Doctors want to ban smoking AND vaping outside hospital buildings
Tuesday, February 18, 2020 at 9:52 The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh wants to ban smoking AND vaping outside hospital buildings.
Today’s Scottish Daily Mail (print edition) reports that the RCPE wants smoking banned in order to ‘protect patients, staff and visitors from the harmful effects of tobacco smoke’.
As for vaping, Professor Derek Bell, President of the RCPE, said:
“The College believes that e-cigarettes should be included in any legislation relating to a smoking ban outside hospital buildings and on hospital grounds. There is strong precedent for including e-cigarettes, as many organisations, including health boards, local authorities and chains of cafes and pubs have introduced their own policies banning vaping on their premises.”
I’m not sure why the RCPE chose yesterday to issue a press release on the subject because the Scottish Government consultation on smoking outside hospital buildings closed four weeks ago, but I guess they just want to keep up the pressure on ministers to implement the ban.
Forest seems to be the only organisation actively opposing hospital smoking bans (a fact I’m quite proud of, although I know it raises a few eyebrows) but I’m surprised how quiet vaping advocates are on the use of e-cigarettes outside hospitals.
Anyway, this is our full response to the RCPE press release. The Mail used the first two paragraphs, understandably omitting my additional comment about vaping because the whole thing was quite long:
“It’s one thing to ask people not to smoke outside hospital entrances, but making it an offence and threatening patients, visitors and staff with fines and other penalties is unacceptable.
“Hospitals can be stressful places. Banning smoking outside, where there is no risk to non-smokers, shows an appalling lack of empathy for people who may be at a low ebb and in need of a comforting cigarette.
“Banning vaping on hospital grounds is particularly stupid because most vapers are using e-cigarettes to help them quit smoking.
“If this is a health issue, why would you ban the use of a product that leading bodies like Public Health England say is 95 per cent less harmful than cigarettes?
“If doctors want smokers to quit they should encourage the use of e-cigarettes, not ban it.”
Meanwhile, Rachael Hamilton MSP will tomorrow introduce a motion to the Scottish Parliament to ban smoking from play parks and outdoor sports facilities in Scotland.
They never stop, do they?
Reader Comments (3)
This is ridiculous since there are no actual harmful effects from second hand smoke or vaping outdoors.(Actually the same is true indoors with sound ventilation.) I suggest they review the actual data rather than the relentless antismoker propaganda.
Yes, I think that the anti-smoking industry has done a very good job of Divide and Rule on vapers without them noticing. After all, for all their sins – and there are many – no-one can doubt for a moment that the anti-smoking movement are past masters at manipulating any opposition to their chosen standpoint and effectively rendering it ineffective. Their lukewarm “support” of e-cigarettes – but only as a quit smoking aid – does seem to have won the day and all the people that I know today who use e-cigarettes are using them precisely for that reason – to give up cigarettes – and fully intend to wean themselves off e-cigarettes as soon as they no longer feel the urge to smoke real ones any more. These people now far outnumber those vapers who have actively chosen to use e-cigarettes because they genuinely enjoy them more than the real thing. And there you have it – Divide and Rule personified. The “just quitting” e-cig users aren’t going to have sufficient love for the experience of vaping to take to the streets to protect its use, because they fully intend to ditch e-cigs as soon as possible, so why bother? And the “vaping by choice” users are vanishingly small in number and easily dismissed as biased commentators along the Rice-Davies lines of “well, they would say that wouldn’t they?”
The anti-smoking movement, probably more than any other campaign group, know full well that a few words emanating from an “expert” in a white coat with a string of letters after his name will sink far deeper and more quickly into the public’s psyche than any counterargument or opinion, no matter how well-researched or accurate, by a non-medical (i.e. not an “expert”) member of the vaping community, especially when the white-coated one’s comments are eagerly and excitedly parroted by each and every newspaper in the country as “established fact” whereas the non-expert vapers’ view will be virtually ignored or, if by any chance one does make it into the papers, brushed aside as “obviously” biased – just like smokers’ comments have been over the years and, in the early days, those of the tobacco industry. It’s exactly the same tactic, simply used against a different set of targets, for no other reason than that it works.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – vapers were just plain dumb when they decided to align themselves with the anti-smoking movement in the hope of currying favour with them, and by so doing alienating the one group who had been at the sharp end of this battle from the beginning and who could have told them well in advance what the Prohibitionists’ next move would most likely be. Perhaps it’s just a fact that if a group of people are gullible enough to still believe all the health hype against smoking – much of which is fast becoming embarrassingly obviously untrue – then they’ll be gullible enough, too, to believe Tobacco Control’s rose-tinted propaganda campaign about themselves as saviours of humanity whose only concern is to rid the world of smoking, but nothing else – even as that also continues to reveal itself self-evidently untrue.
Oh well. They can’t say they weren’t warned about backing the wrong horse, can they?
Anti smokers are making the national health service socially exclusive for healthy, wealthy, socially acceptable people. I am sure this is not what Nye Bevan had in mind when he made the NHS possible. Shame on those prejudicial, bullying doctors. Medics clearly cannot trusted to look after people's health anymore if they happen to be the "wrong" sort of person.
Shame on them. Who among us would trust them to be impartial and treat smokers fairly without prejudice. We are no longer safe in the NHS's hands.