Unfinished Business - Tobacco Reporter
Monday, August 12, 2024 at 10:27 A few weeks ago I gave an interview to the trade magazine Tobacco Reporter.
I met George Gay, TR’s European editor, at the British Library in London and, although it was teeming with visitors, we soon found a quiet spot where we could talk without interruption.
George and I have crossed paths many times over the years, and he and the editor of Tobacco Reporter, Taco Tuinstra, have always been generous with their coverage of Forest events and campaigns, for which I am grateful.
You can read the interview - Unfinished Business - online, and I believe it will also appear in the print edition of the October issue.
In the meantime, here are a couple of passages:
Forest, almost uniquely, has been willing to stand up publicly for the rights of cigarette smokers, who, though still amounting to more than 6 million people, have been treated like outcasts by much of polite society - like people of the wrong class, people considered to be without agency, without the mental capacity to make the “right” choices for themselves.
And, regrettably, it is not only the public health community that has tried to “denormalize” cigarette smokers in this way. In recent years, so too have large swathes of the tobacco/nicotine industry - those who would sell cigarette smokers alternative lower-risk nicotine products, some of them while still selling cigarettes.
Also:
One of Clark’s big concerns is that governments are increasingly interfering in all manner of people’s lifestyle choices by attacking those choices rather than their likely causes. Noting that smokers are more prevalent in deprived areas, governments have chosen to double down on anti-tobacco activities in those areas rather than taking the more difficult route of attacking the cause of the deprivation.
Despite that:
“I still enjoy my job,” he said. “I still think I have something to offer. I still get a kick out of it. And I still think we have a role to play.”
See also: Rebel With A Cause (Tobacco Reporter, December 2017)
Forest Turns 40 (Tobacco Reporter, June 2019)
Celebrating Choice (Tobacco Reporter, August 2019)
Hear, Hear! (Tobacco Reporter, August 2022)
Food for Thought (Tobacco Reporter, May 2024)
PS. After meeting George it took me four hours to get home because, due to signalling failure, the train I was on made an unscheduled stop at Potters Bar, just outside London, and everyone had to get off.
No trains were running north from Potters Bar and the only way I could get home (a further 54 miles) was by taxi but taxis were in such demand I had to queue for the best part of an hour.
Given I only travel into London by train a few times each month, what were the odds?!
Reader Comments (1)
We subscribe to Tobacco Reporter and have read Gay's columns, which are good. I do think he's a little soft, though, on the weakness of the evidence used against smoking, e.g. all the studies used to show tobacco's harm are observational. Observational studies are easy to manipulate and are weak to begin with. Randomized studies are the "gold standard." Next to these, animal studies are considered reliable.
"Attempts were made to show that inhalation of tobacco smoke would produce lung cancer in animals. Although these experiments involved thousands of animals, they failed to confirm the observational human studies. These studies, conducted over the lifetime of animals, failed to produce lung cancer." (International Journal of Toxicology, July, 2007)