Spurious correlation news

The "gateway" theory of vaping is based on the observation that teenagers who have ever vaped are more likely to smoke than teenagers who have never vaped. I have often pointed out that teenagers who have ever vaped are more likely to have done lots of things that never-vaping teenagers have done, because they are different people. That doesn't mean that one behaviour causes another.

In 2018, for example, I wrote...

 

Since marijuana has never killed anyone, supporters of the war on drugs resort to claims about it being a gateway to heroin. E-cigarettes have never killed anyone either and so anti-nicotine extremists resort to claims about vaping leading to smoking.

In both cases, correlations can be found, but it is fairly obvious that they are not causal. Teenagers who vape are more likely to smoke, but they are also more likely to ride motorcycles, watch X-rated movies and have unsafe sex. They are also more likely to smoke cannabis, for that matter, but that doesn’t mean that vaping leads to any of these behaviours, nor would they be less likely to engage in them if vaping didn’t exist.

 

In an IEA report the previous year, I had written... 

 

Indeed, one of the studies in the Soneji review found that e-cigarette users were not only more likely to smoke cigarettes but were more likely to smoke marijuana (Unger et al. 2016). It would not be surprising to find that they are also more likely to drink alcohol and have unprotected sex, but it would be a stretch to claim that these risky activities are somehow caused by their earlier experiments with vaping.

 

And only last month I made the same point in relation to zero-alcohol beer...

 

Teenagers who like the idea of drinking non-alcoholic beer are presumably more likely to be interested in drinking real beer in the same way that risk-taking teenagers who are drawn to vaping, motorcycling and unprotected sex are more likely to be interested in smoking and illegal drugs. This is known as a ‘common liability’ and it could produce a statistical correlation between non-alcoholic beer consumption and actual beer consumption, but it would not be serious evidence of cause and effect, i.e. a ‘gateway’.

 

The example of vaping as a gateway to unprotected sex is a good way of illustrating spurious correlations. There is no plausible mechanism for vaping - or any form of nicotine use - to cause people to have unsafe sex. 

 

So it was with grim amusement that I saw that some clown in (where else?) Australia takes these correlations seriously.

 

Emergency medicine expert Professor Brian Burns said the anti-vaping program was vital to help curb vaping among youth given it was a gateway to cigarette smoking and high-risk behaviours. 

“Studies have shown that engaging in unsafe sex, other substance abuse, drink driving, texting while driving and driving without a seatbelt are associated with increased e-cigarette use among youth,” he said.

“Sensation seeking – the desire to experience novel sensations and the willingness to take risks is also associated with e-cigarette use. These activities can result in severe physical injury and harm.”

 

This chump also claims that vaping causes "asthma attacks", "inflamed or collapsed lungs", "severe respiratory illness", "seizures" and "cardiovascular system shutdown". Australia really is a basket case.

 

The article is headlined 'World-first anti-vaping program rolled out to tackle teen nicotine addiction crisis'. Perhaps they should try banning e-cigarettes, lol.

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Impact Assessment for vape ban doesn't assess the impact

I've been reading about the Impact Assessment for the proposed vaping ban. It is very poor and quite weird. It doesn't seem to know what the ban is supposed to achieve and certainly doesn't seem confident that it will achieve anything. I've written about it for The Critic...

 

Vapers going back to smoking is by far the most likely consequence of the vaping ban, especially since it will be accompanied by a tax on e-cigarettes that will double the cost of vaping, and the possibility of a ban on various flavours. And for what? DHSC admit in the Impact Assessment that “we cannot conclusively say whether these policy options will impact smoking, heated tobacco product, or vaping prevalence or consumption, and therefore whether there will be an improvement on health.” It puts the cost of the various new restrictions at £531.8 million, mostly from businesses having to put up new signs and train employees, while the benefits are priced at £0 because DHSC have no idea what the consequences will be. I never thought I’d say this about a government department, but you have to admire their honesty.

 

Do go read it all.

