Sweanor Attacks The WCTOH
David Sweanor attacks the World Conference on Tobacco or Health 2018.
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by Dave Cross
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Sweanor is part lawyer, part public health expert and widely applauded for his philanthropic work. As one of his beneficiaries once said: “He’s very much about leaving a better world for his kids.”
Harm reduction is a no brainer to the vaping advocate: “My goal is to reduce death and disease. The problem is smoke, not the nicotine. If we can give people nicotine without the smoke we largely solve the health problem.”
“There are a lot of people who have an abstinence-only moralistic view. They see smoking and smokers as sin and sinners. It’s very much like the war on drugs or trying to deal with teenage sexuality by saying no sex outside of marriage. An abstinence-only view kills people instead of saves people. Any barrier in the way of people using a less hazardous product has to be firmly based on science and human rights.”
What turned the WCTOH into a farcical event was that they banned Dr Derek Yach from attending. Despite setting up the Foundation for a Smoke Free World, he was denied the ability to walk through the conference’s doors because of a sizeable donation to his foundation by Philip Morris International.
A spokesperson for the foundation said: “Although Dr Yach has supported and led smoking cessation research and policy development and has been a strong proponent of harm-reduction policies, calling for a greater emphasis on harm reduction as early as 2005, the conference organisers have not taken into account the benefit his attendance would have provided the community with.”
In a blog post on Clive Bates’ Counterfactual website, Sweanor explains that the problem the WCTOH has is that its members see themselves as being “in a battle against Big Tobacco”. It is civilians who suffer during wars, and here it is the smokers who are neglected as the tobacco control community focus all of their attention on trying to destroy Big Tobacco.
Sweanor claims that the vilification of the tobacco industry leads to the tobacco control community fixating on “a caricature of an enemy rather than the rational pursuit of a goal.”
He delivers a message of balance that has been his modus operandi for years. In 2016, he delivered a similar message: “It is perfectly sensible to have a healthy skepticism about new products and technologies, particularly their long-term effects. Where real risks exist, it is important to identify them. But it makes little sense to focus on theoretical, minuscule or entirely bogus harms without acknowledging the serious, well-known harms caused by existing products, which these new innovations could mitigate.”
He says that rather than driving a vape market for nefarious ends, tobacco companies are legitimately moving to a new technology that has disrupted their old business model. As Sweanor says, it is “the alignment of profit-seeking and public health.”
As someone who has been personally attacked, he advocates for a greater level of understanding of what is taking place – leading to an acceptance of harm reduction and saved lives.
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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