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 and on being confronted by the crew caused a ruckus. Later, when asked why she decided to smoke on the plane she replied, ‘the anxiety.’ [...]

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 US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced it has awakened to the interesting idea that the way to help people quit smoking is for them to have a wider range of ‘products’ available in addition to so-called nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). The FDA recognises that NRT (nicotine-containing gum, patches, and lozenges) is of limited effectiveness and [...]

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 – Three Steps to Quitting’. (The word ‘Cessation’ is redundant.) The object seems to be to get smokers to quit through fear: the word [...]

Tobacco company CEOs lying to the US Congress in 1994 that nicotine is not addictive For today’s post, let’s hear it from the Tobacco Action Committee of the American Thoracic Society (ATS). The Committee is charged with organizing and coordinating the Society’s tobacco control activities which will include…activities with the ultimate goal of minimizing the impact of tobacco [...]

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 2017 version of Stoptober, as they call it, finished on 28th October. The idea was that if smokers could be encouraged and supported not to smoke for twenty-eight days, they would be 'five times more likely to quit for good'. Those who signed up received daily messages of the following kind: If you're using stop smoking aids, [...]

Bhutan, where the sale and purchase of tobacco is prohibited I wrote earlier about the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study on 17 June 2017. Here is another paper about it in, where else, Tobacco Control (July 2017). It’s written by a no less than forty-one American authors from thirteen different institutions. The conclusion of this [...]

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. [...]

In ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News of 20 October 2017 there appears a commentary on a report lamenting recent cuts to local authority stop smoking budgets. Ms Hazel Cheeseman, Director of Policy at ASH, has this to say: Without high quality local services in place vulnerable groups of smokers, such as pregnant women or smokers [...]

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 pages [...]

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 [...]

When I used to work in obstetrics (care of pregnant women) certain routine tests were carried out at each attendance, such as checking the urine and measuring the blood pressure. The reason was that these tests can give early warning of serious problems such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and then the appropriate action could be taken. [...]

There was recently on the ITV network in Britain a so-called reality show, Love Island, although it seemed rather a far cry from everyday reality to me. It featured a number of attractive young men and women who appeared to be on holiday in a villa in Majorca. The object of the series was to see who had [...]

‘There’s such a craving for cessation!’ This cynical comment was made to me by Christopher Proctor, chief scientist of British American Tobacco, the company whose poisonous products, legally on sale everywhere, are responsible for about 9,600 deaths every year in the UK. (At the time of writiing they had 10% of the cigarette market and 96,000 people die [...]

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 [...]

My blog Mrs May – Save Us! was a critique that I wrote in January 2017 of an appeal by a group of 1000 doctors to the UK Prime Minister and Health Secretary to publish a new Tobacco Control Plan: https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/mrs-may-save-us/ The government did so, in rather a hurry it seems, in July 2017. The details are set [...]

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, [...]