Doctors want to ban smoking AND vaping outside hospital buildings

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh wants to ban smoking AND vaping outside hospital buildings.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail (print edition) reports that the RCPE wants smoking banned in order to ‘protect patients, staff and visitors from the harmful effects of tobacco smoke’.

As for vaping, Professor Derek Bell, President of the RCPE, said:

“The College believes that e-cigarettes should be included in any legislation relating to a smoking ban outside hospital buildings and on hospital grounds. There is strong precedent for including e-cigarettes, as many organisations, including health boards, local authorities and chains of cafes and pubs have introduced their own policies banning vaping on their premises.”

I’m not sure why the RCPE chose yesterday to issue a press release on the subject because the Scottish Government consultation on smoking outside hospital buildings closed four weeks ago, but I guess they just want to keep up the pressure on ministers to implement the ban.

Forest seems to be the only organisation actively opposing hospital smoking bans (a fact I’m quite proud of, although I know it raises a few eyebrows) but I’m surprised how quiet vaping advocates are on the use of e-cigarettes outside hospitals.

Anyway, this is our full response to the RCPE press release. The Mail used the first two paragraphs, understandably omitting my additional comment about vaping because the whole thing was quite long:

“It’s one thing to ask people not to smoke outside hospital entrances, but making it an offence and threatening patients, visitors and staff with fines and other penalties is unacceptable.

“Hospitals can be stressful places. Banning smoking outside, where there is no risk to non-smokers, shows an appalling lack of empathy for people who may be at a low ebb and in need of a comforting cigarette.

“Banning vaping on hospital grounds is particularly stupid because most vapers are using e-cigarettes to help them quit smoking. 

“If this is a health issue, why would you ban the use of a product that leading bodies like Public Health England say is 95 per cent less harmful than cigarettes?

“If doctors want smokers to quit they should encourage the use of e-cigarettes, not ban it.”

Meanwhile, Rachael Hamilton MSP will tomorrow introduce a motion to the Scottish Parliament to ban smoking from play parks and outdoor sports facilities in Scotland.

They never stop, do they?

PMI-funded Quit Cigarettes initiative stubbed out

The ‘Quit Cigarettes’ initiative funded by Philip Morris International and run by Change Incorporated, a media company owned by Vice Media, has come to an end.

I don’t know whether Vice or PMI pulled the plug or whether the campaign was only intended to last a year, but the final articles were posted online last month.

Launched in April 2019, the fiercely anti-smoking project drew criticism (mainly from me!) for the puerile nature of some of its content.

As I wrote here (My brush with Vice and its help to quit project, Change Incorporated), the initiative seemed determined to belittle smokers and their habit.

Headlines included:

How Smoking Increases Chances of Genital Warts
This Is How Smoking Makes Your Penis Shrink
How Smoking is Ruining Your Sex Life
Is Smoking a Deal-Breaker on Tinder?

Other posts included:

Are Festivals Doing Enough to Phase Out Smoking?
How Cigarettes Blight British Seaside Towns
Why It’s Time to Ban Smoking in Airports For Good
Are You Being Bullied Into Smoking Cigarettes?

It was so tedious I eventually stopped visiting the site because I couldn’t imagine that anyone would take it seriously.

I often wondered if the target audience (which, to be fair, didn’t include me) felt the same.

Why, as a smoker, would you continue to visit a site that repeatedly seeks to denigrate you and your habit? I know some smokers are prone to self-flagellation, but come on!

The project seemed ham-fisted and confused from the start. Readers may recall that I was approached and interviewed by a freelance journalist who said he had been commissioned to write a couple of articles about smoking for Vice.

One, he said, would be about the ‘smoking lobby’.

Sadly it never appeared which, on reflection, probably isn’t a surprise. Comments advocating the freedom to smoke were hardly going to be compatible with a campaign called Quit Cigarettes even if the tone of the piece (which I haven’t seen) was anti-smoking in a ‘how bonkers are they?’ kind of way.

Despite this I was contacted not once, not twice, but three times by young ‘casting producers’ working on videos for the project. They left me thinking the project was somewhat chaotic.

The first said she was ‘working on a series of short films for Change Incorporated ... which follows the journey of comedians who want to quit smoking’.

