SAVE THE E-CIGARETTE FROM EXTINCTION

Corporate interests are seriously threatening what some people call the best invention ever to help them quit smoking.  The following video from a concerned UK citizen  is a call to action to stop the e-cigarette from being medicalized.  As far as Canada goes, e-cigarettes containing nicotine have been banned.  Read the four letter correspondence C.A.G.E. exchanged with Health Canada on this issue starting here:  http://cagecanada.blogspot.ca/2009/05/e-cigarettes-letter-to-health-canada.html

NICOTINE IS NOT NECESSARILY WHAT KEEPS PEOPLE SMOKING, SO WHY KEEP THE NICOTINE ADDICTION MYTH ALIVE?

 

Pr. Robert Molimard has been saying it for decades. Now Dr. Michael Siegel finally acknowledges it. Nicotine is not necessarily the sole reason or even the reason people smoke.

Excerpts from: http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/11/obsession-with-nicotine-as-sole.html

''The tobacco control movement's obsession with nicotine as the sole factor in smoking addiction has contributed to its missing a golden opportunity to save lives: the development of electronic cigarettes. ''

''The tobacco control movement's pre-occupation with smoking cessation drugs that target nicotine receptors is not a coincidence. The movement is heavily funded by Big Pharma and has followed the money, rather than the best interests of the nation's smokers in finding ways to help them.''

And here is precisely what Pr. Molimard has been saying for as long as he studied tobacco:

''Since no formal evidence of dependence to pure nicotine has yet to be produced, the conclusion that nicotine alone is addictive is not a syllogism, but rather, pure sophistry.''

''And yet, against all scientific rigor, this fallacy was implanted through repetition, hammered in as an unassailable truth, all with the support of health authorities and politicians.''

 

'' Because having arbitrarily decided that nicotine alone explains tobacco dependence and having it engrained in the minds of doctors, the authorities and the public, any research on the other possible factors of this dependency is now excluded in advance and a vast new market is made available for commercial exploitation by the pharmaceutical industry. ''

http://cagecanada.blogspot.ca/2010/12/beliefs-manipulation-and-lies-in.html

A WIKI FOR A WIKI

To the media:  You are invited to read the press releases on this story at :  http://tctactics.org/index.php/Press_Releases  

On  June 4TH we briefly mentionned in a French article about how tobacco control advocates in the UK resorted to intimidating tactics in an effort to silence any dissent from their group-think mentality.   Along with an article they  had published  in the Guardian  , they created a Wiki type of website in a hardly veiled effort to tie ordinary free-choice citizens to the tobacco industry and to label them as pro-tobacco. 

In response to this latest attack from  a UK chapter of the Tobacco Control Industry, members of various free-choice groups across the world put up a mirror Wiki site exposing the other side of the story .  This collective effort  reflects the extensive  knowledge and the many years of research and dedication  of  truly concerned citizens (smokers and non-smokers)  alarmed at how far the tobacco controllers have pushed the tobacco control goal posts over the years to the point of blatantly and shamelessly discriminating the same citizens they're paid to ''help''.  C.A.G.E. played an active role in building the site.   

When short of coherent arguments, ad-hom attacks are the weapon of choice of  anti-smokers, but apart from a dinner paid by some tobacco industry representative to a free-choice activist, or a brief exchange of correspondence, they can't produce any proof that any of the bloggers and free-choice activists who are fighting the exaggerations and outright lies of the Tobacco Control Industry are being funded by Big Tobacco.  On the other hand, there is plenty of  well documented proof  on how  the Tobacco Control Industry profits both from the public trough and corporate interests to sustain their ''do-gooder'' careers and you can discover much of what is going on by clicking here:  Tobacco Control Tactics

NEWS DIGEST MAY 6, 2012

High school students do not appreciate in the least that the Ontario Ministry of Education limited their choices of food in the school cafeteria.  Some now leave their school to eat elsewhere where they can choose what they want causing losses of revenue to the school cafeteria.  When will governments learn that you can drive a horse to water but you cannot make it drink?   

