Harry Shapiro
Harry’s blog 61: The shiny blue moon of Kentucky
June 4, 2018
However, the bluegrass state is leading the charge in determining that tobacco taxation should be assessed on risk, a possible global first. In May, the Kentucky legislature passed a tax reform bi...
Harry’s blog 60: The wrong end of the telescope
May 21, 2018
Until recently the US Federal Government has refused to support funding for drug harm reduction interventions. The opioid crisis, which has hit the USA in the past 10 years, has changed official t...
Harry’s blog 59: Won’t somebody think of the ‘bad’ children?
May 4, 2018
This is mirrored by a recent exchange among tobacco academics and analysts about how a totally independently review of the evidence for tobacco harm reduction (THR) might somehow build bridges bet...
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 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...