Tobacco name drop

Forgive my current obsession with Tobacco Reporter magazine, but I seem to have played a small part in eliciting a statement from the company that owns the title.

To recap: the December issue, published this week, is the last edition of a magazine whose lineage goes back 150 years.

I wrote about it here (Stubbed out - world’s oldest tobacco trade magazine to close) and on Thursday night I posted the link on LinkedIn, adding the words:

Not sure they’ve thought this through. In a hostile media environment, the closure of Tobacco Reporter means the tobacco industry is set to lose a valuable communication tool.

Late last night, having already posted a reply to my post, the CEO of the TMA (which owns the magazine) posted this statement, also on LinkedIn:

I won’t comment further. I’m posting it here merely for your information. (Click here for the original pdf which is easier to read.)

Interestingly, however, and according the final issue of Tobacco Reporter, the US-based TMA, founded in 1915 as the Tobacco Merchants Association, will shortly operate under a new name.

Even the cursory nod to ‘tobacco’ in TMA will disappear, with the company henceforth to be known as the Nicotine Resource Consortium.

How very 21st century!!

Tobacco Reporter - final edition online

The final issue of Tobacco Reporter is now available online.

‘An Outbreak of Sanity’, George Gay’s article about Smoke On The Water, the recent Forest boat party, can be found on page 36. (Click on the image, right.)

To repeat what I said in a previous post, I am grateful to George, editor Taco Tunistra, and publisher Elise Rasmussen for their support over many years. Much appreciated.

I understand the decision to close the magazine came as a shock to both the publisher and the editorial team who weren’t included in the discussion.

Strange way to treat people, some of whom have worked on the world’s oldest international tobacco trade magazine for decades.

Thanks for the memories, Sticks

Dave was in the same year as me at school.

He was tall - one of the tallest boys in our year - and slim, so we called him ‘Sticks’.

We were in different classes and had gone to different primary schools so we weren’t close friends, but we were on friendly terms.

I remember going to a party at his house. I was 14 or 15 and it was the first ‘proper’ party I had been to where the host’s parents were away and alcohol was freely available.

I wore my favourite mustard coloured shirt (it was the Seventies) and it’s one of the few teenage parties I have genuinely fond memories of.

A few years later he was one of the first people in my year group to own his own car. He had at least three, all Hillman Imps, two of which he cannibalised to provide parts for the one that was just about roadworthy.

After we left school (in June 1976) Dave, ‘Titch’ Little and I enrolled on a two-week potato roguing course at Elmwood Agricultural College in Cupar, Fife.

Thereafter, for three successive summers (1976, 1977, and 1978), we were part of a four-man potato roguing team led by Bill Smith, an art teacher from Ellon in Aberdeenshire who is now a polar guide and explorer.

We went to the same university (Aberdeen) but rarely saw each other because we were in different faculties, and living in different halls of residence.

Also, while Dave played rugby and I played hockey, we moved in different circles, apart from Saturday afternoons when our respective teams were both playing at home.

We lost contact after university and I didn’t see him for years. Then, quite by chance, I was with a mutual friend from school and we bumped into him in a bar in London, as you do.

That must have been 30 years ago and it was the last time I saw him in person. We did however reunite on Facebook a decade or so ago and I was able to piece together what he had been doing.

After he left university he got a job in the oil industry, working on oil rigs in the North Sea. One of his more poignant Facebook posts, posted on the 36th anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster, read:

In over 40 years working offshore I have never seen or ever wish to see such a tragic series of events as unfolded on Piper Alpha. That 167 personnel had to lose their lives at work to ultimately make the North Sea a much safer place to work is so desperately sad. I will raise a glass to all those lost souls tonight.

A keen sailor, he subsequently spent a lot of time in Greece where he owned what I think was a yacht charter business.

But his adult home, to which he would always return, was in Oban, on the west coast of Scotland, where he was an active member of the local rugby club.

