British physician Paul D. Jepson, has made international headlines with a simple suggestion he made in a letter to the editor of British Medical Journal (BMJ). In the letter entitled “Fundamental re-think on smoking is needed,” Dr. Jepson suggests that British tabloids begin publishing the names of all British people that die of smoking related illnesses.
To make his point, Dr. Jepson points out that because of the long history of tobacco, it’s somehow managed to get a pass compared to other health concerns. No other product on the market that harms and kills so many people would be allowed to continue production and sale in a legal marketplace. He cites as an example, the class B drug mephedrone, which after use as a drug to help addicts get off other drugs was found to contribute to the death of a few people. The uproar that followed wound up in its discontinuance despite the good it had done for many thousands of others. He compares those small numbers to the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.K. every year and wonders why it alone is allowed to be sold legally while others that are proven to be hazardous, are not.
Dr. Jepson then goes on to say that drugs should never be allowed to be sold freely in the market place due to political bias or pressure and should only be sold based on the facts of its use. Here he implies that only drugs that are beneficial should be allowed to be for sale. In this, the assumption is that he considers the sale of cigarettes and all other tobacco type products due to the nicotine in them that works as a stimulant and as an addicting agent, to be drugs, and thus should be regulated as such.
He finishes up his note by declaring that cigarette smoking will never go away so long as buying and selling them legally remains a part of modern life, noting that levying ever higher taxes on them hasn’t done much to put a dent in the numbers of people who still smoke and neither has costly anti-smoking campaigns.
In all the uproar caused by the little note, what’s not been addressed as yet is whether publishing the names of those who die from smoking related illnesses would be legal. Nor or course, is who would pay for the roundup of the names and payments to the tabloids to include them if they were so inclined.