On Nicotine’s Potential For Dependence
“It seems very safe even in nonsmokers,” he said. “In our studies, we find it actually reduces blood pressure chronically. And there were no addiction or withdrawal problems, and nobody started smoking cigarettes. The risk of addiction to nicotine alone is virtually nil.”
– Dr Paul Newhouse
Director, Vanderbilt University Center for Cognitive Medicine
“There is very little to no evidence for the abuse of nicotine when not delivered in a tobacco vehicle.”
– Prof K Fagerstrom
“Studies have shown that none of the nicotine replacement therapies – chewing gum, inhalers, patches – none of those are addictive. Nicotine is not addictive. The cause of addiction is the release of monoamine oxidase inhibitors, or MAOIs, along with nicotine.”
– Prof Peter Killeen
Emeritus Professor of Psychology, ASU
“The changes that FDA is allowing to these labels reflect the fact that although any nicotine-containing product is potentially addictive, decades of research and use have shown that NRT products sold OTC do not appear to have significant potential for abuse or dependence.”
– US FDA
Nicotine Replacement Therapy Labels May Change
On Dependence And Addiction
“Addiction these days is a term usually used to refer to a chronic condition in which there is repeated powerful motivation to engage in a purposeful behaviour (usually involving a psychoactive drug) that is or can be harmful.”
– R West
On The Safety Of Nicotine
“Nicotine does not cause heart disease or cancer.”
– Dr K Farsalinos
Consultant cardiologist
“Addiction to nicotine has never caused harm to the user or to bystanders. That is why NRT products are now recommended by the FDA and the MHRA as long-term substitutes for smoking.”
– Dr K Farsalinos
“Compared to a range of dangerous non-nicotine chemicals in tobacco smoke, nicotine is relatively harmless, except in pregnancy and in some rare conditions.”
– Prof Hajek
“Nicotine is not associated with cancer or heart disease.”
– NICE, PH45
NICE is the clinical guidance authority for all UK medical practitioners
“Nicotine is not the major cause of any disease associated with smoking; it’s comparable to caffeine, which is highly addictive but safely consumed in coffee, tea and cola.”
– Prof B Rodu
Professor of Medicine, oral pathology specialist
On Nicotine-Related Topics
“Smokers are harmed by the deadly tar and toxins in tobacco smoke, not the nicotine. While it’s best to quit completely, I realise that not every smoker can and it is much better to get nicotine from safer sources such as nicotine replacement therapy.”
– Prof S Davies, UK Government Chief Medical Officer
“The current optimal plasma cotinine cut-point to distinguish smokers from non-smokers in the general US population is 3 ng ml. This cut-point is much lower than that established 20 years ago, reflecting less secondhand smoke exposure due to clear air policies and more light or occasional smoking.”
– Benowitz et al 2009
Nicotine Chemistry, Metabolism, Kinetics and Biomarkers
On The Safety Of E-Cigarettes
“Switching is so close as good as quitting that from a health point of view there is no point in worrying about the difference.”
– Dr C Phillips
“The risk is negligible and compared with smoking, there is no contest.”
– Prof R West
Director of Tobacco Studies, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London
“Among millions of e-cigarette users, credible adverse events are almost non-existent.”
– Prof B Rodu
“In exposure terms, quitting equates to switching to the e-cig.”
– Prof R Polosa
“We have such a massive opportunity here. It would be a shame to let it slip away by being overly cautious. E-cigarettes are about as safe as you can get.”
– Prof P Hajek
“Determining that a tobacco-free nicotine-delivering product is safer than a product that delivers nicotine with thousands of tobacco smoke constituents is a fact of basic science, and anyone who challenges such a notion would probably benefit from a remedial course in basic sciences.”
– Prof M Siegel
“E-cigarettes are probably about as safe as drinking coffee.”
– Prof R West
“[e-cigarettes] pose very small or maybe no health risks.”
