Harry Shapiro

Harry’s blog 58: Big Bang Theory

April 26, 2018

The media love a good bad news e-cig story. Next in line is probably death by JUULing (you read it here first), followed closely I suspect by those delicious stories about exploding devices. Mainl...

Harry’s blog 57: Snus won’t rot your teeth, but watch out for truth decay

April 16, 2018

Anti-tobacco harm reductionists spend an awful lot of time claiming those who support tobacco harm reduction are simply the lackeys and stooges of Big Tobacco. But the truly insidious nature of mo...

Harry’s blog 56: A marathon not a sprint

April 8, 2018

It is no shock that when science and politics don’t coincide, then politics will win the day – and in Australia, it was unlikely that the MPs on the enquiry committee would go against the governme...

Harry’s blog 55: Will somebody please stop thinking about the children?

March 26, 2018

So with visions of abstinence shattered, the next level approach has been to deal with the adverse consequences to those in the orbit of the drinker, smoker or drug user. Aside from outright alcoh...

Harry’s blog 54: Lies, damn lies and public health misinformation

March 19, 2018

Researchers analysed data from 1,736 adults: about 85% said nicotine is what causes people to want to keep smoking, while 53% said they believed nicotine causes most of the cancer related to smoki...

Harry’s blog 53: WTF

March 12, 2018

Not surprisingly, this sparked howls of outrage from many in the tobacco control community. OK. Fair enough – be outraged and move on. OR maybe take a more grown up approach. If you think this is ...

Harry’s blog 52: Leave them kids alone

March 5, 2018

In the main, the aim has been neither to educate nor inform, but simply to shock teenagers into abstention.  Some years ago, I wrote a book called ‘Shooting Stars; drugs, Hollywood and the movies...

Harry’s blog 51: Could the goalposts shift?

Feb. 20, 2018

http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(17)30749-3/fulltext http://dailyvaper.com/2018/02/15/another-smoking-cessation-study-fails-to-understand-smoking-cessation/ The publication of this pap...

Harry’s blog 50: There is law on snus but is there justice?

Feb. 12, 2018

Those putting the case for snus included Gerry Stimson, Karl Lund, Lars Ramström and Martin Jarvis. The ban was defended by the UK, Norway, the European Parliament, the European Council and the Eu...

Harry’s blog 49: Norway, Gateway? No Way

Feb. 6, 2018

On the strength of the rise in the number of younger snus users, the Norwegian government decided to intervene in the European Court of Justice case brought against the EU by the UK’s National Nic...