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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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It is a truth that appears not to be universally acknowledged that in order to stop doing something you have to start doing it first. People are not born smokers. Public health organisations are much exercised to appeal for funding to run stop smoking clinics. They have a modest success with smokers who seek their […]
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It has been claimed that ‘The English tobacco control/smoking cessation community is internationally regarded as being utterly, hopelessly smitten with e-cigarettes. It’s become almost cult-like.’ See https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/hopelessly-smitten-with-e-cigarettes/ Now it seems this community is about to take leave of its senses. A certain Martin Dockrell, the Tobacco Control Programme Lead of Public Health England, is quoted […]
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Juul Labs is the nice scientific-sounding name of the company that makes the popular—especially with school kids—nicotine drug delivery device with the catchy name of Juul. Now hold on a minute, Dr Symonds! Nicotine a poison? It’s no more harmful than coffee! Anyway, it’s such fun to suck nicotine-laden vapour into your lungs hundreds of […]
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I recently came across a curious piece in an online publication, Broadly, (26 February 2019) written by a smoker, one Brandy Jensen. Rather than being an apology, justification, or excuse for smoking, it seems to be a defiant declaration: I’m a smoker and proud of it! We are off on the wrong foot from the […]
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The highly esteemed tobacco company, Philip Morris International (PMI), in January 2019 published an anonymous fifty-five page document entitled Public Health – Much Harder than Rocket Science. They modestly call it a White Paper, as if it’s an official government report, and it’s padded out with eighteen artistic black-and-white photos of no relevance to public […]
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The two-faced André Calantzopoulos, CEO of Philip Morris International (PMI), is at it again. He’s written an open letter to the Global Leadership Community [sic], whatever that is, in which he presents himself and the repulsive company he heads as the saviour of the world. It’s not difficult, however, to see through the lies, distortions […]
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Some illuminating insights can be gained into the smoking problem by different people’s comments on my answer to a question posted on Quora (a US based question-and-answer website). The question was: What is your opinion on vaping and e-cigarettes? I answered thus: E-cigarettes should be seen for what they are: drug (nicotine) delivery devices. There’s […]
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Earthlings’ curious ritual If you were a visitor from another planet you would soon notice that many of the human species engage in a curious ritual. They take a small white cylindrical object known as ‘a cigarette’ out of a packet, set fire to one end of it, put the other end into their mouth […]
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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 […]
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Imagine you are sitting in your flat (apartment) on a warm summer’s evening, enjoying the fresh air with the window open, when suddenly your nose is assailed by a horrid stink—someone in a nearby flat is smoking! What to do? Close the window and try to ignore it? Go round to the neighbour and politely […]
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A recently released short film, produced by a number of local health authorities in the north of England, is titled ‘Don’t be the 1’. This is an admonition not to be the one of the one-in-two smokers who will die from a smoking-related illness. It made me feel quite angry—not with the makers of the […]
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It seems these days everyone is jumping on the e-cigarette bandwagon—the debate is swirling back and forth. Are e-cigarettes harmful or good for smokers? If they’re harmful, how much less so than smoking? Should vaping be permitted/banned everywhere/on public transport/in classrooms/hospitals? Should they be regulated, and if so, how and how much? As an example […]
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When you think of charities, what usually occurs to you next? That they are, no doubt, deserving, and the fact that they all want money. For example, the Tibet Relief Fund, Yorkshire Cat Rescue, or the National Trust—all worthwhile charities in need of funding from the philanthropic public. Now, let us take the so-called New […]
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In The Times (2 September 2018) there is an article by the liberal democratic politician, Norman Lamb, MP, (pictured) with a title that it must have given him a chuckle to write, ‘It’s time to stop tarring e-cigarettes and tobacco with the same brush’. Mr Lamb is a solicitor. Nonetheless, he is Chair of the […]
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You will not have not heard of this organisation because it’s still in the process being set up. When the Board of Trustees is established – Dr Gabriel Symonds has volunteered to be the honorary Chairman – we intend to apply to the UK Charities Commission for registration. The main aim of ANA is to […]
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In the venerable New Yorker (24 May 2018) there was an article about the emerging problems with the latest nicotine delivery device that looks like a USB stick, called Juul. The article starts by parroting a myth, twice: Nicotine is both a stimulant and a relaxant: it peps you up when you’re tired, and if […]
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Here’s a remarkable piece of news that came my way today about the war on tobacco. It’s a report of recent activities of an organisation called the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA). In case you’ve never heard of this, I’m sure you’ll be interested to know that it ‘works on the development, ratification, and implementation’ of […]
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In a previous blog about Allen Carr I critiqued his Easyway To Stop Smoking book and looked at the claimed success rate of his stop-smoking seminars. Today I’ll tell you more about these seminars. Some time ago I had the opportunity of observing an Allen Carr ‘Easyway To Stop Smoking’ group session in London. There […]
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Do you really want to put this stuff into your lungs? In the wonderful country of America it takes a lawsuit or two to see the obvious. The Juul brand of e-cigarette looks like a USB stick but the difference is that, after you’ve charged it in the USB port of your computer, you stick […]
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The alleged pleasure of smoking is sometimes put forward in an attempt to counter the nanny state which says smoking’s bad for you. Here’s an example from Huffington Post (6 April 2011) by Christopher Mathias, ‘I love loosies’: I love smoking. I like the way it smells, I like the way it tastes after a […]
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Have you ever wondered why, if you go into a room where someone has been smoking even a long time ago, there’s a horrid stink? Second-hand smoke Now we have the answer. You’ve probably heard of second-hand smoke. It consists of the smoke emitted from the lit end of a smouldering cigarette mixed with the […]
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The headline to an article in the online The Scotsman (4 April 2018) laments that ‘Smoke-free Scotland goal stalls as one in five fail [sic] to quit’. This is blamed on funding for smoking cessation campaigns being cut by the Scottish Government. The article elaborates: About one in five Scots, equivalent to 850,000 adults, are […]
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Gentle reader, let me ask you a hypothetical question. If you were in the unhappy position of being a smoker (i.e., nicotine addict), and you wanted to escape this predicament, do you think it would be a good idea to put more nicotine into your body before you even tried to quit? I have written […]
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How to enjoy poisoning yourself ‘The English tobacco control/smoking cessation community is internationally regarded as utterly, hopelessly smitten with e-cigarettes. It’s become almost cult-like.’ These words were written by Professor Simon Chapman, the well-known Australian public health expert and anti-smoking campaigner, in response to a debate in The British Medical Journal (28 April 2018) on […]
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