Category Archives for "Nicotine Addiction"

Nicotine Addiction

Most smokers refuse to acknowlege the real reason they cannot quit smoking, it’s their addiction to Nicotine. Nicotine patches and gum are popular remedies, but only service to transfer smokers’ nicotine addiction from one form to another form.

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 […]

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 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 […]

Up the Garden Path to Prove the Useless about E-Cigarettes

Why not just eat a banana? The latest breakthrough since lunchtime, if you’ll pardon the cliché, is revealed in the result of a study carried out at Penn State College in the US, styled Population Assessment of Tobacco andHealth (PATH). Did they think of the acronym first and then juggle the words to find a […]

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 […]

Exploding E-Cigarettes

Why bother with all this? The doughty online publication, ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News, on 9 June 2017 carried a warning headline: ‘Safety advice given after e-cigarette fire’. A woman called Leanne Williams had a potentially serious problem with an ‘88 Vape’ brand e-cigarette apparatus. This is how 88 Vape advertises these […]

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 […]

Tobacco is the Root of all Evil

A young girl ties tobacco leaves onto sticks to prepare them for curing The desperate need to deal with the smoking problem by outlawing tobacco could not be more plainly made than in the six bulleted points of ASH’s (Action on Smoking and Health’s) online Daily News of 30 May 2017. Here they are: Tobacco […]

The Great Smoking Paradox

The scholarly journal with the curious name of Tobacco Control, on the cover of the May 2017 issue shows a picture of an inflated balloon with a map of the world on it about to be burst by a lighted cigarette. The wording is ‘Tobacco threatens us all’ and ‘Say No to Tobacco’, among other […]

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 […]

Controlling Tobacco with Horrible Pictures

The UK government is about to introduce legislation to require cigarettes to be sold in what is called standardised packaging. They claim this will discourage children from starting to smoke. Fine, but it’s rather a roundabout way of going about it. They’re saying, in effect, ‘Don’t buy this, it’s dangerous.’ Or are they trying to […]

What the ’Eck! Journalism or Medical Advice?

My attention was drawn recently to a badly written ‘Ezine’ article from 2010 by the well-named so-called expert author Hayden Eck with the confusing title ‘Do Not Give Up – Smoking Cessation is Possible’. At first glance it looks as if he’s telling you not to give up smoking, but he means you should not […]

How to Stop Smoking (?)

Is this a statement or a question? In either case it’s a strange idea. Where does the how come into stopping doing something? If people want to stop smoking why don’t they just stop? Why does it seem to be so difficult? Many methods, ways, techniques, systems, or ‘tools’ for smoking cessation are on offer […]

The Rubbish Way to Stop Smoking

If you were new to the piano and wanted to play Bach’s C major prelude you would need to practise. (There are YouTube videos showing how to do this.) But if you decided to give up learning this wonderful piece, which would be a pity, all you would have to do is close the piano […]

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 […]

More BAT Duplicity

Fumatul ucide is Spanish for smoking kills In my tireless efforts to bring you the low-down on the tricks of the tobacco trade let me tell you about this little gem I came across recently from British American Tobacco (BAT): http://www.bat.com/group/sites/UK__9D9KCY.nsf/vwPagesWebLive/DO8GSFQT Under the page header the eye is drawn to the large print: ‘Our Guiding […]

Lies, Damned Lies, and Big Tobacco

How can Nic-‘otine’-andro Durante face himself in the mirror each morning? Let me put it another way. What are 10,000 deaths a year in the UK worth? To work this out we need to remember that one of the warning labels appearing on cigarette packs amusingly states ‘Smoking kills’. More precisely, smoking kills about 100,000 […]

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others

The title is a quotation from Groucho Marx. Keeping this in mind, let’s look at the website of Japan Tobacco International (JTI), in particular the section headed ‘Our six core principles’. (The word ‘core’ is redundant.) The hypocrisy from start to finish is breathtaking. The very idea of a tobacco company declaring it has any […]

Nothing Much Changed in Thousands of Years

German industrial cigarette machine – makes 10,000 cigarettes a minute There are some individuals and organisations that have found a way to deal with awkward questions: ignore them! Recently I cast my critical eye at the website of the venerable cigarette manufacturing company, Japan Tobacco International (JTI). In their ‘About tobacco’ section we find the […]

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 […]

Vaping for Fun

Smoking used to have a certain cool image. When Sherlock Holmes had a difficult problem to solve he would smoke shag tobacco in his pipe and think it through. He also used cocaine and morphine to escape from ‘the dull routine of existence’ as he put it.

The Best Way to Quit Smoking

Now here’s something for smokers to ponder. The popular online medical information website, healthline.com, has a feature on ‘The best quit smoking apps’ for 2016.

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 […]

The Reluctant Quitter

Gentle reader, forgive my cynicism, but here we have another example of what might be called ‘The Hard Way to Quit Smoking’, this time from the website of New York City Government. I’ve put selected quotes in italics and added comments that an imaginary smoker might make as he or she reads through the site. […]

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 […]

General Practitioners Can Foretell the Future!

Here’s an amazing news story. No, it’s not the Flat Earth News, but comes from the hallowed pages of The Scottish Sun. (Online edition, 25 January 2017.) First, the surprising headline: GPs telling smokers how soon they will die ‘makes them three times more likely to quit’. Now hang on a minute. How is it […]

A Little-Known Risk of Smoking

Here is a sad story which illustrates a little-known sad fact about smoking. It was recently reported in the Southern Daily Echo online news that ‘a Mum tried to smuggle nearly 35,000 cigarettes through Southampton docks’. It is said that she ‘tried to avoid paying almost £11,500 in tax by storing the tobacco in her […]

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