– Prof P Hajek
“Do you want the tobacco industry to carry on making cigarettes which are highly addictive and kill when used as intended, or do you want them to move to a product which is much nearer licensed nicotine replacement therapy and is unlikely to kill anyone?”
– D Arnott, ASH UK, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2015 annual meeting, San Jose, California.
“E-Cigarettes are orders of magnitude safer than conventional cigarettes.”
– Prof P Hajek
“Some public health experts have expressed concern that widespread use of e-cigarettes could ‘re-normalise’ smoking. However, we are tracking this very closely and see no evidence of it. Smoking rates are declining, quitting rates are increasing and regular e-cigarette use among never-smokers is negligible.”
– R West
On The Potential Saving Of Life
“If all the smokers in Britain stopped smoking cigarettes and started smoking e-cigarettes we would save 5 million deaths in people who are alive today. It’s a massive potential public health prize.”
– Prof John Britton
Chair, Tobacco Advisory Group, Royal College of Physicians
“If, on a population scale, smokers switched from cigarettes to e-cigarettes, there will be an enormous public health benefit.”
– Prof P Hajek
“If we could get all of those people [who smoke] to completely switch all of their cigarettes to noncombustible cigarettes, it would be good for public health.”
– Mitch Zeller
Director, Center for Tobacco Products, FDA
On E-Cigarette Bans & Regulations
“The e-cigarette is a tsunami – you cannot stop it with a law.”
– Prof J F Etter
E-Cigarette Summit, London
“I’ve always thought these objections were led by ideology not science or real concern for health. That’s why the Snus case is so revealing. They looked for expedient arguments to support a ban on Snus (gateways, dual-use, reduced cessation etc.), but when those arguments proved utterly baseless they still didn’t change their position on wanting a ban. This is why you can’t trust any of those who backed the Snus ban to ever do the right thing on e-cigs – whatever the evidence says, because it isn’t actually about evidence.”
– Clive Bates
UK civil servant
Regulatory expert, independent public health advocate
“We are trying to help regulators and politicians to put their policies on a rational basis… at the moment it’s really driven by vested interests and unsupported worries…”
– Prof P Hajek
“When you can’t govern, legislate.”
– C Snowdon
“Legislators are much more interested in the arguments [of middle-class parents] than they are in evidence.”
– P Davidson, UoC
On The Tobacco Control Industry
“Part of the tobacco control job description is to avoid thinking critically, after all.”
– Dr CV Phillips
THR science specialist
ex-Professor of Public Health, Alberta University
“Hiding THR from smokers, waiting for them to decide to quit entirely or waiting for a new anti-smoking magic bullet, causes the deaths of more smokers every month than a lifetime using low-risk nicotine products ever could.”
– CV Phillips
“Opposition to THR is an entirely dishonest enterprise.”
– Phillips & Rodu
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
– Upton Sinclair
“In one of the most ironic twists in my 30-year career in tobacco control, the anti-smoking movement is doing more to harm the public’s health than to protect it with respect to its position and actions on electronic cigarettes.”
– Prof M Siegel
“As anyone with a modest understanding of the science knows, tobacco controllers and other ‘public health’ people make countless statements that are utterly false.”
“The tobacco control industry depends on making claims that flatly contradict what the science shows.”
Dr CV Phillips
On Corruption And Incompetence In Public Health
“All who call for e-cigs to be removed from the market have a financial COI.”
– Prof M Siegel
“…every one of the anti-smoking groups which has called for electronic cigarettes to be pulled off the market ….. has a financial conflict of interest with pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the smoking cessation drugs.”
– M Siegel
“Whatever happens with e-cigs next week, thousands of vapers have learned that ‘public health’ is a financially and morally corrupt enterprise.”
– Christopher Snowdon
“It’s not about our health, it’s about their wealth.”
– jpargana, ECF
“You give them grants, you establish friendships, you make sure they become beholden to you, you start programs with them, which they can make a profit from. But they are not going to continue to get money unless they are saying what you want them to say.
