Cigarettes phase-out considered as trial tests if vapour safer

Getty Images

Australia could become the first major nation to outlaw smoking, with a federal government-funded trial about to test the viability of electronic cigarettes as a safer, permanent replacement for tobacco.

Medical experts, cancer groups and anti-smoking lobbyists battled for decades to rid cigarettes from public spaces.

''E-cigarettes'' are battery-powered devices that simulate the effects of smoking by heating a nicotine liquid into vapour, which the user then inhales and exhales.

While the gadgets have been hailed as a safer substitute for cigarettes, there is no comprehensive scientific research into the health risks of inhaling vapour.

The Sun-Herald can reveal that as part of its anti-smoking reform agenda, the previous Labor government committed more than $1 million to a pioneering study that, by 2015, will determine whether or not e-cigarettes could be utilised to phase out traditional cigarettes altogether.

Read More

Electronic cigarette firm ordered to give back online address

The boss of an electronic cigarette firm has seen his plans for an online address go up in smoke after web watchdogs ordered it be given back to a Welsh anti-tobacco charity.

Action on Smoking & Health Wales Ltd - or ASH Wales - used ashwales.co.uk as its homepage until April, 2011, when it developed a new site and forgot to renew its registration on the old domain.

Earlier this year, the Cardiff-based charity - a branch of the anti-smoking health group set-up by London's Royal College of Physicians in 1971 - discovered the domain had been bought by Surrey businessman, Brett Horth.

Read More...

The Anti-Smoking Lobby’s Clueless Crusade

From The Daily Beast By Nick Gillespie:

The anti-smoking movement is going after e-cigarettes, the harmless inhalers that help people kick the habit. Nick Gillespie on why their single-minded zealotry has gone too far.

H.L. Mencken famously defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” He might have been describing contemporary anti-smoking activists, that dour band of fuss-budgets constantly on the prowl for new ways to make life slightly less bearable by limiting the choices available to grown adults.

Incredibly, the latest push from tobacco eliminationists doesn’t involve actual smoking, which has already been driven out of polite society more thoroughly than Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermons, early David Allan Coe records, andThree’s Company-era gay jokes combined. But it does lay bare the prohibitionist mindset and its fixation on scrubbing the planet clean of any behavior or attitude the crusader deems unacceptable.

Read More...