Taxi for the gateway theory

New smoking prevalence data were published today and it was egg on face time again for the anti-vaping alarmists.

Britain's smoking rate fell by 1.7 percentage points between 2015 and 2016 and has fallen by 4.3 percentage points since vaping went mainstream in 2012. All that talk about the 'gateway effect' is looking decidedly stupid now. Taxi for Capewell and McKee please!

As this graph shows, the smoking rate was flatlining between 2007 and 2012 when ASH's neo-prohibitionist efforts were in full effect. Since then, ASH have been mainly lobbying for plain packaging, a policy that came into force this year and isn't covered by the latest ONS data. The only anti-smoking law of any note since 2012 was the display ban and that wasn't introduced until 2015. Whereas government coercion failed to reduce the smoking rate, vaping in a free market worked.

To put it another way, the smoking rate fell at an average rate of 0.1% in the five years after the smoking ban. Since 2012, it has fallen at more than 1.0% a year. Taxi for Arnott!

To put it still another way, between 2013 and 2016 the UK had vaping but did not have plain packaging and the smoking rate fell by 3.1 percentage points. In Australia, which had plain packaging but did not have vaping, the smoking rate fell by 0.6 percentage points. In fact, as the Australian government recently admitted, 'the daily smoking rate did not significantly decline' at all between 2013 and 2016. Taxi for Chapman!

Meanwhile in the good ol' US of A, new smoking figures for school students were also been released today. Was there any sign of a gateway effect in the home of anti-vaping hysteria? Not at all. Cigarette smoking prevalence is down to just 8 per cent among high school students. In 2011, the rate was 16 per cent.

That's right, the smoking rate has halved in five years 'despite' (ie. because of) e-cigarette use rocketing up. This news comes less than six months after Stanton Glantz claimed that the smoking rate among school kids is not falling faster than it did before and said:

“E-cigarettes are encouraging – not discouraging – youth to smoke and to consume nicotine, and are expanding the tobacco market.”

Taxi for Stan please!

Enough time has passed for us to close the book on the gateway hypothesis. If 'public health' was an honest enterprise, the people responsible would resign, or at least apologise. Let's not forget that they wanted to ban e-cigarettes - and probably still do.

There will be no resignations, of course. The denial and quack science will continue, but it is getting ever more more difficult to maintain this absurd scare story.