Famous American Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus who won the Prize in 1989 for making the observation that cancer can be genetically transferred from the DNA to cells through genetic anomalies, declared his opposition to prohibition and smoking bans for combatting the deadly disease.
Harold Varmus found himself in India where he was in 2020 set to deliver a series of lectures that got postponed because of the pandemic, and said from India, “Trying to prohibit tobacco or to ban tobacco entirely is a mistake because we know that you can’t enforce complete prohibition. That is the kind of thing that leads to various forms of crime and it doesn’t work. I don’t think bans work very well. But I do think that not just in India and every country, including the US, where we still have 18% of our population smoking, we have people using nicotine vapes instead of cigarettes. All these are risk factors for cancer. The focus should be on novel medicines and diagnostic tools and not on complete prohibition.” Harold Varmus is today aged 83 years.
Bring Back Smoking Freedom 