As I wrote here, she wondered if someone from Forest ‘might be interested in chatting with one of our comedians (on film) about your views around smoking?’

She told me she was working on a short-term contract (two weeks, I think she said) and because it ended in a couple of days I would be contacted by someone else if they decided to follow up her initial enquiry.

The following week I did receive a follow-up call but after I explained Forest’s position on smoking I heard nothing more.

A few months later we were contacted by a third casting producer working on another video for Change Incorporated:

We are casting for 3 x expert panelists to take part in a filmed, ‘pub-style’ debate, discussing government plans to make Britain Smoke Free by 2030. This will be a filmed 2-3 hour debate, with questions and discussion, hosted by TV presenter Cherry Healey. 

The debate is taking place in London on Wed 2nd Oct, to coincide with Stoptober. It will be an evening event with invitees of up to 30-50 people. 

We are looking for a panel of industry experts who can talk about the government paper with gravitas, eg smoking cessation and healthcare experts.

Main debate/discussion themes:
1. How do we make Britain Smoke Free by 2030
2. How could a no-deal Brexit harm this objective?

Each panelist will be paid a fee of £500-750 for their contribution. 

The final film will be approx. 3-5 minutes and the content will sit on the Change Incorporated website. Change Incorporated aims to create measurable social change on some of society’s biggest issues that are important to Vice’s audience and the first mission is to get the UK to Quit Cigarettes. 

I was in Manchester on October 2, attending the Conservative party conference, so I couldn’t have done it even if I had wanted to.

But I don’t believe for a moment they would have had someone from Forest on their panel of ‘experts’.

In fact, it was clear to me that none of these ‘casting producers’ had a clue what Forest is or what we represent.

Meanwhile, what began as an online campaign then launched a series of ads on the London Underground.

Posing the question ‘Why do you smoke?’, one advertisement carried the slogan ‘Your Reasons Aren’t Good Enough’. Alerted by an observant commuter, I wrote about it here.

PMI - which insisted it had no editorial control over the Change Incorporated initiative - is reported to have paid Vice £5 million to produce ‘sponsored content’ for the project. I would love to see an internal memo justifying the expense and explaining what, if anything, it achieved.

How lovely to have that amount of money to spend on a single campaign. Then again, £5 million is loose change to a company committed to giving the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World one billion dollars over twelve years.

Having reached the end of the road with its Quit Cigarettes initiative, the Change Incorporated website is now running a series of articles about climate change and the environment.

Meanwhile I look forward to PMI’s next quit smoking initiative. What will those clever people in Lausanne think of next?

Below: 40-a-day comedian Phil Ellis fronts an anti-smoking film for Change Incorporated, funded by Philip Morris International ('My lungs look like the meat from a late-night kebab shop', Chortle):

“I’d say like my relationship with cigarettes is akin to, maybe like a loveless marriage. You can share the same bed but you barely touch each other and when you do you feel physically sick.”

Disappointing response to EU vaping regulations petition

Readers will know that I'm not a huge fan of petitions.

Even those that attract hundreds of thousands of signatures are usually ignored by decision-makers and very few have any impact beyond highlighting the issue concerned.

That is not, in itself, a bad thing but expectations have to be managed.

I speak with experience having been been involved in several petitions myself.

The most successful was the Hands Off Our Packs petition against plain packaging of tobacco. In just 16 weeks we generated over 260,000 signatures that were submitted to the Department of Health in response to a consultation on plain packs.

In that instance I'm pretty sure the petition did have some effect on government because it took the DH almost eleven months (rather than the usual three) to publish its report on the consultation, following which the government kicked the idea to one side (albeit temporarily).

When David Cameron resuscitated the idea six months later we responded by launching a further petition that generated 95,000 signatures (and 50,000 letters) in just four weeks.

Ultimately they failed to prevent the introduction of plain packaging but we gave it our best shot and I don't think we could have done much more.

It's worth noting however how hard we had to work for those signatures. Very few were generated online. The overwhelming majority were collected via street canvassers in towns and cities up and down the country.

The only other petitions Forest has instigated were an online petition against the EU's Tobacco Products Directive (1600 signatures in ten days) and a petition to amend the smoking ban to allow designated smoking rooms (approx 5,000 signatures).

