France Admits It's Never Been About Health

Online news site The Local can usually be relied on for some superb off-the-wall articles about bizarre behaviour by people in Sweden, Germany, Denmark and France. You know, like Danish farmers marrying donkeys or Swedes setting up a church to worship lettuce, that sort of thing.

This, however, is apparently a serious story about bizarre behaviour by the French government.

The French government could be set to ban the use of electronic cigarettes in public places and at work because of health precautions, it emerged on Monday. The ban threat comes as the nicotine-filled ‘vaporisers’ experience a boom in sales in France.

"Health precautions"? They are hugely safer than the cigarettes the French government has been nagging everyone to give up for years!

France’s Minister for Health, Marisol Touraine, could be ready to introduce a ban on the use of e-cigarettes in certain public places, once she receives an expert report on Tuesday into the health effects of the smokeless devices. 

Despite what is thought to be a largely positive report, commissioned in March and carried out by pulmonologist Professor Bertrand Dautzenberg, sources for French radio RTL claim that Touraine is planning a bill to outlaw e-cigarettes in public.

Now, one has to wonder why the need to ban e-cigs in public. If the French government has fears about their safety to users, the ban should be on their sale, shouldn't it? There has never - except in the minds of the most hysterical hypochondriacs and pathetic tobacco control scaremongers - been any suggestion that they could be harmful to passers-by.

Don't those pharma tentacles get everywhere these days? It's never been about health, merely secret corporate hand-shaking.