No Smoking Day stunt or premature April Fool?

No Smoking Day can always be relied upon to produce at least one shameless PR stunt and yesterday was no exception.

Reports in Scotland revealed that former professional footballer and 'television personality' Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock had joined forces with Edinburgh-based vaping retailer VPZ to campaign for an outright ban on smoking north of the border.

The former Spurs and Liverpool footballer ‘smoked 20 cigarettes a day before quitting through vaping’ and like many ex-smokers has become an evangelist for a smoke free world.

However the choice of Ruddock to launch what has been presented as a ‘health’ campaign is incongruous for several reasons, not least his well-publicised heavy drinking and his equally well known battle with his weight.

Ruddock is also English (he has one cap for England) and in his long professional career he never once played for a Scottish club so why has he been chosen to front a campaign to outlaw smoking in Scotland?

Apart from a generating a few headlines it makes very little sense.

Interestingly VPZ director Doug Mutter, who is quoted in the reports, is also listed as a spokesman for the UK Vaping Industry Association. I’d love to know what other members of the UKVIA think of this initiative.

If governments can ban combustible tobacco they can ban electronic cigarettes too. In fact, give politicians a taste for prohibition and they might just be tempted to ban several more consumer products that are deemed to be unhealthy.

As for e-cigarettes, they may be 95 per cent less harmful than combustible tobacco, according to Public Health England, but tobacco control campaigners who are currently advocates of vaping are never going to be long-term supporters of e-cigarettes.

Vaping, as I’ve pointed out time after time after time, is a means to an end - not a ‘smoke free’ world but a world in which any and all addiction to nicotine has been eradicated.

I assume VPZ thought they were being clever by teaming up with Ruddock. Either way I’d love to have been in the meeting when his name was suggested.

Personally I consider it an own goal that reflects badly on all concerned, VPZ in particular. After all, calling for a ban on a rival commercial product enjoyed by millions of consumers is not a good look.

I’m not sure it does much for the reputation of the wider vaping industry either. I certainly don’t see it impressing the Scottish Government, not even one as anti-smoking as Nicola Sturgeon’s.

In the words of Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute, “There's a certain Baptists and Bootleggers side to this.”

Meanwhile the Ruddock-led campaign may have been launched on No Smoking Day but it read more like a premature April Fool.

And the joke is on the prohibitionists not smoking.

Update: Interesting. The tweet below has been ‘liked’ and retweeted by John Dunne, director general of the UK Vaping Industry Association.

Are we therefore to assume that John also supports a ‘complete smoking ban’? It would appear so.

Btw, this is not the first time I've posted about VPZ. See also:

'UK's largest vape retailer targets a smoker free future' (May 13, 2020) and 'UK's 'leading vaping specialist' wants to 'spearhead' fight against smoking' (July 16, 2021).

Draw your own conclusions.