The first sign that all was not well, health wise, appeared in April last year when he informed his Facebook friends that ‘for the last 25 days I have been a patient at the QEUH in Glasgow following emergency colon surgery’.

In December he was back in hospital having a cancerous tumour removed, and in April this year he posted an update:

It’s 20 months since I first was aware of a problem and 16 months since my colon tumour diagnosis. Since then I have had major surgery twice, radiotherapy and eight cycles of chemotherapy …

Thereafter his Facebook feed returned to ‘normal’ - that is, photos of Greece, aboard yachts, or at some beachside bar. There were also the usual rugby-related posts.

He looked fit and well (he continued to cycle, swim, and travel) and didn’t mention his illness again.

And then, two days ago, I read that he had died. Maybe I should have seen it coming but I didn’t and I am genuinely shocked, and sad.

If there is some consolation for his family, the tributes on social media make it clear that he was hugely popular with his peers, several of whom refer to him as a ‘gentle giant’ and someone who made a difference to other people’s lives.

My hope is that he lived to see Scotland beat Australia at Murrayfield last weekend. As a proud Scot, and rugby man, he would have enjoyed that.

Dave, aka ‘Sticks’, earlier this year

From the mouths of children

I made a very brief appearance on the latest edition of Sharp End, a late night current affairs programme broadcast on Mondays on ITV Wales.

This week’s programme featured an item about the Tobacco and Vapes Bill during which a group of schoolchildren (teenagers) were asked their opinions on the generational ban.

I groaned, assuming they would be strongly in favour because that’s what normally happens when children are invited to express a view on issues such as this.

Instead, when asked by their teacher, “If you were an MP voting on this bill, would you vote for it?”, and invited to put their hand up, not one of the dozen children in the classroom did so.

Instead comments included:

“I feel like we’re educated well enough so we should have the decision ourselves rather than being banned altogether.”

“I feel like it’s not fair. We have no right to have a choice anymore. What will happen further on down the line? They could ban anything really.”

“It’s going to create more problems than you’re solving. And say you ban them, and no-one can buy them any more … people are going to start making them illegally, and it’s just going to become worse than what it was before.”

“When you ban something like this where does the line actually stop? You can ban cigarettes and then you can go on to alcohol or anything like that that could affect you in many different ways, but I think we should have the right to a choice. We’ve been educated from a very young age and no-one sees it as good anymore. Not our age anyway. “

Even the Sharp End reporter was taken aback:

“So I imagine a lot of people watching this will go, ‘OK, we would have thought that you would all be in favour of banning this’, but it seems like that’s not what you all think.”

It appears that the next generation - the very people the generational ban is designed to ‘protect’ - have more sense than our elected representatives. Who knew?!

You can watch it here. The item starts at 44:50.

Stubbed out - world’s oldest tobacco trade magazine to close

I was disappointed to hear that Tobacco Reporter magazine is to close.

The December 2024 issue is the last, bringing to an end a publication whose lineage can be traced back 150 years, to 1874, before the invention of the mass manufactured cigarette.

If I have a vested interest it’s because I have been interviewed twice for the magazine - in 2017 (Rebel With a Cause), and again this year (Unfinished Business).

In 2019 Forest’s 40th anniversary dinner also featured in the magazine (Celebrating Choice), likewise our parliamentary reception in February 2024 (Defending Liberty) and our Beat the Ban lunch in May (Food for Thought).

The final print edition also includes a report inspired by our recent boat party (An Outbreak of Sanity).

These and other articles about Forest were written by the magazine's European editor George Gay. Over the years George has attended many of our events, and I’m grateful to him - and long-serving editor Taco Tuinstra - for continuing to take an interest in our work when it may have been easier, or politically more astute, to quietly consign Forest, and our message about smokers’ rights, to history.

