The Conference That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen

While world health officials closed their doors, a rogue alliance opened the debate on nicotine, science, and dissent.

In Geneva, where silence skirts the status of an official language and the corridors of multilateral forums operate under a code of opacity, something broke protocol this European autumn.

Less than two kilometers apart, but separated by worldviews that neither speak to nor tolerate each other, two gatherings disputed the same symbolic ground: the map of global health and the right to narrate it.

On one side, the 1,400 delegates of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, assembled at COP11, inside a conference center fortified against dissent, inaccessible even to organized ex-smokers and independent scientists with no industry ties.

On the other hand, in the soft, understated light of the Hotel Royale, an assembly as heterogeneous as it was unyielding: physicians, scientists, economists, public health advocates, and nicotine users from 23 countries.

There, the discussion went beyond nicotine. What was at stake was the very right to debate: harm reduction not as heresy to be corrected by institutional moralism, but as a legitimate, and for many, urgent language of science.

November 17, 2025

Geneva woke with Swiss punctuality, a fine mist tracing the precise outlines of the Hotel Royale. Inside the bright hall, where chandeliers hang like promises of order, a diverse group of experts, activists, and delegates from 23 countries gathered for what they’ve dubbed GoodCop 2.0: the second edition of a conference that, by all accounts, shouldn’t exist.

David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, opened the event with a blend of enthusiasm and irony. “They say sequels never outshine the originals,” he quipped, nodding to franchises like Rocky or Star Wars. But here, in the heart of European diplomacy, he promised a different kind of script: more experts, more countries, and more “star power” per square meter. In other words, a narrative with more voices, and perhaps more urgency.

The setting might have suggested optimism, but the first crack surfaced over breakfast. Kurt Yeo, just in from South Africa, approached Williams’ table with a question disarming in its simplicity: “Why are we here?” The jet-lagged delivery made it seem like a fleeting existential musing, until it landed as a pointed critique. “We shouldn’t have to be here,” Yeo insisted.

In that moment, the event’s polished surface split, exposing its central contradiction: the need for a costly, emotionally taxing, international effort just to reaffirm evidence that, for these participants, should be self-evident. “We shouldn’t have to be convincing the World Health Organization of something so simple,” Williams confessed. Science, in their eyes, has already spoken, and spoken clearly. But in this arena of global power, clarity is becoming a foreign tongue.

From the ornamented stage of the Hotel Royale, the week’s script began to unfold: technical panels, policy debates, ideological clashes, and a steady push to shape a narrative that, according to attendees, continues to sidestep both data and lived realities. Yet the real story shifted from content to context: what does it say about our time that the obvious now demands this level of mobilization?

Williams handed the mic to his colleague, Martin Cullip, who noted that this edition wasn’t just larger; it was heavier. With expectation, frustration, and a weariness only long-time campaigners know. “What’s changed since Panama?” Williams asked, pointing back to the first edition of the event, and implicitly inviting a moral comparison between what was known then and what continues to be ignored now.

Cullip, a Brit with dry wit and sharp perception, offered a revealing sidestep: “The weather, unfortunately.” In Panama, the sun had seemed complicit in the cause. In Geneva, the chill and drizzle played the skeptic: persistent, wet, and cooling to the touch. Still, there were moments of breath. “On Saturday, I walked along the Rhône,” Cullip confessed, as if sharing a private reprieve before the institutional storm.

But meteorology was merely the preamble to a deeper contrast: the naïveté of the first gathering, and the strategic maturity of the second. “In Panama, we didn’t know what to expect. We just wanted to see what would happen.” And more happened than expected. Out of that uncertain wager, a community was born.

The word “community” isn’t decorative here. It describes a rare phenomenon in technical conferences: the emergence of a collective body bound not just by shared cause, but by the sense of standing together outside a system that ignores them. Now, in Geneva, that body has returned, enlarged, from 24 experts to 39, from 14 countries to 23. Some came from far, very far. A speaker from New Zealand flew 36 hours, across time zones and exhaustion, to be here for just a few days. In this context, distance isn’t merely geographical; it’s a measure of symbolic value.

