Dr. Gabriel Symonds is a medical doctor who has helped patients quit smoking for 3 decades. Find out what Dr. Symonds has to say about Smoking Harm Reduction below.
Do you know why vaping is such a big problem with school children? Because they are buying vapes, especially the brightly coloured disposable kind with child-friendly names and flavours, and getting hooked on them. And why are they engaging in this idiotic behaviour? Because vapes are easily available for purchase, online and at vape shops, […]
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Evidence or Common Sense? – Part II Momentous news! Later this month the 2023 iteration of The E-Cigarette Summit UK will take place under the auspices of the Royal College of Physicians, no less. This is what it’s all about: The E-Cigarette Summit has a single aim of facilitating respectful dialogue and thoughtful analysis of […]
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Potential progress in the fight against smoking was announced The British Medical Journal (10 September 2020) with the headline, ‘US doctors support bid to ban menthol cigarettes.’ We learn that the American Medical Association together with the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council and the UK charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), have brought […]
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The two-faced André Calantzopoulos, CEO of Philip Morris International (PMI), is at it again. He’s written an open letter to the Global Leadership Community [sic], whatever that is, in which he presents himself and the repulsive company he heads as the saviour of the world. It’s not difficult, however, to see through the lies, distortions […]
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Earthlings’ curious ritual If you were a visitor from another planet you would soon notice that many of the human species engage in a curious ritual. They take a small white cylindrical object known as ‘a cigarette’ out of a packet, set fire to one end of it, put the other end into their mouth […]
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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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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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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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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 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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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 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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Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) with its punny acronym of a name seems reluctant to embrace the only action that would solve the smoking problem once and for all: calling for banning tobacco. I recently asked their Chief Executive, Ms Deborah Arnott, by email, twice, whether this is ASH’s policy, and if not, why […]
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My blog Mrs May – Save Us! was a critique that I wrote in January 2017 of an appeal by a group of 1000 doctors to the UK Prime Minister and Health Secretary to publish a new Tobacco Control Plan: https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/mrs-may-save-us/ The government did so, in rather a hurry it seems, in July 2017. The […]
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Why should you need willpower to refrain from poisoning yourself? We do not need to read very far into the July 2017 edition of Tobacco Control to have demonstrated to us yet again the feebleness of the current official approach to the tobacco problem, the duplicity of the tobacco industry, and the futility of academic […]
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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 […]
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Gentle reader, bear with me until l come to the bit where I disclose the amazing revelation that recently came upon me. Now, the following is from the website of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), quoting the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE): While recognizing that quitting smoking is always the […]
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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 […]
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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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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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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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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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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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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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You can’t say they’re not trying. Here’s news of a campaign by an organisation with the pleasant name of Fresh, announced in the online News Guardian (24 February 2017), to try to get smokers to quit. Well, so they should, if they know what’s good for them. Readers are reminded that cutting down on smoking […]
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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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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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We have to thank the BBC for bringing us news of a major scandal (online 30 November 2016). Andre Calantzopoulos, the CEO of Philip Morris, a tobacco company that turned out 850 billion cigarettes in 2015 from which it generated net revenue of about $74 billion, was recently interviewed on the BBC. AC: We produce […]
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Smoking ‘harm reduction’ advocates seem to be working from the premise that some degree of harm is inevitable or unavoidable in relation to smoking. But this is manifestly untrue. The harm from smoking could be eliminated rather than just reduced – if there were the political will to ban tobacco products. In the meantime the […]
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