Most smokers refuse to acknowlege the real reason they cannot quit smoking, it’s their addiction to Nicotine. Nicotine patches and gum are popular remedies, but only service to transfer smokers’ nicotine addiction from one form to another form.
The British Thoracic Society recently published a ten-author Clinical Statement with the promising title, Medical management of in-patients with tobacco dependency. It’s supposed to be a guide for doctors to help smokers give up the evil weed if they have the misfortune to be admitted to hospital, though if they’re addicted to vaping presumably it doesn’t apply to [...]
Courtesy of that august organ, ISH Daily News, for 10 January 2024, there is both good and bad news about Wirral, part of the city of Liverpool in northwest England. First, the good news: ‘Fewer pregnant women in Wirral were smokers when they give birth, new figures show.’ This means that maternal smoking rates fell from 9.1 [...]
Does the Symonds Method make smokers feel ashamed? Smokers, if they’re honest with themselves, are already ashamed by their apparent inability to stop poisoning themselves with tobacco fumes – a great misfortune. I recently received a message from a smoker in Australia that was rather critical of my approach to helping smokers become non-smokers again. I am even [...]
Here we go again. An article on BBC News (14 June 2022) shows everything that’s wrong with the current approach to smoking and vaping. Let’s start with the headline: ‘Vaping – it is a risk-free option?’ An option for what? For a way of taking nicotine into your body? You don’t need options for this purpose because you [...]
I wrote a critique of the so-called New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) in March 2018. What have they been up to lately? NNA Board of Trustees’ Bios Let’s start with the Board of Trustees on their website. Five names are mentioned, but of one, Mary Stamp, we are told nothing except that her bio is to follow. Of the [...]
I have just read a book called Allen Carr Easy Way To Quit Vaping. But taking a second glance at the cover one can discern in small print the words ‘with John Dicey’. Did they both write the book? Obviously not, since it was published in 2021 and Allen Carr died in 2006 (ironically, from lung cancer). The [...]
The current woeful state of understanding of the smoking problem is shown in the online Daily News (10 March 2020) of the UK charity, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH). According to this, Mr Ciaran Osborne, who as ASH’s director of policy and communications ought to know what he is talking about, apparently thinks that what smokers [...]
One of my smoker patients said to me, ‘The pleasure of smoking may be an illusion, but it’s a very nice illusion!’ It is really? It’s no illusion, and certainly wouldn't be nice, if you contracted a smoking-induced disease. Yet it’s extraordinary the lengths to which smokers will go to justify their smoking. Here’s what some of them [...]
I recently came across a curious piece in an online publication, Broadly, (26 February 2019) written by a smoker, one Brandy Jensen. Rather than being an apology, justification, or excuse for smoking, it seems to be a defiant declaration: I’m a smoker and proud of it! We are off on the wrong foot from the very title: Smoking [...]
The highly esteemed tobacco company, Philip Morris International (PMI), in January 2019 published an anonymous fifty-five page document entitled Public Health – Much Harder than Rocket Science. They modestly call it a White Paper, as if it’s an official government report, and it’s padded out with eighteen artistic black-and-white photos of no relevance to public heath except for [...]
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 and false emotional [...]
Some illuminating insights can be gained into the smoking problem by different people’s comments on my answer to a question posted on Quora (a US based question-and-answer website). The question was: What is your opinion on vaping and e-cigarettes? I answered thus: E-cigarettes should be seen for what they are: drug (nicotine) delivery devices. There’s enough trouble already [...]
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 and suck the [...]
Do you know what formaldehyde cyanohydrin is? The answer will be revealed shortly, but first, kind reader, consider the following: A BBC news item (20 September 2018) shows TV presenter Jeremy Kyle sitting at his desk, looking rather serious. He boasts he’s quit smoking twenty cigarettes-a-day after thirty-five years: ‘I am proud to say that I quit smoking [...]
When you think of charities, what usually occurs to you next? That they are, no doubt, deserving, and the fact that they all want money. For example, the Tibet Relief Fund, Yorkshire Cat Rescue, or the National Trust—all worthwhile charities in need of funding from the philanthropic public. Now, let us take the so-called New Nicotine Alliance (NNA), [...]
