Sydney Health Law

Tag: tobacco

  • Vaping: the madness of the British?

    My google search engine thinks Public Health England (PHE) is a vaping organisation. “Vaping organisation UK”.  You can try it yourself. E-cigarettes lie at the centre of PHE’s tobacco control strategy, probably drawing attention and commitment away from alternative strategies for reducing smoking rates. In September 2017, PHE encouraged smokers to “stop smoking with an…

  • Smoke-free streets and lanes: a growing headache for big tobacco?

    Smoke-free Melbourne? One of Melbourne’s quintessential experiences is to stroll its laneways, many lined with restaurants.  Smoking here would spoil things for everyone. In 2014, Causeway Lane, a small restaurant strip running between Bourke Street Mall and Little Collins Street, went smokefree. You can read reactions to this smoke-free pilot here. Three more laneways were…

  • Put another Winfield on the Barbie

    Having actor Paul Hogan headline Cure Cancer’s “Barbecure” makes no sense to me. Put another shrimp on the barbie, I get it.  But so what? Hogan may regret the staggeringly successful “Anyhow, have a Winfield” advertising campaign he headed in the 1970s, but his presence in a cure cancer campaign is inept.  It muddies the…

  • A Foundation for a smoke-free world…funded by a cigarette multinational: more smoke and mirrors?

    The Swiss like butter on both sides of their toast. Headquartered in Lausanne, half an hour’s train ride from the World Health Organisation in Geneva, you’ll find the headquarters of the world’s most profitable tobacco company, Philip Morris International (PMI). Makers of Marlboro and other global brands. A few years ago, at the end of…

  • California raises the minimum purchase age for cigarettes and e-cigarettes

    Last week was a big week for those who think the law should have a role in helping to reduce the 6 million deaths caused each year by tobacco. First, tobacco taxes In 2013, the Rudd government announced a 12.5% increase in the tobacco excise to take effect over 4 years:  1 Dec 2013; 1…

  • Dancing on Christopher Hitchens’ grave? The tricky business of talking about consequences

    A “pro-smoking blogger for the libertarian right”  accuses me of “dancing on Christopher Hitchens’ grave”. And other stuff. Christopher Snowdon is a Research Fellow for the UK-based Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank that receives tobacco funding.  He is an opponent of plain tobacco packaging, keeper of the pure flame of libertarianism etc. My sin…

  • Our new Nanny State? The Senate inquiry into tobacco, alcohol, and bicycle helmet laws

    Earlier this month, Senator David Leyonhjelm announced aSsenate inquiry into legislative and policy measures introduced to restrict personal choice “for the individual’s own good,” including laws related to tobacco, e-cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, bicycle helmets, and film classification. Leaving to one side the irony of a government inquiry into government’s unreasonable interference in our lives, many…

  • A tiny illustration of what the tobacco industry is like

    Click on this link.  It’s a tiny illustration of what the tobacco industry is like.  It ought to be placed on the health curriculum of every school. Professor Stephen Leeder once wrote that public health is a “contest of raw political power” (S.R. Leeder, “Ethics in public health” Internal Medicine Journal 2004; 34:435-439).  Basically, it’s…

  • Why is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce playing patsy to the tobacco industry, and what does this mean for Australia?

    “From Ukraine to Uruguay, Moldova to the Philippines” – according to the New York Times – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its affiliates “have become the hammer for the tobacco industry”.  This is revealed by “interviews with government ministers, lobbyists, lawmakers and public health groups in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States.” By…

  • Policing parenting: is the Family Court going to punish you for having a drink?

    Sascha Callaghan, University of Sydney News outlets have pounced on a Family Court “order” for parents of a six-year-old boy to not smoke around the child and to limit their alcohol consumption while caring for him. Readers commented that the case represents an unacceptable “intervention by the courts into the personal space of the individual”,…