2016

Saturday night was a night of glitz, glamour and awards. It also sparked a lot of media attention. Not for who won awards particularly, although there was some coverage on that, but for seemingly everyone’s favourite celebrity vaper. Leonardo DiCaprio. This in itself isn’t the root of the hypocrisy, oh no.

That all comes in the media backlash towards Mr DiCaprio and his ‘deeply troubling’ lifestyle choice.

Apparently a few folks over at the American Lung Ass’n are a bit miffed at the idea of a high-profile celeb not smoking.

Unsurprisingly there has been yet another study published making a big song and dance about the “gateway” theory, claiming that “teens that use e-cigarettes are three times more likely to smoke” (taken from a headline), or that teens that use e-cigarettes are more likely to smoke.

A quick Google news search for e-cigarettes gives you 92 articles, each with a variation of the same headline and all citing the same study, or to be more precise the same press release. Some of the journalists did seek comments from Cancer Research UK, but not, it seems, Professor Linda Bauld who has already criticised the study here, and Professor Kevin Fenton from Public Health England.

Once again, another study citing “concerns” reaches the media. This time it is all about flavoured vs non-flavoured e-cigarettes, gateways and smoking all based on exposure to adverts. As David Dorn highlights on his blog post:

So asking kids whether an advert they won’t see (by law), for a thing they can’t buy (by law), in a place they can’t use them (by bye-law) is likely to make them want one is a pointless, fruitless and, frankly bloody idiotic thing to do.

By now you’ve probably heard of, or seen the latest attempt from Stanton A. Glantz to discredit e-cigarettes as a viable method for cessation. He, and co-author Sara Kalkhoran performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of research published for a set period of time to try to identify if e-cigarettes are indeed a viable tool for cessation. So what did our illustrious aeronautical engineer come up with?

Well before I begin, it’s worth pointing out two key phrases:

Sometimes, I struggle to fathom the motives behind certain organisations. I truly do. Here we have a supposedly respectable organisation in the American Lung Association saying that e-cigarettes are a “new” tobacco product that have still largely unknown health effects. Then there’s a link to this page, which I wouldn’t click on if I were you; you’ll probably get asked to donate to them like the American Cancer Society (quick tip, don’t).

You’ll remember Shirley Cramer talking about “nicotine free” cigarettes at the E-Cigarette Summit and how, by some margin many of the general population (87% to be precise) think that nicotine is the harmful component of cigarettes. Well it turns out that there is a company out there trying to become the “world’s first manufacturer of cigarettes with the distinction ‘very low nicotine’”.

So, forget everything you’ve ever learned about the 4000+ other ingredients and chemicals contained within cigarettes it’s all about reducing exposure to nicotine. As thoroughly covered at the E-Cigarette Summit, and on many occasions before and after, the stigma surrounding nicotine needs to be addressed. In fact, as Joe Gitchell points out frequently (yes I have been listening Joe!), many in tobacco control and public health need to re-think nicotine. I would definitely agree with that. Wholeheartedly in fact.

You will of course remember the slew of scary sounding headlines between Christmas and the New Year, each one blindly repeating the same headline and the contents of a press release of a terrible study without any regard whether or not the press release relates to the study in any way shape or form.

I picked apart the press release and study the day after it appeared on the Eureka Alert site, as did Fergus Mason. Adam Jacobs (The Stats Guy) also pulled it apart and called it Dangerous Nonsense and rightly so. Linda Bauld with some help from Suzi Gage published a rebuttal in The Guardian, which didn’t get anywhere near the coverage that the original article received of course.

It doesn’t take much to spark some errant thinking and lengthy discussions. In this instance it was the release of the final quarter statistics of 2015 from the Smoking Toolkit Study which is of course performed by Professor Robert West. This survey is used, along with other evidence, to inform those that need to know how many folks are smoking, whether or not they quit smoking and how they quit.