The problem of 'denormalising' smoking can be summed up like this: will people stop buying cigarettes because they’re no longer available, or will cigarettes no longer be on sale because no one wants to buy them? The picture shows a street sign near where I live in Tokyo outside a convenience store, announcing that they sell alcohol and [...]

The UK Government wants to enact legislation to ban the sale of single-use vapes from 1 June 2025, for the two good reasons stated on the gov.uk website: Making the sale of single-use vapes illegal, delivers on the Government’s commitment to act on this important issue, and kick-starts the push towards a circular economy and helps to curb [...]

The way to solve the smoking problem is obvious I have asked this question before, but no one seems prepared to answer it: If tobacco is merely to be controlled rather than abolished, this implies there are some circumstances where tobacco use is legitimate or acceptable. And what, pray, are these? Furthermore, to talk of tobacco harm reduction [...]

The 2024 WHO Clinical Treatment Guideline for Tobacco Cessation in Adults has just been published. This scholarly endeavour starts with the usual mantra: ‘Tobacco kills more than 8 million people per year.’ The problem, then, is what should be done about this dreadful situation? It’s put in a nutshell by WHO: Although globally there are still 1.25 billion [...]

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 [...]