Cullip pointed to a detail likely invisible to diplomatic eyes: two conferences were happening simultaneously in Geneva. One at the Hotel Royale. The other, “up the street,” he gestured vaguely, toward the formal halls of the World Health Organization. But to him, the latter had lost the plot. “They’re not discussing what they should be,” he said, with the composure of someone long past shouting. The real debate, he argued, was here, among those willing to speak the uncomfortable truth: how to help people quit smoking through less harmful nicotine alternatives.

The WHO’s refusal to even place that issue on the table is, for many here, the nerve center of their indignation. This is a technical disagreement and an epistemological rupture. What do you do when the very institution created to protect life refuses to acknowledge the most effective, contemporary ways, according to these experts, of doing just that?

Between coffee breaks and mineral-water interludes, what’s being built at the Hotel Royale isn’t just a gathering. It’s a parallel narrative challenging the official one. A counter-history, written by those who, shut out from the halls of power, chose to build their own.

The Nicotine That Arrived Too Late

Behind the graphs, the statistics, and the regulatory battles, there are stories that resist abstraction. David Williams, who, until now, had steered the event with the demeanor of a pragmatic strategist, suddenly lets a more intimate, less quantifiable layer rise to the surface.

“I’ve told this story a few times,” he begins, hesitating, not from fatigue, but reverence. He’s speaking of his father. A man who, in the 1970s, smoked three and a half packs of cigarettes a day, and made smoke the backdrop of Williams’ childhood. “We lived in Puerto Rico. My father would drive us to school with the car windows up, air conditioning on, cigarette after cigarette. The whole car would turn into a smoke chamber.”

Memory has a smell. A texture. And childhood, as we know, archives everything with brutal fidelity. His father died at 63. Had a triple bypass at 42. “Back then, I thought 63 was old. Now, at 59, 63 is looking back at me.” Time, relentless, unsentimental, has given his loss a new edge. It’s no longer just absence. It’s evidence.

Williams doesn’t turn to statistics here. His argument is empirical, visceral. Cigarettes didn’t just steal his father’s health, he says, they corroded his personal life, his work, his marriage. “It destroyed him.” And that’s the moment when the topic of the conference ceases to be merely an institutional agenda and becomes something closer to an ethical imperative. He’s not trying to persuade with charts. He’s trying to keep others’ stories from ending like his.

“I wish these products had existed back then,” he says, referring to the arsenal of less harmful alternatives to traditional cigarettes: e-cigarettes, heat-not-burn devices, snus. Not as miracle cures, but as possible bridges. “The science is clear,” he insists. “These products are less harmful.” And if they had been available in the ’70s, perhaps his father would still be alive.

But what we have instead, he says, is a bitter irony: an organization created to save lives—the WHO—that, by denying legitimacy to these alternatives, helps perpetuate harm. “A bureaucracy funded by taxpayers, trying to stop consumers from accessing products that work.” For Williams, institutional resistance isn’t just misinformed, it’s insulting. Because, as he puts it, “consumers are smarter than that.”

He speaks with conviction. People are finding their own ways, even as governments impose bans. One of the most frequently cited examples at the conference is Sweden, which has reportedly slashed smoking rates by allowing regulated access to less harmful nicotine products. “Nicotine is not the problem,” he says emphatically. And to drive the point home, he reminds the room: if it were, the FDA wouldn’t have approved nicotine replacement therapies like gums and patches, sold over the counter in every American pharmacy.

The narrative returns to the present: the panels that will shape day one of the conference. “Today we’re building the foundation,” he says. A kind of mise en place, so that in the coming days, the discussion can boil over with more substance. Williams turns again to Martin Cullip, now to introduce one of the event’s most anticipated speakers: Dr. Tiki Pangestu. “Martin, tell us what he brings to the table.”

But the table is already set. What’s taking shape in Geneva is as much a space of resistance as it is of reinvention. It’s not just about questioning the WHO’s science. It’s about challenging the narrative that justifies its silence.

The Dilemma of Those Still Trying to Save the WHO from Itself

Among the names circulating through the corridors of the Hotel Royale, one carries a particular symbolic weight: Dr. Tiki Pangestu. A physician of global renown with decades of service inside the World Health Organization itself, Pang is not merely a scientific authority; he is, paradoxically, a critic of the very institution to which he dedicated much of his life.

