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Monday 9 June 2014

The Department of Public Harm

Anti tobacco meddling has caused more deaths than you know of or imagine and are likely to do so even more in the future. These deaths are not just old age pensioners dying in the cold outside, or more pedestrian accidents outside pubs and hotels, nor smokers falling on pavements whilst out taking a puff.

The demand that cigarettes become less harmful, led to the production of low tar cigarettes. People had to get used to them as this old advert (below) explains. But they were so unsatisfying that people smoked far more than if they had had the old type cigarette that was strong and did the job. Part of the new "less harmful" cigarette drive for safer products, included putting small holes where the filter joined the tube causing an airy disappointing experience. People smoked far more, inhaling the really poisonous stuff - the smoke. Without Tobacco Control insistence, cigarettes would have been less harmful they had been left alone.

Of course  the blame for "lights" is placed fairly on the shoulders of Big Tobacco trying to keep their customers.

This was an unintentional and regrettable outcome.

But it shows that Tobacco Control efforts to help are not always wise. Any meddling in electronic cigarettes to make them medicinal products, to control the nicotine dose, to interfere in innovation in any way, is a massive error - far greater than forcing cigarettes to conform to THEIR demands by making a product more dangerous than it was before.

This is how the new low tar, inferior smoking experience was advertised in the UK.


Fortunately I used to smoke Rothmans. I never fell for the new "light" cigarette. A doctor warned me to keep away from "lights" because I would simply smoke more. Seemed pretty logical to me.

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