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An excellent column in the Globe & Mail about how we are being manipulated and medicated for profit.  

Isanybody normal any more?

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Another good opinion piece about how insecure and fearful of living (or is it of death?) some of us now are.   

TheLand of the Free, and the Home of the Neurotic

''Ontario, in particular, has gone crazy in terms of safety''

Analysis:Playgrounds without swings just aren’t playgrounds

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It doesn't matter how many people still smoke and how many kids they tell us are starting every day, the neo-prohibitionists will never give research for a safer cigarette the time of day. Who is more guilty, those who stifle all progress towards a safer product or those who attempt to better a product for which there is still a considerable demand and for which there will always be a supply even if they succeed to put the legitimate tobacco industry out of business.  

ControversialChina Tobacco Research Withdrawn from Prize Competition

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The following video is more than just a discussion about plain tobacco packaging which is presently being debated in the UK. It's a must watch to discover or rediscover many of the shenanigans in tobacco control. 

DRUNKOREXIA

Drunkorexia: A term coined to refer to condition of binge drinking combined with the typical self-imposed starvation seen with anorexia nervosa. It has also been used to refer to individuals who use purging (as seen with bulimia nervosa) to try to reduce caloric intake to offset the calories consumed in alcohol. The typical individual described as a drunkorexic is a college-aged woman who is a binge drinker, starving all day in order to get drunk at night. (Source: MedicineNet.com)

The Calgary Herald reports that a non-peer reviewed study (aka Science By Press Release) found that one in five students in campuses suffer from drunkorexia, and that this ‘’disorder’’ could affect their ability to learn, to make decisions, and to ultimately damage their internal organs.  They sure give new and awful connotations to something many students have been doing ever since universities were established and mostly all grew out of it alive, don't they? 

''Valerie Taylor, the chief of psychiatry at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, told the paper that “alcohol abuse and mental-health issues are on the rise in Canada and schools continue to try to address the problem.”

Perhaps Taylor should be looking elsewhere for the cause of the rise in mental health issues in Canada because according to Statistics Canada alcohol consumption is not increasing. Actually it has decreased significantly since 2004.  Rather than blaming an increase in alcohol consumption that simply didn’t happen for the rise of mental issues, Taylor should be looking at psychotropic drugs that her profession is now over-prescribing to ever younger children. 

 

(Hat Tip  to Andrew Phillips at http://www.andrewmphillips.net/Adhd.php for the video)  

What we're witnessing is only the beginning of the modern day alcohol prohibition and there will be a lot more from where this came from. Better get used to reading results from junk studies, bogus statistics, sound bites such as no safe level of alcohol, harm to the ''kiddies'', new disorders, new drugs, higher taxes, no advertizing, gory health warnings on the bottles…There is lots of money to be made from selling anti-alcohol propaganda.   http://www.wikihow.com/Quit-Drinking-Alcohol-Using-Anti-Craving-Medication

The WHO propagandists are talking about it here European Region has heaviest drinking in the world - Countries seek to reduce the harmful use of alcohol where you can read that ''There is no safe level of drinking, and in many societies no difference in the risk for men and women.''

The CDC talks about it here Alcohol & Public Health

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Bas du formulaire

So does anyone want to wager on how many years before we are no longer allowed to drink in a bar if we don’t seriously fight against these neo-prohibitionists?  Get involved now!  Write, phone, use public forums and open lines to make your opinion known before it goes too far.  

'Drunkorexia' growing problem on campuses, research suggests

How long does it take someone who gets occasional whiffs of smoke in the great outdoors to die?



1915 No smoking sign - Note how the lady posed in front
of the sign while holding a cigarette in each hand



Not content to have implemented smoking bans in beaches in Vancouver, there is now talk from one City Council that they will ban it in parks because ‘’ Second-hand smoke is a known health hazard, even outdoors, and so banning smoking in parks would help protect children and others from being exposed’’.  

