E-Cigarettes

E-cigarettes are being encouraged in Britain as a means of quitting smoking.

This is misleading and irresponsible. E-cigarettes are merely an alternative way of continuing nicotine addiction that is hoped will be safer than smoking.

It’s often argued that with e-cigarettes, since you don’t inhale many of the poisons found in tobacco smoke, it’s healthier to vape than to smoke. This is defeatist: it disempowers and even infantilises smokers. You don’t need an alternative to smoking!

Sucking nicotine-laden fumes into your lungs many times a day for years on end is obviously risky. Only when people have been doing it for twenty or thirty years will we know whether it’s safe – but in the meantime why take the risk?

It’s also claimed vaping is pleasurable and sociable. If you look into this it’s clear the pleasure is illusory; and the sociability of vaping merely means you don’t feel quite so foolish inhaling poison if other people are doing it with you.

Quitting smoking and all forms of nicotine completely can be easy – with the Symonds Method.

Parliamentary Enquiry into E-Cigarettes

A headline in today’s online BBC news (so it must be true) announces ‘E-cigarettes: Cross-party group of MPs launches inquiry’. The main point of this exercise is to try and fill the ‘significant gaps’ in what is known about e-cigarettes including how effective they are as a stop-smoking tool and how they are (or should be) regulated. But [...]

2023-04-04T05:43:50+00:0025 October 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Nicotine Addiction, Nicotine Replacement Therapy, Vaping|

Blame the Government if you Can’t Stop Smoking!

In ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News of 20 October 2017 there appears a commentary on a report lamenting recent cuts to local authority stop-smoking budgets. Ms Hazel Cheeseman, Director of Policy at ASH, has this to say: Without high quality local services in place vulnerable groups of smokers, such as pregnant women or smokers needing [...]

2023-04-04T05:44:44+00:0020 October 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Smoking in Pregnancy|

Inhale Poison to Stop Smoking

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 quit is to [...]

Nasty Juice Yummier Than Fruit

There is no doubt that e-cigarettes are big business. The flyer I received recently about the forthcoming Vapexpo conference in Paris lists around two hundred brands of e-cigarette liquid from sixteen countries. Promoted on the misleading meme that e-cigarettes help smokers quit, if anyone has any doubts that vaping is drug addiction by other means, they only need [...]

The Great E-Cigarette Confusion

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 not. The answer [...]

Stigmatization of Pregnant Smokers

When I used to work in obstetrics (care of pregnant women) certain routine tests were carried out at each attendance, such as checking the urine and measuring the blood pressure. The reason was that these tests can give early warning of serious problems such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and then the appropriate action could be taken. [...]

2021-10-23T00:32:11+00:0030 August 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Nicotine gum, Nicotine Patches, Smoking in Pregnancy, Vaping|

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: nicotine addiction, which [...]

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 old licensed products [...]

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 match? (Report in [...]

2023-04-26T07:39:01+00:0017 June 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Nicotine Addiction, Vaping|

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 in Warsaw in [...]

Cancer Research UK’s Failure to Call for Banning Cigarettes

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 example, condoms don’t [...]

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 contraptions on their [...]

2018-07-23T22:28:35+00:0010 June 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Nicotine Addiction, Vaping|

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 cigarette has recently [...]

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 shop staff supposed [...]

Over 600 Flavours!

The UK Ecig Store likes to make a splash: they boast of ‘Over 600 e-cigarette flavours’! So much for e-cigarette regulation in Britain. If this sort of advertising is not to entice young people to ‘vape’ and get hooked on it I don’t know what is. Now let’s go to the small print at the bottom of the [...]

2018-07-23T22:26:30+00:0017 April 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Smoking Alternatives, Vaping|

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 noble goal, it’s [...]

2021-06-15T06:03:24+00:0031 March 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Nicotine Addiction, Smoking Harm Reduction, Vaping|

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 there people who [...]

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. […]

2022-01-16T02:19:43+00:0016 March 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Nicotine Addiction, Vaping|

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 about a detail [...]

Ditch Tobacco Completely!

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 still leaves you [...]

2020-06-04T05:19:17+00:0027 February 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Smoking Harm Reduction|

E-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 tobacco controllers get [...]

2021-11-03T01:10:22+00:0020 February 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Nicotine Replacement Therapy, Vaping|

Australia Leads the Way: Vaping is Verboten!

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 door Romania. He [...]

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 that makes drugs [...]

Why Doctors Should Quit Being Involved in Smoking Cessation

As part of my continuing efforts to keep up to date in the practice of medicine I subscribe to a generally very good online publication from America called, appropriately enough, UpToDate®. They send bi-weekly reminders of the latest research, and in today’s issue a section on  e-cigarettes caught my eye. In America they are, rightly in my view, [...]

What’s the Harm in Smoking Harm Reduction?

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 prevailing view seems [...]

2021-04-09T02:38:15+00:007 January 2017|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Smoking Harm Reduction, Vaping|

Keys, Wallet, Phone – Vaporiser!

If you’re like me, before you leave your home you need to check, and double check, that you’ve got your keys, wallet, and phone. Women do not have this problem because they keep everything they need, and probably a lot more besides, in their handbag. However, life has just become more complicated, at least for some people, according [...]

2020-08-30T02:29:40+00:009 December 2016|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Vaping|

Sitting on the ASH Tree Fence

‘Action on Smoking and Health’ (ASH) is a charity set up by the Royal College of Physicians of the UK. It’s supported by those worthy bodies, the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK. ASH's website informs us that it’s ‘a campaigning public health charity that works to eliminate the harm caused by tobacco.’ So far so good. [...]

2018-06-14T03:07:12+00:009 December 2016|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Nicotine gum, Nicotine Patches|

E-Cigarettes: a Public Health Disaster Waiting to Happen?

Heavy smog in Piccadilly Circus, London, December 1952. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Do you know what a pea-souper is? You don’t really want to know, at least not at first-hand. It was the humorous name given to an decidedly unfunny atmospheric condition, not uncommon in the winter months in London in the nineteenth century [...]

2021-10-20T00:23:54+00:007 December 2016|Categories: E-Cigarettes, How to Quit Smoking, Vaping|

E-Cigarettes May Be Hazardous To Your Health

Is this the beginning of the end for ENDS? The acronym – much medical writing is peppered with annoying non-standard abbreviations of this sort – means Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems. These drug-delivery devices (for that is what they are) were in the spotlight at a conference in India of the FCTC (there we go again) which means the [...]

To Vape, or Not to Vape: That is the Question!

I recently signed up for the Vaping Post, an online publication that ‘brings information on vaping’. They add, ‘We consider that the electronic cigarette (vaporizer) is a method of risk reduction for adult smokers who can’t or don’t want to quit smoking.’ Having set out their raison d'être they rightly caution that: Vaping exposes the user to the [...]

2024-03-21T08:04:01+00:0028 November 2016|Categories: E-Cigarettes, Smoking Harm Reduction, Vaping|
Go to Top