Martin Cullip speaks of him with a mix of respect and curiosity, as though he were preparing not for an interview but for a meeting of minds. “Tiki is one of the most outspoken voices in support of harm reduction,” he says. “He understands the real benefits it can offer, and he speaks about them with clarity.” And yet, what makes Pang a particularly compelling figure is that duality: even as he disagrees with some of the WHO’s decisions, he continues to describe himself as “a passionate defender of the organization.”

It’s this apparent contradiction, or rather, critical loyalty, that Cullip wants to probe: “How is it possible to love an institution that, at this moment, seems to reject the very science he himself champions?” The question isn’t rhetorical. It lies at the heart of the debate. Pang represents the reformer’s dilemma: those who know the machinery from within, who still believe in its founding purpose, yet now feel compelled to raise their voices against its current direction.

Their upcoming conversation already hums with the tension of a friendly philosophical duel. This isn’t just about public health policy. It’s about loyalty, institutional memory, and the limits of ethical silence. When someone who helped build a house begins to point out its cracks, the gesture carries a legitimacy that even the staunchest skeptics can’t ignore.

And perhaps that’s the most complex dimension of this conference: that many gathered here aren’t enemies of the system. They are, in truth, its wayward heirs: technocrats, scientists, former agency officials, public health experts, and ex-smokers, coming together outside the official summit not to tear it down, but to defend, paradoxically, the very principles the central institution seems to have abandoned.

The Cold War of Global Health: The Day a Parallel Conference Became Necessary

The critique looming over Geneva is neither new nor mild. What’s at stake in this brightly lit room at the Hotel Royale is the perceived derailment of one of the most powerful institutions in global health. The World Health Organization, which two decades ago established the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), was, in the eyes of many here, once a beacon, a moral, legal, and public health pact against one of the planet’s most preventable epidemics.

David Williams acknowledges this without hesitation. “The original intent was good,” he says. “They created the treaty to confront a real problem.” But like so many bureaucratic structures that decay from the inside out, the FCTC, he argues, has lost its compass. What began as a multilateral, transparent effort to save lives has, according to attendees, become an increasingly closed system estranged from its founding purpose.

What they now witness is a kind of architecture of exclusion. “They started open. Now, they’re closing themselves off more and more,” says Williams. To illustrate this drift, he recounts a near-Kafkaesque episode in India. One of his colleagues, Drew Johnson, a journalist and researcher with the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, traveled for hours from Delhi to the FCTC’s meeting site, not to participate, but merely to observe. “He was sitting there silently, as a member of the press.” Even so, two security guards forcibly removed him. Expelled from a public health meeting. “Literally dragged out.”

This is why they insist on calling their parallel gathering GoodCop: a symbolic, almost ironic response to the Conference of the Parties, or what they now prefer to call BadCop. The metaphor may sound playful, but it conveys a serious political diagnosis: while one meeting retreats into orthodoxy and censorship, the other opens its doors to dialogue. “If the WHO wants to come here, our doors are open,” Williams says. It’s a statement that lands both as an invitation and an indictment.

That openness, in fact, is the ethos of this gathering. In Panama, where the first GoodCop was held, the controversy was already in the air. There were local protests. Some Panamanian doctors denounced the staggering cost of hosting the WHO conference in a country where much of the population lacks basic healthcare. “They spent millions on a closed-door event,” recalls Williams. The paradox is glaring: a public health conference, funded by public money, is inaccessible to the very public it was meant to serve.

And in a move that laid bare the cold war of narratives, Williams recalls that, on the eve of Panama, the WHO allegedly instructed its delegates to steer clear of the parallel event. “They told them to stay away from us.” The scene is revealing: an international body, ostensibly committed to promoting knowledge and cooperation, advising its members not to hear dissenting voices, even when those voices bring data, science, and, above all, human stories.

This isn’t just a dispute about nicotine. It’s a dispute about who gets to speak, who gets to be heard, and who has the right to help shape the story of global health.

The Treaty, the Betrayal, and the Doors That Closed

Martin Cullip returns to the memory of India, now with the weight of someone who saw, with his own eyes, the episode that has come to symbolize an institution in slow erosion. “I was there when they kicked Drew out,” he says. “Literally. And he left with a piece of the carpet stuck to him from resisting so hard.” The anecdote draws laughs, but the laughter is uneasy. It’s clear this wasn’t an exception; it was a symptom.

