in e-cigarettes: to corner the market they’ve lost in the United States.

McFadden’s colleague, Robert Gehrmann, who is McFadden’s Pittsburgh equivalent at the Smokers’ Club, a national pro-smoking advocacy group, conspicuously agrees. Speaking by e-mail, he hints that anti-smoking advocates and pharmaceutical companies are working together to make cigarettes a dirty word.

“There are no nico-gummy patches that a pharmaceutical company may sell to ease the fears of the uninformed so that disease will not strike them down,” Gehrmann says. His wife has ALS and he seems to believe that that if science had put as much effort into her disease as they did into smoking, she wouldn’t need the 24-hour home care he provides her.

Gehrmann makes sure not to point at anyone directly when discussing his wife’s condition. But someone else is responsible, it seems. Unfortunately, as has been noted in hordes of articles about conspiracy theorists, who’ve made a comeback as of late, this is typical. And he, like McFadden, may also believe that Ron Paul had the election stolen from under his nose—a point repeated to me by multiple Paul supporters during a 2012 rally at Independence Mall in Philadelphia.

“Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview,” wrote Maggie Koerth-Baker in The New York Times on May 21, 2013, in her article, “Why rational people buy into conspiracy theories.” She adds: “Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.”

‘Only I saw it happening’

McFadden wasn’t always this way. For a while he was an optimist. He dreamed of creating a world without mass murder.

A baby-boomer of the Vietnam era, he spent his higher education years learning about the propaganda utilized by governments, searching for a common thread so he could stop future generations from getting sucked into another Vietnam or Nazi Germany.

“I couldn’t understand how Nazi Germany happened,” he says. “Germans are, by and large, good people. How did good people get to the point where they accepted a minority group as non-humans?”

In 1974, after graduating from Manhattan College, McFadden came to Philadelphia to study at the Wharton School on scholarship. He admits his undergrad grades were nothing to throw a party over, but he had a hook: He had created his own major at the West Philadelphia school. And he called it ‘Peace Studies.’ It combined aspects of several other subjects in order to make the world a better place—and, he says, to spot propaganda.

That doctorate he came down the New Jersey Turnpike to earn never came to fruition. He dropped out after two years of study and began living in a West Philadelphia Quaker commune, working odd jobs, including night custodian at the University of the Sciences back when it was called Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science.

By the late ‘70s, McFadden, then a bicycle advocate (amongst the many powers of the bicycle, he says: They were more affective than tanks in Vietnam, since the side which utilized them won), began going door-to-door asking for nuclear proliferation donations for a nonprofit—a time in which he probably never would have seen himself, 40 years later, hold his nose and vote for a guy like Mitt Romney.

Things changed, he said, after the World Smoking Conference.

“After that conference three people in the community came home with a packet of pamphlets and told me, ‘If you want to smoke, you should only do it in your rooms,’” he says.

Going outside to smoke wasn’t even thought of, yet.

“It caused a big disturbance in the community,” McFadden says. “We were tolerant of all kinds of differences people had. And suddenly there was this division between two groups — smokers and nonsmokers, and smokers would have to stay in their rooms if they wanted to smoke.”

He began reading the pamphlets his fellow Quakers were fond of, and noticed a pattern. “I looked at the wording they used, the arguments they used, and it was the same kinds of things I studied when I was in school studying peace. They used emotive words, statistical words that can be bent,” he says, sarcastically adding: “Did you know that up to 100 percent of the people around second hand smoke are going to die?”

The most common statistical trick, he says: “up to 100 percent,” which includes zero percent. “You see that commonly in anti-smoking literature. Little language tricks that make you realize that this isn’t real; this is propaganda.”

His involvement in pro-smoking efforts didn’t really begin, though, until the 90s. By then, smoking ads had been banned from TV and radio for two decades. Numerous studies were released showing the harmful effects on smokers’ lungs and the number of smokers in the west was declining rapidly.

He believes the “anti-smokers” weren’t just forcing each other to quit; they were telling us that smokers weren’t real people—that they weren’t as good as you and me.

He finally had enough when he and a friend were driving in the Philadelphia suburbs on a cold Thanksgiving evening and an elderly woman caught his eye. She was shivering on the front porch of a home, quickly sucking up nicotine-ridden smoke.

Wow, he thought, her family actually sent her outside to smoke. On Thanksgiving. He began doing his research, writing articles on the Internet and testifying in front of city governments—from Philly to New York to London.

“It was happening,” he says, “and only I saw it happening.”

Today, McFadden lives on just $5,000 of inheritance money per year on Ludlow Street. He hangs out at some of the few smoking bars left in Philadelphia (except McGlinchy’s at 15th and Locust; he was banned for handing out pro-smoking literature some years back), rolling and smoking his own cigarettes—a preferred method so he doesn’t have to pay the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement tax, which came into place after Medicaid lawsuits against big Tobacco in 1998.

In 2006, McFadden released his self-published book, the 369-page Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains, detailing what he sees as a propagandized war on tobacco users by the American government, detailing the previous wars he’s fought against Philadelphia, and other city councils and state governments.

He and fellow advocates see anti-smoking causes as just another lobbied front—though instead of Big Tobacco pulling the strings, it’s Big Pharma and progressive politicians. He said as much while testifying before City Council in 2000, calling potential smoking bans “one of the most effective weapons in the arsenal of social engineering when it comes to reducing smoking and getting smokers to quit smoking.”

