Smoking in Scotland
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 [...]
Nicotine Preloading Cure For Smoking
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, [...]
Hopelessly Smitten With E-Cigarettes
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 [...]
Nicotine Patches for Nicotine Addiction
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 [...]
More Quit-Smoking Tips
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 [...]
Addiction Sticks and Tobacco Control Vaccine
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 [...]
Quit Smoking with Coconut Oil
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 [...]
Smoking Health Effects
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 [...]
Schrödinger’s Cat and Cigarettes
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 [...]
Feeding Nicotine Addiction With E-Cigarettes
Under the guise of protecting public health, the pro-vaping lobby gets into some curious twists and turns. For example, there is an official-looking 2017 paper, Reshaping American Tobacco Policy. It [...]
Juul – the Safer Way to Poison Yourself with Nicotine
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 [...]
A Complicated Way to Quit Smoking
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 [...]
Nicotine Addiction and Risks of E-Cigarettes
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 [...]
Tobacco Control: Confusion and Naïvety
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 [...]
You’re Not Allowed to Cure the Patients the Wrong Way!
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 [...]
The Greatest Barrier to Quitting Smoking
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 [...]
The Charity that Promotes Nicotine Addiction
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 [...]
Distract Yourself to Quit Smoking!
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 [...]
Promotion of E-Cigarettes: Misleading and Irresponsible
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 [...]
More Smoke on Love Island
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 [...]
Review of Allen Carr’s Famous Book
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 [...]
Just One Cigarette…
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 [...]
Key Influencers and Decision Makers for E-Cigarettes
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 [...]
Failing to Give Up Cigarettes
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 [...]
It Hit Me Like a Wall of Bricks
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. Don’t [...]
A Fun Way to Quit Smoking
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 [...]
Smoking Alternatives and Philip Morris
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 [...]
Why Regulate E-Cigarettes?
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 [...]
Smoking Trouble at North East
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 [...]
Air Rage and Other Nicotine Notes
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 [...]