Killing By the Million...And That's Just the Health Campaigners, by Clive Bates

Clive Bates is a former director of Action on Smoking and Health, an organization whose vision and mission includes "eliminating the harm caused by tobacco." In his blog (http://baconbutty.blogspot.com) Clive comments on a wide range of issues.

It is important to note that Bates is not an apologist for cigarette manufacturers. But he makes a far more important observation: tobacco harm reduction will succeed when anti-tobacco extremists abandon a quit-or-die approach to tobacco control, or when anti-tobacco extremists are themselves abandoned as hopelessly unproductive and irrelevant.

The title of this page is from Bates' first blog entry on tobacco harm reduction in June 2006 (read the entire post here). In April 2007 he commented again on the subject (read it here).

Staying Stupid Things with Fake Sophistication , by Clive Bates

Anti-tobacco extremists are desperate to maintain the ban on smokeless tobacco products in the European Union (with the exception of Sweden), which denies smokers vastly safer alternatives to cigarettes. Extremists are in control of most governmental health agencies and organizations, so we can expect to see many "official" reports in defence of the prohibitionist status quo.

Prohibitionist reports use a distorted logic to make the case that smokers should not be given access to safer tobacco products. A great example is the 2007 report from Action on Smoking and Health- Scotland, which uses a selective review of the published literature on tobacco harm reduction to support the ban on smokeless tobacco. In this September 2007 post, Bates destroys these weak arguments with elegance and clarity (read it here).

Useless Scientific Advice , by Clive Bates

The European Union has become a super-federal government, encompassing (as of this writing) 27 countries and 490 million people. Readers of this website will know that, with the exception of 9 million Swedes, smokers in the EU do not have access to safer smokeless tobacco products. Putting it bluntly, the most dangerous tobacco products (cigarettes) are widely available in the EU, while smoke-free tobacco products -- which are 98% safer than cigarettes and have resulted in Swedish men having the lowest smoking (and smoking-related disease) rates in the developed world -- are banned.

The EU recently asked one of its scientific advisory bodies, the Scientific Committee on
Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) to review the health effects of smokeless tobacco products. The SCENIHR report was issued in June 2007. According to Bates, the report was "useless scientific advice." His September 2007 post (read it here) is just a summary of his full critique (read it here).