In The Times (2 September 2018) there's 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 Science and Technology Committee [...]

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 educate the public [...]

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 you’re anxious it [...]

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 an international treaty [...]

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 were, as I [...]

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 it in your [...]

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 meal or with [...]

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 fumes breathed out [...]

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 [sic] still lighting [...]

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 before about this [...]

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 the question, ‘Should [...]

It’s an unfortunate fact that many smokers, although they dislike smoking and wish they didn’t have to do it, find the prospect of quitting very difficult. Therefore, it’s understandable that they seek help in how to stop smoking, including using nicotine patches. In theory, all that smokers need to do is to stub out their last cigarette and [...]

Continuing our look at quit-smoking ‘tips’ we can find many other websites where these words appear. For example: 13 Best Quit-Smoking Tips Ever With Pictures, 10 Scientific Quit-Smoking Tips, and Top Ten Tips on How to Stop Smoking. The last-mentioned misleadingly uses this heading to draw people into the site but no tips as such are given. The [...]

The March 2018 edition of the highly esteemed journal, Tobacco Control, contains interesting examples of infelicitous writing, to say nothing of wrong-headed ideas: addiction sticks and tobacco control vaccine. As part of an attack on Philip Morris International’s cynical and false claim, 'We're trying to give up cigarettes', it’s gratifying that the editor, Professor Ruth E Malone, is [...]

A fool and his money are soon parted – old English proverb. Modern version: There’s one born every minute. Whether it’s a seemingly miraculous cure for hair loss, type 2 diabetes, erectile dysfunction, or a recently rediscovered ancient formula guaranteed to abolish unhappiness, it’s all to be found on the internet. The spiel is always the same: a [...]

Here are some facts about a natural disaster, tuberculosis. According to WHO, in 2016: 10.4 million people fell ill with TB, and 1.7 million died from the disease. And now here are some facts about an unnatural disaster, smoking. Tobacco kills more than 7 million people each year. More than 6 million of those deaths are the result [...]

Schrödinger's cat, for readers who have not heard of it, is the name of a thought experiment devised by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It is meant to illustrate a principle of quantum mechanics in which a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time. I am not clever enough [...]

Under the guise of protecting public health, the pro-vaping lobby gets into some curious twists and turns. For example, there's an official-looking 2017 paper, Reshaping American Tobacco Policy. It's written by three people, one of whom, Clive Bates, oddly designates himself as ‘Director, Counterfactual’, evidently being unaware of what counterfactual means: pertaining to or expressing what has not [...]

Or so the makers of this latest e-cigarette device would have us believe. And what a clever name, suggestive of the jewel in the crown, no doubt. All right, Dr Symonds, that’s enough cynicism. What is Juul all about? Their website describes it as ‘The Satisfying Alternative To Cigarettes’. Do you know what the best and most satisfying [...]

In California there’s an organisation with the amusing name of Ash Kickers. It’s a six-session programme intended to cure you of smoking. Sounds interesting, but six sessions? And how do they do it? It’s based on the ‘trans-theoretical model of behaviour modification.’ Pardon? They explain: It helps smokers travel through the various stages of quitting smoking. These stages [...]

Professor Colin 'Nicotine' Mendelsohn, a self-styled tobacco treatment specialist, is a man with a mission. He has the noble goal of wanting to cure smokers of their dangerous habit of smoking – but he wants to do this by encouraging them to switch to e-cigarettes. I am sure our good Professor would agree that smokers smoke because they [...]

Let me explain. Tobacco Control is the name of a learned journal that states one of its aims is: To study the nature and consequences of…efforts to prevent and control the global tobacco epidemic. This is confused. The tobacco epidemic, as it’s called, is all too obviously in full swing. Therefore, it's too late to prevent it. What [...]

These words were spoken to me by the late Dr James Cyriax. He was lamenting the fact that he didn’t get the recognition he felt he deserved for his seminal work in diagnosing and treating the ubiquitous disorders of back pain, sciatica, shoulder pain, etc. Even after his death in 1985 his work has been largely ignored. A [...]

A clue as to the nature of the greatest barrier to quitting smoking is given in the utterance of a smoker patient who said to me, 'Thank you very much for the offer, Dr Symonds, but I’m not going to come for your stop-smoking session because I’m afraid that if I did, I would succeed.' Now, as part [...]

What does the name New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) mean to you? The word ‘new’ here is ambiguous. Is the organisation one that supersedes a previous nicotine alliance, or is it new in the sense that a pair of trousers is new when you buy it but after having been worn for a while can no longer be so [...]

The highly esteemed WebMD, I discovered, has a series of fifteen quit smoking tips ‘for the first hard days’. Apart from the discouraging title rubbing it in that it will be hard – but why should it be hard? – none of these tips shows understanding of why people smoke in the first place and most of them [...]

An organisation called Yorkshire Cancer Research has put out a video entitled Vape to Quit. This video, titled Vape to Quit, though well meant, shows everything that’s wrong with the current approach to quitting smoking. I’ll transcribe some of the content and add my comments. Why do you need a 'way' to stop doing something? ‘There’s [sic] various [...]

The fuss about the depiction of smoking on a British TV programme called Love Island shown last year is still raging. I commented on this lamentable situation in a previous article, Steam and Smoke on Love Island, and made the point that ‘Any depiction of smoking in a contemporary film, play, or TV show should not be countenanced; [...]

I have a copy of the 4th (2009) edition of Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. In 2015 the book was re-issued with a foreword by John Dicey. It’s otherwise identical, even to the pagination, to the 4th edition so it’s a bit misleading of Penguin Books to sell this as if it’s a new (6th) edition. [...]

Persons who deliberately inhale cigarette smoke are known as smokers, and those who use e-cigarettes are called vapers. But what about people who obtain their regular supply of nicotine from skin patches or chewing gum? Should we call them patchers and chewers, respectively? I propose, in order to simplify the terminology as well as more accurately to reflect [...]