WHO ATTACKS HARM REDUCTION! WHO ARE THEY PROTECTING?

By Pippa Starr

9 November 2025

The WHO Is About To Make a Historic Public Health Mistake, And Most People Have No Idea It’s Even Happening

Most people have never heard of “COP11”.It’s the next major global meeting of the World Health Organization’s tobacco treaty (the FCTC) ,where bureaucrats and health officials decide what rules, restrictions, and global norms should apply to nicotine products and smoking policy worldwide.

And most everyday Australians also don’t realise that tobacco harm reduction, the simple idea that helping smokers switch to much safer non-combustion alternatives massively reduces illness and death, is a mainstream, evidence-based strategy everywhere else in drug policy. We use harm reduction for opioids. For HIV prevention. For road safety. For alcohol policy. For hepatitis. It is standard public health.

It works.

Except… apparently not for nicotine.

COP11 Wants To Declare Harm Reduction a Thoughtcrime

A new document prepared for COP11 doesn’t examine whether safer alternatives actually save lives. It doesn’t compare death rates between burning tobacco smoke and smokeless nicotine. It doesn’t invite scientific debate.

Instead, it attacks the very existence of harm reduction as a bad faith tobacco industry plot.

It pre-decides that any mention, advocacy or evidence of reduced-risk nicotine products is automatically “industry interference”. Therefore, it never needs to be evaluated. It can be dismissed without scientific review. The ideology now protects itself from falsification.

This is breathtakingly anti-science.

The Human Cost of This Political Game

Millions of ex-smokers all around the world quit cigarettes using safer alternatives. Countries like the UK, New Zealand, Sweden and France have embraced harm reduction and seen smoking plummet to historic lows, without violence, without firebombings, without exploding black markets like Australia is experiencing RIGHT NOW.

And yet COP11 is structurally positioning harm reduction not as a life saving strategy — but as a narrative threat that must be suppressed.

Consumers erased. Lived experience erased. Evidence erased.

This is not public health. This is prohibition ideology defending itself.

Australia Is The Perfect Case Study of How This Ends

Australia already tried the “ban first” model. We have $82 billion a year in organised crime damage. We have over 250 tobacco store firebombings. We have criminal distribution networks now as sophisticated as national drug cartels.

This didn’t happen because harm reduction failed.

This happened because harm reduction was never allowed.

COP11 Is Not About Science — It Is About Narrative Control

If harm reduction is automatically treated as illegitimate because it reduces the case for prohibition, then COP11 is not a scientific meeting anymore.

It is a censorship summit.

And if WHO pushes the world into another decade where smokers are denied safer alternatives, history will record this moment as one of the greatest public health betrayals of the 21st century.

They aren’t “protecting the public from harm”.

They are protecting themselves from being proven wrong, while people continue to die in numbers they refuse to count.

Harm reduction isn’t being co-opted.

Harm reduction is being executed.