The March/April issue of Tobacco Asia includes a three-page, 2000-word Q&A feature with me about secondhand smoke.
It’s rare to be given an opportunity to address this issue at length so thanks to both the magazine and interviewer Thomas Schmid.
Headlined ‘The Passive Smoking Myth’ it’s currently available only in print (or to subscribers online) but if that changes I'll post a link.
In the meantime here’s my response to a question about the ‘endgame’. It will be familiar to readers of this blog:
The endgame is clear: governments and anti-smoking campaigners want to create a smoke-free world in which the use of combustible tobacco is confined to a tiny ‘pariah’ rump of the population. This will be followed by a world in which all forms of recreational nicotine are prohibited to ‘save’ us from possible addiction, regardless of whether we want to be saved or not.
To achieve that goal an environment of fear has been created in which the argument that adults have a right to smoke as long as they don’t harm anyone else is outweighed by the claim that there is no safe level of ETS [environmental tobacco smoke]. The suggestion that smokers are harming non-smokers is a carefully orchestrated means to an end, designed to turn even the more tolerant non-smokers against those who smoke.
To this I added:
The threat to vaping and reduced-risk products is equally clear. According to Jacob Grier, whose articles have appeared in Reason, Daily Beast, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other publications, the anti-smoking movement has a long history of exploiting dubious science for political gain. Today's moral panic about vaping, especially in the United States, has its roots in the decades-long campaign to delegitimize the use of nicotine in pursuit of a complete ban on smoking in public.
Grier rightly focuses on the arguments surrounding passive smoking. However, what he and others overlook is that many of today’s most prominent pro-vaping advocates are also the very same people who sold us the myth that thousands of non-smokers die each year from second-hand smoke. The irony of that deception is that the relentless scaremongering about second-hand smoke will almost certainly lead to vaping bans in public places too because as far as the public and many politicians are concerned there is little difference between tobacco smoke and e-cigarette vapor.
Oh what a tangled web we weave.