Dave Atherton Meets Deborah Arnott - Poor Guy

Freedom 2 Choose's friendly fellow Dave Atherton was interviewed on CNN alongside ASH UK's Deborah Arnott. If you've been following either side of the smoking debate for any reasonable length of time both names will probably be familiar to you. Dave did a great job and provided a number of key facts that completely undermined Deborah's position - although undermining her position is like shooting fish in a barrel. Check out the video below:

E-Cigarettes to be Banned in the UK

We all knew this day was coming. Ever since their release onto the public market ASH and so-called health groups have demanded they be banned. No one who understands the source of funding and overall agenda of these groups had any illusion as to why they wanted e-cigarettes removed from the market - the groups are funded by the pharmaceutical industry, the pharmaceutical industry makes nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) which has a 98.4% failure rate, e-cigarettes are not made by the pharmaceutical industry and work as a good tool for smoking cessation. E-cigarettes satisfy every facet of real cigarette smoking. ASH, Department of Health et al are still eluded by the fact that smoking is not an addiction to nicotine, but is a multi-faceted sensual habit. Smokers smoke for different reasons, from the Freudian theories of wanting or needing something to hold in their hands on their mouth, to enjoying the hypnotic dances of the smoke through the air, to the simple feeling it provides. E-cigarettes, with their looking, feeling and, to some extent, tasting like real cigarettes, allow a smoker to smoke without smoking. NRT, on the other hand, simply bypasses all the aforementioned, working instead on the placebo effect by convincing smokers they are simple addicts.

The pharmaceutical industry developed some time ago the inhalator; essentially their own equivelant of the e-cig except it looks like a lump of plastic and, frankly, anyone users it looks plain stupid. It also emits no vapour, looks nothing like a cigarette and feels nothing like a cigarette. Big Pharma cottoned on to the fact smokers often feel the need to have something in their mouths, but again overlooked the multi-faceted interest in smoking.

Chris Snowdon reported on his blog that e-cigarettes will soon be banned in the UK:

Michael Kitt at ecigarettedirect.co.uk has received a letter from a Trading Standards Officer who has (apparently) been told by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) that they  will be opting for what they always said was their preferred option and banning all nicotine products. There are are—of course—two major exceptions: the most hazardous nicotine products (smoked tobacco) will continue to be on sale, as will the least effective smoking cessation aids (pharmaceutical nicotine).

From the letter:

I have been in discussions with other Trading Standards authorities and have found out that the consultation is almost complete. The outcome will be that as of a date (yet to be announced) there will be a 21 days period and then these products will be outright banned in the UK, unless the traders apply for certification as a medical device from MHRA. This process could be complicated and costly so it is expected that many traders may cease trading.

There is a large and growing number of e-cig users in Britain, known as 'vapers'. With their newfound method soon disappearing, they will simply pick up real cigarettes again. Can we really take "health" groups seriously when they purport that cigarettes are the biggest health threat we face, yet systematicallyremove any harmless alternative? And why are we so quick to ban everything? We should long be aware by now that banning doesn't eradicate a substance or a problem, it simply increases criminal activity and turns good citizens into criminals in the process. As Angus Macqueen argued in his brilliant article and tv series Our War On Drugs, we are failing spectacularly.

We know the pharmaceutical industry acknowledges the threat posed by e-cigarettes, so it's very simple to see why they oppose them. And it's also plainly obvious why the anti-smoking brigade are against them - their agenda, now very much public knowledge, is against smokers themselves and not a dislike to the smell of tobacco smoke. They routinely use the phrase "denormalisation of smokers" to highlight their motives and end-goals. Clearly, e-cigarettes undermine this. Sure, they're a great alternative to anyone wanting to stop using the real things or to stop smoking entirely, but if more people use them then the image of smoking will perhaps become more normal again. Plus, e-cigarettes are permitted indoors, including planes, trains and pubs. While they pose no threat or irritation to people in the vicinity, they may remind people of when real smoking was allowed indoors. The long and short of it: e-cigarettes have the potential to shift the attitude towards smoking back to tolerance and acceptance. This isn't acceptable to ASH.

So unacceptable, in fact, that borderline Loony Toon Stanton Glantz has previously said that 

Promoting smokeless tobacco as a safer alternative to cigarettes will not result in a reduction of harm and may lead to an increase in harm at the population level.

 No, I'm not sure how he reached that conclusion either. He has changed his opinion ever so slightly this year though, saying instead "Promoting smokeless tobacco as a safer alternative to cigarettes is unlikely to result in substantial health benefits at a population level."

