Happy No Smoking Day to all my readers!
I hope you'll join me (in spirit) when I light up later today. (I'm currently in Cardiff looking for venues with a smoking terrace.)
Quick update on Forest's hospital smoking/vaping report (Prejudice and Prohibition). Given Brexit I think we did pretty well to get the coverage we did. To the list I reported on Monday I can also add the Telegraph (print edition).
Meanwhile Rob Lyons has written an excellent article for Spiked. See Why we should allow smoking in hospitals: patients are meant to be treated not bullied over their ‘bad habits’.
The New Nicotine Alliance has also posted a piece on its blog – Government messages are still not getting through to NHS trusts.
I was amused too to see that the vaping company Totally Wicked reported our findings on its website (55% of hospitals ban vaping on their grounds) without mentioning or crediting Forest for the data.
The reason our press release – and the subsequent media reports – led with the issue of vaping is because in this context it’s far more newsworthy.
Had we issued a press release headlined '76 per cent of NHS hospital trusts ban smoking' few journalists would have considered that news and the report would have disappeared without trace.
It's called news management.
Nevertheless the war on smoking remains our principal concern and this afternoon I’ll post the foreword to the report which makes it pretty clear where our priorities lie.