In a leading article that accompanied that 2017 interview, Taco wrote:

Many parties have weighed in on the current discussions about a smoke-free future. Industry representatives, regulators and public health advocates have all aired their views, some more vocally than others. Notably absent from the talks, however, have been the subjects of these ambitious plans—the smokers. What do they think?

Attend any debate on the future of tobacco and one insight will sooner or later pop up: the fact that seven out of 10 smokers would like to quit their habit. That is a compelling number, and the various stakeholders are right in wanting to help these people achieve their objective, either by supporting cessation or by offering products that deliver nicotine in a less hazardous manner. But it still leaves three smokers who presumably are happy to keep puffing.

Three out of 10 may seem like a trivial figure, but it is not. Based on the frequently cited statistic of one billion smokers worldwide, it amounts to 300 million people. If these smokers all lived in one nation, their country would be the world’s fourth-most populous.

These devoted smokers deserve respect, even if their choices are not the healthiest. Like other adults, they cast ballots, pay taxes and serve in their countries’ armed forces—at significantly higher rates than their nonsmoking compatriots in the case of the latter two activities. They are, in short, full-fledged citizens, entitled to make their own decisions and in no need of patronizing.

Unfortunately, that is not how smokers are typically treated. Around the world, governments have enacted restrictions beyond those required to protect nonsmokers. Instead of mandating smoking and nonsmoking areas in bars, for example, authorities in many countries have simply kicked smokers to the curb. Through graphic health warnings, smokers have been subjected to gruesome imagery, even though they are well-aware of the risks already. Some workplaces offer smokers fewer holidays than they do to their nonsmoking colleagues.

At a time when even tobacco companies seem to be turning against cigarettes, few people are willing to speak up for smokers. Fortunately, there are organizations, such as Forest in the UK, who continue to stand up on their behalf, even when it is increasingly unpopular to do so (see “Rebel with a cause,” page 38).

The example set by Forest is inspiring. So, as we move into 2018, let’s spare a thought for beleaguered smokers everywhere. Not only do they deserve respect as fellow citizens; they also continue to generate the bulk of our business.

I thought it was brave of Taco to stick his neck out and support us like that because it was clear, even then, that defending the rights of adults who enjoy smoking was no longer a priority for many people in the tobacco industry.

Even an event like the Global Tobacco Network Forum (which changed its name to the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum ten years ago to accommodate e-cigarettes and other nicotine products) is now dominated by speakers whose goal is seemingly a smoke free world, with campaigners like me now excluded from the ‘conversation’.

Reflecting the tobacco industry’s transformation, Tobacco Reporter has changed too (and I have no problem with that). To their credit, though, Taco and George never lost sight of the fact that, even when offered a choice of smokeless products, there are still consumers who don’t want to switch or quit.

In hindsight we could perhaps have predicted the closure of the magazine but the news was still a surprise.

To recap: from 1980 to 2019 the magazine was owned by SpecComm International, a North Carolina-based publisher and conference organiser. It was then announced that SpecComm, and all its assets, had been purchased by the US-based Tobacco Merchants Association.

Founded in 1915, the TMA (not to be confused with the Tobacco Manufacturers Association, the UK trade body) describes itself as a ‘member-driven non-profit source of information, a convener of stakeholders, and a thought leader dedicated to providing our members and subscribers with a complete understanding of tobacco and nicotine issues’.

Through our conferences, webinars, meetings, website, data products, and publications, TMA takes a holistic approach to tobacco and nicotine …

Assets purchased from SpecComm included the GTNF conference, TabExpo, Tobacco Reporter, Vapor Voice, Tobacco Farm Quarterly, Tobacconist, Pipes & Tobacco, and Cigars & Leisure magazines.

TabExpo was subsequently sold to UK-based Quartz Business Media and over the next two years, to the best of my knowledge, Tobacco Farm Quarterly, Tobacconist, Pipes & Tobacco, and Cigars & Leisure magazine all ceased publication.

