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 […]
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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 these tips shows understanding of why people smoke in the first place and most of them are absurd. I’ll […]
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An organisation called Yorkshire Cancer Research has put out a video entitled Vape to Quit. This video, though well meant, shows everything that’s wrong with the current approach to quitting smoking. I’ll transcribe some of the speech and add my comments. Why do you need a ‘way’ to stop doing something? ‘There’s (sic) various ways […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Why should you have to do this all day, every day, for years on end? Now here’s something to ponder. A recent article in the online International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health reports a study of vaping with the wordy title of the sort commonly found in scholarly medical articles: […]
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Towards the end of December each year many smokers announce a new year’s resolution: to give up smoking. Or they might say they resolve to give up cigarettes. What they don’t say (or if they did it would be meaningless) is that their new year’s resolution is to try to give up smoking or cigarettes. […]
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There are, it must be admitted, websites other than mine that claim to be able to cure smokers without nicotine, drugs, or willpower. What these sites offer are techniques. Now don’t get me wrong. If smokers after working their way through a ten-day course to learn how to replace the word ‘cigarette’ in their minds […]
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Isn’t this fun, or isn’t it? Let’s hear it from a lady called Sarah in a video The Switch. The title reminded me of The Great Switcheroo in Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected—a collection of rather sinister stories for adults.
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What is this colourful montage? It’s comprised of the logos of organisations from all over the world who were signatories to a letter addressed, as you can see, to Mr André Calantzopoulos (they omitted his title and if this was from lack of respect for this loathsome person I don’t blame them), the Chief Executive […]
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Inhale deeply To understand the smoking problem one needs to understand smokers. And the way to do this is to talk to them. Two of the questions I ask all smokers who come to see me for help in quitting are, ‘At what age, and why, did you start?’
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Thanks to the online Metro Radio publication (2 January 2018), we learn that in the NHS’s North East region of England, over 38,000 patients are admitted to hospitals every year as a result of smoking-related illnesses. Riding to the rescue of this deplorable situation is Dr Robert Allcock, a respiratory consultant at the Queen Elizabeth […]
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Is this what smoking does to you? According to The Independent (12 December 2017) a 24 year-old woman was arrested in the US after she smoked in the toilet on a domestic flight. When confronted by the crew she caused a ruckus and ended up being arrested. Later, when asked why she decided to smoke […]
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The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) would seem to think smoking is indeed a mental illness, since it has plunged into the debate about e-cigarettes. It takes a wonderfully fence-sitting position in its July 2017 submission to the ‘Inquiry into the use and marketing of electronic cigarettes and personal vaporisers in […]
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Laughing all the way to the bank Philip Morris International (PMI) claim their new ‘heat-not-burn’ tobacco product that goes under the name of IQOS isn’t an e-cigarette. They say this because e-cigarettes are prohibited in Thailand. The Managing Director of the Thailand division of PMI, Mr Gerald Margolis (pictured), argues that their new product ‘is […]
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced it has awakened to the interesting idea that the way to help people quit smoking is for them to have a wider range of ‘products’ available in addition to so-called nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). The FDA recognises that NRT (nicotine-containing gum, patches, and lozenges) is of […]
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The august American Cancer Society, in its efforts to scare people into quitting smoking, sponsors an annual event in November that they call the Great American Smokeout. They show a film titled ‘Smoking Cessation—3 Steps to Quitting’. (The word ‘Cessation’ is redundant.) The object indeed seems to be to get smokers to quit through fear: […]
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Tobacco company CEOs lying to the US Congress in 1994 that nicotine is not addictive For today’s post, let’s hear it from the Tobacco Action Committee of the American Thoracic Society (ATS). The Committee is charged with organizing and coordinating the [Society’s] tobacco control activities [which] will include…activities with the ultimate goal of minimizing the […]
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Jane Goodall and friend The words in the title were used by Dr Jane Goodall, the distinguished primatologist and animal welfare campaigner, in a letter to the FDA Commissioner, Dr Scott Gottlieb, protesting about nicotine addiction experiments on monkeys. This is an extract: I was disturbed — and quite honestly shocked — to learn that […]
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The Nursing Times (13 November 2017) brings us news of a great way to raise awareness of lung cancer for the citizens of the historic city of Leicester in England. Specialist nurses will run a stall at a shopping centre where they ‘will be promoting e-cigarettes to the public…as part of efforts to boost smoking […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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