What needs to be realised is that these people are as far removed from public health as is possible. They spend years shouting of the thousands of chemicals and additives in tobacco, saying these are the reason for the harm, and when an alternative comes along with just nicotine it is apparently just as lethal.

It really is about time this madness was renamed from the anti-smoking movement to the anti-smoker movement.

Tobacco Control Resorts to What It Accuses Big Tobacco Of

Tobacco Control recently accused the tobacco industry of resorting to new ways of creating addicts (clearly haven't read ASH's admission that tobacco smoking is habitual, not addictive), yet a quick look at TC jumping on the blogging bandwagon shows quite clearly where the public mindset is at:

Exhibit A, the blog of ASH Scotland's shamefully despicable Sheila Duffy
Quite clearly, she isn't going to win any awards soon (not favourable ones, anyway).

Exhibit B, the new Tobacco Control blog
Just a cursory glance at some of the commenters shows that it's members of their own community posting, in an attempt to drum up public favour (and who posts under 'stop smoking now' anyway?!).

Maybe the reason they were so quick to accuse the tobacco industry of such a display of foul play is to try to divert attention from their own obvious tactic?

Thirdhand Smoke Heats Up

The first post of this new blog focuses on thirdhand smoke. It's a sad state of affairs that this ridiculous notion is still getting attention, but on the plus side the attention is largely disproving the claim that it poses a health threat - though that isn't stopping the anti-smoking HQ (California) devoting vast sums to "research" into thirdhand smoke. The Request for Proposals (RFP) to "undertake studies on Thirdhand Smoke and Cigarette Butt Waste, under a new initiative" is receiving approximately $3.75 million. Are these people unaware there is a recession and wasting public money should be curbed? Anyway, back to the study in hand.

This is possibly the first study that actually measures thirdhand smoke and compares it to secondhand smoke, which, frankly, is quite disappointing as it means the claims leveled against THS up to this point have been done with no basis. Then again, we already knew that. As Michael Siegel noted, the study, published in Tobacco Control, found that the concentrations of particulate matter in thirdhand smoke were 100 times lower than in secondhand smoke, measured in the same room.

The methodology was as follows:

"A smoking device burned 10 cigarettes in 30 minutes in a non-ventilated furnished room that was then kept closed. On the next day, for particle resuspension, we mobilised the dust on furniture, clothes and surfaces by wiping and shaking and created even more turbulence with a ventilator. An impactor (ELPI) measured the particle sizes (between 0.28 μm and 10 μm) and concentration in the air, 60 cm above the floor: on the first day before and after the cigarettes were smoked (secondhand smoke) then 4 hours later, 24 hours later, before and after resuspension manoeuvres (thirdhand smoke)."

The researchers found that:

"after cigarette smoking: the airborne particles ... concentration was divided by 100 in the first 4 hours and again by 100 in the following 24 hours. After resuspension, the concentration was multiplied by 100, going back to that observed 4 hours after smoking."

The study concludes: 

"These quantitative data support the hypothesis of a resuspension from the cigarette smoke surface contamination. However, this airborne contamination through resuspension remains much lower (100 times) than that of secondhand smoke. The rest of the aerosol mass initially produced by cigarettes could be firmly attached either to surfaces, leading to ingestion hazards and dermal transfer or to household dust and be inhaled with it."

The first part of the conclusion clearly states to any rational person that the THS story should be put to bed. However, being tobacco control, such an admission could never be made and so they must resort to saying that "ingestion hazards" and inhalation risks exist. In theory, this may be true. In reality, this is true: thirdhand smoke exists, and there exists the possibility that some degree may be ingested, but the quantity would be so small as to be barely measureable. We already know that 90% of secondhand smoke is ordinary air and water, and that the risks of SHS are so negligible as to be more or less non-existant - only individuals with an almost unprecedented level of sensitivity are posed any harm, and such people are also threatened by day-to-day pollution, dust particles etc. So having established this, why should any person worry about particulate matter that measures in at 100 times lower than the essentially harmless secondhand smoke?

This study effectively demolishes the claims by Dr Winickoff and ASH etc, who roundly spew the garbage that a smoker with a lingering odour of tobacco poses a health threat to healthy co-workers, friends and family. Moreover, it certainly provides reason to abolish the absurd, but increasingly popular, trend of not hiring smokers solely because they smoke under the pretence that thirdhand smoke puts others at risk.