This has become a Facebook page with effect from three months ago. Its membership has grown steadily (now at 169) but is one of a number of facebook pages and other internet outlets that express disquiet with current tobacco policies: not only in Scotland and the UK, but right from the World Health Organisation. Their Framework Convention for Tobacco Control is an international agreement that requires participants to ban smoking and promote pharmaceutical methods of smoking cessation.
We set up this page prior to organising the demonstration at Glasgow's 2010 UK National Smoking Cessation Conference. We felt that this conference represents huge costs on the NHS throughout the UK, attracting delegates whose major focus of work is smoking cessation. Since cuts to all public health services are now a present threat, we felt that smoking cessation was an area of public health provision that the NHS could well do without.
We have also covered international stories on this page, such as a call for research applications to study (so-called) Third Hand Smoke in California. The money available for this was $US 3.75 millions, money raised by state taxes on tobacco in California, and directed towards research that will inevitably lead to further restrictions on tobacco use – this time with the premise that dropped cigarette butts will lead to contamination of the water supply and to wildlife when it rains.
Closer to home, another source of tobacco control funding is Cancer Research UK, whose list of funding projects is impressive (even extending to projects overseas), but surely begs the question whether they are a UK medical charity or an offshoot of the World Health Organisation.
If you're on Facebook please join up and share! Also look for ASH to ASHES, Anti-Smoking Exposed - Tobacco Control Out of Control, and (NEW!) The Resistance.
1 comment:
Added to blogroll :)
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