Scottish client journalism

Via Taking Liberties, I see that Scotland's Sunday Post has been publishing some anti-smoking slop ahead of the country's 20th anniversary of its smoking ban. 

 

Last week a reporter from the Sunday Post contacted Forest to say she was working on a feature ‘marking the anniversary of Scotland’s smoke-free legislation and its long-term public health impact’.

‘As part of the piece,’ she wrote, ‘I’m reporting on expert claims that improved respiratory health following the smoking ban may have helped reduce the severity of respiratory outcomes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘I’d welcome a response from Forest to include balance in the article.’

 

This was a new one to me so I looked up the article. It is unbelievably thin. The "expert claims" amount to this and nothing more...

 

Doc­tor Rachel O’Don­nell, Asso­ciate Pro­fessor at the Uni­versity of Stirl­ing’s Insti­tute for Social Mar­ket­ing and Health (ISMH), said that Covid out­comes could have been worse without the smoking ban legis­la­tion.

She said: “It’s not an unreas­on­able leap to sug­gest that as a nation we might well have seen a dif­fer­ent scen­ario in terms of the res­pir­at­ory impacts of the Covid-19 pan­demic without the smoke-free legis­la­tion. I think we could have seen a dif­fer­ent pic­ture.”

 

It's not an unreasonable leap to suggest that The Sunday Post will publish any old bollocks and present it as news. This hunch from an activist-academic at the Insti­tute for Social Mar­ket­ing and Health - a slush fund/lobby group founded by the lunatic Gerard Hastings - was reported under the headline: 'Stub­bing out the cigar­ettes helped hos­pit­als cope with pan­demic'!

 

Forest sent them a few quotes, as requested, and pointed out the now-established fact that smokers were less likely than nonsmokers to get Covid during the pandemic. They didn't print any of it.

 

 

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Economic nationalism in 'public health'

Some 'public health' academics have given a surprising endorsement to economic nationalism, as I discuss in The Critic...

 

After botching their modelling on minimum pricing, the Sheffield Addictions Research Group have turned their hands to economics. In a paper published in the journal Addiction this week, they accidentally invented mercantilism, the zero-sum misunderstanding of the economy that was discredited by Adam Smith 250 years ago. 

The authors say that the British government should do more to stop us spending money on “tobacco, gambling and sweets” because “shifting that spending toward domestic sectors like retail, recreation or trades, money stays within the UK for longer.” This, apparently, is the path to prosperity. 

By the same logic, the government should announce a crackdown on foreign holidays. That would undoubtedly make money “stay within the UK”, but it would come at the cost of preventing people from doing what they want to do. From the perspective of the Sheffield Addictions Research Group, preventing people from doing what they want to do is the whole point, but they can’t say that out loud so they have resorted to a weirdly jingoistic approach to economic planning. 

 

Read it all.

 

What I don't mention in the article is that although they reckon that less spending on gambling, tobacco and sweets will boost the UK economy, the reverse is true of alcohol. So enjoy the weekend in the pub with a clear, patriotic conscience.

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What the hell is Impact Unfiltered?

Last November, I reported on the EU’s plan to force member states to levy punitive taxes on e-cigarette fluid and nicotine pouches. The European Commission launched a public consultation which received 18,480 responses, overwhelmingly from consumers who were against. Having lost the numbers game, anti-nicotine NGOs went running to Politico who published an article claiming that the consultation had been “swamped with pro-industry feedback”. Citing an unpublished analysis from a mysterious new “tobacco control consultancy” called Impact Unfiltered, it alleged that “thousands of the posts use terms created only by the [tobacco] sector”, including the phrases “harm reduction” and “illicit trade”.

As I noted at the time, Impact Unfiltered is an offshoot of the smugly named School for Moral Ambition which is run by the equally smug left-wing polemicist Rutger Bregman who inexplicably gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures last year. Neither organisation is on the EU’s Transparency Register, but Impact Unfiltered only seems to have two employees and they are both graduates of the School for Moral Ambition’s “Tobacco Free Future” internship courtesy of money from the fanatical anti-nicotine billionaire Michael Bloomberg via two of his many front groups.

Read the rest at The Critic.

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Minimum pricing in Wales - a textbook example of policy failure

As in Scotland, minimum pricing in Wales had a sunset clause so it could be repealed if it didn't work. As in Scotland, it didn't work but the minimum price has not only been kept, it has been increased. 

I can only assume that the journalists who wrote this for the BBC had a wry smile on their face when they filed it... 

 

Independent research commissioned by the Welsh government suggests the policy could prevent more than 900 alcohol-related deaths over 20 years and reduce the number of "harmful drinkers" by nearly 5,000.

The policy was introduced in Wales in 2020 and the price increase follows a public consultation.

Public Health Wales figures show between 2019 and 2023 there was a rise of more than 50% in alcohol-related deaths.

 

Great success!

 

The "independent research" comes from - you guessed it! - the guys at Sheffield University who always get these lucrative commissions. I recently wrote about them here.