Neither made much impact although the latter – which was supported by TV chef Antony Worrall Thompson – did get a bit of press coverage.

Which brings me to a petition (closing date February 20, 2020) that sits, seemingly gathering dust, on the EU's European Citizens' Initiative website.

The ECI ('Design, Engage, Impact!') is described as a ‘unique way for you to help shape the EU by calling on the European Commission to propose new laws. Once an initiative has reached one million signatures, the Commission will decide on what action to take.'

Even across 28 (now 27) member states one million signatures is a tough target but the EU doesn't stop there because another stumbling block is the fact that for the Commission to even consider taking action the petition has to reach a set threshold of signatories in six or seven member states (based, presumably, on population size).

A year ago a campaign was launched called Vaping Is Not Tobacco. Supported by vaping companies and associations, it proposed a citizens' initiative entitled 'Let's demand smarter vaping regulation!' that called for vaping products to be taken out of the Tobacco Products Directive on the not unreasonable grounds that vaping products do not contain tobacco.

Sadly however, almost twelve months after it was registered as an ECI, fewer than 50,000 people have supported the initiative, far short of the one million required.

No member state has come even close to meeting the threshold for signatories. The initiative has been most successful in Germany which is currently responsible for 22,637 signatories, 31.44% of the 72,000 required.

The only other countries where the percentage of signatories in relation to the threshold is in double figures are Italy (21.47%) and Hungary (19.47%).

It's too late for UK citizens to sign the petition because the UK is no longer a member state. Nevertheless, vapers have had the best part of a year to support it yet the total number of UK signatories is a just 391 (0.71% of the UK threshold of 54,750).

I have several ideas why the initiative has failed to take off and I'd be happy to discuss them privately, but it's hugely disappointing.

Although the bar has been set very high (and there's no guarantee the EC will take action even if an ECI does meet the various thresholds), it's a difficult but not impossible task.

To date, of the 96 requests to register an initiative, 71 (including the vaping petition) have been registered by the EC, and five have been successful.

To be successful I would imagine that an ECI requires the support of a lot of organisations including companies, associations and consumer groups.

Unfortunately, when it comes to vaping, everyone seems to be fighting their own battles and I see little or no attempt to coordinate the type of campaign that might make a difference.

With a new Tobacco Products Directive (TPD3) coming down the track, the vaping lobby needs to get its act together. The 'Let's demand smarter vaping regulation!' initiative was a good idea but a wasted opportunity.

Update: I wasn't aware of this until today but when the government relaunched its e-petitions website in 2011 I was one of several people quoted on the BBC website (Will e-petitions bring in a new era of debate?):

Below: home page of Forest's No Thank EU campaign website

Controlling influences

It’s Valentine’s Day and tobacco company Philip Morris wants smokers to quit for the sake of their loved ones.

Yesterday the company’s hyperactive and always inventive social media team tweeted the following question and command:

What’s more romantic than your significant other giving up a long-term habit for you?

Give up cigarettes this #ValentinesDay ❤️

In a video one half of three young couples is asked, 'Why did you quit smoking for your partner?'

They reply:

I quit smoking smoking for my partner because he constantly moaned at me for it.

I gave up smoking for my partner because it's something he hates the most.

I quit smoking because I love my partner and I want to spend more time with her ... And not to be smelly, of course.

A second tweet featured Christian, whose 'fiancée quit cigarettes and nicotine altogether', and asked the question:

As #ValentinesDay ❤️ approaches, would you give up cigarettes for your partner?

We'll never know what his fiancée thinks because she doesn't appear in the video.

According to Christian, however, the reason his fiancée gave up smoking is very simple:

I'm not gonna be like "smoke or me?". As long as you don't smoke around me, I don't mind. But "Yeah, do what you wish" and she was like, "What, you don't have an issue?". "No, I don't have an issue, just don't smoke around me." And I just spend all my time with her.

Bless. That’s either very sweet or, ahem, very controlling. You decide.

What’s more romantic than your significant other giving up a long-term habit for you?

Give up cigarettes this #ValentinesDay ❤️. Find out more here ➡️ https://t.co/w0AcoXHEVc pic.twitter.com/9AquOneC4V

— Philip Morris International (@InsidePMI) February 13, 2020

I was against HS2 but I’ve changed my mind

I rarely change my mind but, on balance, I’m now in favour of HS2.

