I pointed out the muddle-headed approach of the World Health Organization in 2021, but they’re still at it. They recently issued a 248-page document, WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, 2023: Protect people from tobacco smoke. It’s full of boastful repetitive wordy statements such as the following: No treaty, no set of public health […]
Continue reading
Why do some people, known as smokers, repeatedly every day inhale poisonous tobacco fumes – and continue doing so for years, decades, or even the rest of their lives? The short answer is because they find themselves unable to stop. Now let’s look at why they start this abnormal and potentially lethal behaviour. The simple […]
Continue reading
Courtesy of that august organ, ASH Daily News, on 5 June 2023 we learn that the UK government is in a bind. On the one hand, ‘Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, this week announced measures to reduce vaping among teenagers’, and on the other hand, ‘Health officials believe that vapes can be a useful tool […]
Continue reading
Cancer is a serious problem and a tragedy for those suffering from it and for their loved ones. Many cases are due to smoking which has rightly been called the biggest single preventable cause of death and disease. Therefore, it is pertinent to ask, what should the government do about it? I am getting tired […]
Continue reading
In November 2022 the UK government put out a document with the hyphen-challenged title, The Smokefree 2030 ambition for England. The ‘ambition’ is to make England smoke-free by 2030, but they do not mean that after this date no one in England will smoke; they mean the smoking prevalence will be no more than 5 […]
Continue reading
I have written previously about the cock-eyed plan of bribing pregnant smokers to cease poisoning themselves with tobacco fumes. Now Mr Neil O’Brien, MP, the UK Minister for Primary Care and Public Health, has announced the latest wheeze to try and cut smoking rates. On the gov.uk website (11 April 2023) this what, with all […]
Continue reading
Does the Symonds Method make smokers feel ashamed? Smokers, if they’re honest with themselves, are already ashamed by their apparent inability to stop poisoning themselves with tobacco fumes – a great misfortune. I recently received a message from a smoker in Australia that was rather critical of my approach to helping smokers become non-smokers again. […]
Continue reading
This is the question posed by one Michael Burke. He has a doctorate in education and is a Certified Tobacco Treatment Specialist, no less. But I was set wondering what he actually knows about smoking when I came upon what he says as the Program Director of the highly esteemed Mayo Clinic Nicotine Dependence Center. […]
Continue reading
In a story attributed to George Bernard Shaw, he asked a lady at dinner one night if she would go to bed with him for £1,000. The lady agreed. Then Shaw asked her if she would go to bed with him for £1. The lady became indignant and asked, ‘What do you think I am?’ […]
Continue reading
Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the UK government’s Chief Medical Adviser, lays it on thick. At a recent symposium on medical ethics, after reminding us that ‘Smoking is an appalling way to die, it kills people in multiple ways,’ he is reported as saying that ‘getting smoking down to zero and destroying the cigarette industry should […]
Continue reading
If you’re a pack-a-day smoker, how many lungfuls of poisonous tobacco fumes will you take in a day, a month, or a year? Assuming one cigarette is consumed in ten puffs, the numbers are 200, 6000, and 73000, respectively. This dreadful situation raises the question: what can be done to help smokers cease and desist […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
I wrote a critique of the so-called New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) in March 2018. What have they been up to lately? NNA Board of Trustees’ Bios Let’s start with the Board of Trustees on their website. Five names are mentioned, but of one, Mary Stamp, we are told nothing except that her bio is to […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
I have just read a book called Allen Carr Easy Way To Quit Vaping. But taking a second glance at the cover one can discern in small print the words ‘with John Dicey’. Did they both write the book? Obviously not, since it was published in 2021 and Allen Carr died in 2006 (ironically, from […]
Continue reading
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 […]
Continue reading
To help smokers in London stick to a New Year’s resolution to quit smoking, a campaign was announced towards the end of December 2020. It was called, appropriately enough, ‘Stop Smoking London’, though it’s not clear what’s so special about London in this regard as opposed to the rest of the country. Alas, the campaign […]
Continue reading
Vaping—the activity whereby you repeatedly inhale a nicotine-laced aerosol—is big business. And as one would expect, there’s an online publication which promotes the interests of the vaping industry, the Vaping Post. In a recent edition I came across the headline, ‘Asia-Pacific Groups Create Petition Urging WHO to End Lies About Vaping.’ Well, there’s a challenge! […]
Continue reading
The WHO, bless their cotton socks, in December 2020 launched a ‘year-long global campaign for World No Tobacco Day 2021 – “Commit to Quit” ’ and as part of this splendid effort we are informed that ‘The campaign will support at least 100 million people as they try to give up tobacco…’. Come now, Dr […]
Continue reading
Since I first wrote about the PATH (Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health) study (https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/up-the-garden-path-to-reduce-tobacco-related-death-and-disease/) 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 […]
Continue reading
Potential progress in the fight against smoking was announced The British Medical Journal (10 September 2020) with the headline, ‘US doctors support bid to ban menthol cigarettes.’ We learn that the American Medical Association together with the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council and the UK charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), have brought […]
Continue reading
The American Cancer Society, whose answer to the question, ‘Why is it so hard to quit tobacco?’ I critiqued earlier this year, poses another question on its website: ‘How do I get through the rough spots after I stop smoking?’ So you can expect to have rough spots. Thanks for the encouragement. Now for the […]
Continue reading
This was my first impression when I glanced at a headline of the venerable ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News of 19 August 2020. But then I realised I was indulging in wishful thinking. The actual wording was, ‘Pow threatens tobacco firms over litter.’ Pow is the surname of the British Conservative MP […]
Continue reading
Thanks to the ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News of 18 June 2020, we are informed of a new tactic to get smokers to quit: fear of Covid. Dr Ruth Sharrock, a specialist in respiratory medicine in the English city of Gateshead, is involved in a new campaign launched by an organisation with […]
Continue reading
You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s almost impossible to quit tobacco if you look at the website of the cheerfully named American Cancer Society: A subheading raises the ominous question: Why is it so hard to quit tobacco? Well, that’s encouraging for a start. Quitting tobacco is so hard. Now we find out […]
Continue reading
An earnest young woman, Kylie Lindorff, gazes out at us from a photo in the 2019 Annual Report of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA). This is made up of the organisations – there are nearly 500 of them – which work on the ‘development, ratification, and implementation’ of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on […]
Continue reading
The current woeful state of understanding of the smoking problem is shown in the online Daily News (10 March 2020) of the UK charity, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH). According to this, Mr Ciaran Osborne, who as ASH’s director of policy and communications ought to know what he is talking about, apparently thinks that […]
Continue reading
This idea is set out in an eighty-two page Guidebook commissioned by the Framework Convention Alliance on Tobacco Control (FCATC for short), written by an outfit modestly calling itself Sovereign Border Solutions. The latter name reminds me of a company proclaiming it deals with ‘fluid transfer solutions’ instead of saying they sell hosepipes. Let’s take […]
Continue reading
One of my smoker patients said to me, ‘The pleasure of smoking may be an illusion, but it’s a very nice illusion!’ It is really? It’s no illusion, and certainly wouldn’t be nice, if you contracted a smoking-induced disease. Yet it’s extraordinary the lengths to which smokers will go to justify their smoking. Here’s what […]
Continue reading