Nicotine Monkey blog of many satirical articles on the smoking problem

Four Professors and a Counterfactual

All the fun of the fumes The long-windedly titled The National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training (NCSCT) recently produced a video called E-cigarettes safety: The facts explained. The trouble is that there are precious few facts available at the moment; but there are plenty of opinions. The film features four Professors who are well […]

A Relaxed Smoke in Comfortable, Modern Facilities

For smokers who have occasion to visit Frankfurt Airport there is good news—and for non-smokers too—we are told by the online The Phoenix Newspaper, 7 November 2017: Good news for smokers and non-smokers alike: two more smoking lounges have just been added…at Frankfurt Airport. These comfortable, modern facilities are ideal for getting away from the […]

The attempt and not the deed, Confounds us

The 2017 version of Stoptober, as they call it, finished on 28th October. The idea was that if smokers could be encouraged and supported not to smoke for twenty-eight days, they would be ‘five times more likely to quit for good’. Those who signed up received daily messages of the following kind: If you’re using […]

Up the Garden Path to Reduce Tobacco-Related Death and Disease

Bhutan: sale and purchase of tobacco products prohibited! I wrote about the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study on 17 June 2017 (https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/up-the-garden-path-to-prove-the-useless-about-e-cigarettes). Here is another paper about it in, where else, Tobacco Control (July 2017). It’s written by a no less than forty-one American authors from thirteen different institutions. The conclusion of […]

Parliamentary Enquiry Into E-Cigarettes

A headline in today’s online BBC news (so it must be true) announces ‘E-cigarettes: Cross-party group of MPs launches inquiry’. The main point of this exercise is to try and fill the ‘significant gaps’ in what is known about e-cigarettes including how effective they are as a stop-smoking tool and how they are (or should […]

Blame the Government If You Can’t Stop Smoking!

In ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News of 20 October 2017 there appears a commentary on a report lamenting recent cuts to local authority stop-smoking budgets. Ms Hazel Cheeseman, Director of Policy at ASH, has this to say: Without high quality local services in place vulnerable groups of smokers, such as pregnant women […]

Pondering the Wafting of the Fumes

The more I read about the smoking problem the more it becomes clear there is an almost complete lack of understanding among so-called experts about why smokers smoke. For example, even Dr Robert Proctor, who knows a thing or two about smoking and the tricks of the tobacco trade – he wrote a book […]

How Not to Solve the Smoking Problem

There’s no shortage of ideas, particularly from people who appear to have no experience in actually treating smokers, about how to solve the smoking problem. For example let’s take a look at an article in the online Dorset Echo of 29 September 2017 written by a trainee reporter. To set the mood there are two […]

Inhale Poison to Stop Smoking

Since I’m on the mailing list, I’ve once again started receiving notices of the forthcoming 2017 version of the so-called Stoptober anti-smoking effort put out by Public Health England (part of the UK Department of Health). It’s not my intention to mock this campaign. Smoking is a serious problem and anything that helps people to […]

Nasty Juice Yummier Than Fruit

There is no doubt that e-cigarettes are big business. The flyer I received recently about the forthcoming Vapexpo conference in Paris lists around two hundred brands of e-cigarette liquid from sixteen countries. Promoted on the misleading meme that e-cigarettes help smokers quit, if anyone has any doubts that vaping is drug addiction by other means, […]

He Who Sups With Philip Morris Should Have A Long Spoon!

The words that came to me as I read this piece in today’s Financial Times were disingenuous, self-serving, cynical and the like. Philip Morris International has pledged up to $1bn over the next 12 years to an arm’s-length foundation that will fund scientific research designed to eliminate the use of smoked tobacco around the globe. […]

Repulsive Animal Experiments by Philip Morris

It’s only a rat! Perhaps in my post of 4 July 2017 in which I accuse the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) of torturing animals I was being a little unjust. I had not at that time seen their proclamation, ‘Our standards for animal testing’. In this document they reassuringly tell us ‘PMI takes […]

The Great E-Cigarette Confusion

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) with its punny acronym of a name seems reluctant to embrace the only action that would solve the smoking problem once and for all: calling for banning tobacco. I recently asked their Chief Executive, Ms Deborah Arnott, by email, twice, whether this is ASH’s policy, and if not, why […]

Stigmatization of Pregnant Smokers

When I used to work in obstetrics (care of pregnant women) certain routine tests were carried out at each attendance, such as checking the urine and measuring the blood pressure. The reason was that these tests can give early warning of serious problems such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and then the appropriate action […]

Steam and Smoke on Love Island

There was recently on the ITV network in Britain a so-called reality show, Love Island, although it seemed rather a far cry from everyday reality to me. It featured a number of attractive young men and women who appeared to be on holiday in a villa in Majorca. The object of the series was to […]

How to Smoke Without Smoking – Part II

‘There’s such a craving for cessation!’ This cynical comment was made to me by Christopher Proctor, chief scientist of British American Tobacco, the company whose poisonous products, legally on sale everywhere, are responsible for about 9,600 deaths every year in the UK. (They have 10% of the cigarette market and 96,000 people die annually from […]

How to Solve the Problem of Smoking in Pregnancy

In October 2015 in the UK a report was published called Smoking Cessation in Pregnancy: A Review of the Challenge. This endeavour was endorsed by no less than twenty-one worthy organisations such as Action on Smoking and Health, Bliss (‘for babies born too soon, too small, too sick’), the Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association, […]

Mrs May to the Rescue!

