EU Commission threatens to ban Swedish snus based on falsified ENSP scientific report

[Bill Godshall]

EU Commission threatens to ban Swedish snus based on falsified ENSP scientific report.
Så mörkade de snusrapporten | Nyheter | Aftonbladet (Swedish)


Falsified ENSP report (English)
http://www.stivoro.nl/Upload/_publdocs/Oral Tobacco Report.pdf


Clive Bates: Tipp-Ex away the truth about safer alternatives to smoking (contains English translation of Swedish news article)
http://www.clivebates.com:80/?p=654

Campaigning by so-called health groups to ban much less hazardous alternatives to smoking is dangerous, unethical, lazy with facts and utterly without regard for the people they are supposedly trying to help – see my detailed post Death by regulation. But they go to a whole new level of awfulness – evil maybe – when it is done with deliberate deception and falsification. When that happens, it becomes something much darker – in fact as bad, and as deadly, as the worst excesses of tobacco industry PR. And that is what happened – they used Tipp-ex to erase inconvenient truths in a report intended to inform science based policy on alternatives to smoking.

I’m disgusted with these people. While you consider what has happened here, just imagine the tsunami of righteous outrage there would be if a tobacco company or those of us who support the widespread introduction of much less hazardous alternative to smoking had done similar. Here’s what should happen,

• The report should be withdrawn
• ENSP should be declared ineligible to receive any public funds, including and especially from the European Union
• Someone, somewhere should take responsibility and apologise
• A lot of people who believe they are health advocates, and are paid as such, are nothing of the sort – they ought to be examining their consciences and looking again at the evidence with some humility

Whilst the falsification is absolutely disgraceful, I doubt there was ever any intention to have an objective assessment of the science as it would have given the European Commission an unwanted rationale for reversing their utterly counter-productive ban on oral tobacco. More likely is that they were looking for reasons to prove they had been right all along. That’s why they chose ENSP to do the work in the first place – a group with a blindly hysterical hostility to harm reduction approaches. To make the point they’ve now changed their name to the European Network for Smoking and Tobacco Prevention. Though this dates back to 2003, they are still at it of course: see this ENSP letter to the European Voice in May this year.

By the way, you can read more on this sort of mendacity about snus in the excellent book, The art of suppression: pleasure panic and prohibition since 1800 by Chris Snowdon.

 

[Sophora]

Well if they did falsefy the report, they forgot about the references mentioned in the report.
I know, the casual reader might overlook them easily, but the report can be pieced together again
to it's original form. Quite the challenge, but someone with lots of time might give it a try.

But maybe someone could go to Brussels and ask them what they were thinking, ENSP has a special event at the European Parliament October 3rd:
Registration: Fighting to Save Lives in Europe - Tobacco Products Directive and European Smoking Cessation Guidelines - MEPs and Health Professionals working together to end the tobacco epidemic | ENSP

 

[rolygate]

I think the most usefual approach would be a police fraud department forensic accountancy search for offshore bank accounts held by EU health commission members. Somebody somewhere is being well paid for this.

 

[Vocalek]

Well if they did falsefy the report, they forgot about the references mentioned in the report.
I know, the casual reader might overlook them easily, but the report can be pieced together again
to it's original form. Quite the challenge, but someone with lots of time might give it a try.

But maybe someone could go to Brussels and ask them what they were thinking, ENSP has a special event at the European Parliament October 3rd:
Registration: Fighting to Save Lives in Europe - Tobacco Products Directive and European Smoking Cessation Guidelines - MEPs and Health Professionals working together to end the tobacco epidemic | ENSP

How ironic! They imagine themselves as fighting to save lives by outlawing the products that are proven to work best to help people escape from smoking, and recommending that smokers keep failing, over and over, by using the overprice, undereffective PB products.

Let's give them a project to build a house, and hand them a Bob the Builder Tool Kit and some cardboard to do it with.

 

[NorthOfAtlanta]

How ironic! They imagine themselves as fighting to save lives by outlawing the products that are proven to work best to help people escape from smoking, and recommending that smokers keep failing, over and over, by using the overprice, undereffective PB products.

Let's give them a project to build a house, and hand them a Bob the Builder Tool Kit and some cardboard to do it with.

Does that kit come with detailed instructions?

They'll need them.

 

[TennDave]

Instructions included but translated from Chinese into poor Engrish where the kit was manufactured...