The WHO is excluding discussion on tobacco harm reduction from happening in its forthcoming 10th antismoking conference to be held in Panama City between the 20th and 25th of November, demonstrating its intransigence to negotiate on the relevant solutions and the comparatively harmless properties of alternative products to smoking.
The reason why the WHO denies to negotiate on tobacco harm reduction using electronic substitutes to smoking is that the antismoking conference and adjacent campaign would not have existed as a topical problem of today’s time had those alternatives to smoking been invented before their beginning, since they are based on exclusively dealing with smoking.
So the clauses then contained in the FCTC (Framework Convention on Tobacco Control) as signed on part of the parties to the conference have an exclusively antismoking character stemming from the time during which electronic alternatives were not yet available to consumers and the market.
For the WHO to maintain the relevance of the FCTC to today and the times that have changed, it needs to claim paradox ‘facts’ that are untrue such as that vapour equates to smoke and that both have the same ‘status’, that heated tobacco sticks are supposedly cigarettes and that their users are smokers and have not quit smoking even though they vape.
For the WHO to delimit those false logical statements and their corresponding false claims into some sort of truth or invented fact it first needs to exclude negotiating about their objects. It can then proceed with fabricating facts stemming from false logical statements and claiming them to be true, in order to have the FCTC preserve its relevance to today, given the invention, circulation and popularity of novel solutions to the same problem.
Gerry Stimson, leader of Knowledge-Action-Change, an organisation partly or in whole funded by Michael Bloomberg, commented that “Having observed the WHO’s activities on this issue for some time, many are unsurprised that the FCTC COP10 meeting papers reveal a concerning direction of travel. The WHO and FCTC Secretariat’s refusal to engage with evidence from multiple countries that have witnessed accelerated declines in smoking rates is unscientific and unjustifiable. Their repeated characterization of safer nicotine products as a threat to tobacco control runs directly counter to what should be the overarching goals of the Convention – to reduce smoking-related deaths and disease as rapidly and effectively as possible. People who use safer nicotine products are barred and have no voice at the FCTC COP10. Those Parties who have successfully adopted and supported access to these products as effective tools for smoking cessation must ensure that their own progress is not hindered by COP decisions — and that the potential for tobacco harm reduction is given due consideration by all Parties present in Panama next month.”
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