When I first glanced at an editorial headline in the venerable The British Medical Journal (BMJ) of 4 May 2024, I thought common sense was at last beginning to appear in dealing with the smoking problem. It said, ‘Stop tobacco…’ Perhaps they were following in the footsteps of those environmental campaigners who make such a nuisance of [...]

In previous blogs I have dealt with how vaping makes you feel bad, induces vulgarity, and is an activity from which you will get no satisfaction. Now I have to add another downside to this abnormal and potentially harmful behaviour: it can result in vapers being grumpy, as I shall explain. Do you know what INNCO means? It’s [...]

Here we go again. An article on BBC News (14 June 2022) shows everything that’s wrong with the current approach to smoking and vaping. Let’s start with the headline: ‘Vaping – it is a risk-free option?’ An option for what? For a way of taking nicotine into your body? You don’t need options for this purpose because you [...]

The Tobacco Advisory Group of the highly esteemed UK Royal College of Physicians has produced a report called Smoking and Health 2021 with the intriguing subtitle, A coming of age for tobacco control? It’s an impressive document, written by fifty-one contributors, running to 169 pages, and includes 1,295 references. The authors are all highly qualified academics: professors, research [...]

Vapid thinking about the vaping problem is shown in a seven-author Research Letter in an online publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association called Network Open (2 April 2021). Six of the authors are Doctors of Philosophy and one has a Master of Science degree. (It's part of the PATH study about which I've written before.) [...]

Since I first wrote about the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study how far along have our intrepid researchers got? They now proceed, we are informed, not in steps or stages, but in waves. We’re now at Waves 1–3 with a paper released in March 2020 by Saul Shiffman and Mark Sembower. These gentlemen work for an [...]

Do you know what formaldehyde cyanohydrin is? The answer will be revealed shortly, but first, kind reader, consider the following: A BBC news item (20 September 2018) shows TV presenter Jeremy Kyle sitting at his desk, looking rather serious. He boasts he’s quit smoking twenty cigarettes-a-day after thirty-five years: ‘I am proud to say that I quit smoking [...]

In support of the suggestion that e-cigarettes (vaping) should be available on the NHS, there is a clip shown on the BBC Radio 5 Alive program (19 August 2015) featuring Professor Kevin Fenton from Public Health England. He points out that 'more than 2.5 million smokers have already purchased their own e-cigarettes…some are using them to quit, some [...]