Activist-academia

I talk a lot about "activist-academics", but what other word can you use when a professor is literally recruiting young people, training them in the ways of temperance and teaching them how to lobby politicians?

 

High School Students Learn Activism and Policymaking through SPH Initiative 

David Jernigan leads the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a coalition of school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he cofounded to prepare young people to address pressing issues.

 

This guy has got 60 Massachusetts high schoolers "to share data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers."

 

In the three months before the visit, Jernigan, professor of health law, policy, and management at BU’s School of Public Health, drilled them in democracy and alcohol policy via Zoom and an in-person training at BU, assisted by Hannah Martuscello (SPH’26). 

It’s the second year that Jernigan has recruited young activists from the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a statewide coalition of school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he cofounded.  

 

How very academic. 

 

David Jernigan is a sociologist working at Boston University School of Public Health. He has over 200 publications to his name, mostly pushing neo-temperance policies. Examples of his efforts to extend the field of human knowledge include Alcohol Problems and Policies: the States Have the Power, But Will They Use It?, Strengthening Advocacy Skills for Public Health Leaders, and Media advocacy: lessons from community experiences.

 

“I grew up steeped in the Christianity of witness to injustice,” he says. “And the more I got into alcohol research, the more obvious it was to me: this is a huge injustice that’s being perpetrated.” 

 

In 2000, he became friends with Derek Rutherford who took the pledge at the age of 9 and has said: "In my youth I had three loves: the temperance movement; the church, because I was also an active member of the Baptist Church in Easington; and the Labour Party."

 

Rutherford went on to set up neo-temperance organisations all over the world, including Eurocare and the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance (Jernigan is on the board of the latter) and he was chairman of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Alcohol Studies. 

In a video for the Institute of Alcohol Studies (the successor to the UK Temperance Alliance), Jernigan uses rhetoric straight from the anti-tobacco playbook.

    

"When you have a product that kills three million people a year worldwide, is carcinogenic and is associated with more than 200 disease and injury conditions, you need to do a lot of marketing."

 

Although delivered with a self-satisfied smile, this is nonsense to anybody who gives it more than two seconds thought. Alcohol has been widely consumed for thousands of years, long before the advent of marketing, and it continues to be widely consumed in countries that ban alcohol marketing today. 

Despite being a religiously inspired temperance advocate who doesn't understand the market he has spent his career writing about, Jernigan has been an advisor to the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) and was the principal author of WHO’s first Global Status Report on Alcohol and Global Status Report on Alcohol and Youth.

And now he is using children "to share data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers". Many such cases.

    

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Vaping and lung cancer

A study was published this week claiming that vaping causes lung cancer. The journal has helpfully published the peer review comments. One reviewer provided a strong reason why the researchers had drawn the wrong conclusion from the data, but the study was published anyway. 

Read all about it on my Substack. 

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Game over for Australia

Incredible scenes in Australia where illicit sales officially now make up 80% of the tobacco market. I wrote about this for The Critic...

 

The growth of the black market could have been prevented if the government had listened to economists, historians and criminologists. Instead, they fell under the spell of dogmatic fanatics masquerading as “public health” experts. As predictable as this fiasco was, the statistics in the ABS report are still breathtaking. The black market share of the tobacco trade went from 12 per cent in 2017 to 26 per cent in 2020 and then exploded after the pandemic from 40 per cent in 2022 to 80.6 per cent in 2025. In the same period, the quantity of nicotine consumed in the country rose by almost 40 per cent. The price of legal cigarettes nearly tripled between 2016 and 2025 while tobacco duty revenue more than halved. 

 

And on my Substack...

 

The blame lies squarely on the charlatans masquerading as public health experts who opposed the legalisation of vapes and pushed for ever higher tobacco taxes while scoffing at the idea that any of the obvious unintended consequences would come to pass.

In a sensible country, these people would have gone into hiding to live the rest of their lives in disgrace.

 

 

 

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Extended Producer Responsibility, more government failure

Extended Producer Responsibility is a boring name for a boring regulation, but it is worth understanding if you want to see how the government squeezes the life out of British industry and contributes to the cost of living “crisis”. 