 

I could have written much more about this, and probably will, but here's an example of the barrel scraping that went on. Unable to find an example of non-trivial harm from vaping, the authors turn to an unpublished document from Canada...

 

In the Government of Canada regulatory impact analysis statement for the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act it was assumed that the mortality and morbidity risks associated with vaping are 20% of the mortality and morbidity impacts of cigarettes. This assumption was developed with members of an expert panel composed of five academics in tobacco control.

 

Who cares? Canadian health experts reckon it's dangerous to have more than two alcoholic drinks a week. No one knows what this piece of paper written in 2017 said and it doesn't matter. I've never even heard anyone clam that vaping is only 80% safer than smoking before. We have our own estimate from UK experts and they all say vaping is more than 95% safer. And they published their work so everyone can read it. 

 

Taking the evidence that each person who does not take up smoking gains 1.0 QALY, we could therefore estimate the number of lifeyears gained for each young person that does not take up vaping to be 0.2, or £14,000 in monetary terms. Additionally, taking the evidence that each person who quits smoking is equivalent to 0.74 QALYs, we could therefore estimate the number of life years gained for each person that quits vaping to be 0.148, or £10,000 in monetary terms.

 

You could but it would be mental. 

 

Fortunately, DHSC resisted the urge to quantify the "benefits" of people quitting smoking in this way, or at all. But nor did they quantify the costs of people quitting vaping to start smoking. Despite working on this since October, the Impact Assessment is a shambles.

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The rise and fall of British gambling

Most people know that the number of drinkers and smokers is in decline in the UK, but you might be surprised to hear that the same is true of gamblers. For the first time since the early 1990s, gamblers are in the minority with only 48% of English adults engaging in any gambling activity in the past year.

This is largely because the National Lottery has become less popular. Only 31% of adults in England bought a lottery ticket in 2024, down from 65% in 1999. But fewer people are participating in non-lottery gambling too. As the graph below shows, participation in non-lottery gambling has been in decline for well over a decade. These games are now played by a smaller proportion of the population than in the early 1990s.

 

Read the rest at IEA Insider. 

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Save vaping

I wrote about how the government is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with its Tobacco and Vapes Bill last week.

 

The most notorious — and risible — part of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is the generational ban on tobacco sales which will effectively raise the smoking age by a year every year. This will do nothing for people who have been smoking for decades and whose health is most at risk. But the Bill also gives unlimited “Henry VIII powers” to the Health Secretary to regulate e-cigarette flavours, packaging and advertising, as well as controlling where people can legally vape. The government has said that it plans to use these powers as soon as it gets them and since the Health Secretary is Wes “tonne of bricks” Streeting, it is unlikely to use them wisely.

This is where the Tobacco and Vapes Bill stops being merely stupid and illiberal and becomes counter-productive even on its own terms. There is strong evidence from other countries that bans on vape flavours, e-cigarette advertising and other anti-vaping policies lead to increased cigarette sales and higher smoking rates. Since cigarettes and e-cigarettes are direct substitutes for one another, this is hardly surprising. Vape taxes undoubtedly have the effect of boosting the smoking rate and yet a punitive tax on e-cigarettes will be introduced in October. All this is happening at a time when the black market in tobacco is exploding and the de facto price of a pack of cigarettes is five pounds. 

 

No sooner had this gone online at The Critic than the government had announced that it intends to ban vaping everywhere that smoking is banned. The insane whirlwind of prohibitionism never lets up. 

 

You'll be hearing much more from me about this in the coming weeks, but I've already said a few words on my Substack.

 

I am genuinely puzzled why the government is picking a fight over this, especially when their main political threat is Reform. Do they even know themselves? The way it has been announced makes it seem like they’re almost embarrassed about it. Are they hoping to do it without anyone noticing (it will not require primary legislation once the Tobacco and Vapes Bill becomes law). There are more than five million vapers in the UK and I hope they/we put up one hell of a fight. 

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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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