Everybody knows that this is how things work. They know it and you know it – it’s only maybe the public that does not know it.
That’s how you influence the medical establishment. Simply, with money.”
– Dr. Peter Rost
former vice-CEO, Pfizer (and whistleblower)
“If you are a skilled pathological liar then Public Health is the field for you.”
– sofarsogood, ECF
” ‘Public health’ people are not stakeholders at all. Having an opinion about the proper private actions of others does not make you a stakeholder, it makes you a busybody.”
– Carl Phillips
“Public health, including the research, politics, regulation, and journalism surrounding it, is an inherently dishonest discipline.”
– CVP, 2016
On Propaganda And Junk Science
“I can’t think of a single major environmental, dietary or public health story in my career that has not been driven in some way by junk science. But we are still awash in junk science that affects our health or costs us money, peace of mind and our liberties.”
– Steve Milloy
“The fat vs sugar thing has had one clear unifying public message – don’t believe anything they say.”
– Clive Bates
On Government Oppression
“I will never smoke again. Unless my government makes me.”
– Ian Firth
On The World Health Organistaion
“While the WHO still does good work to reduce infectious and communicable diseases, it’s done an outrageously terrible job on tobacco policies and education.”
– Bill Godshall
Independent anti-smoking-harm campaigner
“…..it is now clear to me that the WHO is a far greater threat to smoker’s health than is the tobacco industry.”
– Bill Godshall
“Snus in Sweden is the source of one of the greatest public health victories in Europe, as seen in Sweden, yet the extent of denial, including by WHO, about this unassailable reality, is extraordinary and shocking.”
– Clive Bates
On The EU
“The EU is a vast, stinking cesspit of corporate corruption.”
– Steve Hilton, ex-adviser to David Cameron
“The purpose of the TPD is now, and probably always will be, to protect the income of the pharmaceutical and cigarette industries and preserve tobacco tax revenues.”
– CP, while Secretary of ECCA UK
“In the EU a tobacco classification for e-cigarettes is essentially the same as a medicinal classification: an easy way to gradually remove them from the market. Our main problem with tobacco classification is that it, and more especially the individual provisions no matter how spurious, will be a thousand times harder to fight than medicinal classification.”
– CP, on Facebook
“These fellows, which are called the commissioners, are the most rake-shamed rogues that ever I saw in my life.”
– Samuel Pepys, c.1663
He appears to have foreseen the EU and its Commissioners.
“Britain is the most centralised country in the developed world. To a degree that would astonish any American, French, German or Japanese observer, the things that affect people’s everyday lives in the UK are decided by distant bureaucrats and politicians.”
-Steve Hilton
“For me, in the end, it’s all about innovation. The European Union is bad at doing it, good at discouraging it, repeatedly sides with those who have vested interests in resisting it, and holds Britain back from achieving it.”
– Matt Ridley
“… the ‘precautionary principle’, formally written into EU thinking and widely interpreted to mean that only the harms, not the benefits, of new technologies must be considered. This has repeatedly prevented the displacement of bad technologies by better ones.”
– Matt Ridley
“The way Brussels works is fundamentally antithetical to innovation. It is top down, with regulation promulgated by officials behind closed doors in meetings with lobbyists. There are about 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels, representing the likes of Big Pharma and Big Green, and they are often in the room when rules get written that erect barriers to entry against irritating new competitors.”
– Matt Ridley
“The way in which Volkswagen, using carbon-dioxide emissions as a cover, got the rules rewritten to suit diesel engines and discriminate against petrol engines, despite the fact that nitrogen oxide and particulate emissions from diesel were far higher and more dangerous, was only the most visible such scandal.”
