My Dear
My Dear,
When you started to work in tobacco control, I was so proud of you. You were saving lives. You were fighting against big evil industries for the good of humanity. But now, I can’t recognize you. I feel you are totally lost and it breaks my heart. I would like to help you but you don’t see me anymore.
The sectarian extremist groups, you started to hang around with, brainwashed you. Yes, they have money and during the blooming era it seemed a good idea to use it to finance the cause. But the strings attached to this money diverted you from a compassionate harm reduction approach. They told you: “There is only one way, ours!” I know that harm reduction was one of your initial aims but you were so scared to lose their tainted friendship that you preferred to forget your own principles.
The smokers’ death tolls justify your actions, you say. But you do nothing for smokers. Most of them are now within the most precarious and stigmatized populations, and you just don’t care. I agree that the one-size-fits-all “quit or die” vision had some success in developed countries but the number of smokers worldwide has been stable for the last 20 years. It is time to do more. But if you keep doing more of the same thing, you will just get more of the same result. I feel sorrowful that you refuse any innovation just because your spiritual adviser tells you to do so.
You live in an imaginary world with very high fences all around. Your withdrawal into yourself worries me a lot. You refuse to look at reality. The world changes around you and there are opportunities to do better, much better. Safer nicotine options are a chance, not a threat. But you refuse to hear anything that doesn’t fit exactly within the doctrine extremists impose on you. Your cognitive dissonance is so high that I feel excluded from your world. Your old friends feel more and more excluded too.
I understand and share your willingness to protect the kids but you are doing it the wrong way. You blindly believe in the “addiction” and “nicotine epidemic” rhetoric your thought leaders created from scratch to oppose harm reduction interventions threatening their supremacy. It is crafted to make you feel in an emergency to act against something that is not the main problem. It’s just a diversion to hide the failures of the obsolete policy advice the extremist groups still push for. Can’t you see that everyone deserves harm reduction, old and young nicotine users?
Because you can’t really beat the strongest, you now only focus on beating the weakest. No matter if it is good or bad. You feel happy when you succeed with policies that protect the ones you were once fighting against. I’m truly chagrined you don’t get that it is exactly what big tobacco wants you to do. By opposing and slowing down the transition to safer nicotine use you allow them to survive and you kill their competitors. It’s so strange to me that I sometimes wonder if your extremist mentors don’t work for them.
And your constant lies, they turn me mad. It started by telling half truths to the populations, trying to scare people away from tobacco. At the time, I disagreed on the principle but I was still hoping for some eventual benefits. Now it has become pathological. You don’t realize that you are lying and your lies go bigger and bigger, sometimes you even call them “science”. And you still use my name for your indigestible propaganda. Less and less people trust us and I feel sad about it.
I see no more compassion in your eyes. You are cold and intransigent. You don’t hear the voices of the nicotine users, the people who are primarily concerned by your work. You leave behind 1.1 billion people who could benefit from a more human and trustful approach. You deny them any right. Your Manichean perception of the world is slowly destroying you. I do really want to help you but I feel you now love your extremist ideas more than me.
Please, my Dear FCTC, come back to me.
Your Public Health
INNCO is a non-profit alliance of 37 volunteer-led Member Organizations all over the world. We support the rights of 98 million adults who use safer nicotine to avoid toxic forms of tobacco. INNCO is funded by individual contributions from thousands of adult ex-smokers, and by a grant from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW). The FSFW is a US nonprofit 501(c)(3) private foundation with a mission to end smoking in this generation. INNCO is independent. Our mission, purpose and goals are driven by our Member Organizations. Those organizations are led by unpaid volunteers (ex-smokers) who, as a condition of membership, agree not to accept funding or direction from industry. The contents, selection and presentation of facts in this article are the sole responsibility of the authors.