A new division, the GTNF Trust, managed the GTNF conference, Tobacco Reporter and Vapor Voice magazines, but I understand the decision to close Tobacco Reporter and Vapor Voice (founded in 2014) was taken by the TMA board.

I appreciate the decision may have been driven by commercial considerations, but I do think it’s short-sighted and a false saving because the tobacco industry needs every platform available to it if it is to communicate with the wider world.

The closure of Tobacco Reporter means the tobacco lobby will lose a valuable communication tool.

The TMA will no doubt continue with its conferences, webinars, meetings, data products, and so on, but I’m old school and I believe that a good magazine is an asset, and print still has the potential to be far more impactful than digital, although there is clearly a need for both.

The TMA board won’t have taken this decision lightly but it’s a sad end to a long and historic journey.

PS. The cover of the December 2017 issue of Tobacco Reporter featured one of my favourite photographs. It was taken by Dan Donovan and I used it as part of my presentation at the GTNF in New York in September that year.

GTNF 2017 was notable because it coincided with the launch of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World funded by Philip Morris International. Pointing to the image on screen, I said:

This picture was taken at an annual Forest event called Smoke On The Water. Each year we hire a Mississippi-style paddle steamer and cruise down the Thames under Tower Bridge and past many of London’s iconic buildings including the Houses of Parliament. Guests include politicians, parliamentary researchers, political activists but, most important, ordinary consumers – smokers and vapers.

I love this photo because it illustrates the type of person Forest represents – a gloriously unashamed smoker who enjoys smoking and doesn’t wish to quit or conceal his habit. Smokers, especially cigarette smokers, are invariably portrayed as victims of a terrible addiction. Does this man look like a victim to you? Of course not. Nor is he alone. There are many, many smokers just like him.

I can't tell you how satisfying it was to see that photo on the cover of the world’s oldest tobacco trade magazine. We even reprinted it, combining it with Taco’s leading article and the interview with me, and sent it to MPs and journalists.

What a pity a similar opportunity won't be available to us in future.

PS. Thanks too to Elise Rasmussen, publisher of Tobacco Reporter, who has been a friend and ally since we met in 2008.

Pete Clark, RIP

Just read that journalist Pete Clark died early last month. A former colleague, Nick Curtis, wrote this tribute:

One of the Evening Standard’s most distinctive, witty and stylish writers from the 1990s to the 2010s, Pete Clark, has died aged 71. Initially a pop critic his brief expanded to cover TV, food, drink, travel, sport and cars, not to mention an infamous column in praise of smoking in ES magazine.

See Pete Clark: in praise of one of the Evening Standard's most distinctive, witty and stylish writers (Evening Standard, November 5, 2024).

I met Pete a few times.

The first occasion, I think, was at Auberon Waugh’s Academy Club in Soho. Forest had been ‘persuaded’ to sponsor a series of soirées at the club (in reality a single smoke-filled room accessed via a creaky wooden staircase) and guests were predominantly writers and journalists.

Another occasion was on No Smoking Day, in March 2000. The previous year (my first at Forest) we had sent a crack team of operatives to Paris, the ‘European capital of smoking’, to escape No Smoking Day in favour of having lunch at a restaurant that was used by the Resistance during the war.

In 2000 we decided to do something closer to home so we hosted a smoker-friendly champagne fry-up at one of London’s most famous restaurants, Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. Pete was one of the guests and within hours he had written a glowing report for the evening edition of the Standard.

Other guests that day included Forest chairman Lord Harris, Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), Charlie Methven (Daily Telegraph), Chris Burke (Loaded), and Lauren Booth, Cherie Blair’s half sister and the daughter of actor Tony Booth (Till Death Us Do Part).

Lauren was a journalist writing for the New Statesman. She subsequently converted to Islam but at that time she enjoyed a rather different lifestyle. She was great fun and attended another Forest event the following year at Antony Worrall Thompson’s restaurant in Notting Hill. But that’s another story.