I know it’s going to cost a fortune and the costs will probably double or even triple before the whole thing (including the Northern bit) is finished in 2040.

Nevertheless I’m willing to overlook that for several reasons.

One, shaving 20 minutes off the time it takes to travel from London to Birmingham (or vice versa) never impressed me.

If however it is true that HS2 will allow many more trains to run, increasing capacity (and therefore seats), that makes far more sense, even if the estimates are bound to be wrong (because they always are).

Two, I do think the government has a duty to offer the Midlands and the North something in return for all those votes they hoovered up at the election.

It might make sense, though, to come up with some local projects (in addition to HS2) that are deliverable by 2024 rather than offering an IOU dated 2040.

Three, I’m a sucker for big civil engineering or construction projects and HS2 is that and more.

Think of the M25 (easy to mock now but a major achievement when it opened) and before that just about every motorway beginning with the M1 in the late Fifties.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact of the motorways. Journeys that took many hours can now be done in half the time, maybe less.

OK, they have eaten into the countryside and can be desperately dull to drive on, but imagine travelling around Britain without them.

Think of the congestion in our towns and villages.

The biggest construction project, in UK terms, was probably the Channel Tunnel and what a success that’s been.

I understand it was paid for with bank loans and a small amount of private capital, but not without financial difficulties.

So there has to be a role for public funding too.

In aviation Concorde was one of the biggest white elephants of all time, commercially at least, but throughout its lifetime it was the source of enormous national pride.

Partially funded by the taxpayer, who would begrudge that beautiful aircraft a penny, even with hindsight?

The same might said by US taxpayers of the NASA space programme, the moon landings in particular.

On a more local level, where I live there is a £2 billion road development that is on time and, as far as I know, on budget.

If it eases the congestion and reduces the accidents that regularly blocked or closed the old A14 between Huntingdon and Cambridge it will be worth every penny.

What else?

I’d like to see plans for Boris’ Garden Bridge across the Thames revived. It sounds like fun and we need a bit of that.

There’s nothing wrong with a good folly. Some of the most famous are still with us, and adored, centuries later.

The Garden Bridge is a bit London centric however so we also need some big projects in other parts of the country. Any suggestions?

Personally I’d like to see more toll roads, like the M6 toll road, to reduce congestion around large cities and towns, but that’s another issue.

Unfortunately too many people have got used to things being ‘free’ at the point of use and are resistant to the idea of tolls.

The Scottish Government removed the tolls from the Forth and Tay road bridges when there was no overriding public demand for it to do so. Reversing that decision in the future will be very difficult, politically speaking.

Nevertheless taxpayers in Scotland seem happy enough to pay for the construction of the Queensferry Crossing Bridge (aka the new Forth road bridge) which is a sign, perhaps, that people don’t mind subsidising big engineering projects if there is (arguably) a need for them.

Ultimately what I want is a government that spends less time micro-managing our lives and one that focuses on the bigger issues.

Enormous multi-billion pound projects like HS2 send out a vibrant, positive message, and that’s what Britain needs post Brexit.

A bridge linking Scotland with Northern Ireland is less appealing but it’s worth exploring, isn’t it? Think big!

What I love most about Boris Johnson is the energy and humour he brings to public life. He won’t get every decision right but he’s a gambler and listening to the positive spin he put on HS2 in Parliament yesterday was genuinely uplifting.

How many politicians can you say that about?

He even made cycle lanes sound fun. As Quentin Letts recorded in The Times today, they would create “mini-Hollands, blooming like so many tulips”, allowing cyclists yet unborn to pedal in “tree-dappled sunlight”.

That’s a masterclass in oratory right there.

Despite that the moaning minnies have been out in force. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of the “gloomsters and doomsters” Boris rightly chided before getting Brexit done and recalibrating Britain’s future.

Yesterday’s announcement on HS2 flushed out thousands more, many on the Conservative right who expressed disappointment with both the decision and the fact that we no longer live in Victorian times when Britain’s railways were built by businessmen (many of whom went bust) with private capital.

Aside from Boris’ infectious enthusiasm, what I really applaud is a prime minister who acts rather than dithers, year after year, kicking difficult decisions into the long grass.

