ISH (Inaction on Smoking and Health, formerly known as ASH (Action on Smoking and Health)) is well named. You can see it in their repetitively and badly written Policy Statement, ‘What we do’. [Since the time of writing, their website hase been changed and this Statement is no longer shown.] We work by using our dedicated team of [...]

Evidence or Common Sense? – Part II Momentous news! Later this month the 2023 iteration of The E-Cigarette Summit UK will take place under the auspices of the Royal College of Physicians, no less. This is what it’s all about: The E-Cigarette Summit has a single aim of facilitating respectful dialogue and thoughtful analysis of the science and [...]

Last month the UK Department of Health and Social Care published a paper with the encouraging title: Stopping the start: our new plan to create a smoke-free generation. There are two main strands to this laudable aim: helping current smokers stop poisoning themselves with tobacco fumes by encouraging them to switch to vaping; and stopping young people from [...]

I pointed out the muddle-headed approach of the World Health Organization in 2021, but they’re still at it. They recently issued a 248-page document, WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, 2023: Protect people from tobacco smoke. It’s full of boastful repetitive wordy statements such as the following: No treaty, no set of public health solutions, has saved [...]

In November 2022 the UK government put out a document with the hyphen-challenged title, The Smokefree 2030 ambition for England. The ‘ambition’ is to make England smoke-free by 2030, but they do not mean that after this date no one in England will smoke; they mean the smoking prevalence will be no more than 5 per cent of [...]

An earnest young woman, Kylie Lindorff, gazes out at us from a photo in the 2019 Annual Report of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA). This is made up of the organisations – there are nearly 500 of them – which work on  the ‘development, ratification, and implementation’ of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). [...]

This idea is set out in an eighty-two page Guidebook commissioned by the Framework Convention Alliance on Tobacco Control (FCATC for short), written by an outfit modestly calling itself Sovereign Border Solutions. The latter name reminds me of a company proclaiming it deals with ‘fluid transfer solutions’ instead of saying they sell hosepipes. Let’s take a further look [...]

Schrödinger's cat, for readers who have not heard of it, is the name of a thought experiment devised by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It is meant to illustrate a principle of quantum mechanics in which a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time. I am not clever enough [...]

From the pages of that trusty source of the latest developments in medical politics, The British Medical Journal (7 January 2017), comes an arresting news item: More than 1000 doctors and other healthcare workers…have written an open letter to the prime minister, Theresa May, and England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, urging them to publish a new Tobacco Control [...]

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 banning tobacco products [...]

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 cigarettes is not [...]