By 2003 however Pete appears to have stopped smoking, a combination of hypnotherapy and acupuncture enabling him to give up his 30-year habit. According to this archived account:



‘I stared into space until it was time to close my eyes,' he told readers of the London Evening Standard, 'and was gently led to a place where I was a person without a cigarette. I won't pretend that I went fully under - I don't think that's the point - but it was a profoundly relaxing experience. And to a smoker who has used a cigarette to 'relax' on countless occasions, it proved it was possible to do it the natural way.'

After the hypnotherapy, said Clark, came the acupuncture. 'I stretched out on the couch, and within a couple of minutes was covered in pins from, literally, head to toe, while  soft oriental music played. The pins do not hurt when they are inserted, but when [they were jiggled] there was a most curious mixture of pain and pleasure ...

‘After the session I felt quietly invigorated and, as with the hypnotherapy, utterly relaxed ... Apart from during the course of one vivid dream, I have not had a cigarette since my first visit. Two months and not counting any more.'

Sadly, very few of his many articles are online because much of his output preceded the internet, but even more recent pieces have disappeared because newspapers have a bad habit of updating their websites without archiving older articles.

Here are three I’ve found that do feature his byline:

Who goes to … the MCC? (Evening Standard)
Everybody needs good neighbours (Evening Standard)
The slow death of Soho (Guardian)

One thing he might not want to be remembered for is being sued for libel. (Cleese has last laugh with £13,500 win for newspaper libel.) Then again, it’s pretty much an occupational hazard if you’re a newspaper columnist.

I did wonder why he seemed to disappear after the mid Noughties but it turns out he was made redundant by the Standard in 2008 and wrote his last piece for the paper, as a freelance, in 2012.

When I moved to London in 1980 the Evening Standard - which was in fierce competition with the London Evening News - printed six editions a day. In September 2024 it printed its final daily edition and rebranded as The London Standard with a single weekly edition.

It’s ironic, perhaps, that having made his name at the Evening Standard, his death should coincide with the demise of a paper whose newsstands were once such a feature of the London landscape.

Pete Clark, far right, with fellow guests including Lauren Booth at our smoker-friendly fry-up at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, March 2000

The NHS is broken - if you can afford it, go private

Letter from my surgeon:

Thank you for coming to see me today after your surgery ... I am pleased to see you have healed and recovered well and have taken the liberty of discharging you back to your doctor.

Since my minor operation in September - for which I chose to go private - I’ve had three post op check-ups.

I don’t have private health insurance but it was money well spent because had I gone through the NHS I would have had to wait at least six months with no guarantee that the NHS would operate at all.

(My GP warned me I would have to jump through several hoops even to be considered for an op. Going private avoided all that, albeit at a price.)

Anyway, ten weeks after the operation I have a barely visible eleven centimetre scar that my surgeon modestly referred to as a “work of art”.

Meanwhile, a friend who needed an ultrasound scan after months of feeling poorly with abdominal pains was told he would be on a three month NHS waiting list just for the scan.

Taking matters into his own hands he went online and found a private company - based in a nondescript industrial estate - and was given an appointment, and a scan, within days.

He can’t afford to go private for the actual treatment (which involves keyhole surgery) but, armed with the scan, he was at least able to return to his GP with the evidence he needed, thereby reducing the process by several months.

He is now on a waiting list to see an NHS surgeon but how long that could be is anyone's guess. As for the operation he needs, who knows?

Liberals for a day

"A parliament of more liberal instincts."

That was the view of Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor, commenting on the second reading of the assisted dying bill which was backed by 330 MPs with 275 against.

The irony of that statement, three days after that very same parliament voted overwhelmingly to deny future generations of adults the right to buy tobacco legally, obviously escaped him, and others.

The hypocrisy, though, of MPs who talked about “choice” in relation to dying whilst voting to hike the age of sale of tobacco until no-one can legally purchase a product that can offer comfort in difficult and painful times, was astounding.