In The Times (2 September 2018) there is an article by the liberal democratic politician, Norman Lamb, MP, (pictured) with a title that it must have given him a chuckle to write, ‘It’s time to stop tarring e-cigarettes and tobacco with the same brush’. Mr Lamb is a solicitor. Nonetheless, he is Chair of the Science and Technology [...]
In the venerable New Yorker (24 May 2018) there was an article about the emerging problems with the latest nicotine delivery device that looks like a USB stick, called Juul. The article starts by parroting a myth, twice: Nicotine is both a stimulant and a relaxant: it peps you up when you’re tired, and if you’re anxious it [...]
Do you really want to put this stuff into your lungs? In the wonderful country of America it takes a lawsuit or two to see the obvious. The Juul brand of e-cigarette looks like a USB stick but the difference is that, after you’ve charged it in the USB port of your computer, you stick it in your [...]
The alleged pleasure of smoking is sometimes put forward in an attempt to counter the nanny state which says smoking’s bad for you. Here’s an example from Huffington Post (6 April 2011) by Christopher Mathias, ‘I love loosies’: I love smoking. I like the way it smells, I like the way it tastes after a meal or with [...]
The headline to an article in the online The Scotsman (4 April 2018) laments that ‘Smoke-free Scotland goal stalls as one in five fail [sic] to quit’. This is blamed on funding for smoking cessation campaigns being cut by the Scottish Government. The article elaborates: About one in five Scots, equivalent to 850,000 adults, are [sic] still lighting [...]
Gentle reader, let me ask you a hypothetical question. If you were in the unhappy position of being a smoker (i.e., nicotine addict), and you wanted to escape this predicament, do you think it would be a good idea to put more nicotine into your body before you even tried to quit? I have written before about this [...]
It’s an unfortunate fact that many smokers, although they dislike smoking and wish they didn’t have to do it, find the prospect of quitting very difficult. Therefore it’s understandable that they seek help in how to stop smoking, including using nicotine patches . In theory, all that smokers need to do is to stub out their last cigarette [...]
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 E Malone, is [...]
A fool and his money are soon parted—old English proverb. Modern version: There’s one born every minute. Whether it’s a seemingly miraculous cure for hair loss, type 2 diabetes, erectile dysfunction, or a recently rediscovered ancient formula guaranteed to abolish unhappiness, it’s all to be found on the internet. The spiel is always the same: a video that [...]
Here are some facts about a natural disaster, tuberculosis. According to WHO, in 2016: 10.4 million people fell ill with TB, and 1.7 million died from the disease. And now here are some facts about an unnatural disaster, smoking. Tobacco kills more than 7 million people each year. More than 6 million of those deaths are the result [...]
Under the guise of protecting public health, the pro-vaping lobby gets into some curious twists and turns. For example, there is an official-looking 2017 paper, Reshaping American Tobacco Policy. It is written by three people, one of whom, Clive Bates, oddly designates himself as ‘Director, Counterfactual’, evidently being unaware of what counterfactual means: pertaining to or expressing what [...]
Or so the makers of this latest e-cigarette device would have us believe. And what a clever name, suggestive of the jewel in the crown, no doubt. All right, Dr Symonds, that’s enough cynicism. What is Juul all about? Their website describes it as ‘The Satisfying Alternative To Cigarettes’. Do you know what the best and most satisfying [...]
Professor Colin 'Nicotine' Mendelsohn, a self-styled tobacco treatment specialist, is a man with a mission. He has the noble goal of wanting to cure smokers of their dangerous habit of smoking – but he wants to do this by encouraging them to switch to e-cigarettes. I am sure our good Professor would agree that smokers smoke because they [...]
What does the name New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) mean to you? The word ‘new’ here is ambiguous. Is the organisation one that supersedes a previous nicotine alliance, or is it new in the sense that a pair of trousers is new when you buy it but after having been worn for a while can no longer be so [...]
An organisation called Yorkshire Cancer Research has put out a video entitled Vape to Quit. This video, though well meant, shows everything that’s wrong with the current approach to quitting smoking. I’ll transcribe some of the speech and add my comments. Why do you need a 'way' to stop doing something? ‘There’s (sic) various ways stop’ says Paul [...]