Tobacco and Vapes Bill - another stitch up

Desperate to rush the Tobacco and Vapes Bill through Parliament before anyone can think about it too carefully, the government is taking it to the committee stage next week. There is no chance of anyone asking awkward questions because none of the 17 MPs on the committee voted against it. 

As Guido reports...

 

16 of the 17 committee members voted for the bill and the one who didn’t, Labour MP Mary Kelly Foy, is vice-chairman of the APPG on Smoking and Health which has been pushing the ban constantly. Almost a quarter of the committee members are from the APPG, which is run by the anti-smoking lobby group ASH. Sorry news for MPs who hoped amendments might be considered fairly…

Simon Clark, director of smokers’ rights group Forest tells Guido: “Committees don’t need to be balanced but this is such an obvious stitch-up it’s embarrassing. The make-up of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill Committee is effectively a f*ck you to every MP who voted against the Bill, and every member of the public who opposes the generational smoking ban.” It wouldn’t be the first time the government has deployed smoke and mirrors for this bill…

 

Four of the 17 MPs are on ASH's APPG (which was originally called the All-Party Group on Action on Smoking and Health), including its chairman Bob Blackman. I can only assume that Mary Kelly Foy didn't vote for the Bill because she wasn't in London at the time.

This is obviously a stitch up. Everyone knows the Bill is going to be rammed through on a tide of virtue-signalling from political pygmies, but they don't need to make it this obvious. Is the government so fearful of opposition that it won't allow a single dissenting or sceptical voice?

We shall see who gives oral evidence next week. I would guess it'll be Debs from ASH plus someone from the Department of Health, a local public health director and one of the other sockpuppet NGOs like FRESH. 

The House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee recently held its 'evidence sessions' and kicked off with Chris van Tulleken, Henry Dimbleby and Tim Spector, all of whom will be familiar with anyone who is up to speed with modern diet entrepreneurs. Also in the first sessions were Katharine Jenner (Food Foundation/Action on Sugar), Anna Taylor (Obesity Health Alliance), Fran Bernhard (Sustain), Rob Percival (Soil Association) and a host of lesser known academics whose bias is obvious from their tweets, such as...

Nikita Sinclair (Imperial College)

Is it fair for the largest food industry players to make most of their money selling cheap, unhealthy food - with big advertising budgets behind these sales often seemingly targeting children and young people? @BiteBack2030 youth movement don’t think so & neither do I! https://t.co/jy8gHgXbs2

— Nikita Sinclair (@nikitasinclair) February 23, 2024

 

Wendy Wills (University of Hertfordshire)

Say no to food industry sponsorship. http://t.co/mHppnFDZ3p

— Professor Wendy Wills (@Wendy_J_Wills) May 20, 2014

 

Amelia A Lake, (Teesside University)

The interlocking directorate smoking industry & food industry - highlighted by @ModiMwatsama #cancerpreventiondiet #cancerprevention @CRUKresearch pic.twitter.com/qdurXIAhEi

— Prof Amelia A Lake (@Lakenutrition) December 4, 2018

 

The difference is that the House of Lords committee is essentially a vanity project in the second chamber whereas the Tobacco and Vapes Bill committee is responsible for crafting good legislation. What a joke.

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More useless alcohol modelling

The 'public health' lobby has been spinning plates this week, trying to exploit the UK's rise in alcohol-specific deaths while claiming that minimum pricing is saving lives. Meanwhile, Colin Angus has admitted that a model he produced in 2022 completely failed to predict what was about to happen.

I've written about all this for The Critic...

 

The increase in deaths in 2022 is more of a puzzle. Although there were no Covid restrictions, higher rates of consumption among some drinkers continued. There is some evidence that the figure for 2023 will be lower, but there is no sign of it coming down to pre-Covid levels. The number of people drinking a dangerous amount of alcohol (not just exceeding the Chief Medical Officer’s ridiculous guidelines, but actually drinking more than is good for them) is still higher than in 2019.

The neo-temperance lobby has reacted in predictable fashion. Richard Piper, CEO of Alcohol Change UK, called for “proper regulation of alcohol marketing, clearer alcohol labelling, and a minimum price for a unit of alcohol”. In Scotland, where the alcohol-specific death rate is 56 per cent higher than in England, the state-funded pressure group Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems demanded “a package of measures which tackle pricing, marketing and availability of alcohol on a population-wide scale”. 

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You can’t blame campaigners for not letting a crisis go to waste, but there are some glaring problems with both the diagnosis and the prescription here.

Firstly, Scotland already has a minimum price for alcohol...

 

An interesting sidenote is that Angus's model assumed that alcohol consumption rose during the pandemic. In fact, it fell. So why did he think it had risen? Because the number of problem drinkers had risen. It's circular logic based on blind faith in the single distribution theory. He and his team then modelled every conceivable scenario, including everybody returning to their pre-pandemic levels of drinking, nobody returning to their pre-pandemic levels of drinking, everybody drinking more than they did in 2020 and everybody drinking less than they did in 2019. Every model has been shown to be completely, hopelessly wrong. The proverbial dart-throwing chimp could have done a better job.

 

This garbage was funded by the supposedly cash-strapped NHS. As I say in the article, what was the point? Even if its predictions had been accurate, it wouldn't have helped in any way.

Do read it all.

 

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Libertarian prohibitionists - you've heard it all now

I wasn't going to write about the tobacco ban again for a while, but the ludicrous spectacle of prohibitionists purporting to be champions of liberty has set me off. 

Their logic is that smoking is so addictive that it restricts freedom. They claim that smokers do not actually want to smoke, but were foolish enough to get hooked in childhood and are now unable to quit. And so, despite the evidence of your eyes and ears, it is the people who keep banning things who are standing up for freedom while libertarians support enslavement. 

