Thanks to everyone who attended Forest’s Smoking Room webinar last week.
Our featured guest, writer and journalist Jacob Grier, was speaking from his home in Portland, Oregon, and you can watch a recording of the meeting on YouTube (above).
The format was same as all our webinars – a 30-minute chat with our guest (or guests) – followed by Q&As, and it seems to have gone down quite well with those who watched it live or subsequently.
Here's one tweet, from Phillip Kirschberg in Birmingham, Alabama:
Smoking, #Vaping and a creative discussion about respecting other's lifestyle choices. This is such a wonderfully cogent, insightful conversation, and a must for any #HarmReduction advocate. I loved every minute - rare. Well done!
Jacob himself summed up the meeting by saying:
Thanks for having me here. It's a very different change of pace to talk to people who are unabashedly enjoying smoking and defending the right [to smoke] because it's a rarity these days.
Whatever disagreements we may have on harm reduction or epidemiology, I think we're all here agreeing that we need to be very vocal in defending liberalism and defending the right to choose.
If we don't defend that together we're ultimately going to lose it together.
I agree with that, as I think you know. Unfortunately it's not a sentiment shared very widely among tobacco harm reduction advocates, many of whom think nothing of throwing smokers' under the bus.
As I said to Jacob, having previously asked him about the tobacco control endgame:
What is the liberal endgame because it strikes me that many so-called liberals and free marketeers have largely abandoned smokers to their fate by almost exclusively advocating reduced risk options like e-cigarettes, heated tobacco or snus.
Also, vaping advocates who claim to be ‘liberal’ have been quick to jump into bed with the very tobacco control activists who have made life so miserable for millions of smokers with their smoking bans and campaigns to denormalise smokers and their habit.
So how do you see the liberal endgame and does it include the right to smoke combustible tobacco without excessive regulations?
I won't post Jacob's reply but you can listen to it on the video from 27:11. I think it's fair to say that although he believes the cigarette to be the most lethal consumer product in history, he's on our side when it comes to freedom of choice.
PS. Thanks to Mo Lovatt who stood in for our usual moderator Rob Lyons. Rob was on sick leave – that is, his dog was sick – but Mo did a great job in his place.