It takes about 20 years, if ever, for a heavy smoker to develop a disease suspected to be caused by smoking. This is why the Center For Disease Control SAMMEC software does not compute any ‘’smoking related’’ morbidity and mortality that occurs before the age of 35 in their computer generated estimates.  How long then does it take someone who gets occasional whiffs of thousands of times diluted smoke in the great outdoors to get seriously sick and die?   Five hundred, a thousand, a million years?  How can outdoor smoking ban proponents insult our intelligence when claiming that breathing tobacco in the outdoors is a health hazard?  They must really think we are idiots!  

And what's this about banning all tobacco products? Are they telling us that smokeless tobacco can also hurt the kiddies in the great outdoors? Naturally there is no talk about banning  pharma nicotine inhalers, patches, gum and lozenges.  Doesn’t nicotine come primarily from tobacco? Aren’t then these pharmaceutical nicotine products much like the smokeless tobacco products they consider banning?  In the face of such incoherency, we can rightfully wonder what ''incentives'' this City Council gets from Big Pharma to consider such absurd ordinances. 

If some people still can't see that smoke-free laws never had anything to do with harming bystanders and everything to do with making Big Pharma even richer, they'll never see it.  If more people don’t wake up, God help us all when they start getting even more aggressive against obesity in a concerted effort to push their wares down our and our children’s throats.  Andrew Phillips has recently written an article in his blog on how medicine is now seriously suspected to be responsible for the rising obesity rates.  You can read it here:  Antibiotics, Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, and the Rise of Obesity

City council weighs outlawing tobacco in parks

ONTARIO LUNG ASSOCIATION - CHARITY ORGANIZATION OR BIG PHARMA FRONT GROUP?



Pharma inhaler ressembling a tampon

Nicotine replacement therapy has been ever increasingly marketed aggressively since the early 90’s. Over the years, the pharmaceutical industry has been attempting to make it ever more attractive to consumers by sugar coating it and enhancing its flavor with fruit and mint essences – while at the same time they mudsling the tobacco industry for marketing attractive and kiddy friendly smokeless tobacco products.  Many nicotine replacement products such as lozenges, patches and even inhalers - poorly mimicking the act of smoking with devices ressembling tampons - are continuously peddled to the public directly by the pharmaceutical industry, pharmacists and anti-tobacco advocates. They have even succeeded to convince governments in various countries (including the province of Quebec) and private insurance companies to reimburse the cost of using nicotine replacement therapy which costs pennies to manufacture but is indecently marked up when it reaches the consumer. Pr. Robert Molimard had this to say on the cost of nicotine: ‘’ Nicotine presently costs, if you buy it at Fluka -- that is an international chemical product company -- 440 euros per liter. An average cigarette will deliver to you about 0,8 mg of nicotine -- since there are 1 million of 1mg in one liter – it would mean 1 200 000 cigarettes. In other words with one euro -- and you can calculate it yourself -- you would buy 143 packs of cigarettes. http://cagecanada.homestead.com/CorporateShenanigans.html

One can rightfully think that it’s all worth it if it really helps people stop smoking for good . Unfortunately this can’t be further from the truth. Reputable studies have shown that nicotine replacement therapy has very poor (as little as 1,6%) long term success rates. Such poor succes rates would not have only never been acceptable for any other type of medication but public or private insurance plans would have categorically refused covering its costs.

Yet nicotine replacement therapy gets a free, no questions asked, pass. Why? Part of the reason may reside in the fact that when it comes to the tobacco issue, Big Pharma tends to do its  lobbying and bidding through the sponsoring of associations that politicians, insurance companies and much of the public blindly trust, or at least pretend to. Who would dare question the authoritarian opinion and advice of long established charity organizations such as the cancer, the lung and heart associations?  It would be political and professional suicide and would be considered as a callous attitude if either politicians or other authoritarian entities dared to challenge their contentions.  Nicotine replacement therapy therefore remains a) heavily prescribed b) continuously reimbursed either through private or public medical insurance plans in various countries including the province of Quebec c) highly lucrative repetitive business for Big Pharma d) an un-attackable myth

The latest campaign to boost nicotine replacement therapy and the dangerous drug Champix (Chantix in the USA) and Zyban which carry a black box warning in the U.S.A., comes to us from the Ontario Lung Association.