This was the message of a slightly Orwellian editorial in The Times yesterday which explicitly described smoking as “enslavement” and described the right to smoke as “a fake freedom”. It was the message of Deborah Arnott, the CEO of the Department of Health’s sockpuppet pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), who said: “Smoking is not a free choice. It is an addiction.” And it was the message of public health minister Andrea Leadsom who told the House of Commons that “this is not about freedom to choose; it is about freedom from addiction.” The words ‘addiction’ and ‘addicted’ were mentioned 83 times in that parliamentary debate.

I have already conceded that giving up nicotine is more difficult than giving up cupcakes (although Chris van Tulleken may disagree). But the rhetoric around addiction this week has reached a different level. We have been told that smoking is not  only a difficult habit for some people to break, but is almost impossible, so much so that smokers “face a lifetime of addiction”, as Bob Blackman MP put it, and that while smokers might say that they want to purchase tobacco, they actually do not.

It is difficult to reconcile this with figures from the Office for National Statistics which show that 69 per cent of all the people in England who have ever smoked are now non-smokers. Andrea Leadsom is one of them. Despite claiming in her speech that people who take up smoking can look forward to “a life of addiction to nicotine”, she also mentioned that she gave up a 40-a-day habit when she was 21. Deborah Arnott is also an ex-smoker. She only gave up after she got the job at ASH. I suppose it wouldn’t have been a good look.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

 

Regarding that Orwellian Times editorial. Let's remember what they say about banning tobacco sales completely for when they inevitably support total prohibition in a few years' time. 

 

 

And let's give a shout out to Peter Hitchens who doesn't think nicotine (or anything else) is addictive, but wants to ban smoking anyway because he doesn't like it and he thinks he knows best. At least he's honest about it.

 

 

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A swift half with Adrian Chiles

You won't want to miss the new episode of The Swift Half in which I talk to broadcaster and Guardian super-columnist Adrian Chiles about drinking.

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The hazards of unopened cigarette packs

Proving that there is no end to 'public health' hysteria, some quackademics in South Korea are warning that unopened cigarette packs put nicotine into the atmosphere and need to be regulated. I wish I was making this up. See my Substack for more. 

 

Our findings indicate that packaged, unopened, and uncombusted cigarettes in cigarette racks at tobacco retailers emits airborne nicotine, which is a previously unrecognized source of nicotine exposure. This result has implications for policy considerations, such as the potential installation of ventilation systems on cigarette racks or the exploration of alternative packaging methods.

 

Also, check out the new episode of Last Orders.

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Sunak's legacy

Rishi Sunak wants tobacco prohibition it to be his legacy. As I say in Spiked, I hope that's what it becomes.

 

Today, MPs will vote on the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. The result is a foregone conclusion since Labour has promised to support it and their members will comfortably outnumber the handful of Conservative MPs who didn’t get into politics to ban things. The flagship policy in the bill is a ban on anyone born after 2008 from ever legally buying a tobacco product. This will gradually extend the war on drugs to include tobacco, but nearly everybody in Westminster seems to be relaxed about that. In an insult to the public’s intelligence that diminishes us all, the latest health secretary, Victoria Atkins, has claimed that Winston Churchill would approve of his party banning cigars (Churchill’s grandson disagrees).

After spending 14 years achieving so little, this Tory government is using its last few months in office rushing through a policy borrowed from the New Zealand Labour Party, one which the British Labour Party would otherwise push through parliament when it wins the next election. It all seems perverse. The ban will not have any effect until 2027 so there is no need for haste, but it is in keeping with the Tories’ longstanding approach of owning the lefties by introducing Labour policies before Labour gets the chance to do so itself.

 

Have a read.

 

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Tim Stockwell's relationship with evidence

Tim Stockwell, who has been running a one man crusade against the benefits of moderate drinking for 20 years, has been on a bit of a media tour recently. He got a feature in the New York Times two weeks ago and is currently in Scotland where he is gearing up for a talk at the Royal College of Physicians on Wednesday. The talk has been organised by the state-funded Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (SHAAP) and the anti-alcohol Institute of Alcohol Studies. As the Herald reports...

 

Prof Stockwell's talk in Edinburgh on Wednesday is also expected to coincide with MSPs voting on a motion to increase Scotland's minimum unit price (MUP) levy from 50 to 65 pence.

 

How fortuitous! 

Stockwell's longstanding approach has been to clog up the search engines with meta-analyses that either cherry-pick the data or retrospectively adjust it to diminish the benefits of moderate drinking - I wrote about his most recent effort last year. In an interview with the Herald this weekend, he was still banging on about the sick quitter hypothesis which has repeatedly been shown to not explain the alcohol J-Curve. 

He then turns to minimum pricing, which he keenly supports. You may recall that Stockwell conjured up some evidence for this policy back in the day, claiming that a 10% increase in the minimum price of alcohol in a Canadian province led to a 32% reduction in alcohol-related deaths. This would be a remarkably large effect if true but, as data from his own research group showed, it was not remotely true.

Stockwell's approach to matters related to alcohol is refreshingly simple. If he wants something to be true, he says it is true, regardless of what the evidence says. Since most journalists are not familiar with the evidence and trust anyone who sounds like they might be a doctor (Stockwell's degree was in psychology and philosophy), this is more effective than you might think.

For example, there is good evidence from both the official evaluation and independent research that minimum pricing in Scotland did not make heavy drinkers reduce their alcohol consumption. A study in BMJ Open found that the heaviest drinking 5% of men drank more after minimum pricing was introduced. Even the people at Sheffield University who did the modelling for minimum pricing in the first place had to admit that "the introduction of MUP in Scotland did not lead to a decline in the proportion of adult drinkers consuming alcohol at harmful levels".

 

Stockwell doesn't believe this therefore he says that it ain't so.

He said he is confident that MUP has made a difference to heavy drinkers, despite some surveys suggesting they had not cut down. 

