Tobacco control Archives - Nicotine Monkey

Category Archives for "Tobacco control"

Tobacco 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 is too late […]

Further up the Garden Path

Bhutan: sale and purchase of tobacco products prohibited! I wrote about the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study on 17 June 2017 (http://nicotinemonkey.com/?p=1605). 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 […]

Mrs May to the Rescue!

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: http://nicotinemonkey.com/?p=1175. The government did so, in rather a hurry it seems, in July 2017. The […]

Feeble, Duplicitous and Futile

Why should you need willpower to refrain from poisoning yourself? We do not need to read very far into the current (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 […]

Out 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 […]

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 […]

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. A further examination of JTI’s of website (see yesterday’s post. https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/nothing-much-changed-in-thousands-of-years) reveals more weasel words. A major section is headed ‘Our principles’ and, more specifically, ‘Six core principles define JTI’s attitude to smoking’. (The word ‘core’ is redundant.) The hypocrisy from start to finish is breathtaking. 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 […]

Tobacco 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 […]

What’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 […]

The 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 […]

The 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 […]