A reminder how the Tobacco Control Industry is killing people...

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Most smokers want to give up smoking. But most of those who want to give up fail to do so. Yet the Tobacco Control Industry - ASH and its associates in any number of local NHS "smoke free" bodies - persist in denying the value of harm reduction strategies and insist on abstinence or nothing.

And this approach means that people are dying unnecessarily - here's the facts (well American facts):

i) There are approximately 46 million tobacco smokers in the United States.
ii) While three-quarters say they want to quit smoking, and about one-third try to quit each year, fewer than 10% succeed.
iii) The FDA-approved smoking cessation aids simply do not work: They improve quit rates only minimally, if at all, therefore …
iv) About 450,000 American tobacco nicotine addicts die prematurely each year from smoking-related causes.

You see, while it is the nicotine that we get addicted to, it isn't the nicotine that kills us. It's the smoke.  Which means that if we remove the smoke, we reduce the harm and save lives.

We see tobacco control people wanting to ban e-cigarettes - despite their proven effectiveness as a smoking cessation aid. And to ban smokeless tobacco products like snus despite the almost complete absence of any evidence indicating harm.

As the author who pointed out the facts above observes:

Despite the demonstrated benefits of harm reduction, and the lack of efficacy of the approved pharmaceutical products (such as patches, gum, and medications), public health spokespersons, governmental and private, adhere to the mantra, “there is no safe tobacco product.”

While inexcusable, their rationales for such unscientific policies understandably derive from deep-seated mistrust of tobacco companies and their phony promotion of ostensibly “reduced risk” products like “light” or filter-tip cigarettes.

But this “won’t be fooled again” policy — ignoring the fate of the millions of addicted smokers — enforces an abstinence only, “quit or die” approach.

But rather than grasping the opportunities presented by a harm reduction approach to tobacco control, the New Puritan fundamentalists focus instead on ineffective, unproven controls such as plain packaging.

And as a result people who might not have died are dying.

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It's the tax, innit?

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...and while we're on the "unintended consequences of New Puritanism":

People selling illegal cigarettes are robbing Bradford’s newsagents of desperately-needed trade, according to the National Federation of Retail Newsagents. Stephen Hunter, the Federation’s Bradford secretary says the knock-on effects of people buying their tobacco from elsewhere means they don’t pop into their local shop for other things either. 

So the war on smoking is finding another victim - hundreds of small businesses threatened, thousands of jobs gone and all in the name of "public health". Just imagine how the minimum pricing on booze will work - corner shops closing as moonshine and smuggled spirits are chosen ahead of buying legit stuff in a shop.

You see New Puritans, you can't (really - look at levels of marijuana use) stop people. And, in trying to do that, the collateral damage to the lives of ordinary people is far more damaging than any of your guesses about how banning booze, fags and burgers will make us all happy, malleable citizens.

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When will journalists start looking at the evidence?

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Every now and then a ray of hope breaks through the dour, New Puritan gloom. For a fleeting moment I feel a little progress towards freedom is made, I read something that makes me think the masters are listening to ordinary people. Sometimes I even hope that people will take note of some real evidence before launching into another promotional story for the Church of Public Health.

And then I read this in my local newspaper:

Mouth cancer patients spoke out yesterday to warn others of the dangers of smoking and using smokeless tobacco.

All well and good except for one small thing – much available evidence suggests there is no strong link between the use of smokeless tobacco and oral cancers. OK, I hear you say, was the journalist aware of this? She was because I had provided her with this:

Snus (Swedish soft snuff) use was independently associated with increased risk of pancreatic cancer (relative risk for ever-users of snus 2.0; 95% CI 1.2-3.3, compared with never-users of any tobacco), but was unrelated to incidence of oral (0.8, 95% CI 0.4-1.7) and lung cancer (0.8, 0.5-1.3).

Yet the opportunity to present an informative, balanced report on mouth cancer was spurned in favour of yet another “tobacco is evil” presentation courtesy of the Church of Public Health.

I shall continue to provide information setting out real evidence rather than the emotive pseudo-evidence from the “health chiefs” – one day my local paper might just take some notice.

I live in hope.

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