 

And I wrote about the failure of minimum pricing in Wales, which has seen the biggest increase in alcohol-specific deaths of any part of the UK since 2020, here.

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Drink beer, smoke tabs

Studies like this are so contrary to 'public health' dogma that it's amazing that they get published at all these days. But every now and then someone has the balls to do it.

 

Impact of Alcohol Intake on Parkinson's Disease Risk and Progression: A Systematic Review and Dose–Response Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies

 

Spoiler: it's good news for drinkers. And although the title of the systematic review doesn't mention them, it's even better news for smokers.

 

One reason why smoking isn't in the title may be that the protective effect of smoking really isn't in any doubt. As a 2024 study said: "The link between smoking and a lower risk of Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the strongest environmental or lifestyle associations in neuroepidemiology." The only question is about the biological mechanism (it doesn't seem to be nicotine).

 

The new study is equally unequivocal...

 

The association between alcohol consumption and Parkinson's disease (PD) risk remains unclear, whereas smoking has an inverse relationship with the disease.

 

The authors looked at the entire scientific literature on alcohol and PD and found that... 

 

Using abstainers as the reference group, a pooled analysis showed a significant inverse association between total alcohol consumption and PD risk (RR = −0.45, 95% CI −0.58 to −0.32, I² = 50%, P = 0.739).

 

That's a 55% reduction in risk, but don't drink too little because... 

 

Sääksjärvi et al. reported that light drinkers (<5 g/day) had an increased PD risk compared with non-drinkers (RR 1.81, 95% CI 1.12–2.93), indicating that former or low-level alcohol intake may not offer protection, or that early disease symptoms lead to reduced alcohol consumption. 

 

Unsurprisingly, Mendelian Randomisation has been used a couple of times in the hope of erasing these findings. Those two studies found "inconsistent results" (surprise, surprise) but one of them found a protective effect from genetically-predicted alcohol consumption and both of them found a protective effect from genetically-predicted smoking. 

  

So far these results are most satisfactory.  

 

Compared with non-drinkers, protective associations were observed in both men and women across all consumption levels.

 

Happy days. And it gets better...

 

Using non-drinkers as a reference, the lowest risk was found among ever-smokers who drank alcohol (LRR = −0.37, 95% CI −0.54 to −0.20), suggesting an additive protective effect. 

...Although the inverse association between smoking and PD risk is well established, few previous meta-analyses have assessed the combined or interactive effects of alcohol consumption and smoking. In contrast, our review included two prospective cohort studies that evaluated joint exposure. Both studies consistently reported the lowest PD risk among participants who both drank alcohol and smoked, suggesting a potential additive or synergistic effect of these habits.

 

So if you want to avoid Parkinson's Disease, smoking will help enormously but you'll also want to drink alcohol, and plenty of it.

 

That, surprisingly, is not the authors' conclusion.

 

Neither alcohol consumption nor smoking can be recommended for PD prevention because of their established overall health risks.

 

But that's just their opinion. 

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Money for almost nothing

Last week I wrote for The Critic about the Sheffield University alcohol research group continuing to get government grants rolling in despite having been wrong about everything for the best part of 20 years. I also wrote for the Spectator about the deranged war on non-alcoholic drinks by people who supposedly want us to drink less alcohol.

These two themes converged when I saw this article in the BMJ by Sheffield’s John Holmes - who is now a “professor of alcohol policy” - and three like-minded souls. It is titled ‘How should public health respond to rise of alcohol-free and low alcohol drinks?’, to which the answer should be either ‘nothing’ or ‘throw a little party’. Instead, the four amigos - who think they represent ‘public health’ - drone on at great length about the trivial concerns of pointless academics.

 

Read the rest on my Substack. 

 

 

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Selling zero-alcohol drinks to kids

Labour is weighing up a crackdown on people under 18 buying ‘no and low-alcohol’ drinks. On current form, this means Keir Starmer’s government will launch a public consultation, commit itself to a ban, endure weeks of mockery and abuse from the public and then perform a humiliating U-turn. But when the inevitable climbdown comes, what will be the main reason? Let us consider the options.

Firstly, it is impractical. Where do zero-alcohol drinks end and soft drinks begin? The very definition of a soft drink is that it has no alcohol. Assuming that the government doesn’t want to ban teenagers from buying Fanta and Pepsi Max, it is going to have to make a legal distinction between a non-alcoholic drink and a soft drink. It could do this on the basis of branding, but if a non-alcoholic beer removes the word ‘beer’ and calls itself a soda, what is the government going to do about it? Conversely, what if a company decides to call its brand of apple juice a non-alcoholic cider?

Kids can buy drinks that have up to 0.5 per cent ABV. One option is for the government to drop this limit to zero. But there is a reason the current limit is 0.5 per cent. Sugars in soft drinks can ferment slightly, meaning that they might contain minute traces of alcohol; less than 0.1 per cent, perhaps, but not nothing. Some fruit juices can contain up to 0.5 per cent alcohol. Even ripe bananas are slightly alcoholic because natural fermentation converts sugars to ethanol.

 

Read the rest at the Spectator. 

 

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