Finally
what is it that makes any of you think that any of these things you do will make any difference at all? The
tobacco harm reduction genie is well and truly out of the bottle. You are few; the people who practise
tobacco harm reduction on a daily basis are legion. To ask these people to abandon their practises on the strength of nothing more than your opinions and speculative science is akin to giving a person fresh water one day and then asking them to drink urine the next.
You cannot win. You came out of the blocks too slowly and have done little more than fight a desperate and increasingly spiteful rearguard action ever since. All that you are achieving now is the destruction of your own credibility and, for some of you, your careers. If I may borrow a line from a song, what youve done here is put yourself between a bullet and a target. You are attempting, in vain and possibly even of vanity, to stave off the inevitable. I defy a single one of you to present me with an example where that has been attempted and in which the inevitable did not, inevitably, win.
Go back to the mirror and ask yourselves; is this battle that you, ultimately, cannot win really what you want?
