Air Rage and Other Nicotine Notes
Is this what smoking does to you? According to The Independent (12 December 2017) a 24 year-old woman was arrested in the US after she smoked in the toilet on a domestic flight. When confronted by the crew she caused a ruckus and ended up being arrested. Later, when asked why she decided to smoke […]
Continue readingFour Professors and a Counterfactual
All the fun of the fumes The long-windedly titled The National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training (NCSCT) recently produced a video called E-cigarettes safety: The facts explained. The trouble is that there are precious few facts available at the moment; but there are plenty of opinions. The film features four Professors who are well […]
Continue readingE-cigarettes are 95 per cent safer than smoking! Or are they?
Is this what we want to see? Among those involved in public health who see it as their task to ‘control’ tobacco by supporting measures to ‘drive down smoking rates,’ as they put it, a new refrain has arisen that has almost become a mantra: e-cigarettes are 95 per cent safer than smoking tobacco! Some […]
Continue readingThe Art of Medicine and Stopping Smoking
The distinguished medical journal, The Lancet, in June 2016 reported the results of a huge multinational collaborative effort to investigate the risks of psychiatric side-effects of two drugs used in smoking cessation: varenicline (Champix®) and bupropion (Zyban®); no evidence of increased harm was found compared with nicotine patches and placebo (dummy) treatments. This must have […]
Continue readingWorld Expert on Smoking and Addiction
With such a billing, who might this be? It’s Professor Robert West, a psychologist and self-styled world expert on smoking and addiction who thinks unless e-cigarettes are made available we’re condemning smokers to death (BBC interview, April 2014). He published a book in 2013 with the intriguing title The SmokeFree Formula, A Revolutionary Way to […]
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