Martin Cullip is an International Fellow at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and has been a prominent voice on tobacco and vaping policy since 2008, when he first gained attention with his libertarian blog, “Dick Puddlecote.” His insights on public health and consumer rights have been featured in publications such as Spiked and Filter Magazine.
Back when I started in vaping many years ago, you were anonymous blog, but you decided to “out” yourself at one point. Tell us how that happened.
I used to run a transport company and I'd drive the bus every morning. I'd put the news on in the in the bus, and it would say, you know, “the government is clamping down on this”, or “the government is banning this”. And I remember going in the office once wondering “has the government declared war on us or something?”. Because that's the way it seemed to me.
That was about 2005, and I started reading libertarian blogs and found other people like me thinking, “why can't they just leave us alone?”. So I started writing my own blog, and I was a smoker at the time. So, I talked a lot about the smoking ban. And immediately people assumed I was some front for the industry; when in reality I was just doing it in my spare time and funding myself to go to events. I just enjoy recreational writing.
But why was the blog anonymous in the early days?
When I started the blog, I was running a small transport company. I think we had about 35-40 staff at the time. And I know I knew the nature of public health. It's vicious. And I was worried that they might have gone after the business if they knew who I was. So I wasn't gonna let my staff lose out because of something like that.
You genuinely thought it was a risk to the business?
Well, we know what they do now. We know that they've written to organisers of conferences to get speakers cancelled; or to participants to warn them against participating in this or that event. And they could have written to local authorities quite easily and that could have caused problems, since we were reliant on local authorities for large contracts.
We also didn’t want to let down the people we served. The company primarily ferried disabled kids to and from school. Some we took to school a decade or more, so you get to know the families, and and it's vital for them because their education really does mean something. We took about 240 kids to school and back every day towards the end before we sold the business. So it was very rewarding and we didn’t want anything getting in the way of that.
You were a smoker, right? Did you completely switch to safer products in the end? Did the blog have anything to do with that?
I was one of these people who accidentally gave up, and the only reason I accidentally gave up because I'd heard that government wanted to ban vaping! And of course, my blog was anti nanny state, so I wanted to argue against that, but I didn't know anything about vaping. So I put a message in one of the forums and said, can someone tell me about them so I understand? And a woman in Leeds sent me down a whole load of kit. She put sticky notes on it saying,” this goes here, this goes there”, and gave me some advice on where to buy more. Initially I just was using it just here and there. And then one day I turned to my wife and said, “I can't remember the last time I smoked - how long ago was it?”, and it had been over a month!
I know I won't drift back to cigarettes because I enjoy vaping much more than I ever enjoyed smoking. I know I can take a cigarette without needing to worry about going back. But every time I do take a cigarette, it's just not as good as my vape.
You’ve often talked about how public health has – let’s be polite – lost its way. How has your view on that evolved since you started vaping?
I think there are two types of public health people now: those who are actually interested in saving lives, and they seem to be wildly receptive to harm reduction; and those who are only interested in it for the money or because they like ordering people about. And they're the ones who it seems tome are anti harm reduction.
I've met many people in public health now, who would obviously completely disagree with with my ideas for freedom of choice with smoking, but they're on the same side as as us when it comes to harm reduction. So it it does show you there are probably good and bad people in it, but I think the ones that are anti harm reduction are overwhelmingly bad.
I've got, like most of us, Google alerts for things that are said about certain subjects. And the one I've got on vaping now almost every article you see is is almost exclusively negative. You have these organisations desperately trying to to convince the public that vaping is is bad or worse than smoking. And I think that's terrible, and it and it is a really bad indictment of of how how these people are not really interested in health.
Stigmatisation seems only to have gotten worse since I’ve been involved in the harm reduction movement…
The the anti-smoking groups always are keen to say thay they are not trying to stigmatise smokers. But it seems to me that everything they do is designed to just harass and demonise them, and and denormalise them. The word denormalise is a horrible word to use. In no other context is it considered OK to denormalise another human being for doing something completely legal.
And you see it now directed at less harmful products like pouches and vapes. The thinking behind banning flavours, it's not about kids. They know that it's part of the pleasure and and the success of vaping, why people enjoy it, and why they have to have forums to talk to each other and chat about it. It's because it's because the flavours make it enjoyable, and they want to take all the enjoyment out of it. Again to harass people who vape, to harass people who use nicotine pouches, and make them stop doing it. And this is what the other side always does.
A lot of people on the pro harm reduction side tell themselves that most of these public health campaigners are well meaning. I don’t think that’s the case at all, frankly. They set groups of people against each other. It's dividing people and causing bitterness.
