Tobacco Control

After weeks of posing the same question in Parliament and being told, repeatedly, that the new tobacco control plan will be published soon, it’s finally happened.

The Government have released their new tobacco control plan - “Towards a Smokefree Generation” - which says it all really.

I’ve read the thing. I tweeted my immediate thoughts as I was reading. Let’s just say I was less than impressed. I’m not going to dissect it line by line, it’d take far too long for one, and I doubt my blood pressure could handle it.

One of the many reasons I have a blog is so that I can spout, mostly nonsense, into the ether my thoughts on a particular topic that piques my interest. It just so happens that this blog has a specific focus. Most of the posts on these pages cover the various bits of “science” - mostly bad science - that grab sensationalist headlines, that do nothing more than to confuse a highly nuanced subject. Most of the time I am fairly factual, though quite often I will, quite frankly, take the piss.

We’ve all seen the recent news about the lowest smoking prevalence on record and all that. Some quangos are of course claiming that this lowest rate is largely thanks to policies (obviously they mean bans and tax hikes among other ludicrous measures, such as banning smoking in your car) and plain packaging (which while passed hasn’t become a reality nationwide yet).

With a few exceptions, the elephant in the room hadn’t been discussed and that is of course the role that e-cigarettes have played. Which brings about another item. Stop Smoking Services (SSS). We’ve been told that the number of people going into these places is in decline (some areas more than others). Now you would think that with such a decline in SSS attendance, there would be a similar decrease in the number of people quitting smoking as in, the prevalence rate wouldn’t be the 16.9% it is now - rather it’d be close to the original 19.3% it was in 2012.

It’s been rather busy outside of my vaper-sphere recently which has unfortunately led to a lot of things slipping, including this post. Many of you are aware that the World Health Organisation recently released all the documents for the upcoming tax-payer funded shenanigans to be held in India for Conference Of Parties #7 (COP7). There’s a number of documents that are of interest, some of which I’ll write about here but the main interest at the moment is the originally named document FCTC/COP/7/11 ‘Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems and Electronic Non-Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS/ENNDS)’

Thanks to Sarah Jakes, a short two-page document from ASH Scotland found its way into my twitter timeline. As you can probably tell from the title of this post, it’s all about youth and e-cigs. I had a read. I had another read. I had a third read. They also have a short blog post on the subject. I read that too. Then I read it again.

There isn’t really much to the document in itself, page one is primarily background stuff, while page two gets to the heart of the matter. Or at least tries to. It is a masterclass in fence-sitting.

To All in Tobacco Control & Public Health,

Yes I’m speaking to you, and for once please listen instead of going glassy eyed and reaching for the infamous block button.

I vape and I’m not going to go away, nor am I going to stop vaping.

That’s right, I use an e-cig (or ENDS if you prefer the term coined by the WHO). I prefer to use it because I no longer want to smoke tobacco. Please see the difference here.