My blog Mrs May – Save Us! was a critique that I wrote in January 2017 of an appeal by a group of 1000 doctors to the UK Prime Minister and Health Secretary to publish a new Tobacco Control Plan: https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/mrs-may-save-us/ The government did so, in rather a hurry it seems, in July 2017. The […]

How Addicted Are You?

A little-known advantage of not smoking In the NHS Smokefree website there’s a section headed ‘Addiction test’. The purpose of this is to find out how dependent you are on nicotine. The underlying concept, however, is wrong. If you’re addicted to nicotine that sufficiently defines your problem. The implication that there are degrees of addiction […]

How To Be Popular With Nicotine

I quote from British American Tobacco’s International Marketing Principles, 2015: We will not portray smoking as an activity that makes people appear more popular, appealing or successful. But they seem to have no qualms about portraying the use of their new product with the almost unpronounceable name of ‘glo’ as an activity that makes people […]

Tobacco Control: Feeble, Duplicitous and Futile

Why should you need willpower to refrain from poisoning yourself? We do not need to read very far into the current (July 2017) edition of Tobacco Control to have demonstrated to us yet again the feebleness of the current official approach to the tobacco problem, the duplicity of the tobacco industry and the futility of […]

Danger! Never Smoke While Using Oxygen!

Here is some good news for those unfortunate patients suffering from the serious condition known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. It’s a complex disorder but the main features are shortness of breath with cough, phlegm, and chest tightness as the lungs are progressively damaged; the result may be fatal. The biggest risk factor […]

How Many Smoking Deaths In The US Would Be Acceptable?

You would think, would you not, that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, MD, would understand a few basic facts about smoking and nicotine addiction. Yet, although he acknowledges that smoking is a pretty serious problem, causing more than 480,000 deaths in the US every year, in a press release of […]

Out With ASH – In With CAT!

Gentle reader, bear with me until l come to the bit where I disclose the amazing revelation that recently came upon me. Now, the following is from the website of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), quoting the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE): While recognizing that quitting smoking is always the […]

The End of the World – Or At Any Rate the End of China – Is Upon Us!

How proud Dr Margaret Chan (Director-General of the WHO) and Helen Clark (Administrator of the UN Development Programme) must feel of their ringing rhetoric in warning of the catastrophe facing China! (Foreword to Health, Economic and Social Costs of China’s Tobacco Epidemic, WHO 2017) Tobacco use kills six million people every year and is a […]

Why Nearly All Stop Smoking Websites Are Unhelpful

I put ‘How to stop smoking’ in Google and this is what came up (emphases added) : Readers’ Digest The 23 Best Ways to Quit Smoking…Make an honest list of all the things you like about smoking…Then make another list of why quitting won’t be easy. WebMD So you’re ready to kick the habit. That’s […]

The Symonds Method Compared

The table below shows the main features of the Symonds Method compared with conventional quit-smoking methods. The ‘chalk and cheese’ analogy puts it clearly, even if I say so myself. This is because I know from my experience of treating hundreds of smokers that quitting smoking is easy. On the other hand, whether because of […]

The Twelve Worst Ways – and the One Best Way – to Stop Smoking

1. Fear Horrible pictures on cigarette packs and emphasizing that smoking causes cancer and heart disease assume people smoke because of ignorance of the consequences. This is not so. Everyone these days knows smoking is harmful to health. Scare tactics have relatively little effect because they don’t take into account the main reason people smoke: […]

Philip Morris Tortures Animals

Yesterday Today The tobacco giant, Philip Morris International (PMI), has applied to the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) to market what they call ‘modified risk tobacco products’ (MRTP), in particular, their heated tobacco contraption with the unpronounceable name of IQOS, or iQOS. They start by putting their cards on the table: ‘PMI recognizes that […]

Stopping Smoking Through Vulgarity

‘Smokefree’ is a catchy neologism used by the NHS Smokefree campaign. It’s supported by Public Health England which is part of the UK government’s Department of Health. So it’s quite kosher. But what’s this? The Leicester City Stop Smoking Service at a quick glance looks similar: As we can see, it offers not just any […]

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