The story begins, as such stories often do, with Theresa May and Michael Gove. After watching too many David Attenborough documentaries, Gove became obsessed with recycling. His first idea was to introduce a bottle deposit return scheme, which would have had huge operational costs and been largely pointless since everybody has a recycling bin at home. His second idea was Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which he said would “cement our place as a world leader in resource efficiency” by taxing businesses for every tonne of packaging they produce, on the basis that “the polluter pays”. Seven years and four Prime Ministers later, EPR came into force last April.

The logic of EPR is not entirely without merit. A company that produces packaging is not actually a “polluter” — although the end user might be — but there is an argument for making companies internalise the costs of recycling the packaging they produce. In effect, the policy takes billions of pounds from manufacturing firms and gives it to local authorities to spend on recycling and landfill.

The problem is one that is often overlooked by politicians. Since businesses get their money from consumers, an increase in costs to business is bound to lead to an increase in prices. Since it is consumers who pay the higher prices, the real question is whether it is better for recycling of widely used packaging to be paid for by individuals as taxpayers or by individuals as shoppers. 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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The anti-gambling slush fund

I said that the gambling levy would provide a slush fund for spongers and activists, and it has.

 

Dozens of pieces of research have already been commissioned. Since many social scientists specialise in woke postmodern guff, that kind of thing is well represented. Projects include “Intersectionality in gambling related harm” (£48,670), “Menstrual change and gambling: a hybrid review” (£51,092) and “A rapid evidence review of gambling harms in ethnic and faith minority communities” (£50,420). A review into “gambling and its spatial footprint” (£51,088) is being led by an economist who only seems to have taken an interest in gambling in 2024 when he received funding to conduct a study which came to the earth-shattering conclusion that “people living in close proximity to gambling establishments are more likely to visit in person”. 

A study of the “aetiology and treatment of disordered gambling” (£164,481) is being led by a psychologist who has been publishing gambling research for years, which sounds promising until you see that the first line of his proposal says: “Gambling is acknowledged as a mental health disorder.” It is not, but such claims will serve him well in “public health” where the distinction between gambling and problem gambling is being deliberately erased. A study about gambling and suicide is being led by an academic who is an expert on suicide but has never published anything about gambling. Her proposal begins with the nonsensical claim that “almost half of adults have gambled within the past four weeks and around 40% within the last year” before claiming that the gambling industry in Britain is expanding (it is shrinking) and that rates of problem gambling have “escalated” (they have not).

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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Introducing Action on Gambling

Action on Smoking and Health's former CEO Deborah Arnott famously insisted that...

 

"the 'domino theory' i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false." 

 

As a staunch denier of the slippery slope, it must have pained her when Consensus Action on Salt and Health was set up as a tribute act to her organisation, later followed by Action on Sugar. 

 

Another new campaign group has recently been moulded in ASH's image. Action on Gambling is now a thing. Amongst their members are the Labour MP Beccy Cooper, whom I wrote about two weeks ago. Her bio reads:

 

As a public health doctor Beccy has been a leading proponent of stricter regulations on the tobacco industry – a skill set she is putting to work to curb the harm caused by gambling. 

 

Even ASH have stopped pretending that the slippery slope isn't real. The webpage that gave us Arnott's immortal quote about the domino theory has been taken offline and their new CEO, Hazel Cheeseman, has some warm words for Action on Gambling...

 

 

We've gone beyond denying the slippery slope now, haven't we? We are now at the "Of course there's a slippery slope, what are you going to do about it?" stage.

ASH always denied being prohibitionists too, but we now know for a fact that they were lying. 

 

So there's a slippery slope and it ends up with prohibition if we let them. This is no longer up for debate. The anti-gambling people will claim that they don't want to ban gambling and the anti-alcohol people will claim that they don't want to ban alcohol. They will say whatever they have to say to get public support, but they are explicitly following the anti-tobacco blueprint that ends with prohibition. 

 

Don't get fooled again.

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Australia's tobacco tax disaster

I knew things were bad in Australia but this graph really show how dramatically the black market has grown since the tobacco turf war took off in 2023.

 

The green and yellow lines show the government's projections from the last few years. Each time, the government forecasts that revenues will flatten out somewhat but they just keep plummeting. It won't be long before the Australian state is spending more on enforcement than it gets in tobacco duty!

What a fiasco. It's great that Simon Chapman has lived long enough for him to see it happen.

 h/t Ed Jegaothy

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