Innovative Approaches to Tobacco Control was the title of a conference organised by ASH Wales last week.
It has now been reviewed by GASP ("your one stop shop for smokefree solutions") which has this to say:
Day 2 started with Prof. Linda Bauld who described some of the successes of projects that offered pregnant smokers incentives for quitting. We then turned attention to mental health and smoking with Lisa McNally who made everyone laugh by introducing pompous quotes from members of FOREST and knocking them down expertly. Whatever you do never say to Lisa that mental health service users can’t quit and won’t quit!
Enquiries have revealed that the "pompous quotes" that "made everyone laugh" were taken from the Forest website. They belong to David Hockney, Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Ronald Harwood and Anthony Worral Thompson.
They read:
"I smoke for my mental health." David Hockney
"Tobacco is not an illegal substance yet the government is persecuting a minority. I think that's a disgrace in a social democracy." Sir Ronald Harwood
"Why should the anti-smoking lobby dictate our lifestyle at the expense of our well-known culture of tolerance?" Antony Worrall Thompson
I am told that Hockney's quote prefaced a discussion concerning the evidence around smoking and the risk of depression.
The quotes by Harwood and Worral Thompson led into a discussion of "how smoking has a unique place within the culture of mental healthcare and that many within it see efforts to help people quit as a form of 'social control' or as an expression of the 'nanny state'".
I'm delighted that the Forest website is being used to stimulate debate within the tobacco control industry. Next time they must invite us to give a full presentation!
PS. I may be wrong, but the review bears the hallmark of my old friend Cecilia Farren. If anyone deserves the epithet "pompous" it's Cecilia. See Named and shamed! (2007).
See also: ASH spokeswoman accuses tobacco industry of "terror campaign" (2010).