Cabinet officer says pencil substitution now proven to reduce smoking-related deaths.
LONDON, ENGLAND —GLOSSYNEWS The UK Cabinet Office wants cigarette smokers to start biting on #2 pencils to replace the cigs they are smoking,in order to lower the numbers of deaths caused by smoking disease each year.
The Office wants every smoker to adopt their new low technology pencils to replace the silly “quit or die” approach to smoking which has never worked. They feel that use of the low tech pencils will have a definite downward effect towards the millions of smoking deaths, which claims 80,000 lives a year.
“If we have a drop of say 20,000 deaths, that’s 25% right there,” said a spokesman for the Cabinet Office. “Yes, it’s a lot of pencils, but with the use of computers and all, no one is really putting any good use to pencils any way.”
He continued, “To be effective, the regulatory framework for these pencils must be right. We need to be able to encourage new products for this task. So far, there are no regs or ordinances in place,” he paused briefly, then said “you know pencil substitution side-effects haven’t been tested much at all. We need to be ahead of the curve here.”
“If a manufacturer makes a health claim for anything then it becomes a drug,” said the source. So all the current nicotine replacements are sold as drugs, but a move is afoot to keep pencils out of the drug trade by saying that pencils are nicotine-free.
The Cabinet spokesman added quickly, “We think that will satisfy the proponents of currently successful smokeless candy and cookie replacement therapy. They think they have the only nicotine-free products. We are pleased with our pencils. And they do tend to be less fattening.”
When asked about the results of pencil use trials, the spokesman said “Our early trials have made us quite confident about public acceptability. Quite.”
He then smiled and said, “there’s no doubt it will save many lives and countless billions; but in fact, low pencil supply problems cause us to have to turn down many of the requests for help. When our supply of nicotine-free pencils is finally ‘up to snuff’ as they say, they will be easily obtainable by all who need to have them. The price will be much lower than a pack of cigs. The government certainly doesn’t plan to make a killing here.”