Category Archives for "Tobacco Control"
Tobacco Control
Which better, Tobacco control or Tobacco Abolition? Dr. Gabriel Symonds is a medical doctor and former smoker. Find out his views below.
Advocacy, Campaigning, and Pressing
ISH (Inaction on Smoking and Health, formerly known as ASH (Action on Smoking and Health)) is well named. You can see it in their repetitively and badly written policy statement, ‘What we do’: We work by using our dedicated team of tobacco policy experts to work collaboratively: Information, networking and support: working with others to […]
Continue readingE-Cigarette Summit 2023
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 […]
Continue readingSolving the Smoking Problem: Evidence or Common Sense?
Last month the UK Department of Health and Social Care published a paper with the encouraging title: Stopping the start: our new plan to create a smoke-free generation. There are two main strands to this laudable aim: helping current smokers stop poisoning themselves with tobacco fumes by encouraging them to switch to vaping; and stopping […]
Continue readingAmbition should be made of sterner stuff
In November 2022 the UK government put out a document with the hyphen-challenged title, The Smokefree 2030 ambition for England. The ‘ambition’ is to make England smoke-free by 2030, but they do not mean that after this date no one in England will smoke; they mean the smoking prevalence will be no more than 5 […]
Continue readingFree E-Cigarettes – What a Brilliant Idea!
I have written previously about the cock-eyed plan of bribing pregnant smokers to cease poisoning themselves with tobacco fumes. Now Mr Neil O’Brien, MP, the UK Minister for Primary Care and Public Health, has announced the latest wheeze to try and cut smoking rates. On the gov.uk website (11 April 2023) this what, with all […]
Continue readingMake Tobacco Obsolete!
The Tobacco Advisory Group of the highly esteemed UK Royal College of Physicians has produced a report called Smoking and health 2021 with the intriguing subtitle, A coming of age for tobacco control? It’s an impressive document, written by fifty-one contributors, running to 169 pages, and includes 1,295 references. The authors are all highly qualified […]
Continue readingUrge WHO To End Lies About Vaping!
Vaping—the activity whereby you repeatedly inhale a nicotine-laced aerosol—is big business. And as one would expect, there’s an online publication which promotes the interests of the vaping industry, the Vaping Post. In a recent edition I came across the headline, ‘Asia-Pacific Groups Create Petition Urging WHO to End Lies About Vaping.’ Well, there’s a challenge! […]
Continue readingBanning Menthol Cigarettes in the US
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 […]
Continue readingThe Successes of the Tobacco Controllers
An earnest young woman, Kylie Lindorff, gazes out at us from a photo in the 2019 Annual Report of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA). This is made up of the organisations – there are nearly 500 of them – which work on the ‘development, ratification, and implementation’ of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on […]
Continue readingHow to Solve the Tobacco Problem
This idea is set out in an eighty-two page Guidebook commissioned by the Framework Convention Alliance on Tobacco Control (FCATC for short), written by an outfit modestly calling itself Sovereign Border Solutions. The latter name reminds me of a company proclaiming it deals with ‘fluid transfer solutions’ instead of saying they sell hosepipes. Let’s take […]
Continue readingHow to Solve the Smoking Problem
It is a truth that appears not to be universally acknowledged that in order to stop doing something you have to start doing it first. People are not born smokers. Public health organisations are much exercised to appeal for funding to run stop smoking clinics. They have a modest success with smokers who seek their […]
Continue readingAddiction 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 part of an attack on Philip Morris International’s cynical and false claim, ‘We’re trying to give up cigarettes’, it’s gratifying that the editor, Professor Ruth […]
Continue readingSchrödinger’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 illustrate a principle of quantum mechanics in which a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time. I am […]
Continue readingTobacco 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 the global tobacco epidemic… This is confused. The tobacco epidemic, as it’s called, is all too obviously in full swing. Therefore, it’s too late to […]
Continue readingUp the Garden Path to Reduce Tobacco-Related Death and Disease
Bhutan: sale and purchase of tobacco products prohibited! I wrote about the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study on 17 June 2017 (https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/up-the-garden-path-to-prove-the-useless-about-e-cigarettes). Here is another paper about it in, where else, Tobacco Control (July 2017). It’s written by a no less than forty-one American authors from thirteen different institutions. The conclusion of […]
Continue readingTobacco Control: Feeble, Duplicitous, and Futile
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 […]
Continue readingOut With ASH – In With CAT!
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 […]
Continue readingThe 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 […]
Continue readingTobacco 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 […]
Continue readingThe 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 […]
Continue readingControlling 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 […]
Continue readingLies, 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 […]
Continue readingThose 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 […]
Continue readingAre 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 […]
Continue readingMrs May – Save Us!
From the pages of that trusty source of the latest developments in medical politics, The British Medical Journal (7 January 2017), comes an arresting news item: More than 1000 doctors and other healthcare workers…have written an open letter to the prime minister, Theresa May, and England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, urging them to publish a […]
Continue readingTobacco Doesn’t Need to be Controlled; it Needs to be Abolished
These cigarette machines are ubiquitous in Japan. Note the ad for Parliament cigarettes. The attractive models imply that smoking is sexy. The wording says something like ‘vivid, strong menthol, crystal blast’. You can undergo this refreshing experience by crushing the menthol flavour capsule in the filter. The small print at the bottom, covering only about […]
Continue readingWhat’s up with ASH?
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) in their 2008 report draw attention to a well-known but nonetheless shocking fact: Products which are known to kill one in every two of their life-long users are available for sale in shops throughout the land. What to do about this scandalous situation? The obvious thing they dismiss: As […]
Continue readingThe Latest Wheeze in Tobacco Control
Cancer Research UK, bless their cotton socks, wants Big Tobacco to be obliged to ‘cough up’ to the tune of £500m, the equivalent of one penny per cigarette sold in the UK. The intention is to make up the current government deficit in health funding and would be used in public health services to help […]
Continue readingThe Curious Idea of Controlling Tobacco
Did you know there is a scholarly journal calling itself, indeed, Tobacco Control? The very title shows the wrong-headed approach to the smoking problem: tobacco doesn’t need to be controlled; it needs to be abolished. In a recent edition there is an editorial and a research paper complaining that the full list of ingredients in […]
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