From harm reduction to harm elimination

After the WHO anti-nicotine conference last month, I wrote...

 

It is very clear that the Bloomberg/WHO approach from now on will be to demonise nicotine and portray harm reduction as an industry scam.

 

This will require some sharp U-turns given that nicotine products are on the WHO's list of essential medicines and "harm reduction" is an explicit part of the WHO's definition of tobacco control, but we're dealing with seasoned liars who face no pushback from the media so they have every chance of success.

 

Nicotine was literally advertised as being "therapeutic" when Big Pharma was the main seller of it outside of cigarettes. It is now portrayed as some sort of brain poison. And the WHO's war on harm reduction goes beyond the demonstrably false narrative of it being an "industry" invention. They are now changing the very meaning of the term, as some of Bloomberg's minions explained in an article in Tobacco Control this week...

 

This year’s discussion demonstrated the strong interest among Parties in identifying the best approaches to protect future generations from both tobacco and nicotine addiction. In preparation for this discussion, the Convention Secretariat prepared a report, making it clear that there is no legitimate ‘tobacco harm reduction’ based on advancing the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry. In the context of the WHO FCTC, ‘harm reduction’ is ‘harm elimination,’ the intended outcome from the full implementation of the treaty’s existing, evidence-based measures. 

 

This is a grotesque rewriting of history and the dictionary. Harm reduction has never meant, or even implied, harm elimination, and if the authors of the FCTC had meant 'harm elimination' they would have said so. This is truly Orwellian.

 

As Michael Siegel says:

 

The rejection of harm reduction by WHO endangers the lives of millions of smokers worldwide. The WHO is literally abandoning smokers and using them as sacrificial lambs in an effort to demonize safer alternatives to cigarettes because the FCTC leaders can't stand the idea that the use of a nicotine product could actually be beneficial to health (even though they have no problem with pharmaceutical companies reaping in billions of dollars based on the same concept - perhaps this is because the WHO Foundation receives millions from the pharmaceutical industry). 

While it is bad enough that tobacco control organizations and health agencies in the United States have shunned harm reduction in tobacco control, the fact that WHO has rejected harm reduction strategies to address the worldwide burden of smoking-related disease is truly a global public health disaster. 

 

It would be interesting to know to what extent this is being driven by the pharmaceutical industry, as Siegel implies. My sense is that it is the Tobacco Taliban within the various Bloomberg front groups who are really pulling the strings. After all, if the goal is total harm elimination, Big Pharma's products are in the cross-hairs too. 0.4% of the risk of cigarettes is 0.4% too much!

 

 

 

Can someone tell me what the hell is the ethical basis for a harm elimination strategy backed up by state coercion?

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