Wednesday 27 March 2013

Bradford Council and e-cigarettes

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I can now confirm that Bradford Council doesn't have a policy on e-cigarettes - this means, as the Council Leader told me, that people can use them on Council premises until such time as some nannying fussbucket introduces a policy to ban them.

This seems to be good news although I'd love to see if people have tried!

Let's remind ourselves why it's good news:

"Nicotine itself is not a particularly hazardous drug," says Professor John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for the Royal College of Physicians.

"It's something on a par with the effects you get from caffeine.

"If all the smokers in Britain stopped smoking cigarettes and started smoking e-cigarettes we would save 5 million deaths in people who are alive today. It's a massive potential public health prize."

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The wording of Prof. Britton is sadly indicative of the anti-everything movement these days (unless he's been misquoted, which is always possible).

"...we would save 5 million deaths in people who are alive today"

No you wouldn't. Death is not avoidable. No matter how tightly you regulate my life, no matter how miserable you make my existence by stripping my liberties to do what I want, I WILL STILL DIE IN THE END.

Anonymous said...

Is that 5 million real deaths or lots of estimated bits of death across the whole population that add up to 5 million whole people?

Jonathan Bagley said...

Yes, it's a ridiculous comment and brings academia into disrepute. A professor is supposed to profess - not talk s****. I'm guessing he means that half of all today's smokers (about 10 million) currently die from a tobacco related disease (the long-standing claim of the anti-tobacco industry) and they would all die from something else, sometime later, if they hadn't been smokers.

Good news from Bradford. My sister is CEO of a Borough Council and I'll be spending Sunday lunch trying to get her to disuade the Councillors from making a foolish decision, when this issue crops up, as it surely eventually will in every Council office.