How consuming cigarettes ended up as a medical diagnosis for British practitioners

The British drink a lot of tea, and that’s a well-known fact. In fact, the British drink tea instead of coffee and find that to be normal, or do so as if somebody told them to. Did the King say that we must drink tea instead of coffee, because I think that I heard a rumour?!

When you drink tea instead of coffee, and you distance yourself from drinking coffee on a regular basis, you see drinking coffee as an exception to the norm, and that leads you to believe that the same stimulant is a narcotic drug. Whilst that is unscientific and ill-informed, and no stimulant identifies as a narcotic drug, but that may be the perception that the British have for coffee and its regular consumption, based on its property that it keeps you awake throughout the day and more alert.

On the other hand doctors in the UK diagnose cigarette consumption as an illness or condition, by calling it tobacco addiction or anything similar with a descriptive term, and hence diagnose their patients by implicitly calling them drug addicts. When that comes from somebody that finds drinking tea instead of coffee normal, or as if somebody told them to, they should diagnose themselves as perverts who do the same thing.

Diagnosing someone who consumes cigarettes as doing so is close to calling someone who smokes socially or who smokes like everyone else practising a social custom as a drug addict. Because narcotic drugs exist in the same form it does not mean that stimulants are narcotic drugs rather than light ones.

Even so they should take a better look at themselves and accurately distinguish between stimulants and narcotic drugs and not imply that smokers on a daily or regular basis are drug addicts. And a better look at themselves will reveal that drinking tea instead of coffee supports their perception that coffee is a drug as well, when both coffee and tobacco are stimulants that contain caffeine and nicotine respectively, two substances that belong to the same family that can be addictive, but not to the point of identifying themselves with psychoactive properties.

(The photo above is from May 2023 when Mark Dolan lighted up a cigarette in the GB News studio on his show Mark Dolan Tonight, and you can read more coverage from here.)