Number crunching

2018: Adam Smith Institute report suggests that if vaping replaces smoking Britons could save one million life years.

1 Million Years of Life: How Harm Reduction in Tobacco Policy Can Save Lives

Now a new ASI report, published yesterday, claims:

If the smoking rate in the North East, North West and Yorkshire and the Humber was reduced to London’s by smokers switching to vaping, nearly 2 million years of life would be saved.

2 Million Years of Life: How Safer Smoking Alternatives Can Level Up Health and Tackle the Cost of Living Crisis

Leaving aside the convoluted and somewhat questionable nature of this calculation, what next? Any advance on two million ‘life years’ that could be saved by vaping?

2030: 100 Billion Years of Life: How Reduced Risk Nicotine Products Can Save The Planet and End All Wars

See also: ‘Healthier, happier, freer’, how the ASI sees the future if more smokers quit and switch to vaping (June 2018).

Update: In response to one of Derek Chance's points in the comments I have written an additional post, 'E-cigarettes and consumer choice'.

Comments

[Derek Chance]

Reductio ad absurdum only works when you follow an argument to its logical conclusion.

I have to say, as one of the 'confirmed smokers' you purport to support, I find this blog and the view of Forest appear increasingly distanced from supporting the freedom of choice. It's difficult to believe there is true benevolence when you ignore or belittle attempts to reduce the harm that tobacco does cause. The ASI work is an estimate, which come with boundaries of error. Even if tobacco-free nicotine alternatives reduce a fraction of the harm isn't that still worthwhile?

[Pat Nurse]

As a confirmed smoker who supports Forest, I would say those in thrall to vaping or harm reduction - who ignore any attempt to introduce harm reduction that includes smoking less without quitting- have forgotten what choice means for smokers - and that is the right to smoke without constant belittling of our life choice with made up numbers to push what is now a political campaign to force people to vape or quit or push them into other people's preferred methods of "harm reduction". The hypocrisy of some of these groups and their supporters is astounding.

Check out the name of FOREST - the Freedom Organisation for the Right to SMOKE TOBACCO. It isn't rocket science to work out that Forest is for smokers who like smoking but even that hasn't stopped the organisation also standing up for other alternatives to smoking for those smokers who want to try something else.

What a shame the so called "harm reduction" lot are not of the same tolerant mind and rather swivel eyed in their attempts to make vaping the saviour of the age because there is Big Business to be had and Big Fashion to follow. How very bloody vacuous. Who knows what health hell vaping will lead to long term.... but let's not ask that question because it goes against the belief that vaping is some form of miracle cure when it is in fact a weapon to be used against smokers now and one to be attacked some decades down the line when the long term harms are revealed.

It is already shocking, but largely brushed under the rug and barely mentioned, to see how many kids vape today. I haven't seen as many turning to nicotine in years but now I see as many vaping as I saw smoking as a child smoker back in the 60s. That's not progress. That's just a new problem in the making in future.

Forest should not, like others, abandon its principles for the new fad fashion of forcing smokers to quit or vape or stuff tobacco powder up their nose or whatever other thing some of the quitters have turned to to make themselves feel better and more socially acceptable.

Forest is for smokers - the only group we have standing up against the bullies who attack us for the Brave New World they want where smokers will be forced out of society, criminalised, or socially excluded because some over paid activists and born again nicotine addicts have decided they want a world with no smokers in it.

Keep up the good work Simon. We smokers are not all desperate to quit neither do we believe the constant hype coming from the vaping advocates who have shown many times they are not on the side of real choice or harm reduction that could suit smokers who do not want to quit, but on the side of choosing to force smokers to quit by any means - including lying for dramatic effect.

Perhaps it is now time to recognise officially what has been clear for a very long time - vapers and their back stabbing groups are not our friends and never have been.