He said: "If you look at total sales data: 50% of the alcohol sold is consumed by heavy drinkers.

"You don't get population level reductions - a 3% total reduction in consumption compared to England and Wales - unless heavy drinkers are cutting down. It's mathematically impossible."

 

I don't wish to insult your intelligence, dear reader, but it is definitely not mathematically impossible.  

 

"All the surveys done, however good they seem, are observational studies - not control studies."

Control studies? Does he mean randomised controlled trials? How could you even design an RCT to measure this? Nearly everything we know about the risks of drinking comes from observational studies. Isn't it funny how Stockwell accepts these when they show risks but not benefits and demands an impossible burden of proof when the results don't suit his agenda.

"So it really has worked, especially in people with heavy alcohol use."

 

OK, bud.

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The Tobacco and Vapes Bill

The Impact Assessment for the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is laughable, relying on nonsense figures from ASH and ignoring the impact on the illicit trade. I've written about it for The Critic where I also ask for an ethical justification for stopping informed adults engaging in risky but self-regarding behaviour.

 

Last week, the Regulatory Policy Committee gave its verdict on the Impact Assessment. It expressed concern about the “over-reliance on evidence from ASH” and spotted the obvious problem that ASH’s productivity estimates “do not control for other factors that may affect a person’s earnings”. It suggested rethinking the assumption that the prohibition was “unlikely to have substantial impacts on tourism” since smokers may be reluctant to visit a country where they can’t even buy cigarette papers, let alone tobacco. And it politely recommended that more consideration be given to “the continued likelihood of some people buying cigarettes illegally for others”, an issue that is given astonishingly little attention in the Impact Assessment. 

Legislating for prohibition without considering the effect on the black market is almost comically negligent, but there is one other aspect of this policy worth mentioning that is ignored in both the Impact Assessment and the RPC’s opinion. A lot of people enjoy smoking and, if this policy works as intended, that enjoyment will be denied them. This is not a popular thing to say and the anti-smoking lobby goes to great lengths to deny it. They claim that people only smoke because they started in childhood and got hooked. The government claims that “most smokers want to quit”. But do they? There is enormous social pressure on smokers to say that they don’t want to smoke, but in the last Public Health England survey, only 20 per cent of smokers expressed a strong desire to quit and even among this minority, most did not intend to quit in the next three months. Moreover, it is no longer true that most smokers start in childhood. The majority of people who start smoking today have their first cigarette between the age of 18 and 24.

 

Do read it all.

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Big Tobacco meets Big Food

I've seen a few posts like this recently, claiming that 'Big Tobacco' used its mysterious, fiendish tricks to manipulate food when some of them bought food companies in the 1980s. 

 

Fun fact: Many of the unhealthy processed foods you see today were created by the Big Tobacco.

In the 1980's, tobacco giants Phillip Morris & R.J. Reynolds bought the major food companies you see today.

Kraft, General Foods, Nabisco, and many other food companies were run by… pic.twitter.com/IzhpoARn0o

— Dan Go (@FitFounder) April 8, 2024

 

As I explain on my Substack, it's nonsense.

So why say it? Presumably because it advances the goal of applying tobacco-style regulation to the food your eat.

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A swift half with Simon Clark

I had your friend and mine Simon Clark, the indefatigable leader of FOREST, on the Swift Half last week. We talked about his career fighting for liberty. Check it out.

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Why is alcohol regulated differently to tobacco?

In the Notes & Queries section of last week's Observer, a reader asked: 

Why is alcohol advertised openly in the UK, without pictures on the packaging highlighting the medical effects, for example, when tobacco is treated so differently? John Fisher, by email

Yesterday, the Observer published the replies, a mixed bag mostly harvested from the comments section. There are one or two nutters but also a few sensible souls. 

Nobody mentioned the official reason that was repeated for decades by the anti-smoking lobby and which is gradually fading from the popular memory as we slide down the slippery slope.

The official argument for regulating tobacco differently to alcohol is that cigarettes are a “unique product”. The WHO says that tobacco “is the only legal consumer product that kills when used exactly as intended by the manufacturer." This was the explanation given by anti-smoking campaigners for decades whenever it was suggested that tobacco regulation creates a "slippery slope”. For example, when campaigning for plain packaging in 2012, Deborah Arnott of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) said:

“...the “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false. The same argument was used against the ban on tobacco advertising, but 9 years after the tobacco ban in the UK, alcohol advertising is still permitted with no sign of it being prohibited. Tobacco is a uniquely dangerous consumer product which is why there is a WHO health treaty (the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control) to regulate tobacco use.”

The American anti-smoking activist and academic Stanton Glantz wrote in 2003:

"The 'slippery slope' argument is one that the tobacco industry has routinely raised to oppose policies against its interests, including smokefree policies, decisions by arts and cultural organizations not to accept tobacco money, advertising restrictions, and other policies. These predicted subsequent problems simply have not materialized"

In the same year, with reference to warning labels on cigarettes, the Australian anti-smoking activist and academic Simon Chapman wrote:

"In pre-warning days, when arguments could be couched in incredulity that tobacco should be singled out from other consumer products, the industry used “slippery slope” or “thin edge of the wedge” rhetoric, arguing that the policy would inexorably bleed into other product areas. 'The precedent is one which could easily come to affect other industries. For instance, a number of medical scientists claim that butter and milk are dangerous to the health of some people. It is recognised that drinking too much liquor or reckless driving are hazards to life... can we expect all these products to carry a ‘danger’ label …?' This argument appears to have quickly lost momentum when the dire predictions of rampant warnings never materialised.”

More recently, however, public health campaigners have cited the precedent of graphic warnings, advertising bans and plain packaging for tobacco as a justification for applying the same regulations to other products, including alcohol. It is far too early to say that the “dire predictions” were wrong.