When a “Restaurant and Hospitality Task Force” was formed in 2000 to study the costs of an anti-smoking bill in Philadelphia, he wrote to a friend by email: “my sort of input was not wanted,” and noted the task force consisted of “six Antismoking advocates and five restaurateurs to ensure that the right decision would be reached.”

Six years later, it happened. And he again testified before City Council, publicly comparing anti-smoking protesters’ “nasty little theatrics” (bringing children to City Hall with signs and sneakers to note how many children are killed per year due to second hand smoke) to Saddam Hussein “posing with little American hostages and patting them on the head for TV cameras.”

The same way dictators throughout history have used children as props, McFadden says, antismokers will use children to further their cause. “Politicians do this all the time. George Bush said we had to go to war because Iraqis were dumping Kuwaiti incubators in landfills … Hitler said Jews were stealing Christian babies. Children get support over and over again.”

There’s more. Propaganda is primarily effective when the denormalized are also said to have a disease and have it on display. Jews were branded in Nazi Germany. Homosexuals wore pink triangles.

Today, he says, it’s more subtle. Smokers carry a disease in their pockets. When they expose that disease, they’re asked to go outside, on full display to the disapproving public. After all, he doesn’t believe second-hand smoke is a real threat. Outdoor smoking’s real point is to make smokers isolated. Stand out in the cold and get your fix, secluded from society.

“They want to treat people like they’re rats,” he says, “make it painful [to smoke] and hurt them. Then tell them that’s what’s good for them.”

Just the Beginning

There are other theories. In 2013, the University of Pennsylvania Health System announced it would no longer hire smokers and other tobacco users so it could lower its own health care costs. In doing so, it cited a Center for Disease Control and Prevention study that found smoking and secondhand smoke leads to 443,000 premature deaths each year and costs $193 billion in health-care costs and lost productivity.

Anna, an occupational therapist from West Philadelphia, who asked her last name be omitted from this article, says it was two years before her co-workers and some patients realized she smoked. “It was one of those things where my bag was on the table and the loud mouth of the group was like, ‘Are these cigarettes?’” she notes in between smoke breaks at Bonner’s Pub in Center City Philadelphia. “She said, ‘you don’t look like the kind of person who smokes.”

Anna hides her habit well.

Although many people in the health industry smoke (at least 11 percent of those at UPenn), it’s still taboo—“Everyone knows it’s bad for you,” she says. “If someone said, ‘I did not know it was bad’ (she says this in a lung-cancerous voice, her finger on the base of her neck), it’s like, ‘yes, you did.’”

But healthcare workers have been using nicotine to deal with pressure since forever. And sometimes you just need to get outside.

“Everyone I know in the health industry who does smoke, it’s just to get away for a little while,” she continues. “Your boss isn’t going to let you take a fresh air break. But you tell someone, ‘I’m going for a cigarette break,’ it’s OK.”

UPenn’s policy, set to go into effect in July, has not been without its controversies. The head of the system’s smoking treatment program, Dr. Frank Leone, told Newsworks he didn’t think the new policy would curb healthcare costs, and it might even curb quitting. “It’s hard to imagine a person doing anything but really just hiding the fact that they’re a smoker,” Leone said last year. “And once that happens, particularly in a healthcare institution, the chances that they’ll go and seek care for the problem go down considerably in my mind.”

And UPenn is probably ahead of the curve. Under the Affordable Care Act, often known as Obamacare, premiums for smokers are as much as 50 percent higher than nonsmokers, if patients buy their health care from the exchanges.

This, McFadden believes, is just the beginning.

Tobakkonacht

“The Nazis developed a word: ‘Denormalization,’” McFadden notes. “They say, ‘This is not normal,’ whether you’re a gypsy, a Jew, or a smoker. And it’s a slippery slope. First they say ‘They’re harming us,’ then they say they’re harming our children … and now we’re told smokers are killing babies all over the place [through second-hand smoke].”

The United States will never reach the same point with smokers that Germany did with Europe’s Jewish population, he believes, “but you still have this early acceptance of allowing them to be discriminated against. Allowing laws to be applied to them that we wouldn’t accept for others — going outside, not being allowed to live in certain condos, allowing children to be taken away in custody disputes.”

McFadden says he estimates “at least 200 kids” have been taken away from a parent in custody disputes because of that parent’s smoking habit, but does not provide evidence.

The last thing he shows me is the final chapter of his book, which he’s named Tobakkonacht. It’s a take on Kristallnacht, the 1938 event in Germany, which saw 30,000 Jews either killed or put in concentration camps. The front cover art is an action shot of the Statue of Liberty literally getting stabbed in the back by a gigantic arm, a tattoo of Caduceus on the arm’s wrist.

It’s pretty sharp imagery. Some might even call it offensive. But as we walk down 46th Street so McFadden can grab his bike and head home, his final thought is that he’s just doing his part. Because no one else will. Suddenly, he stops. He realizes he’s forgotten his milk at the bar. He looks back. And I can almost see his eyes die a little as he decides we’ve already gone too far. His milk is gone.

Randy LoBasso is a staff writer at Philadelphia Weekly and winner of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association’s 2014 Distinguished Writing award. Follow him on Twitter: @RandyLoBasso.