For the first time in more than a generation we have a PM who, for the moment at least, is not beholden to opinion polls or the naysayers within or surrounding his party.

Whatever happens, let’s enjoy this invigorating moment in our island history. It won’t last!

Election 2020: the curse of Forest

As a regular visitor to Ireland I’ve been following the election with interest.

The outcome is a remarkable success for Sinn Fein which won the most first preference votes for the first time ever.

In terms of seats, the party came second with 37 seats behind Fianna Fáil (38) but ahead of the the governing party Fine Gael (35) whose leader Leo Veradkar had a humiliating wait before his election was confirmed after the fifth count in Dublin West.

I believe it was the first time a sitting taoiseach was not re-elected on the first count in his own constituency.

Michael Martin, the Fianna Fáil leader, fared even worse, having to wait until the sixth count for his election in Cork South-Central.

Even if you don’t follow Irish politics Martin’s name may be familiar to readers because I’ve mentioned him often enough.

As health minister in a previous Fianna Fáil government he is of course the man who introduced the smoking ban to Ireland in 2004.

As we know, this emboldened Scotland to do the same in 2006, followed by the rest of the UK in 2007.

The smoking ban is ancient history in political terms and has nothing to do with Martin’s current standing with the electorate in Ireland, but it’s worth noting because, despite his embarrassing result in Cork South-Central, there is every chance he could be the next taoiseach.

What that would mean for smokers and vapers remains to be seen but this is a man, remember, who won global recognition (and awards) for banning smoking in the workplace and knows how such policies can distract the public’s attention from far more pressing matters - the state of the nation’s health service, for example.

Thankfully the political career of another former health minister has come to an end before he can inflict even more damage on choice and personal liberty.

Having failed (again) to win a seat in the Dail (his third defeat in four years), Senator James Reilly promptly announced he was retiring from politics.

Reilly is credited with introducing plain packaging in Ireland but his mission to stop people smoking goes far beyond that. It had become a personal crusade.

Two years ago he successfully lobbied parliament to support a ban on smoking in al fresco dining areas. It has yet to be enacted by government but it sits on the table, waiting for someone like Michael Martin to give it the green light.

Last year Reilly even called for a ban on flavoured e-cigarettes.

Our spokesmen in Ireland have gone head-to-head with him several times on TV and radio and although he was widely unpopular for other reasons his absence will be felt by the tobacco control lobby. I wonder who will step up to take his place.

It won’t be Catherine Noone or Marcella Corcoran Kennedy. Awarded the title ‘Nanny-in-Chief’ at Forest’s Golden Nanny Awards in 2017 and 2018 respectively, neither Noone nor Corcoran Kennedy were elected.

The latter lost her seat and Noone’s attempt to be elected to the Dail for the first time crashed and burned in spectacular fashion.

She shot herself in the foot midway through the campaign when she naively suggested that her party leader, taoiseach Leo Veradkar, might be “autistic”, but despite her nannying ways I liked her a lot.

If she loses her seat in the Seanad (Ireland’s upper parliament), to which she was elected in 2011, it will be a loss to the vaping movement because she was one of the few politicians in Ireland who openly backed the use of e-cigarettes, albeit only as a smoking cessation tool.

Like Noone, Marcella Corcoran Kennedy also impressed me as someone who enjoyed a laugh. This might make me seem shallow but I think it’s important.

I also think their support for nanny state interventions were motivated by good intentions, but what a pity their own enjoyment of life didn’t extend to giving ordinary people greater freedom over their own choices without being denormalised and lectured.

Finally, another Fine Gael politician who seems to have fallen victim to the curse of Forest.

Noel Rock was also a guest at our Golden Nanny Awards in Dublin in 2018. He didn’t win an award because, unlike Catherine Noone and Marcella Corcoran Kennedy, he seemed a rare example of that endangered species - a genuinely liberal politician.

Not only was he seeking to protect electric scooters from unnecessary regulations, he once declared that minimum unit pricing of alcohol was based on “middle class guilt with working class consequences”.

Sadly, like most politicians, he was not immune to jumping on bandwagons. Literally. (Rock says hotels should be banned from providing mini toiletries in plastic bottles.)