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The nanny state trough

If you told me that there was a massive pile of cash to be dished out to 'public health' academics and asked me to guess which two people would be first in line for it, I would say Anna Gilmore and Petra Meier. And sure enough, they were. This week it was announced that they're getting £15 million between them to build yet another little empire, on top of SIPHER, SPECTRUM and the rest. It is, as I say on my Substack, a racket. 

 

Anna Gilmore has her finger in so many pies that it is difficult to keep up. She made her name back in the day by pretending that England’s smoking ban reduced the number of hospital admissions for heart attacks. Having demonstrated that she will say anything for money, she was made a professor and spent the 2010s in a flurry of activity, displaying an extraordinary degree of ineptitude in a range of disciplines, including economics. She became director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, an organisation that received millions of pounds from the (state-funded) UK Clinical Research Collaboration despite doing no clinical research. Spotting new funding opportunities, the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies became the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies in 2013. She has since branched out into ‘research’ on fossil fuels which she says, not unpredictably, should be subject to ‘tobacco control style regulation’.

In 2018, she got $20 million from Mike Bloomberg to set up an ‘industry watchdog’ and in 2019 she got a grant from SPECTRUM to research ‘unhealthy commodity industries’. SPECTRUM is the preposterous acronym for Shaping Public hEalth poliCies To Reduce ineqUalities and harM. It was funded to the tune of £5.9 million by the UK Prevention Research Partnership, a largely taxpayer-funded body created in 2017 to provide yet another source of cash for nanny state quackademics.

Gilmore is also the co-director of something called the Centre for 21st Century Public Health which doesn’t have much to say about itself but is more than likely paid for by you and me.

 

Read on. 

Also, there's a new Last Orders to listen to.

Happy Easter!

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Looking back on the WHO and looking forward to prohibition

I caught up with Martin Cullip and Lindsey Stroud on their podcast Across the Pond last week. I was with them in Panama in February to shadow the big WHO anti-nicotine conference. We looked back on events over there and discussed Rishi Sunak's looming crackdown on vapes and tobacco.

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Temperance 2.0

There's a good article in the wine trade press titled 'How Neo-Prohibitionists Came to Shape Alcohol Policy' by Felicity Carter looking at temperance groups masquerading as 'public health' NGOs. Give it a read. 

 

Movendi International describes itself as "the largest independent global movement for development through alcohol prevention."

Founded in upstate New York in 1851, it began as a temperance group that was heavily influenced by the Freemasons-complete with regalia and rituals. Originally called the Independent Order of Good Templars (I.O.G.T.), it spread rapidly across the U.S., Canada, and England. By 1900 there were groups in places as far-flung as Sri Lanka, Burma, Nigeria, and Panama. Everywhere the I.O.G.T. went, it inspired the founding of other temperance groups.

The efforts of such groups culminated, of course, during Prohibition, yet the unpopularity of Prohibition caused membership to fall, while the rise of Alcoholics Anonymous made such groups less relevant. After World War II, the I.O.G.T. turned to southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

It dispensed with the regalia in the 1970s and rebranded as Movendi International in 2020. Movendi is a portmanteau of 'modus vivendi,' meaning 'way of living;' it presents itself as a human rights, "heart-led" organization and says it is not against alcohol12. Instead, "...we advocate for every person's right to choose to live free from alcohol." Yet anyone who joins must agree13 that "I lead a lifestyle free from the use of alcohol and other drugs."

Movendi's worldview is simple: There are no artisans, small producers, or vignerons connected to land and history. There is only 'Big Alcohol,' which uses propaganda words like "moderation" and "craft" to conceal its true nature.

And Big Alcohol is an ally of Big Tobacco14—Movendi links alcohol to tobacco whenever it can.

But while Movendi and other groups are busy mischaracterizing the alcohol industry as one united group, they go out of their way to hide their own origins.

Take Movendi's Swedish branch, the IOGT-NTO15, which presents itself as an anti-poverty organization-solving poverty by solving alcohol. It was formed in 1970 after the Swedish branch of I.O.G.T. merged with a Christian temperance group.

Ironically, the Swedish branch is partly funded by a lottery16; in 2018 they were taken to court17 and threatened with a fine of 3 million kroner (about $260,000) if they didn't stop using deceptive practices. Specialists have long recognized that gambling is an addiction, making this a curious choice of funding for a temperance movement.

Other temperance groups use similar tactics. Take the Institute of Alcohol Studies18 in London, for example, which has a stellar line-up of doctors and scientists advising it, but which is funded by Alliance House19, a temperance group headed by religious figures.

 

 

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Dan Malleck on drink, drugs and prohibition

I forgot to mention that we've started a new series of The Swift Half with Snowdon. Check out the entertaining episode with the anarcho-capitalist Charlie Amos here.

The Canadian historian Dan Malleck was in London recently so I got him to come on The Swift Half again. Dan is one of the few people to have publicly spoken out about the zany new alcohol guidelines that have been proposed in Canada. We discussed how that was going and talked about drink, drugs and prohibition generally. Give it a watch.

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Greg Fell - Britain's most pointless man?

Our old fiend Greg Fell has been busy getting billboards banned in Sheffield in what even he admits is a pointless endeavour. 

 

There are over 130 directors of public health in England and it is nice work if you can get it. The job comes with a six figure salary and you don’t need a medical degree. So long as you can turn up to meetings and drop phrases like “health inequalities” and “commercial determinants of health” into conversation, you’re in clover. Not knowing much about infectious diseases proved to be a handicap when COVID-19 emerged in 2020 and public health directors were left twiddling their thumbs while they waited for instructions from central government, but Greg Fell spotted an opportunity. When Boris Johnson closed the pubs on 20 March, he suggested that “whilst we are implementing emergency legislation why not go really far and ban tobacco sales”. Exactly four years later, the government brought forward legislation to do precisely that.

