The BMA’s bizarre jihad against e-cigarettes

What strategy should we adopt to cope with the British Medical Association? Its members kill more people each year than President Assad — 72,000 is the latest estimate, from the House of Commons health select committee. Perhaps it is at last time to sit down and negotiate with them, much though this will stick in the craw, like a misplaced scalpel. We say that organisations like the IRA and the BMA will ‘never win’ and that we will ‘never negotiate’ – but this is empty rhetoric, because we always end up doing so. If we could just reduce by 10 per cent the number of people killed every year through medical errors it would at least bring the figure below the combined annual deaths attributed to smoking and drinking and obesity. That’s something to aim for, isn’t it? Attempt to find some common ground with the more moderate elements and then persuade them to put down their weapons. It could work, it could work.

The BMA’s latest act of lunacy is to oppose, with all its might, what we have come to call e-cigarettes. These are those electronic devices, usually styled to look like a B&H, often with a glowing tip, which release nicotine when inhaled and emit a colourless, odourless water vapour. Steam, in other words. They are used by people who wish to give up smoking in preference to nicotine replacement gum, which can have a nasty bilious effect on the gut, and patches, which seem to deliver no nicotine buzz at all (in my experience). Certainly e-cigarettes are totally harmless to anyone in the vicinity of a user, and nobody has argued otherwise. They are also much, much less harmful to the user — everyone is agreed on that — than actual, proper smoking, and may be of no harm at all.