Why should you need willpower to refrain from poisoning yourself? We do not need to read very far into the July 2017 edition of Tobacco Control to have demonstrated to us yet again the feebleness of the current official approach to the tobacco problem, the duplicity of the tobacco industry, and the futility of academic research into smoking. [...]

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 [...]

Gentle reader, bear with me until l come to the bit where I disclose the amazing revelation that recently came upon me. Now, the following is from the website of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), quoting the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE): While recognizing that quitting smoking is always the best option for [...]

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 [...]

The table below shows the main features of the Symonds Method compared with conventional quit-smoking methods. The ‘chalk and cheese’ analogy puts it clearly, even if I say so myself. This is because I know from my experience of treating hundreds of smokers that quitting smoking is easy. On the other hand, whether because of vested interests or [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday Today The tobacco giant, Philip Morris International (PMI), has applied to the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) to market what they call ‘modified risk tobacco products’ (MRTP), in particular, their heated tobacco contraption with the unpronounceable name of IQOS, or iQOS. They start by putting their cards on the table: ‘PMI recognizes that cigarettes are a [...]

‘Smokefree’ is a catchy neologism used by the NHS Smokefree campaign. It’s supported by Public Health England which is part of the UK government’s Department of Health. So it’s quite kosher. But what’s this? The Leicester City Stop Smoking Service at a quick glance looks similar: As we can see, it offers not just any old licensed products [...]

Why not just eat a banana? The latest breakthrough since lunchtime, if you’ll pardon the cliché, is revealed in the result of a study carried out at Penn State College in the US, styled Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH). Did they think of the acronym first and then juggle the words to find a match? (Report [...]

Dave Dorn is a trustee of the so-called New Nicotine Alliance (astonishingly, a Registered Charity in the UK). He claims that 80% of smokers who have taken up vaping have successfully switched from smoking because of what he calls the pleasure principle. The gold necklace-wearing Dave gave a talk at the Global Forum on Nicotine in Warsaw in [...]

Healthline does it again. They put up a website in 2014 entitled ‘29 Things Only a Person Who’s Quitting Smoking Would Understand’. Apart from the crudity and smugness of the writing, it’s another example of everything that’s wrong with the orthodox approach to the smoking problem. For a start, the very idea of ‘quitting smoking’ implies it’s a [...]

Why is this allowed? As an example of the continuing official confusion in about smoking/vaping, here is a statement (9 Dec 2016) by Cancer research UK: Harm reduction is a type of public health policy that aims to reduce the harmful consequences of substances, or actions, without necessarily reducing or eliminating the use itself. For example, condoms don’t [...]

Why bother with all this? The doughty online publication, ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News, on 9 June 2017 carried a warning headline: ‘Safety advice given after e-cigarette fire’. A woman called Leanne Williams had a potentially serious problem with an ‘88 Vape’ brand e-cigarette apparatus. This is how 88 Vape advertises these contraptions on their [...]

Is smoking harmful, or isn’t it? Or is it, perhaps, good for you? In particular, the weighty question needs to be considered: is there any connection between passive smoking (breathing cigarette smoke-polluted air produced by other smokers) and dementia? A headline in an online publication called Care Appointments says: ‘[The University of] Wolverhampton secure (sic) funding to assess [...]

Here is an interesting piece of news reported in the online Health News (Reuters Health) on  26 May 2017. The headline is the alarming statement: ‘Heat-not-burn cigarettes still release cancer-causing chemicals.’ Shock, horror. This is according to an investigation by Dr Reto Auer and colleagues of the University of Bern, Switzerland. The heat-not-burn type of cigarette has recently [...]

A young girl ties tobacco leaves onto sticks to prepare them for curing The desperate need to deal with the smoking problem by outlawing tobacco could not be more plainly made than in the six bulleted points of ASH’s (Action on Smoking and Health's) online Daily News of 30 May 2017. Here they are: Tobacco kills more than [...]

The scholarly journal with the curious name of Tobacco Control, on the cover of the May 2017 issue shows a picture of an inflated balloon with a map of the world on it about to be burst by a lighted cigarette. The wording is ‘Tobacco threatens us all’ and ‘Say No to Tobacco’, among other slogans. The dire [...]

Here is a fantastic piece of news about an undercover investigation by the Royal Society of Public Health, reported in April 2017. They found that nine out of ten retailers of e-cigarettes ‘are turning a blind eye to their use by non-smokers, and effectively pushing them as a lifestyle product.’ Very wicked! What are vape shop staff supposed [...]

The UK government is about to introduce legislation to require cigarettes to be sold in what is called standardised packaging. They claim this will discourage children from starting to smoke. Fine, but it’s rather a roundabout way of going about it. They're saying, in effect, ‘Don’t buy this, it’s dangerous.’ Or are they trying to put people off [...]

My attention was drawn recently to a badly written ‘Ezine’ article from 2010 by the well-named so-called expert author Hayden Eck with the confusing title ‘Do Not Give Up – Smoking Cessation is Possible’. At first glance it looks as if he’s telling you not to give up smoking, but he means you should not give up on [...]

Is this a statement or a question? In either case it’s a strange idea. Where does the how come into stopping doing something? If people want to stop smoking why don’t they just stop? Why does it seem to be so difficult? Many methods, ways, techniques, systems, or ‘tools’ for smoking cessation are on offer on the internet [...]

The UK Ecig Store likes to make a splash: they boast of ‘Over 600 e-cigarette flavours’! So much for e-cigarette regulation in Britain. If this sort of advertising is not to entice young people to ‘vape’ and get hooked on it I don’t know what is. Now let’s go to the small print at the bottom of the [...]

If you were new to the piano and wanted to play Bach’s C major prelude you would need to practise. (There are YouTube videos showing how to do this.) But if you decided to give up learning this wonderful piece, which would be a pity, all you would have to do is close the piano and walk away; [...]

There was an interesting article two days ago in the online Manawatu Standard titled: ‘Government legalises e-cigarettes in effort to make New Zealand smokefree by 2025.’ Why 2025? Because this is a nice round figure? Why not sooner, say, 2019? Apart from the date by which the New Zealand government is trying to achieve this noble goal, it’s [...]

Fumatul ucide is Spanish for smoking kills In my tireless efforts to bring you the low-down on the tricks of the tobacco trade let me tell you about this little gem I came across recently from British American Tobacco (BAT): http://www.bat.com/group/sites/UK__9D9KCY.nsf/vwPagesWebLive/DO8GSFQT Under the page header the eye is drawn to the large print: ‘Our Guiding Principles’. So BAT [...]

How can Nic-'otine'-andro Durante face himself in the mirror each morning? Let me put it another way. What are 10,000 deaths a year in the UK worth? To work this out we need to remember that one of the warning labels appearing on cigarette packs amusingly states ‘Smoking kills’. More precisely, smoking kills about 100,000 people each year [...]

The title is a quotation from Groucho Marx. Keeping this in mind, let’s look at the website of Japan Tobacco International (JTI), in particular the section headed ‘Our six core principles’. (The word ‘core’ is redundant.) The hypocrisy from start to finish is breathtaking. The very idea of a tobacco company declaring it has any principles at all [...]

German industrial cigarette machine - makes 10,000 cigarettes a minute There are some individuals and organisations that have found a way to deal with awkward questions: ignore them! Recently I cast my critical eye at the website of the venerable cigarette manufacturing company, Japan Tobacco International (JTI). In their ‘About tobacco’ section we find the amazing fact that [...]