MEDICAL leaders have urged Celtic and Rangers football clubs to reconsider their links with an electronic cigarettes company amid concerns that it will damage efforts to reduce smoking.Woah! Slow up buttercup, what was that again? A product which is reducing the number of people smoking is damaging efforts to, err, reduce smoking?
In the BMA’s letter, Dr Andrew Thomson, a GP in Angus, said sport was a health activity and clubs such as Celtic and Rangers “should be leading by example to encourage healthy living rather than advertising a smoking product, which contains the addictive substance nicotine”.
The BMA’s call was welcomed by campaign group Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) Scotland.
Chief executive Sheila Duffy said: “There is a real concern that seeing people behaving as if they are smoking by using electronic cigarettes could normalise smoking."Or, alternatively, seeing people not smoking by using electronic cigarettes instead could normalise, err, not smoking by way of using electronic cigarettes instead.
You know, I'm starting to think that big pharma must have a far greater hold on these tobacco controllers than just the symbiotic flow of cash. Have Pfizer and their chums snapped them during a rubber-clad orgy involving goats and trafficked Lithuanians, or something?
So, Glasgow footie fans, remember to keep smoking the tobacco before and after matches, yeah? Whatever you do, don't let your football club introduce you to an alternative or you might like it. And that just wouldn't help pharma profits or Duffy and Thomson's next pay rise, now would it?*
* Plus you could end up seeing them pictured on the front page of The Scotsman trussed like a turkey while being whipped by lady-boys, which will harm you more than any number of Superkings might!