With COVID-19 in the rearview mirror, there is a palpable sense of relief among directors of public health that they can get back to lobbying for petty interventions in private lifestyles. Last December, Wakefield’s public health director complained that legal action from Kentucky Fried Chicken was “thwarting efforts to stop fast-food outlets near schools” in his area. There was happier news in Sunderland where the council managed to prevent a Mexican takeaway shop from opening and the public health director’s annual report focused exclusively on the “commercial determinants of health”. They are so back!

 

Read it all.

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Same old ASH

Last week, former public health minister Steve Brine wrote in support of Sunak’s tobacco ban for Conservative Home. Like nearly everyone who goes to the Department of Health, Brine went native and has never recovered. His article is the usual blinkered prohibitionist nonsense - he even denies that the ban will boost the illicit trade - but he starts with a statistic that sounds credible.

 

Two-thirds of adults in Britain back the Government’s smoking ban plan, including nearly three-quarters of Conservative voters, in a representative poll carried out by YouGov for ASH.

 

He returns to this poll in his closing paragraph.

 

The public understand that the Government’s smoking ban will save lives and improve the health and wellbeing not just of individuals and their families but also of our economy. That is why the overwhelming majority of the public and parliamentarians support the legislation.

 

Since 87% of Britons do not smoke and the UK has become an oppresively intolerant country in recent years, this claim wouldn’t surprise me. But I know better than to trust an ASH survey. Before the smoking ban, they conducted several polls claiming that most people wanted a total ban on smoking in pubs. They achieved this by giving people a binary option between smoking everywhere versus smoking nowhere. But when other polls gave people the option of allowing separate smoking rooms, most people were happy with that (and remained so for years after the ban was introduced).

 

The question ASH used in their latest survey is almost unbelievable:

 

“How strongly, if at all, do you support or oppose a goal to make Britain a country where no one smokes?”

 

You will have noticed that there is no mention of ban there. There is no mention of any policy, coercive or liberal, let alone the gradual prohibition of all cigarettes, cigars, heated tobacco, shisha and cigarette packs. It doesn’t show that ‘the overwhelming majority’ ‘support the legislation’. It is just an aspiration, a ‘goal’. It would be quite possible for a liberal who supports tobacco harm reduction but hates the nanny state to agree with this ambition.

Read the rest on my Substack (free). And I have replied on Conservative Home today.

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Prohibition, problem gambling and playing with words

Australia's umpteenth attempt to ban e-cigarettes has been warmly applauded by the renowned wowser and imbecile Simon Chapman. Nicotine-containing vapes have always been illegal in Australia. Importation of these products for personal use was banned a few years ago and now the government is banning all e-cigarettes regardless of whether they contain nicotine or not. 

As dozens of tobacconists are being literally firebombed, the devastating yet predictable consequences of prohibition (for vapes) and neo-prohibitionist sin taxes (on cigarettes) could not be more obvious to Australians. (There's an excellent article by two criminologists in The Conversation that is well worth reading.) But Simple Simon not only refuses to take any share of the blame for the consequences of the policies he spent his life lobbying for, he refuses to accept that what is happening to vapes is prohibition. Why? Because vapers will (in theory) be allowed to get e-cigarettes on prescription.

 

How Australia's extremist vaping advocates have tried to frame prescription access as "prohibition" when 223 million prescriptions in 2021/22 for all other prescribed drugs are of course also all "banned". La La Land https://t.co/B9vCQNP5D0

— Simon Chapman AO https://bsky.app/profile/simoncha (@SimonChapman6) March 16, 2024

Note the way in which he portrays those who think e-cigarettes should be sold as consumer products like they are in normal countries as 'extremists'. Note also that he is using a photo of an anti-Prohibition rally taken during Prohibition in the USA. This is, of course, the example that comes most readily to mind when people hear the word 'prohibition'. Chapman is keen to distance himself from that kind of prohibition because it was such a notorious fiasco.

However, if he weren't such an ignoramus and didn't suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome, he would know that alcohol was available on prescription during Prohibition (Winston Churchill famously got a doctor's note when he visited the USA). Indeed, the Volstead Act was softer on drink than the Aussie government is on vapes. Ordinary people were never arrested for mere possession of alcohol whereas people are already being arrested for the possession of vapes and vape juice in Australia.

So if Chapman doesn't think the ban on vapes is prohibition, he must think that Prohibition wasn't prohibition either.

Back in Britain, the anti-gambling lobby's rising star Matt Gaskell has also been playing with words.

 

We should discourage the use of stigmatising language by the media & within the field…. e.g. problem gamblers, problem gambling, addict, pathological gamblers, disordered gamblers etc.

Language & framing matters.

— Matt Gaskell (@mgaskell12) March 16, 2024

The problem here is that most of these phrases are technical terms with scientific definitions. The exception is 'addict', but the only people who use that word about problem gamblers are anti-gambling activists and the media. Problem gambling does not necessary involve addiction, but problem gambling is definitely a thing. It is recognised by clinicians and researchers around the world and is diagnosed with the PGSI test. PGSI stands for Problem Gambling Severity Index.

A similar but distinct test is the DSM-V. This refers to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is the diagnostic test for the recognised condition of 'gambling disorder' which, in the previous (fourth) edition, was called 'pathological gambling'.

 

Matt Gaskell is the Clinical Lead for the NHS Northern Gambling Service which is part of the NHS's National Problem Gambling Clinic . When it opened in 2020, he said:

 

"Gambling addiction is a new public health crisis. It’s causing serious harm to thousands of people across the UK. This includes mental health problems, serious debt, breakdown of relationships, loss of employment, crime, homelessness and, tragically, sometimes suicide.

"Through my work in mental health and addictions treatment over the years I’ve seen the harms that problem gambling can cause people. However the chances of recovery from addictions like problem gambling can be very good with proper treatment." 