For Cullip, the FCTC, once a multilateral forum for listening and action, has morphed into an echo chamber. A sealed space where any dissent is branded “tobacco industry interference.” That accusation, he says, is wielded with as much frequency as disproportion. “We organized a campaign with consumers from around the world. Ordinary people. People who quit smoking using lower-risk products. We asked them to register as observers.” None had ties to industry. None were accepted.

The replies, if they can be called that, came back in the form of vague, impersonal phrases. No names. No explanations. “Just a sentence. And nothing else.” The message lay not just in the content but in the delivery: anonymous, opaque, quietly disdainful. It’s a silence that doesn’t just erase people, it erases what they represent: the success of strategies the WHO refuses to even consider.

While the organization insists it is simply following protocols laid out by the United Nations, Cullip pushes back: “That’s not true.” He points to the contrast with other global conferences (on climate, for instance) where thousands of participants are welcomed, even in contentious arenas. “But not here. Here, they shut the doors.”

The most commonly cited institutional rationale, avoiding influence from Big Tobacco, has become, in the eyes of GoodCop participants, a smokescreen. “These people have no links to any industry. They’re teachers, workers, parents. But because they use products also sold by the industry, they’re automatically disqualified.” It’s a twisted logic: by advocating for their own health, these consumers become, by association, suspects, unwitting accomplices of a pre-designated enemy.

Cullip has tried to attend other editions of the Conference of the Parties. In the past, he says, it was enough just to show up. Now, he doesn’t even consider applying. What used to be a public gallery has become a locked room. “They don’t want to admit that people are using these products responsibly. That they’re benefiting from them. That this is improving public health.” Because to admit that would require the WHO to revisit its own dogmas, and perhaps concede that, somewhere along the way, it failed.

But numbers do not vanish under censorship. WHO’s own studies estimate that there are currently 1.35 billion smokers or users of harmful tobacco products worldwide.” And yet the focus falls on the 150 million who’ve switched to less harmful alternatives. “They ignore the 1.35 billion and go after the 150 million.”

The irony thickens: the treaty was never written to fight nicotine; it was meant to fight smoking. “Watch Jeannie’s interview with Brent,” Cullip suggests. “They say it themselves: this was about tobacco, not nicotine.” But today, the dominant narrative appears intent on erasing that distinction, as if any form of nicotine use were inherently harmful, even when the science says otherwise.

That divergence between the treaty’s original language and its current interpretation is acknowledged even by those who helped draft it. Cullip cites Derek Yach, one of the architects of the FCTC, who has recently voiced disagreement with the direction the organization has taken. He also mentions Tiki Pang, whose relationship with the WHO, as we’ve seen, is marked by critical loyalty. “A lot of people who were there in the beginning no longer recognize what the organization has become.”

Those voices, from the origin, from the margins, from the outside, will be present at GoodCop. And the goal is clear: “We’re going to have these conversations,” Cullip says. “We’re going to get to the root of it. And we hope the delegates over there, at the other meeting, can see beyond the institutional fog.”

A Mosaic of Rebellions and the Institution That No Longer Represents

On one hand, the World Health Organization is sealing itself off ever more tightly under the guise of neutrality in the face of so-called “tobacco industry interference.” On the other hand, it is turning a blind eye to actors who don’t fit into that binary: small business owners, local shopkeepers, ordinary people operating on the margins of regulation, now watching as their stores and livelihoods vanish in the name of a public health crusade that seems indifferent to the complexity of real life.

“They never talk about small businesses,” says one speaker, with the tone of someone finally letting something out. “They don’t mention the corner vape shops, the families who survive on that income.” Instead, the dominant narrative flattens every voice in favor of harm reduction into a shadow extension of Big Tobacco. The logic is simplistic and, like all simplifications, brutal: if you defend less harmful nicotine products, you must be working for the enemy. End of discussion.

But perhaps the day’s most disquieting moment doesn’t stem from criticism: it emerges from a question few dare to ask aloud: Should the World Health Organization still exist? The question isn’t rhetorical. It’s on the official agenda of one of the most anticipated sessions of the gathering. The goal, say organizers, is to “unnaturalize” the existence of an entity whose legitimacy was, for decades, nearly untouchable.

