Last week, wrinkly rocker Simon Chapman applied himself to picking holes in my report about plain packaging. Having given due thought to the possibility that standardising the colour, shape and size of cigarette packs might just make life easier for those who counterfeit cigarettes, Chapman came back with this killer argument....
The evidence he presents is a short video clip in which an undercover journalist shows a Hong Kong counterfeiter a pack of Winfield Lights and asks him: "How close can you get to that?" The counterfeiter replies "100%". That's it. He doesn't say it's "100% easy" (even if he had, it would be a meaningless statement.) He certainly doesn't say that counterfeiting cigarette packs couldn't be made any easier. He just says that perfect replication is, in his opinion, possible.
For Chapman, however, this statement indicates that there is a scientifically provable ranking of easiness and that counterfeiting elaborate cigarette packaging is right at the top of it. Perhaps it looks something like this...
As you can see from the graph, counterfeiting cigarettes is "100% easy". QED, there are no economies that can be made. It is literally the easiest thing in the whole world. My six month old daughter has been doing it for ages. I've counterfeited several packs whilst writing this.
Spot the logical flaw? Of course you do, and I put all this down to the early onset of senility that comes from of a life-time of wowserism and paranoia, but Chapman evidently thinks that he really has found a dazzling argument because he has pestered me about it twice since, most recently...
OK Simon, especially for you...
There isn't a Scale of Easiness that goes from 0% to 100%, and even if there was, it wouldn't be measured by the bravado of organised criminals. You have taken one idea— that it is possible to replicate a product perfectly—and confused it with a wholly different idea: that the product can be replicated with perfect ease. Having made that logical error, you then assert that it is impossible to replicate the product more easily.
That is manifestly untrue. Counterfeiting cigarettes is a complex process with significant barriers to entry and relatively high start-up costs. By asserting that barriers to entry could never be lowered, costs could never be cut, and the process could never be made more convenient or accessible, you make an absurd statement.
As with all propagandists, it is difficult to know whether Chapman is deliberately trying to mislead or is genuinely confused. If he is sincere, it demonstrates something that is common amongst cranks and conspiracy theorists. The guy in the video didn't say what Chapman wanted him to say so he changed the guy's words around in his head. He then made a basic error of logic which led to a patently ridiculous conclusion and yet, because he cannot see where his thought process went wrong—and because the conclusion matches what he wants to believe—he incorporates it into his dogma as if it were fact. Whereas other people would regard an absurd logical outcome to be the result of absurd logic, he treats the absurd as if it were rational and dismisses logic as "alchemy".
Simon Chapman edited the journal Tobacco Control for seventeen years.