To be honest, I found many of the speeches yesterday hard to listen to. We were told the debate represented parliament “at its best” but what I heard was a lot of preening and unctuous self-congratulation.

What is clear is that some legislation is driven more by emotion than hard fact.

Prior to introducing live coverage of the second reading, Five Live presenter Adrian Chiles mentioned that doctors of his acquaintance were complaining that the debate about assisted dying had been unduly influenced by anecdotal evidence. (I think that’s what he said.)

Lo and behold, what did we get yesterday? One anecdote after another - sometimes personal to the MP, sometimes personal to a constituent.

This was not a battle of ideas, more a battle between who could tell the most hair-raising story of pain and suffering, bullying and abuse.

It reminded me that the smoking debate is similarly influenced by individual stories of death and disease that are said to be caused by smoking.

Sometimes the same people are trotted out year after year to tell their personal stories, which are then regurgitated by campaigners and politicians.

I don’t doubt their authenticity, or the sincerity of the individuals telling their tales, but how representative are they of smokers as a whole?

Unlike yesterday’s debate on assisted dying, the alternative (and equally anecdotal) argument that many people enjoy or take comfort from smoking is rarely if ever given the time of day, especially in parliament.

There was at least some element of balance in yesterday’s debate, but - again - how representative are many of the stories we heard?

In truth, listening to several hours of the second reading would have made many people extremely fearful of old age and death. It certainly gave me the heebie-jeebies and I think I’m fairly relaxed about the prospect.

Of course, there are people who endure an unnecessarily gruelling and painful death, and I do think we should do a lot more to help them, whether that’s through better palliative care (a subject that came up again and again yesterday), assisted dying, or both.

However, I don’t believe that’s most people’s experience and we are in danger of turning death into a nightmarish monster.

A further irony is that the current obsession with longevity is creating a society in which more people are living longer, and that in turn raises the risk that we will eventually succumb to something - cancer or dementia, for example - that is potentially far worse than a sudden, fatal, heart attack at an earlier age.

Incidentally, I concluded my previous post about the assisted dying bill by writing:

According to my mother [whose father was a GP], it wasn’t uncommon … for doctors to ‘help’ terminally ill patients who were in severe pain die by discreetly administering a fatal dose of morphine to end their suffering.

Today few if any GPs would risk prosecution, so decisions that were once made by individual doctors will now be made by a committee of people representing the state, and those decisions could take months, prolonging someone’s suffering, and for what purpose?

The principle of assisted dying is not, however, unreasonable. It’s humane. It’s just a pity the state has to intervene in an area where qualified doctors once exercised their common sense and compassion.

Listening to the second reading yesterday, I heard a familiar voice - that of Julian Lewis, Conservative MP for New Forest East and someone I once worked for.

In my opinion, the key to this dreadfully difficult conundrum - about end of life care, pain and the possibility of assisted dying - lies, or should lie, in the ability of medical personnel to administer effective pain relief even if it shortens the patient’s remaining time. In my view, there should be no bar on the use of painkilling medication, if that is the only way to ease human suffering, even if it leads to a speedier death—hence the frequent references to putting dying people “on an appropriate pathway.”

It was therefore most alarming to me to read a very important paragraph in a letter sent to me in favour of changing the law and voting for the Bill by my constituent, the distinguished broadcaster Dame Esther Rantzen, in which she explains that doctors no longer feel able to follow this humane course of action since the atrocious Harold Shipman case, which was briefly alluded to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis). If there has been such a change in regulations, as Dame Esther believes, it is imperative that that should be reversed. That is something positive that could come out of the imminent debate.

Julian voted against the Bill, but his comment above reflected my own view that things were better when doctors could use their own judgement in these matters without fear of prosecution.

Quite how we get back to those days, given the threat of litigation, I don’t know, but it’s something we need to explore.