With such a billing, who might this be? It’s Professor Robert West, a psychologist and self-styled world expert on smoking and addiction who thinks unless e-cigarettes are made available we're condemning smokers to death (BBC interview, April 2014). He published a book in 2013 with the intriguing title The SmokeFree Formula, A Revolutionary Way to Stop Smoking Now. [...]

There's a stop smoking promotion by NHS England called 'Stoptober', presumably because this scheme was launched in the month of October. Stoptober is the conventional approach – discouraging. They seem to recognize this fact and try to make a joke of it: Welcome to Day 1 of Stoptober. Now, it's fair to say that this is the toughest [...]

If you're a smoker trying, that is, failing, to quit, what help is out there? The orthodox approach, promulgated by the medical profession, is called, curiously, nicotine replacement therapy. Does this mean nicotine is a replacement for something or is the nicotine going to be replaced with something? What is meant, of course, is cigarette replacement: cigarettes are [...]