Either way, nothing could save him from the political storm that rolled across Ireland at the weekend. What happens over the next few days will be fascinating.

By the way, I can see how the Irish electoral system is ‘fairer’ and more representative of the nation’s votes than the UK’s first past the post system.

Nevertheless it’s a pretty tortuous system in terms of producing a result and I prefer FPTP for the simple reason that, while it may be unfair on smaller parties who don’t get the number of seats their share of the vote might deserve, at least we get a clear outcome (most of the time).

The system in Ireland, as in a lot of European countries, lends itself to a never-ending series of coalition governments, or minority governments that retain power only as a result of a confidence-and-supply agreement with another party.

If anyone can persuade me that’s a better outcome than a single party in government with a substantial majority, let me hear your arguments.

I accept, btw, that some countries have more of a history of single party governments abusing their power, leading to fraud and corruption, so maybe coalitions and PR offer a safety net against that type of regime.

In the UK, though, I still think FPTP is the best option.

Below: Catherine Noone and Marcella Corcoran Kennedy at Forest’s Golden Nanny Awards in 2018. The curse of Forest has now struck both their political careers.

Wanted: billion dollar foundation to challenge global health industry lies

Last week Clive Bates, former director of ASH and now a leading advocate of reduced risk products, tweeted:

Idea: somehow find a billion dollar foundation to set up a system to meticulously track and challenge the false and misleading statements of WHO, CDC, Bloomberg-funded proxies, and call out the junk science and press releases of influential academics and medical society chancers.

I would be surprised if Clive’s reference to a ‘billion dollar foundation’ was entirely innocent.

He didn’t elaborate though and none of the people who subsequently commented took the hint so let me spell it out.

There already exists a ‘billion dollar foundation’ that could do the work outlined by Clive (assuming his plan is to challenge the scaremongering about e-cigarettes and other reduced risk products).

It’s called the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World and it was launched in New York in September 2017. (I know, because I was there.)

Supporting the initiative is the tobacco giant Philip Morris International which has pledged to donate one billion dollars to the Foundation over twelve years (€83 million per year until 2029).

Announced twelve months later, in September 2018, one of the Foundation’s core projects is the Smoke-Free Index which has recently and very quietly been renamed the Tobacco Transformation Index.

(Frankly, I’m not surprised. Given the nature of the project, calling it the ‘Smoke-Free Index’ was an obvious hostage to fortune and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought so.)

According to the Foundation’s website:

The Tobacco Transformation Index will provide quantifiable evidence over time of what steps the largest tobacco companies are taking toward achieving a world free of combustible cigarettes and other high-risk tobacco products and any actions they take to impede that progress. 

This resource will evaluate 15 of the largest tobacco companies in the world. Previously known as the Smoke-Free Index, the Tobacco Transformation Index is the first action of the Foundation’s Industry Transformation initiative, a core strategy of the Foundation’s overall mission to achieve a smoke-free world within this generation.

When I first wrote about the project (Was that it? Smoke-Free Index fails to ignite) I made the point that:

I do wonder what PMI’s competitors think of the company funding a body that intends to hold their feet to the fire, forever monitoring their activities in the name of some ‘smoke-free’ utopia.

I wonder too if by committing a billion dollars to the Foundation, PMI has created an albatross that could seriously embarrass both the company and its investors in the years ahead.

For example, if their public statements are anything to go by, senior PMI executives clearly think their company is leading the race towards a ‘better’, smoke-free future.

They boast that they are disrupting not just the industry but their own company.

But what happens if and when PMI lags behind some of its rivals? (Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words.)

Will the Foundation’s Smoke-Free Index point the finger at the company that is bankrolling it?

We’ll find out in September when the first Tobacco Transformation Index is scheduled to be published, two years after the project was announced.

In the meantime I urge the Foundation to take up Clive Bates’ idea and set up a sister project that, in his words, would ‘meticulously track and challenge the false and misleading statements of WHO, CDC, Bloomberg-funded proxies, and call out the junk science and press releases of influential academics and medical society chancers.’

They won’t, of course, because the Foundation is desperate to win the approval of the very organisations it should be calling out for their lies and disinformation.

So instead of taking on the real obstacles to change and transformation it prefers to focus on 15 tobacco companies, many of them direct commercial rivals to their sole funder.

