"Nicotine control" and the WHO

I wrote about the WHO for the Telegraph over the weekend. One of its Regional Directors has said that he wants to "erase" alcohol. In the article I discuss the malign influence of "Movendi" - the temperance group formerly known as the International Order of Good Templars - who are official partners of the WHO (fun fact: they are funded by the Swedish lottery).

 

Movendi is one of the “civil society” groups that Dr Piukala described as “essential” in his speech this week. Drinkers everywhere should be worried about a gospel temperance society collaborating with the world’s biggest health agency, although the WHO has become so puritanical and dogmatic in recent years that it is hard to know which of them is more extreme.

They both want to denormalise alcohol through advertising bans, licensing restrictions and sin taxes. They both claim that drinking is harmful at any level. They both compare alcohol to tobacco and equate the alcohol industry with the tobacco industry. This is no small thing when WHO Europe explicitly says that its goal is to create a society that is not just “tobacco-free” but “nicotine-free”.

 

More fool anyone who isn't worried about the direction of travel. The WHO didn't always want to eradicate tobacco. At one time, it would have accused anyone who suggested that it had prohibitionist intentions of being hysterical. They now explicitly want to eradicate not just tobacco but nicotine. If you don't think they would like to eradicate alcohol, even as a WHO Regional Director essentially says as much, then I am afraid that you are gullible.

 

On the point of erasing nicotine, Clive Bates points out that the UN's snappily titled Political declaration of the fourth high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases and the promotion of mental health and well-being has been made worse since it was first drafted. In the first draft, there was "only one asinine reference to nicotine" (a reference to electronic nicotine delivery systems), but now member states are urged to focus on "nicotine control".

 

This is supposed to be a statement about NCDs (i.e. cancer, cardiovascular disease, COPD, etc) finalised after a lengthy deliberative process. It is intended to focus on UN SDG Target 3.4, which aims to reduce mortality in adults aged 30-70 from major NCDs by one-third by 2030. The target that is likely to be missed by some distance. Yet, the text refers throughout to “tobacco and nicotine control” even though the primary driver of NCDs is not tobacco per se or nicotine, but smoke, including tobacco smoke.

  

The good news is that the UN was forced to water down some of the messaging in the final draft. For example, member states were told to "Increase taxation on tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverages" in the first draft, but in the final draft this has been changed to "Consider introducing or increasing taxes on tobacco and alcohol to support health objectives, in line with national circumstances".

 

But its crusade against nicotine has been ramped up, with member states encouraged to:

 

(a) significantly reduce tobacco and nicotine use by: (i) implementing health warnings on all tobacco and nicotine packages; (ii) restricting tobacco and nicotine advertising

 

A nicotine-free world isn't going to happen. It is a pie in the sky prohibitionist fantasy. But, as I say in the Telegraph article, people can do a lot of damage reaching for Utopia. 

 

The irony is that, even if you think that using state coercion to create a smoke-free world is an ethical objective, it is made much more difficult if you fight a parallel war against nicotine, firstly because you will be using scarce resources on multiple targets and secondly - most importantly - because people are more likely to stop smoking if they can use a safer form of nicotine.

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