The World Conference on Tobacco or Prohibition

No matter how low the bar of reason and integrity is set, the anti-smoking racket finds ways to limbo dance beneath it. This week, I have been following the #WCTOH2018 hashtag in awe. There is no shortage of charlatans and spivs in the anti-drink, anti-soda and anti-food cults, but for shameless hypocrisy and junk science, no one can touch the anti-smoking lobby.

WCTOH is the World Conference on Tobacco or Health. If memory serves, it has been taking place since 1967 and was a more or less serious science conference until around 1983 when the prohibitionists began to take over (see my book Velvet Glove, Iron Fist for details). It is now a playground for fanatics and tax spongers. Britain was well represented, with various activist-academics running up a quarter of a million pound bill for the taxpayer to pick up.

After a decade writing about this issue, I shouldn't be surprised by the pitiful standard of the rhetoric but it just keeps getting worse. Consumers are never mentioned except, perhaps, as victims of Big Tobacco. Ridiculous assertions abound, such as the claim that cigarette taxes were 'once thought regressive' but are no longer because, er, it doesn't help the cause to admit it.

#WCTOH2018 closing panel. Dr. Frank Chaloupka points out that tobacco taxes, once thought regressive and most harmful to the poor, are actually progressive, yielding health savings that turn into wage/income increases. pic.twitter.com/Y4FFhIoILb

— Whitney Magendie (@WhitneyMagendie) March 9, 2018

As for the science behind reduced-harm claims of new products, the response of the tobacco control cult is to simply ignore it.

No engagement on science allowed. If I wasn't here, I'd assume this was a parody. #WCTOH2018 pic.twitter.com/Lll3ZqQukH

— Gregory Conley (@GregTHR) March 7, 2018

Perhaps my favourite non-argument of the week was a 'debunking' of the Nanny State Index (which I edit). The Index is only a league table of policies that 'public health' people lobby for so they should be proud if their country is at the top, but a Finnish 'public health' professional gave a whole presentation about it, including the killer argument that the Index is 'rubbish'. Alas, this was also the only argument.

How old are these people?

The most striking aspect of this year's event was how much of it was devoted to in-fighting and the preservation of funding. The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, funded by Philip Morris, has a billion dollars of research funding which the tobakko kontrol establishment can't access because it would blacken their names in the eyes of their colleagues. This is driving them (even more) mad and a lot of energy has been expended turning their own friend Derek Yach into a non-person.

Then there are e-cigarettes. Tobacco control is explicitly morphing into nicotine control. The target is almost irrelevant. The key word is control and the emergence of a viable, low risk alternative for cigarettes is an existential threat to their racket. The same goes for snus. Naturally, therefore, the speakers at this (Pfizer-funded) conference are opposed to harm reduction and use classic merchant-of-doubt tactics to suppress them (or, in the case of snus in the EU, to keep it suppressed).

They are quite prepared to resort to blatant lies to this end...

So the cunning tobacco industry touts #ecigs as vaping but it's not a fun anymore. #Teenagers who smoke #ecigarettes are poisoning their bodies with the same chemicals present in traditional #tobacco #cigarettes, finds a research https://t.co/4V7sGyIfiq @WCTOH2018 #WCTOH2018

— Rahul Dwivedi (@rahuldwived85) March 9, 2018

#Smokeless tobacco use is a complex public health globally. Smokeless tobacco is highly addictive. Smokeless tobacco is not a less harmful alternative to cigarettes. @WCTOH2018 #WCTOH2018

— Tobacco Free Finland (@TobaccoFreeFin) March 9, 2018

Carl Phillips and Dick Puddlecote have covered some of the lowlights from this event so I won't go through them all, suffice to say that rank hypocrisy is a running theme, from demanding 'nothing about us without us' to complaining about the WHO shutting out civil society.

Shutting people out is what the WHO does, of course, as we shall doubtless see again in Geneva this October. This week, the corrupt WHO capitulated to demands from China to exclude delegates from Taiwan. Tobacco controllers who rightly described this as an outrage seem to have no problem with the press and public being kicked out of the COP meetings every two years, just as those who 'demand nothing about us without us' never ask smokers what they think about being under their 'control'.

That brings us to smoking, which is supposed to be reason for the conference's existence. After years of denial, the prohibitionists are finally owning up to being prohibitionists. There was even an official declaration.

You might think that the experience of alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs would make 'experts' wary of endorsing a ban on a product consumed by a billion people. But according to Tobacco Control's news editor, there is nothing to worry about:

If smokers had any doubts about what these people have in store for them, an official declaration at the world's foremost tobacco control conference to ban the sale of cigarettes should put an end to them.

Let's not mince words any more. These people are not the tobacco control lobby and they are certainly not public health professionals. They are prohibitionists and should only be described as such.