The reality is that however hard the Foundation tries to win the blessing of its detractors within the global health industry, it will never be accepted by WHO, Bloomberg and co because of that pesky link with PMI.

Anyway, I can’t wait to see how PMI fares when the first Tobacco Transformation Index is published by the Foundation in September.

My guess is that the company will be near the top of the transformation table - if indeed there is a table - but will they dare place PMI in first place?

Even if it’s merited by scrupulously impartial third party analysis, the cynics will have a field day.

There is of course another issue that needs to be addressed and it’s this.

When Clive Bates talks of the need for a ‘billion dollar foundation to set up a system to meticulously track and challenge the false and misleading statements of WHO, CDC, Bloomberg-funded proxies, and call out the junk science and press releases of influential academics and medical society chancers’, he is obviously talking about a project that will combat the disinformation on e-cigarettes and other risk reduction products.

But what about the many false and misleading statements about combustible tobacco, or the junk science on second and even third-hand (sic) smoke?

The truth is, while e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and snus may pose a significantly smaller risk than combustibles, some of the arguments used to denormalise smoking - and smokers - are equally open to question and examination.

Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to concern many anti-smoking, pro-vaping campaigners because they’re as keen on a smoke-free world as any public health professional and the end justifies the means.

Adults who enjoy smoking and don’t want to quit are unimportant. If they can be persuaded (or forced) to stop smoking, because it’s ‘good’ for them, it doesn’t matter whether it’s by fair means or foul.

I get that on current evidence smoking combustible tobacco poses a much greater risk than vaping regulated e-cigarettes, but that doesn’t excuse some of the wilfully exaggerated claims about the risks of smoking.

Whether it’s smoking or vaping, all false and misleading statements should be challenged.

Those of us with memories longer than the last decade will never forget the lies and fear-mongering that preceded workplace smoking bans, graphic health warnings, plain packaging and the rest.

Excuse, therefore, any sense of schadenfreude when I hear the same people who promoted the ‘quit or die’ mantra, or helped create an unfounded fear of ‘secondhand’ smoke, complain when similar tactics are used to undermine reduced risk products.

They say you reap what you sow and this is a classic example. The health risks of smoking and vaping may be light years apart but having used junk science to denormalise smoking in public places and stigmatise the consumer don’t whinge when a product you support is targeted by the same public health organisations you were once happy to endorse.

The war on smoking set a precedent for future public health campaigns and vaping advocates in tobacco control will just have to face the consequences of the template they created and are responsible for.

Update: Charles Gardner, who I understand works for the Foundation, tweets:

Holding big tobacco's feet to the fire is just as important as holding public officials and octagenarian philanthropists to account for misinformation.

That’s all very well but I see little evidence that the Foundation is doing anything to address the latter. Is there a report or project I’m unaware of?

Hockney: smoking remains an act of defiance

Always grateful to David Hockney for his spirited defence of smoking.

Few articles about the great man fail to mention the subject because it is so much part of his identity and yesterday’s interview in the Sunday Times Magazine was no exception.

The full interview is behind a paywall but you can read his comments about smoking here - Don't tell me not to smoke! Artist David Hockney, 82, reveals he sees his 60-year habit as an 'act of defiance'.

Over the years Hockney has attended several Forest events. The first was a private dinner in 2004 which he later described as “life-affirming”.

The following year he accepted an invitation to speak at a fringe meeting organised by Forest at the Labour conference in Brighton when we were campaigning against the proposed smoking ban.

There are several reports of that day online (Hockney was interviewed by the Guardian, The Times, Sunday Times and Telegraph, plus Andrew Neil for the BBC) but this piece in the Independent (Hockney blows smoke on Labour's plan to ban tobacco) always makes me laugh. (You have to read to the end.)

In 2008 he attended a Forest event at Boisdale of Belgravia to mark the first anniversary of the smoking ban in England, and in 2011 he joined us at the House of Commons where we were promoting the Save Our Pubs & Clubs campaign.

He is pictured above on the terrace of the HoC talking to Sir Greg Knight MP who co-hosted the event.

See also ‘Looking for David Hockney’ (below).

David Hockney: Drawing from Life, National Portrait Gallery, London WC2, February 27-June 28