Smoking or vaping, nicotine 'addicts' will never be left in peace
Thursday, August 13, 2015 at 7:01 Smoking should be banned outside pubs and bars say 'experts'.
The aim is to force smokers to switch to less harmful e-cigarettes.
BBC News reports that:
The Royal Society for Public Health said smoking should be seen as "abnormal" and more controls are needed to cover areas where people gather.
The RSPH is also calling for greater use of e-cigarettes by smoking cessation services, all places selling cigarettes to be forced to also offer e-cigarettes, and e-cigarettes to be renamed vapourisers or nicotine control products as the term is 'misleading'.
It's pretty clear what they're trying to do – make it even harder for people to smoke, forcing them to quit or switch to medicinal e-cigarettes (or nicotine sticks as they'd like to call them).
If that were to happen, and the number of smokers and vapers were to be reversed (ten million vapers, two million smokers), rest assured public health lobbyists would launch a series of campaigns against nicotine addiction and vaping in public places. It's only a matter of time.
I'm not saying smokers shouldn't be encouraged to use e-cigarettes or other harm reduction products but forcing them to make a choice between combustible and electronic cigarettes isn't the way to do it. It's simply another illiberal attack on people's freedom to choose.
It's clear too that even though some admit that nicotine is no more harmful than caffeine, in the eyes of most public health campaigners e-cigarettes are a smoking cessation tool – nothing else.
The idea that people might use e-cigs as a recreational rather than a medicinal device is anathema to them.
Anyway, here's Forest's response to the PCHE report:
"We support proposals that make it easier for smokers to use e-cigarettes but we reject measures that will make it harder for adults to smoke tobacco.
"While it makes sense to encourage smokers to switch from combustible cigarettes to electronic cigarettes, public health campaigns should be based on education not coercion and prohibition.
"Banning smoking outside pubs and bars would discriminate against adults who enjoy smoking.
"Renaming e-cigarettes is a silly idea. It ignores the fact that e-cigs are popular because they mimic the act of smoking. The name is part of their appeal.
"Calling them nicotine sticks or vapourisers suggests a medicinal product and that misses the point.
"For many consumers e-cigarettes are a recreational product. If public health lobbyists don't understand that they could sabotage a potentially game-changing device."
See Encourage use of e-cigarettes but don't discriminate against smokers, says Forest.
We're quoted by the BBC (Call for pub garden smoking ban), Mail Online (Call for smoking ban OUTSIDE pubs) and Guardian (Promote e-cigarettes over harmful tobacco smoking, say experts).
PS. ITV's Good Morning Britain also featured the story this morning. In the studio, discussing the issue, was Rob Lyons of Action on Consumer Choice.
I had to get up early to see that – he was on at 6.20 – but not as early as Rob!
Update: Fancy that! No sooner had I posted this than I read this in a letter in the Scotsman:
"The government should step in and ban e-cigarettes immediately."
There's no pleasing some zealots.
Update: Rob was also on ITV's This Morning and BBC Five Live. I did a handful of local radio stations and later, between four and five, I'll be doing a whole lot more (nine) from the BBC's Cambridge studio.
Reader Comments (13)
I wondered how long it would take for 'Public Health' to try this angle!
All of a sudden 'vapourisers' (ecigs) should be promoted even though 'we don't know what's in them'! Sounds like a deal is being done behind closed doors with certain producers of 'vapourisers'.
All that will happen is smokers will not venture out to their local anymore and many more pubs will close.
Even with the huge variety of ecigs currently on the market, many smokers do not enjoy their initial experience and prefer to smoke. Only those people determined to stop lighting up, persevere with them until they find something that is more pleasurable than smoking. Next year, the choice will become limited to a few approved brands, making it even less likely that using an ecig will be an enjoyable option for smokers.
Buying cigarettes is LEGAL and the pleasure that many smokers derive from smoking them is almost always ignored.
If they want smoking to become 'abnormal', they should put their money where their gobs are and call for a ban on the sales of cigarettes - but they daren't!
more controls are needed to cover areas where people gather
Gosh, did they really say that?
Public Health gets more Orwellian everyday and if any behaviour should be seen as "abnormal" then that's it.
The most sinister line in the guidelines for article Article 8 of the FCTC
No exemptions are justified on the basis of health or law arguments
Just think about that for a moment.
[Article 8]
24. This creates an obligation to provide universal protection by ensuring that all indoor public places, all indoor workplaces, all public transport and possibly other (outdoor or quasi-outdoor) public places are free from exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke.