And that’s where the conference takes on something bordering on heresy, and with it, deep political weight.

There is a return to recent history. In 2016, under Donald Trump, the United States temporarily withdrew from the WHO. The move, later reversed by the Biden administration, was widely condemned at the time. But now, Trump is floating an even more radical idea: forming an entirely new international health alliance with countries like Argentina, a sort of “parallel WHO,” outside the United Nations umbrella.

The mention of this still-nascent and seemingly far-fetched project reveals something beyond mere geopolitics. It lays bare the growing distrust in global institutions: organizations which, in the eyes of many, have lost their connection to the people they are meant to serve. “We contribute $400 million a year to the WHO,” says one panelist. “But who do they really represent?”

This session promises to do more than question the organization’s functionality; it’s set to put two fundamentally opposed worldviews in direct confrontation: on one side, those who see the WHO as obsolete, bureaucratic, and ideological. On the other hand, those who still believe it can, and should, be saved from itself. That tension reflects a broader contemporary dilemma: the collapse of trust in global institutions and the rise of parallel initiatives, not as blind rejection, but as a response to a sense of exclusion, alienation, and a deaf technocracy.

So in the Geneva meeting room, what’s being debated isn’t just tobacco, nor even public health alone. What’s on the table, both between the lines and increasingly out in the open, is the future of multilateralism. Can it still be repaired? Or, as some argue, does it need to be replaced altogether?

The Caribbean Island That Shook a Global Conference

The question hung in the air like thick, lingering smoke: if the World Health Organization can’t handle tobacco, how can it be trusted to lead something even more complex, like a future pandemic? It was that provocation that sparked the white paper presented by economist Roger Bate, a document that directly challenges the WHO’s capacity to legitimately lead a prospective pandemic treaty. “If the FCTC is any indication of how they operate,” said Martin Cullip, blunt and unsparing, “they can’t be trusted with anything.”

The argument is as stark as it is deliberate: the WHO’s handling of tobacco control is a cautionary tale of what goes wrong when bureaucracy, ideology, and institutional opacity override science and public engagement.

Yet the value of this gathering doesn’t lie merely in its critiques. Its strength, above all, lies in making dissent visible, something the WHO, ironically, seems to have abandoned. Cullip recalls a conversation with Clive Bates, another heavyweight in the field and a speaker at the event. Bates read the report, praised its clarity and the strength of its arguments, and then said, true to his British candor, “I completely disagree with you.” From that respectful friction emerged one of the conference’s most anticipated debates: Roger Bate versus Clive Bates. Not a clash of egos, but a collision of ideas on what to do with the WHO: reform it, preserve it, or replace it?

“This kind of debate won’t happen in the WHO’s halls,” noted one speaker, gesturing toward the official COP11 summit taking place just a kilometer away. “There, the conversation is singular and sealed. Here, it’s plural.”

That contrast, between the official gathering and its parallel counterpart, was already evident at the last GoodCop meeting in Panama. There, the difference manifested in moments bordering on the surreal. When the delegation from Saint Kitts and Nevis dared to raise questions about harm reduction—just to ask—they were immediately silenced. Other nations attempted to show support, but the small Caribbean island had already been branded the dissident voice and was treated accordingly.

The memory of Panama now serves as a warning in Geneva. What will be the “trigger words” during this first day of the official COP? What phrases will activate internal censors? Who will dare to say the unsayable?

Inside the Hotel Royale, those questions aren’t rhetorical; they’re preparations for battle. “We want to provide a window into what’s happening just over there,” says Williams. And what’s at stake now is no longer just a debate about public health policy. It’s about the right to ask questions and the right not to be dragged out of the room for asking them.

Survival Is Not Enough: The New Battle for the Right to Dialogue, and to Dissent in Public Health

By late morning, the mechanics of the debate had begun to reveal their deeper scaffolding. What seemed, at first glance, to be a dispute over the legitimacy of less harmful nicotine products had slowly unfolded into something broader: a fight for national sovereignty, legislative autonomy, and the integrity of international treaties.

Martin Cullip pointed to a specific item on the current COP agenda (Item 4.1) as evidence, he said, of a semantic and legal mutation underway within the FCTC. At the center of it all is Article 2.1, a clause originally conceived as a zone of freedom: signatory countries could exceed the treaty’s guidelines if they wished, but they were under no obligation to do so. It was, in essence, a gesture toward autonomy. “A freedom clause,” as he calls it.

