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.
I have a copy of the 4th (2009) edition of Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. In 2015 the book was re-issued with a foreword by John Dicey. It’s otherwise identical, even to the pagination, to the 4th edition so it’s a bit misleading of Penguin Books to sell this as if it’s a new (6th) edition. [...]
Persons who deliberately inhale cigarette smoke are known as smokers and those who use e-cigarettes are called vapers. But what about people who obtain their regular supply of nicotine from skin patches or chewing gum? Should we call them patchers and chewers, respectively? I propose, in order to simplify the terminology as well as more accurately to reflect [...]
Why should you have to do this all day, every day, for years on end? Now here’s something to ponder. A recent article in the online International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health reports a study of vaping with the wordy title of the sort commonly found in scholarly medical articles: ‘A Qualitative Exploration [...]
Isn’t this fun, or isn’t it? Let’s hear it from a lady called Sarah in a video The Switch. The title reminded me of The Great Switcheroo in Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected—a collection of rather sinister stories for adults. […]
Inhale deeply To understand the smoking problem one needs to understand smokers. And the way to do this is to talk to them. Two of the questions I ask all smokers who come to see me for help in quitting are, ‘At what age, and why, did you start?’ […]
Thanks to the online Metro Radio publication (2 January 2018), we learn that in the NHS’s North East region of England, over 38,000 patients are admitted to hospitals every year as a result of smoking-related illnesses. Riding to the rescue of this deplorable situation is Dr Robert Allcock, a respiratory consultant at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, [...]
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 on the plane [...]
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) would seem to think smoking is indeed a mental illness, since it has plunged into the debate about e-cigarettes. It takes a wonderfully fence-sitting position in its July 2017 submission to the ‘Inquiry into the use and marketing of electronic cigarettes and personal vaporisers in Australia’ of the [...]
Laughing all the way to the bank Philip Morris International (PMI) claim their new ‘heat-not-burn’ tobacco product that goes under the name of IQOS isn’t an e-cigarette. They say this because e-cigarettes are prohibited in Thailand. The Managing Director of the Thailand division of PMI, Mr Gerald Margolis (pictured), argues that their new product ‘is different from e-cigarettes, [...]
The august American Cancer Society, in its efforts to scare people into quitting smoking, sponsors an annual event in November that they call the Great American Smokeout. They show a film titled ‘Smoking Cessation—3 Steps to Quitting’. (The word ‘Cessation’ is redundant.) The object indeed seems to be to get smokers to quit through fear: the word ‘cancer’ [...]
Jane Goodall and friend The words in the title were used by Dr Jane Goodall, the distinguished primatologist and animal welfare campaigner, in a letter to the FDA Commissioner, Dr Scott Gottlieb, protesting about nicotine addiction experiments on monkeys. This is an extract: I was disturbed — and quite honestly shocked — to learn that in 2017 the [...]
The Nursing Times (13 November 2017) brings us news of a great way to raise awareness of lung cancer for the citizens of the historic city of Leicester in England. Specialist nurses will run a stall at a shopping centre where they ‘will be promoting e-cigarettes to the public…as part of efforts to boost smoking cessation.’ One of [...]
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 known e-cigarette enthusiasts, [...]
For smokers who have occasion to visit Frankfurt Airport there is good news—and for non-smokers too—we are told by the online The Phoenix Newspaper, 7 November 2017: Good news for smokers and non-smokers alike: two more smoking lounges have just been added…at Frankfurt Airport. These comfortable, modern facilities are ideal for getting away from the hustle and bustle [...]
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 [...]
The more I read about the smoking problem the more it becomes clear there is an almost complete lack of understanding among so-called experts about why smokers smoke. For example, even Dr Robert Proctor, who knows a thing or two about smoking and the tricks of the tobacco trade – he wrote a book running to 737 [...]
There’s no shortage of ideas, particularly from people who appear to have no experience in actually treating smokers, about how to solve the smoking problem. For example let’s take a look at an article in the online Dorset Echo of 29 September 2017 written by a trainee reporter. To set the mood there are two large illustrations: ‘A [...]
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 [...]
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 words that came to me as I read this piece in today’s Financial Times were disingenuous, self-serving, cynical, and the like. Philip Morris International has pledged up to $1bn over the next 12 years to an arm’s-length foundation that will fund scientific research designed to eliminate the use of smoked tobacco around the globe. [Philp Morris]…last week [...]
It's only a rat! Perhaps in my post of 4 July 2017 in which I accuse the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) of torturing animals I was being a little unjust. I had not at that time seen their proclamation, ‘Our standards for animal testing’. In this document they reassuringly tell us ‘PMI takes to heart public [...]
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 [...]
In October 2015 in the UK a report was published called Smoking Cessation in Pregnancy: A Review of the Challenge. It was endorsed by no less than twenty-one worthy organisations such as Action on Smoking and Health, Bliss (‘for babies born too soon, too small, too sick’), the Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association, and the like. The [...]
A little-known advantage of not smoking In the NHS Smokefree website there’s a section headed ‘Addiction test’. The purpose of this is to find out how dependent you are on nicotine. The underlying concept, however, is wrong. If you’re addicted to nicotine that sufficiently defines your problem. The implication that there are degrees of addiction is unfounded and [...]
I quote from British American Tobacco’s International Marketing Principles, 2015: We will not portray smoking as an activity that makes people appear more popular, appealing or successful. But they seem to have no qualms about portraying the use of their new product with the almost unpronounceable name of ‘glo’ as an activity that makes people appear more popular, [...]
Here is some good news for those unfortunate patients suffering from the serious condition known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. It’s a complex disorder but the main features are shortness of breath with cough, phlegm, and chest tightness as the lungs are progressively damaged; the result may be fatal. The biggest risk factor for getting COPD [...]
You would think, would you not, that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, MD, would understand a few basic facts about smoking and nicotine addiction. Yet, although he acknowledges that smoking is a pretty serious problem, causing more than 480,000 deaths in the US every year, in a press release of 28 July 2017 [...]
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 threat to health [...]
I put ‘How to stop smoking’ in Google and this is what came up (emphases added) : Readers’ Digest The 23 Best Ways to Quit Smoking…Make an honest list of all the things you like about smoking…Then make another list of why quitting won’t be easy. WebMD So you're ready to kick the habit. That's great! Making that [...]
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 [...]