 

Running a problem gambling clinic without uses terms like 'problem gambling' and 'gambling disorder' is like being an oncologist and banning the terms 'cancer' and 'tumour'. So why this sudden retreat from recognised scientific terminology that no one has had a problem with in the past? It all comes back to what I was writing about last year - the 'public health' takeover of gambling policy and research. Under the new ideology, everyone is at risk from gambling, every gambler is harmed and gambling is inherently dangerous. 

Put simply, the existing literature correctly sees problem gambling as a complex mental disorder (“gambling disorder”) that is best dealt with by clinicians and augmented by harm reduction policies. By contrast, the “public health” approach is to stigmatise gambling, demonise the gambling industry and use tobacco-style regulation to deter as many people from gambling as possible. The difference between the two approaches is that the former is based on evidence and works whereas the latter is based on wilful ignorance, creates negative unintended consequences and fails.

 

The new wave of anti-gambling activists take issue with anything that implies that the psychological condition of gambling disorder only affects a relative handful of people (which it does) or implies that individuals can do anything about it (which they can). It's going to be difficult for people who treat problem gamblers to maintain this conceit because the first step to recovery is getting people to admit that they are responsible for their actions and can change their behaviour, but I'm sure they'll manage it.

 

 

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The menthol cigarette ban - another 'public health' win!

Menthol cigarettes were banned in the EU in May 2020 and, as usual, the UK government decided against using its new freedoms outside of the bloc to allow more freedom to people in the UK.

A study in the junk journal Tobacco Control by the usual career anti-smokers (Linda Bauld etc.) now claims victory because...

 

The current study shows no increase in illicit purchasing 3 years after the ban in GB and is an important contribution to the literature assessing the longer-term impact of menthol cigarette bans; it is another example of how the industry’s oft-predicted surge in illicit cigarette purchases as a result of tobacco control measures did not materialise.

 

Big Tobacco in the mud! Take that!

However...

Despite being banned in 2020, one million adults continue to smoke menthol cigarettes in GB. The prevalence of menthol cigarette smoking only decreased slightly and non-significantly among adults who smoke, from 16% at the end of 2020 to 14% at the beginning of 2023.

 

Oh dear. Still, let's not allow the total and utter failure of the policy to achieve its goal distract us from Big Tobacco being wrong about the illicit trade. They're in the mud!

 

According to the authors, people who smoke menthol cigarettes were no more likely to buy from illicit sources than those who smoke normal cigarettes, although that's not what their own data shows (see table below).

 

 

Nevertheless, it is clear that a lot of people have been buying menthol (or menthol-ish) cigarettes from legal sources. The authors explain various ways in which this can be done, all of which could have been predicted by someone who is a genuine expert on the tobacco market rather than a rent-a-gob prohibitionist.

 

There are several reasons why people in the UK may continue to smoke menthol cigarettes despite the ban. First, it is possible to buy factory-made cigarettes or roll-your-own tobacco with menthol flavour in countries without a ban and bring them back to the UK either within the legal limits for personal use or through illicit means. Second, people can purchase menthol accessories, such as filters or capsules inserted in a hole in filters of factory-made cigarettes, infusion cards for cigarette packs to spread menthol aroma and flavour or menthol-flavoured filters for use with roll-your-own tobacco. These accessories are not covered by the ban and some of them seem to have been placed on the UK market in direct response to the ban. Another tactic that the tobacco industry used to circumvent the ban is to produce cigarettes that may be perceived as mentholated, while the manufacturers claim that the flavours are not characterising and are therefore allowed.

So the reason there has not been a booming black market in menthol cigarettes is that the legislation was so badly drafted that a black market wasn't necessary. And this is supposed to be a win??

 

Incidentally, all the data used in this study starts in October 2020 and ends in March 2023, despite the ban taking effect in May 2020, so it doesn't tell you anything about what happened when the ban was introduced. Tobacco Control really will publish any old rubbish.

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Follow the money in the campaign against GambleAware

The 'Good Law Project' has suddenly started going after the dull but worthy charity GambleAware. Why? As I explain in this article for The Critic, it looks like a case of follow the money.

 

A levy on gambling companies is imminent and is expected to raise at least £50 million a year. The money will be earmarked for “research, prevention and treatment” and there are a lot of potential recipients who will be fighting like rats in a sack to get their hands on it. The House of Lords called for a gambling levy in June 2020 and the government consulted on the matter later that year. Since then, problem gambling NGOs have been sprouting up all over the place. Among the organisations that have already received grants from the Gambling Commission are Gambling Harm UK (founded in 2020), Deal Me Out CIC (founded in 2020), the Epic Restart Foundation (founded in 2021), GamFam (founded in 2022) and the Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling (founded in 2022).

Having been founded in 2018, Gambling with Lives is a relative veteran and has received £600,000 from the Gambling Commission so far. It is likely to be in the running for further grants when the levy takes effect, alongside such recently formed organisations as The Big Step (founded in 2019), Clean Up Gambling, the Coalition Against Gambling Ads, Bet Know More, Action Against Gambling Harms (all founded in 2020), Tackling Gambling Stigma (founded in 2021) and GamLEARN (founded in 2022).

GambleAware, founded in 2002, is the daddy of them all and has an income of nearly £50 million a year, virtually all of which comes from the gambling industry. These donations will cease when the statutory levy is introduced. The levy will effectively nationalise industry donations, with decisions about how the money is spent made by bureaucrats rather than businesses. When the donations dry up, GambleAware will have to bid for the pot of money marked “prevention”. With 20 years experience of running educational campaigns and helping problem gamblers, it will be the favourite to get the contract, unless its name is sullied in the meantime. If GambleAware becomes politically toxic, there are plenty of pressure groups ready to accept the money who will argue that the most effective form of “prevention” is tobacco-style regulation.