– Matt Ridley
“Sir James Dyson was amazed to find that Brussels set energy ratings for vacuum cleaners without testing them filled with dust, because this suited the German bagged vacuum cleaner manufacturers that he threatened: ‘Washing machines are tested with washing in them, cars are tested with people in them, and fridges are tested with food in them. But when it came to our request to test vacuum cleaners with dust in them, the big German block of manufacturers complained’.”
– Matt Ridley
“In the 1950s, you could just about make the case that Britain’s destiny lay in a regional trading bloc. But now? When container shipping has collapsed the cost of intercontinental trade? When the internet and budget airlines and Skype have made it as easy to do business in Asia and America and Africa as in Europe?”
– Matt Ridley
“…our membership of the European Union prevents us being able to change huge swathes of law and stops us being able to choose who makes critical decisions which affect all our lives.”
– Michael Gove
“The EU is an institution rooted in the past and is proving incapable of reforming to meet the big technological, demographic and economic challenges of our time. It was developed in the 1950s and 1960s and like other institutions which seemed modern then, from tower blocks to telexes, it is now hopelessly out of date. The EU tries to standardise and regulate rather than encourage diversity and innovation. It is an analogue union in a digital age.”
– Michael Gove
On Politics
“…..science-based popular education can have an enormous impact on politics.”
– Carl Phillips
“The fact is, in a democracy run by fools, it is necessary for people to generally suffer for a period to learn the truth.”
– seen in a blog comment by ‘Lem’
“Mainstream broadcasters will have to give airtime to ideas that sound superficially attractive to the hard of thinking.”
– Iain Martin, Capx
On Ethics
“In the case of cigarettes and e-cigarettes, history will judge us harshly as to how we answer this billion-person question. It may also look back in anger at policy-making amounting to institutionalized manslaughter.”
– Prof Julian Kinderlerer
President of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE)
“I believe the marketplace can do a better job than the government on the issue of public health.”
– Jeff Stier, public health expert, The National Center for Public Policy Research, USA
On Artificially Prolonged Lifespans
“Ironically, one of the crueller side effects of the sophistication of modern medicine is that we have perfected ways of keeping people alive long after any pleasure or meaning has disappeared from their lives. We sentence them to years of mournful inanition, though many of them would happily take their leave while they had a mind to do so.”
– Bishop Holloway
On Smoking Cessation
“It’s pretty clear to me that e-cigarettes have helped more people quit smoking than the 2009 Tobacco Control Act, all the FDA-approved smoking cessation drugs and all the government anti-tobacco propaganda programs combined.”
– Bill Godshall
“Self-motivated quitting is far more effective than NRT.”
– M Siegel
“Vapers and vape shops are the new front line in smoking cessation.”
– Prof G Stimson
On The Future
“I predict that by 2050, about half the population will be using tobacco products – almost all low-risk – in free countries where people can afford it. Despite the health risks from such usage being minimal, this is the greatest nightmare of those with the endgame fantasy.”
– CV Phillips
On Vaping Products
Q: “So is ‘pharmaceutical grade’ the same as ‘USP’?”
A: “No, they are different.”
– Neil E. Levin, CCN, DANLA
On Snus
“Modern epidemiologic studies reveal that the oral cancer risks from Snus use in Sweden and from modern moist snuff and chewing tobacco use in the U.S. are so small that they cannot be measured with any precision.”
– Prof B Rodu, a world authority on the oral pathology of tobacco consumption
“[Snus] is a huge success story that hasn’t received enough attention. It shows that other forms of nicotine that aren’t as lethal as cigarettes can be used to reduce death and disease.”
“The evidence we have from Sweden is the most solid we have in the world.”
– Dr. David B. Abrams, Executive Director of Tobacco Research, American Legacy Foundation
On General Topics
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
– P J O’Rourke
“If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey, he is obligated to do so.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
– Schopenhauer
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
– Gandhi
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
– Seneca the Younger
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
– Thomas Sowell
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
– Carl Sagan
“There are some people who, if they don’t already know, you can’t tell ’em.”
– Yogi Berra
