Category Archives for "E-Cigarettes"

E-Cigarettes

E-cigarettes are being encouraged in Britain as a means of quitting smoking.

This is misleading and irresponsible. E-cigarettes are merely an alternative way of continuing nicotine addiction that is hoped will be safer than smoking.

It’s often argued that with e-cigarettes, since you don’t inhale many of the poisons found in tobacco smoke, it’s healthier to vape than to smoke. This is defeatist: it disempowers and even infantilises smokers. You don’t need an alternative to smoking!

Sucking nicotine-laden fumes into your lungs many times a day for years on end is obviously risky. Only when people have been doing it for twenty or thirty years will we know whether it’s safe – but in the meantime why take the risk?

It’s also claimed vaping is pleasurable and sociable. If you look into this it’s clear the pleasure is illusory; and the sociability of vaping merely means you don’t feel quite so foolish inhaling poison if other people are doing it with you.

Quitting smoking and all forms of nicotine completely can be easy – with the Symonds Method.

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 […]

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Inhale Poison to Stop Smoking

Since I’m on their 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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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, […]

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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 […]

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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: […]

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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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They – Will – Cause – Death!

Dave Dorn is a trustee of the so-called New Nicotine Alliance (astonishingly, a Registered Charity in the UK). He claims that 80% of smokers who have taken up vaping have successfully switched from smoking because of what he calls the pleasure principle. The gold necklace-wearing Dave gave a talk at the Global Forum on Nicotine […]

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Cancer Research UK’s Failure to Call for Banning Cigarettes

Why is this allowed? As an example of the continuing official confusion in about smoking/vaping, here is a statement (9 Dec 2016) by Cancer research UK: Harm reduction is a type of public health policy that aims to reduce the harmful consequences of substances, or actions, without necessarily reducing or eliminating the use itself. For […]

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How to Smoke Without Smoking!

Here is an interesting piece of news reported in the online Health News (Reuters Health) on  26 May 2017. The headline is the alarming statement: ‘Heat-not-burn cigarettes still release cancer-causing chemicals.’ Shock, horror. This is according to an investigation by Dr Reto Auer and colleagues of the University of Bern, Switzerland. The heat-not-burn type of […]

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Vaping Forever!

Here is a fantastic piece of news about an undercover investigation by the Royal Society of Public Health, reported in April 2017. They found that nine out of ten retailers of e-cigarettes ‘are turning a blind eye to their use by non-smokers, and effectively pushing them as a lifestyle product.’ Very wicked! What are vape […]

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Vaper’s Lung – The Disease That Will Never Be, I Hope

There was an interesting article two days ago in the online Manawatu Standard titled: ‘Government legalises e-cigarettes in effort to make New Zealand smokefree by 2025.’ Why 2025? Because this is a nice round figure? Why not sooner, say, 2019? Apart from the date by which the New Zealand government is trying to achieve this […]

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Are Smokers Getting A Raw Deal?

Tobacco is not an illegal substance yet the government is persecuting a minority. I think that’s a disgrace in a social democracy. Sir Ronald Harwood Playwright and screenwriter There is in Britain a smokers’ rights group called Forest (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco). The name tells you a lot. But are […]

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Smoke-Free but Nicotine-Trapped

I hope the copywriters of Public Health England’s ‘Smokefree’ campaign will forgive me for my satirical review of their efforts which I put in a chapter of my book, Smoking is a Psychological Problem. At least they were trying, however misguidedly, to help smokers quit. Now, the other day I wished to refresh my memory […]

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Australia Leads the Way: Vaping is Verboten!

What’s this? A smoking doctor? No, a vaping doctor! He has the unusual name of Attila Danko, which seems to be of Eastern European provenance, possibly Hungarian, and I hope he will forgive me for saying that this perhaps explains his passing resemblance to the actor Christopher Lee in his role as Dracula from next […]

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Cigarette Harm Reduction? What About Harm Abolition?

I have just come across an interesting presentation by one Maciej L Goniewicz, PhD, who works at the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit of Queen Mary University of London and the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies. So he should know what he’s talking about. Oh, and he receives research funding from Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company […]

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Why Doctors Should Quit Being Involved in Smoking Cessation

As part of my continuing efforts to keep up to date in the practice of medicine I subscribe to a generally very good online publication from America called, appropriately enough, UpToDate®. They send bi-weekly reminders of the latest research, and in today’s issue a section on  e-cigarettes caught my eye. In America they are, rightly […]

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