 

The difference between helping individuals and the 'public health' approach is that the latter doesn't work. It is a political stance to make people within the extended bureaucracy feel virtuous.   

You can see the new ('public health') approach most clearly in Manchester where the local authority has got into bed with Gambling With Lives to create this website which is straightforwardly anti-gambling. It has links to places where problem gamblers can get help, but if you click on the National Gambling Helpline, you will be effectively warned off it by an ad hominem statement.  

 

 

So you have a charity subtly dissuading problem gamblers from ringing a problem gambling helpline. This should be a "are we the baddies moment?"

 

 

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Fighting Scotland's sockpuppet state

Annemarie Ward, CEO of the addiction recovery charity FAVOR doesn't hold back in this interview with The Herald. Unlike most Scottish health organisations, she is not funded by the state - and it shows.

Here are some of the choicest quotes...

On Scotland's sockpuppet state: 

 

“So many aspects of their approach need to change,” she says, “but if I were to choose one then it’s this: get rid of all the addiction quangos that have grown fat on public money.”

She begins to describe a lucrative, self-serving sector which is in denial about the true nature of addiction and doesn’t really believe that people can actually recover. And so they specialise in ‘harm reduction’, which she says is “middle-class virtue-signalling at its worst”.   

... She begins naming the addiction quangos and says she’ll soon be compiling a list of them to show how crowded the field is.

This is where Scotland’s public sector gravy train can be seen at full tilt, driven by a vast array of political actors who attend all the right networking events; leadership seminars and lobbying dinners. 

“They’ve become a shadow state,” she says. “They’re policy actors with at least one organisation employing 70-odd staff. There’s no equivalent to them south of the border because England got rid of them years ago. They simply de-funded them as part of a structural change leading to more funding for front-line services.  

“All of these Scottish quangos think they’re doing something, but they’re little more than the government lobbying government for no other purpose than to maintain funding levels.” 

... “I’m willing to work with Labour. I want to contribute positively; I don’t want to be the one who’s always screaming. But if they don’t get rid of these quangos then I know they’ll just continue with the grift of government lobbying government.”

 

On minimum pricing:

 

In recent weeks, she’s become a harsh critic of the Scottish Government’s Minimum Unit Pricing policy which seeks to discourage people from buying alcohol. “It simply doesn’t work,” she says, “because those making the policy have no clue about the reality of the lives of those who are worst affected by alcohol addiction.” 

... “I read 40 studies around this and only seven were looking at health-based outcomes. Then I looked at who commissioned the research on all the studies and the only one that was positive about MUP was a researcher from Public Health Scotland. And it was Public Health Scotland who were writing the report. So you wonder if there’s some jiggery-pokery going on here.  

“These people don’t live in the real world. If they were, they’d looking at the correlation in the rise in drugs deaths since Minimum Unit Pricing was introduced in 2018. It doesn’t need a genius to work out why. And in the meantime, I’m still burying my friends.”

 

On alcohol advertising: 

“I don’t even see the problem with booze adverts. I don’t care about ‘the optics’ of a swimming pool sponsored by Tennent’s lager. The Government thinks the people in these communities are stupid and that we’re easily influenced. They’re obsessed with channelling ethics but what they’re doing in facilitating the already vast profits of the booze industry is grievously unethical.”

 

Can I get a "hell, yeah"?

 

You can follow her on Twitter here.

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The vape tax

So the UK is set to have one of the world's highest vape taxes to go alongside a ban on disposable vapes and the gradual (or not so gradual) prohibition of tobacco. I've written about the Tories' deranged scorched earth policy for Spiked...

 

Hear me out: is it possible that when Rishi Sunak became UK prime minister he set himself a Brewster’s Millions-style challenge of getting support for the Conservative Party down to zero by the time of the General Election? Does he have brainstorming sessions in Downing Street late at night to identify the dwindling number of people who might still vote for him and discuss how to alienate them? ‘We’ve already lost the people who use disposable vapes, but there are still people who use refillable e-cigarettes’, you can just imagine him saying. ‘How do we needlessly annoy them? I’ve got it! Let’s tax e-cigarette fluid.’

 

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Pipes and pipemen

There is an epidemic of kids smoking pipes and cigars, if you believe the people at SPECTRUM. As I explain in The Critic, you shouldn't. 

 

As a rule of thumb, any sharp rise or fall in a longstanding data series is due to a change in methodology. When it comes to surveys, you reach different groups of people depending on whether you knock on their door, phone them up or use an online questionnaire. People may be more or less likely to confess to bad habits depending on whether you ask them face-to-face, over the phone or on a website. The abrupt rise in the number of people claiming to smoke non-cigarette tobacco in this study is obviously the result of the change in methodology and yet the authors refuse to admit this. Instead, they put forward a bunch of unlikely explanations for why people suddenly started smoking cigars and hookah in March 2020, including the fear that smoking cigarettes increased the risk of getting Covid-19, the ban on menthol cigarettes that was introduced two months later and economic pressures that meant people could only afford to smoke cigars (!). 

You have to scroll down to the “strengths and limitations” section before there is any acknowledgement of the obvious problem. Although the authors claim that people tend to give similar answers in substance abuse surveys regardless of whether they are asked face-to-face or online, they admit that when they used both surveys in a one-off test in March 2022, they found “the prevalence of exclusive non-cigarette smoking was 1.24 percentage points higher in the group surveyed via telephone than face-to-face (2.03 per cent [95 per cent CI = 1.42–2.90] vs. 0.79 per cent [0.48–1.31])”. This is clear evidence that people are nearly three times more likely to say “yes” when you ask them over the phone and yet the authors still insist that the fivefold increase in non-cigarette tobacco consumption is real.

