The WHO Goes In To Bat For Big Pharma

Well, the World Health Organisation has finally come out of the closet and admitted that its Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the transnational pharmaceutical industry.

We've kinda known this for a while but it has always previously posed as being concerned with health by attacking tobacco. However, once again e-cigs have thrown a huge spanner in the works and the WHO has been forced to reveal its hand in the most shameful of ways.

The World Health Organisation is recommending a ban on using e-cigarettes in public indoor spaces because of fears over second-hand smoke.

It also says e-cigarette solutions with fruit, sweet-like and alcohol-based flavours – which may appeal to children – should be taken off the shelves and vending machines should be removed in almost all locations.

The ban on indoors use should be put in place “until exhaled vapour is proven to be not harmful to bystanders,” the group said.

A variety of flavours which draw users away from the taste of tobacco, and the ability to vape in many locations are the two most attractive qualities of e-cigs which make them viable. Without this there are only two options, either a huge unregulated black market or a mass migration – and I'm talking literally millions of people here – back to smoking tobacco.

This is proof positive – as if we've ever really needed it since the previous evidence-free assault on snus – that the hysterical anti-tobacco movement has never been about health (as many commenters to the linked article seem to be starting to recognise) but is driven in large part by corporatist defence of pharma industry profits from supplying the nicotine market.

Note too the methods being used here. They fabricated fear of the non-existent dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke, but have been unsuccessfully scratching around trying to find something with which to kill e-cigs too. They strove, they searched, they came up blank … so decided just to tell a load of lies again, as Prof Gerry Stimson observed on Tuesday. 

WHO’s mission is to save lives and prevent disease but once again it is exaggerating the risks of e-cigarettes, while downplaying the huge potential

The WHO position paper appears to have cherry-picked the science, used unnecessary scaremongering and misleading language about the effects of nicotine.

Just the same old same 'ole from tobacco control. Well, it worked last time so what can go wrong, they guess. The difference is that no-one is going to buy it; passive vaping is quite simply a non-starter, even a hypochondriac is going to struggle to find the energy to be mildly perturbed. It's quite simply not a thing, nor ever will be.

And kids, of course, the old staple. Banning fruit flavours because kids like fruit (and adults never do, oh no) but also banning alcohol flavours because even though adults consume alcohol they, err, also attract kids? It's incoherent codswallop and the public will spot it a mile off.

Sadly, the public don't get a look in - fuckwitted politicians do. So we can expect blind, ignorant caution to prevail and bans to appear all over the world. If so, history will judge these people as some of the most hypocritical, avaricious, irresponsible, dangerous and disgusting ever to have walked the Earth.

I've mentioned before that this year's WHO 'COP6' summit in Moscow is endorsing Putin's Russia while the rest of the world is imposing sanctions, but on this evidence the tobacco control industry and the pharma-shilling WHO have chosen the perfect venue location. They're a global disgrace and belong there with the bigoted, the corrupt and the inhumane.

On the plus side, trust in the WHO and their professional tobacco control hordes can only evaporate amongst right-minded people thanks to this incredible development. There's always a silver lining, eh?