No exemptions are justified on the basis of health or law arguments.
If exemptions must be considered on the basis of other arguments, these should be minimal. In addition, if a Party is unable to achieve universal coverage immediately,Article 8 creates a continuing obligation to move as quickly as possible to remove any exemptions and make the protection universal.”
http://www.who.int/fctc/cop/art%208%20guidelines_english.pdf
It's not like we don't know what they are up to. All this is online for anyone to see, the WHO are very open about it, unlike The Royal Society for Public Health who seem to be pretending this is all their own idea.
The Public Health Industry knows full well that all effective and cheap to use vaping systems are banned from next May, so it feels free to say whatever it wants about vaping.
This makes me so nervous. It's hard enough as it is to find a restaurant that one can smoke outside of, but to ban it altogether, and in beer gardens, means that those of us who enjoy a cigarette with a drink or after a meal will have to do all of our eating and drinking at home. Especially when e-cigarettes are banned too - which they already are in many venues.
How much research has been done into the effect of loneliness and lack of a social life on people's mental health and longevity?
The move to expand controls on smoking must be reversed. This isn't about health at all. It is clearly bout totalitarian social control. No health risk to others has ever been demonstrated from second hand smoke indoors or out. Beyond that a majority favors amending existing indoor bans to allow smoking rooms. That public will is ignored while the hysteria to expand bans is promoted.
Rose,
Check this out:
Loneliness May Lead to Serious Illness, including Cancer
It should be fairly obvious that the Public Health industry want to close all pubs. If you look at their activities from the perspective that they want to remove access to all pubs, bars, clubs, drinks, tobacco and nicotine, their policies make sense.
Except for the rich of course. These policies never apply to themselves or their friends - the smoking rooms in politicians' bars are the last to go, and only if they are 'outed'; doctors' unions try and flog as much alcohol to their members as possible; and a Public Health dinner is not going to feature tofu steaks and lettuce profiteroles followed by root beer and healthy non-brandy.
In any case the RSPH is simply trying to drive a wedge between smokers and vapers. Deal with one, then when they're gone, deal with the other (as you point out above, Simon). These people are professional liars, and a leopard can't change its spots.
(And for god's sake how many of these useless, corrupt, half-crazed lobbying orgs are there? It's like the propaganda-for-hire US alphabet soup 'body part' orgs but re-badged with a kind of Brit PH flavour. A nasty, toxic flavour you can't get rid of, no matter how much you try.)
I thought that letter in the Scotsman looked familiar; it's, word for word, in The Herald as well!
http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/13593380.It_is_time_to_ban_e_cigarettes/
Would I be a bit paranoid to suggest there's more to this than meets the eye?
Rose W and JRed, smokers are known to be sociable creatures so I'm sure these factors will have been fully taken into consideration.
In fact they've done several studies on the impact of denormalisation or the "spoilt identities of smokers"
(See S.Chapman - Markers of the denormalisation of smoking and the tobacco industry)
It's important to know which buttons to press when you are out to crush peoples confidence and break their will.
Anti-tobacco don't do empathy.
There is a mistaken belief by extremely dim and /or wilfully ignorant members of the establishment, that lifestyle public health funding is money well spent. Having wasted so much of our taxes on it, the hierarchy is loathe to admit the damaging unforeseen consequences, which now seem to include social engineering of a kind not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Pull the plug on the enormous trough that has fed the talentless totalitarians for decades now, and the public health industry will vanish overnight. It is all about funding and, of course, a rather twisted modern interpretation of what constitutes "charity".
We really have reached the depths when a so called charity sets out to stigmatise and ostracise a huge percentage of the population for no good reason other than its own prejudicial view on how others should behave. No doubt the politicians will either sit on their hands or actively encourage this behaviour. Their dreadful track record speaks for itself. .
"Public Health seems to resemble the black shirt Moseleyites of the late1950s
Please show support by signing this petition. Why should the likes of Ash a so called charity have the power to dictate peoples lives? End government funding for all charities.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/105732
Public Health allows pen-pushers to remain in their jobs and as such are a complete waste on the productivity for our country.
Too many career-led politicians have backed them for their own gain enabling the filthy lucre to line them. They ignore the fact that positive discrimination against legal citizens is occurring concurrently.
It's a very sad state of affairs but appears to be one that the government is ignoring due to world events.
For anyone who takes time to learn the facts, the government is allowing those in the know to explode as far as the junk science that Public Health spout.
I really hope I'm still around to say 'I told you so' when the fraud is exposed.