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 [...]
Thanks to that fount of medical wisdom, The British Medical Journal (BMJ), we learn from the 23 November 2024 edition that ‘a new treatment option is proposed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to help people stop smoking.’ (At least they don’t say they’re going to roll out the new treatment.) This refers to cytisine, [...]
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 [...]
Do you know why vaping is such a big problem with school children? Because they're buying vapes, especially the brightly coloured disposable kind with child-friendly names and flavours, and getting hooked on them. And why are they engaging in this idiotic behaviour? Because vapes are easily available for purchase, online and at vape shops, and any enterprising youngster [...]
When I first glanced at an editorial headline in the venerable The British Medical Journal (BMJ) of 4 May 2024, I thought common sense was at last beginning to appear in dealing with the smoking problem. It said, ‘Stop tobacco…’ Perhaps they were following in the footsteps of those environmental campaigners who make such a nuisance of [...]
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's 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 per [...]
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 [...]
According to the ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Newsletter of 27 September 2023, ‘The “vapes are 95 per cent safer than cigarettes” message has backfired.’ Indeed it has, as I pointed out in 2017. But first, a digression. ASH is misnamed. Smoking and health are incompatible. The one action they could take to improve the health of [...]
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 [...]
Why do some people, known as smokers, repeatedly every day inhale poisonous tobacco fumes – and continue doing so for years, decades, or even the rest of their lives? The short answer is because they find themselves unable to stop. Now let’s look at why they start this abnormal and potentially lethal behaviour. The simple reason is because [...]
Courtesy of that august organ, ASH Daily News, on 5 June 2023 we learn that the UK government is in a bind. On the one hand, ‘Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, this week announced measures to reduce vaping among teenagers’, and on the other hand, ‘Health officials believe that vapes can be a useful tool to help smokers [...]
Cancer is a serious problem and a tragedy for those suffering from it and for their loved ones. Many cases are due to smoking which has rightly been called the biggest single preventable cause of death and disease. Therefore, it is pertinent to ask, what should the government do about it? I am getting tired of repeatedly pointing [...]
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 [...]
I have written previously about the cock-eyed plan of bribing pregnant smokers to cease poisoning themselves with tobacco fumes. Now Mr Neil O’Brien, MP, the UK Minister for Primary Care and Public Health, has announced the latest wheeze to try and cut smoking rates. On the gov.uk website (11 April 2023) this what, with all due modesty, he [...]
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 [...]
This is the question posed by one Michael Burke. He has a doctorate in education and is a Certified Tobacco Treatment Specialist, no less. But I was set wondering what he actually knows about smoking when I came upon what he says as the Program Director of the highly esteemed Mayo Clinic Nicotine Dependence Center. As usual, I’ll [...]
In a story attributed to George Bernard Shaw, he asked a lady at dinner one night if she would go to bed with him for £1,000. The lady agreed. Then Shaw asked her if she would go to bed with him for £1. The lady became indignant and asked, ‘What do you think I am?’ Shaw replied, ‘We [...]
Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the UK government’s Chief Medical Adviser, lays it on thick. At a recent symposium on medical ethics, after reminding us that ‘Smoking is an appalling way to die, it kills people in multiple ways,’ he is reported as saying that ‘getting smoking down to zero and destroying the cigarette industry should be an aim [...]
If you’re a pack-a-day smoker, how many lungfuls of poisonous tobacco fumes will you inhale in a day, a month, or a year? Assuming one cigarette is consumed in ten puffs, the numbers are 200, 6 000, and 73 000, respectively. This dreadful situation raises the question: what can be done to help smokers cease and desist from [...]
In previous blogs I have dealt with how vaping makes you feel bad, induces vulgarity, and is an activity from which you will get no satisfaction. Now I have to add another downside to this abnormal and potentially harmful behaviour: it can result in vapers being grumpy, as I shall explain. Do you know what INNCO means? It’s [...]
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 [...]
The Tobacco Advisory Group of the highly esteemed UK Royal College of Physicians has produced a report called Smoking and Health 2021 with the intriguing subtitle, A coming of age for tobacco control? It’s an impressive document, written by fifty-one contributors, running to 169 pages, and includes 1,295 references. The authors are all highly qualified academics: professors, research [...]
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 [...]
Vapid thinking about the vaping problem is shown in a seven-author Research Letter in an online publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association called Network Open (2 April 2021). Six of the authors are Doctors of Philosophy and one has a Master of Science degree. (It's part of the PATH study about which I've written before.) [...]