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Panama conversations

While I was in Panama recently for the Good COP conference, I met lots of interesting people. I interviewed two of them for the IEA podcast: David Williams, President of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, and Prof Dr Rohan Andrade De Sequeira, a Consultant CardioMetabolic Physician from Mumbai, India. We talked about tobacco harm reduction and the damage done by the WHO's approach.

Have a listen.

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Normal for Tasmania

 

A Tasmania anti-smoking activist called Kathryn Barnsley has made a grotesque banner lying about e-cigarettes and has been telling vapers to look forward to getting mouth cancer. It is based on a dreadful case report in Pediatrics that should never have been published and is a new low even by Australian standards, as I explain in The Critic...

 

The claim that e-cigarettes caused the cancer in this instance rests solely on the fact that the patient was a vaper. He was also a former smoker of cigarettes who took up smoking marijuana after biting his tongue, but this gets short shrift as an explanation from the authors. His alcohol consumption is not mentioned at all. 

Case reports of this kind can be useful to medical practitioners but they were never designed to identify the cause of illnesses and they are totally incapable of doing so. Although vaping cannot be discounted as a risk factor for oral cancer, any investigation should begin by asking whether there has been a rise in young people getting oral cancer since e-cigarettes came on the scene and whether oral cancer is more common among vapers who have never smoked than among other nonsmokers. A case study of a solitary individual tells us absolutely nothing and looks more like exploitation of a personal tragedy than a serious scientific endeavour.

Do read it all.

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A depressing conversation with Christopher Snowdon

It was a pleasure to sit down with Amul Pandya recently for a thoughtful chat on his Meeting People podcast. We discussed the abuse of statistics, social media, Rishi's tobacco ban, low grade politicians, daylight saving time, face masks, obesity and much more. You can watch it below or (I assume) download the audio wherever you get your podcasts.

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McCarthyism as a protected philosophical belief

Jim McCambridge, a 'public health' zealot whom we have encountered before, is involved in a strange employment tribunal after York University found him guilty of bullying and harassment. He now claims that his dogmatic, anti-industry opinions are protected philosophical beliefs under the Equality Act.

I have written about this for The Critic.

 

McCambridge has taken his behaviour a worrying step further at the employment tribunal by portraying McKeganey’s association with York University as a real and present danger to people’s health. His argument, as summarised by the judge, is that:

The impact of Mr [sic] McKeganey’s relationship with the University of York would be to impact adversely on the health of some unidentified people in society. This was explained in two ways: firstly, that Mr [sic] McKeganey’s association with the University would improve his credibility. Because he (allegedly) supports tobacco companies, an improvement in his credibility will add greater weight to any support he gives to tobacco companies, thereby increasing the risk that more people will smoke and thereby impact on the health of those (unidentified) people. Secondly, that an association with Mr [sic] McKeganey by the university would undermine their criticism of tobacco companies thereby increasing the risk that more people might smoke similarly presenting an increase risk to those unidentified people.

Leaving aside the question of whether the tacit endorsement of an obscure academic by York University is ever likely to influence an individual’s decision to start smoking, this takes no-platforming to a new level. The clear implication is that anyone who might inadvertently increase the chances of an unidentified, theoretical person to start smoking is a health and safety risk. Furthermore, anyone who fails to ostracise such a person is also a threat to public health. The same presumably applies to alcohol and any of the growing number of adult activities that are now considered to be “public health” issues. This is a recipe for blanket censorship and cancel culture on steroids.

 

Do read.

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Ultra-processed food labels

 

From the BBC...

Ultra-processed food should be clearly labelled - study

Ultra-processed foods should be clearly labelled, experts say.

Scientists said the warnings were needed as some ultra-processed foods could fall into the "healthy" green category of the "traffic-light" system.

Is that a problem with the labels or is it the problem with inventing an excessively broad category?

 

UCL senior research fellow and weight-management specialist Dr Adrian Brown told BBC News he had looked at a "meat alternative", for example.

"Generally, it can be considered highly processed - but if you look at front-of-package labelling for energy, fat, saturated fat and sugar, they're all green, which would be considered healthy," he said.

'Meat alternatives' offer a good opportunity to test the UPF theory. Run some trials to find out if they are associated with obesity and/or cancer. If they don't then the claim that UPFs are associated with obesity and cancer (which is made in the BBC article) is false.

The curious thing about the article is that no one is quoted saying that UPFs should be labelled and the only people mentioned consider it to be an open question as to whether UPFs as a category are bad for health. And although the headline seems to quote a study, the only study mentioned in the article has yet to be written.

 

Dr Brown's team at UCL have now begun a trial to see how healthy a UFP-only diet can be, compared with a minimally processed one, and whether guidance should be given to consumers.

"We're putting people on an eight-week diet which meets the government's recommendations for salt, fat, sugar and energy - what is considered healthy - and we're comparing the outcomes of them, related to weight and other changes in terms of health as well," he said.

 

Good stuff. Makes sure it's randomised and that people are given different versions of the same meal this time. Better still, change the methodology and give the control group a diet that is merely processed (not minimally processed or ultra-processed).

As for UPF's alleged relationship to cancer, it's worth reading this response from some scientists to the authors of a study who made that claim recently...

The authors conclude that “our results suggest that higher consumption of UPF increases the risk of cancer and cardiometabolic multimorbidity”, but their data only show that consumption of foods of animal origin and sugary or artificially sweetened beverages is associated with such a risk, which is not surprising.

This indicates that the association between UPF consumption and the risk of multimorbidity would disappear if the data were adjusted not only for the consumption of sugary or artificially sweetened beverages, but also for foods of animal origin at the same time. Indeed, in our opinion, the article underlines the absolute need to return to the evaluation of foods on the basis of their nutritional role (including their nutrient composition, quantities consumed, metabolic effects, etc.) and not on the basis of their degree of processing.

 

 Amen.

 

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