Your caring, sharing NHS at its most cruel

I know the term 'health fascism' is pretty polemical and intended to shock. But the truth is that increasingly public health 'campaigners' (as the newspapers always call them) have created a culture around their obsessions that is unpleasant, officious and even cruel:

What happened I found out in stages - apparently someone saw me at the week-end refilling the vape from the 'sipped case' - and told them. This evening a nurse walked over to me me and said, 'what a sweet little teddy' and proceeded to play with him - 'Oh do you keep your pen in there, good heavens no its a vape'. It was so odd that I didn't twig at first. Well, I got the rules and regulations read to me in such a patronising tone of voice.

This dying woman has one small remaining pleasure removed because the rules - rules without any basis in health - don't allow it. As Dick Puddlecote points out this is a women "on a regime of intravenous Ketamine - the drug designed to stun a rampaging elephant - and Oxycodeine, but apparently nicotine is not to be tolerated." But it's worse - part of this torture is where nurses left the vape pen just out of this paralysed woman's reach.

We're told almost daily how NHS staff are wonderful and caring yet somehow we've reached a point where "as there wasn't evidence to prove that e-cigs were safe or unsafe, they were banned on health grounds" - for people in a hospice receiving palliative care for a terminal illness. Not only is this stupid but it is really cruel. So much for the caring, sharing NHS.

Since you asked, this is what I mean by health fascism.
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Why e-cigs matter. And the public health nannies are wrong...

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Currently the tobacco cessation lobby are spending between eight and ten million quid a year to perhaps get two per cent of Britain's ten million smokers to quit. Here's the effect of electronic cigarettes - without a single penny of public funding:

...an increase in e-cigarette use from two per cent to 16 per cent in 28 months.  That is a 14 per cent increase in just over two years.  Basing that figure we see that there is a 14 per cent increase over 28 months which works out as an average monthly increase of 0.5 per cent.  This means that at present 40,625 smokers are switching to e-cigarettes each month[5].

It's probable that, before the EU's egregious Tobacco Products Directive comes into force, over a third of current smokers will have wholly or partly switched to vaping. And this will be, if you accept that smoking is the biggest preventable cause of death, the greatest public health breakthrough since the clean air acts of the 1950s.

And these idiots want to ban e-cigs? Seriously!

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Here we go again...EU e-cig regulation

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You thought it was over. You thought the rush of common sense through the usually nonsensical MEPs meant that the job was done. Electronic cigarettes wouldn't be regulated as medicines. You'd be able to buy them form the local shop rather than require a prescription.

You were wrong. The regulatory zombie has crawled from out its tomb:

Late last week the European Commission circulated a confidential new proposal for regulating e-cigarettes.   The document was sent only to those negotiating the future of e-cigarettes behind closed doors in Brussels – representatives of the European Parliament and European Council.  This isn’t a final proposal, but it provides the negotiators with something to discuss.

And the something to discuss - as Clive Bates explains - will have this effect:

...if implemented this proposal bans every product on the market today and would severely limit options for future products - and may make it commercially unviable to develop in future.

It's almost as if EU officials actually want smokers to die.

So what do we do? It's back to the letter writing and campaigning again. Clive Bates provides a helpful guide to who you should contact - he suggests writing to your MP and MEP (providing useful links). I might add that there are European elections coming up next year so:

1. Write to your local paper saying you'll not support candidates who argue for excessive regulation
2. Contact local candidates (if you can find out who they are which might be tricky) to get their support

We only get one go at this - once the EU has regulated the direction is always one of more control, more rules. So sharpen your quills and go into battle!

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