In a recent press release that the Canadian press picked up (linked below), they are launching the ''Abolish Word Habit Program''  which is campaigning  for stopping to call smoking a habit and start calling it by what it is i.e. an addiction.

They explain how quitting smoking is harder than quitting heroin and cocaine and how nicotine is delivered to the brain in the addictive format.

Then they switch into their offensive mode of peddling nicotine replacement therapy and medication and especially their main agenda for this particular campaign:  getting public healthcare and private insurance plans to cover nicotine replacement therapy and Champix/Zyban :

‘’Seventy-nine per cent of smokers surveyed said they would be more likely to try at least one smoking cessation medication if they were free of charge.


(…) most smokers can't quit cold turkey and politicians need to step up.’’


He advocates counselling, nicotine replacement therapies and medications that people can afford through a drug plan.’’

How shameful for the Ontario Lung Association to lobby  for the squandering of public funds and especially that our public healthcare system is on the verge of becoming totally unsustainable!

Oh, just in case anyone still thinks that their motives are noble, reading the very last sentence of their press release should convince even the most skeptical of our readers:

‘’The association's 'abolish the word habit' program is being sponsored by the drug company Pfizer Canada Inc.’’

We will leave the last word on nicotine addiction to Pr. Robert Molimard’s expertise and wisdom.  Excerpt from: BELIEFS, MANIPULATION AND LIES IN THE TOBACCO ISSUE - Robert Molimard

The big fraud in the tobacco issue was none other than the publication of the 1988 Surgeon General Report entitled “Nicotine Addiction’’. This fraud is incomprehensible unless one sees the link with the launch of the nicotine gum. The major premise of the Report seems to be a syllogism that states: “Tobacco products cause a powerful addiction’’ The minor premise is: “Tobacco contains a neurotropic poison - nicotine’’. Hence follows the conclusion: “Therefore nicotine is responsible for the addictiveness of tobacco’’. But there is no evidence that allows us to draw such a conclusion. A host of other assumptions are possible, and there are even major arguments to oppose it, such as the fact that no cases of nicotine dependence have ever been documented when this substance was used in isolation, as was already established long before the “Medication Enterprises” began marketing nicotine as a form of medication.

(…)having arbitrarily decided that nicotine alone explains tobacco dependence and having it engrained in the minds of doctors, the authorities and the public, any research on the other possible factors of this dependency is now excluded in advance and a vast new market is made available for commercial exploitation by the pharmaceutical industry.

Kick the habit of calling smoking a habit, it's an addiction: lung association

SO PREDICTABLE!

On a December 2008 blog post we were commenting on how India had lowered the normal BMI level from 25 to 23 and how it artificially created millions of obese people. This in a country where malnutrition should be of much greater concern. In fact the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) ranks India 67th out of 122 developing and in transition countries based on the proportion of people who are undernourished, the proportion of children under five who are underweight, and the child mortality rate. They describe India’s hunger situation as alarming. 

When we wrote about the decrease of the BMI level back in 2008, we predicted that reading about an obesity epidemic in the Indian and international papers should be forthcoming and that the table had been perfectly set for the media to go ahead with the anti-obesity propaganda force-feeding. A few extra millions of obese citizens, are not a negligible customer base that can and will surely yield handsome dividends for the Big Pharma shareholders.
Well here it is folks exactly as predicted:

Obesity, diabetes: expanding India faces big problem

Worthy of note is how the increase in obesity coincides with right around the time the lower BMI was adopted and how they don't adjust or mention of that change in their rhetoric: 

‘’ Childhood obesity has definitely increased in the last couple of years," said Dr Paula Goel, from the Fayth Clinic in Mumbai, which runs a weight loss programme for adolescents.’’

So predictable!


Additional reading: Ethnic-specific revisions of body mass index cutoffs to define overweight and obesity in Asians are not warranted


The World Bank malnutrition report on India