But what’s now being proposed, he warns, is something else entirely. “They want to turn that freedom into a checklist of obligations.” Among the “prospective measures” being floated: generational bans, restrictions on the number of retailers, and most controversially, the extension of these limitations to all nicotine products, including snus, e-cigarettes, and pouches. “That’s not in the treaty,” Cullip emphasizes. “This is an attempt to bypass it, to rewrite from the outside, what can’t be rewritten from within.”

The issue, for him, is not just legal. It’s ethical. It’s political. By pressuring countries to report annually on their compliance with these extraterritorial recommendations, the FCTC is, in effect, creating a shadow system of accountability, one that bypasses national governments. “These decisions belong to finance ministries and agriculture departments,” he insists. “Not the FCTC.”

The logic behind this regulatory pivot also carries a particular kind of blindness: a universalism that refuses to see the epidemiological, cultural, and social specificities of each country. “Sweden, for instance, is on the verge of becoming smoke-free among young people, thanks to snus, not in spite of it. New Zealand has seen a sharp drop in smoking rates. So has the UK, despite recent political fluctuations.”

For participants in GoodCop, these countries are not anomalies. They are blueprints. “If these policies work, why fight them?” The question is not naive: it pierces the soft underbelly of the dominant narrative, which seems more invested in ideological purity than in tangible gains for public health.

Cullip also draws attention to Item 4.5 on the agenda, which, he says, sets up a “full-frontal assault” on reduced-risk nicotine products. “It’s as if any mention of harm reduction is automatically framed as industry sabotage.” The logic is stark: to disagree is to be guilty by association.

And perhaps that is the most unsettling undercurrent among those gathered in this parallel conference: not just the content of WHO policy, but the manner in which it is imposed. By exclusion. By simplification. By forced silence. “They’re living in a fantasy world if they think they can stop people from using nicotine,” said one speaker. “We just hope more countries have the courage to say: not in our name.”

At the close of the last COP, Cullip recounts, the head of the FCTC reportedly ended the session with a sigh of relief: “We survived.” The phrase lands less like a celebration than a diagnosis. Something, it seems, is deeply wrong when a conference’s success amounts to little more than surviving dissent.

But this time, mere survival may not be enough. Because what’s at stake isn’t just public health policy, it’s the right to choose, to debate, and to exist beyond the boundaries of manufactured consensus.

From the Outside, You Can Still Speak

On the surface, there’s a war of protocols. Behind the scenes, a clash is underway between two visions of the future. One closes itself off in dogma; the other, with scarce resources and modest microphones, tries to redraw the contours of what is possible.

While in the halls of COP11, the debate unfolds in carefully choreographed language, avoiding terms like “harm reduction” or “safer nicotine”, at the Hotel Royale, time ticks differently: urgent, contradictory, shaped by the voices of small countries and big stories, of dissenting scientists and everyday users. At times, the table resembles a mosaic of accents and rebellions, and that is precisely what gives it life.

There is hope amid the friction. Some countries, once quiet, are beginning to stir. The “sleeping nations,” as they were called from the stage, may be waking up. There is anticipation in unlikely coalitions, in improvised backrooms, in off-camera dialogues. The Middle East, once a hardliner, is now considering more flexible regulation. Pakistan is beginning to promote powdered nicotine production. Even within the European Union, consensus is cracking: Belgium, France, and the Netherlands push for bans; Sweden, Italy, and Greece push back. The word “ban” was removed from the final text, less by conviction than by resistance.

By late morning, what emerges from this conference that “shouldn’t exist” is an undeniable truth: the WHO no longer speaks for everyone, and consensus is no longer uniform. More than a critique of the institution, what was heard in Geneva was a reminder of what it could, and should still be. Because the problem was never the existence of opposing voices. The problem is that those voices can only be heard from outside the door.

For those who want to see firsthand what rarely makes it to official stages, the full first day of GoodCop 2.0 is available on YouTube. Listen to the debates, trace the fractures, witness the silences finally interrupted. The conference that wasn’t meant to exist may, in the end, be the only one where people can still speak freely.

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