[delsarto]

John Safran has just released a book Puff Piece about the incredible way Philip Morris has rebranded as a "health enterprise" and released the "heatstick" with their "vaping" IQOS platform (quotes are intentional, because as the books shows, words mean nothing!)

https://johnsafran.com/

The podcast below sums it up perfectly:

Three years ago, tobacco giant Philip Morris announced they were moving away from cigarettes and that they were campaigning to "unsmoke the world".

They said they would offer people a better alternative to the cigarette, a device that would give you your nicotine fix from a "HeatStick".

Author and documentary maker John Safran discovered the HeatStick is made primarily from tobacco, and that it still generates carcinogenic tar.

John soon found that Philip Morris were financing "anti-smoking" initiatives all over the world.

They look just like conventional Quit programs, but they are designed to shift people onto this new device.

https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/conversations/john-saf...

[casefields]

>John soon found that Philip Morris were financing "anti-smoking" initiatives all over the world.

They are literally obligated to fund them according to the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...

[robbedpeter]

What's being discussed here is not real "quit smoking" campaigns but "get addicted to our shiny new thing" campaigns disguised as such. The anti vape campaigns and reporting in recent years has been heavily influenced by Philip-Morris and their iqos strategy, which is to get people to switch to non- combusted tobacco sticks instead of alternative methods of delivery.

Vapes have turned out more or less ok, with a negligible impact on health and lung capacity. Chronic nicotine has its own impact, certain flavorings are problematic, but it's orders of magnitude better than smoking. There's no indication that iqos is any better, but it's certainly far more expensive.

IQOS by Philip Morris is the latest cynical plot to get people hooked and extract endless streams of cash. Vape is cheaper, iqos far more expensive.

It's an interesting bellwether for news organizations. If they run anti-vape, PM has their hooks in.

[delsarto]

In a big picture sense they've managed to reverse engineer this from a message of "quit" (i.e. do not ingest anything, which is what basically all health-based quit campaigns are about) to "stop smoking" where their IQOS system, which uses non-combustable tobacco-in-a-cylindrical-package-with-a-filter tip "HeatSticks" is "not smoking".

[TaylorAlexander]

Private advertisements that pretend to be public service health announcements seem particularly evil!