Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2016 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I want to say just a couple of words about this. First, I do not really have an interest to declare. I have a wife who is a very heavy chain-smoker, but I do not smoke—I let her go on smoking because it keeps her slightly calmer and liveable-with, and it is probably better than her going on to Valium. Personally, I am a chocoholic, which is a different problem altogether.

I think that we should separate out in our minds the difference between the harm done by the burning of substances which we inhale and the harm, or not, from a particular drug within it—nicotine. If you separate those as two different issues, you realise that this is not the right directive, because this is about tobacco, which at the end of the day is a herbaceous substance which we dry and burn. That is what it is meant to be about; it is not about whether or not nicotine is a beneficial drug.

I do not know much about this because I am not a doctor. I read things in the press which say, for instance, that it can help with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and I read other things which say that that is rubbish. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Snape, that nicotine definitely used to be an appetite suppressant. One thing that I predicted when tobacco was cracked down on was that we would have an obesity crisis. It is one of the few things that I have been right about and it happened very quickly. If we wanted to prevent all the problems with people being overweight, we could perhaps recommend smoking—it is a question of which way you go.

The calming effect is well known for people who are quite nervous and tense; again, I think that is from the nicotine rather than the burning part of it. We also now have signs over the motorways saying, “Tiredness kills—take a break”. In the old days, you had a cigarette when you were driving and felt tired. I know that you should take a break but sometimes it is 30 miles to the next place where you can stop or you have a deadline, so a nicotine hit was a perfectly acceptable way of keeping yourself awake. Maybe vaping would do that, but the point I really want to make is that we should not be confusing the two things.