Scottish client journalism

Via Taking Liberties, I see that Scotland's Sunday Post has been publishing some anti-smoking slop ahead of the country's 20th anniversary of its smoking ban. 

 

Last week a reporter from the Sunday Post contacted Forest to say she was working on a feature ‘marking the anniversary of Scotland’s smoke-free legislation and its long-term public health impact’.

‘As part of the piece,’ she wrote, ‘I’m reporting on expert claims that improved respiratory health following the smoking ban may have helped reduce the severity of respiratory outcomes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘I’d welcome a response from Forest to include balance in the article.’

 

This was a new one to me so I looked up the article. It is unbelievably thin. The "expert claims" amount to this and nothing more...

 

Doc­tor Rachel O’Don­nell, Asso­ciate Pro­fessor at the Uni­versity of Stirl­ing’s Insti­tute for Social Mar­ket­ing and Health (ISMH), said that Covid out­comes could have been worse without the smoking ban legis­la­tion.

She said: “It’s not an unreas­on­able leap to sug­gest that as a nation we might well have seen a dif­fer­ent scen­ario in terms of the res­pir­at­ory impacts of the Covid-19 pan­demic without the smoke-free legis­la­tion. I think we could have seen a dif­fer­ent pic­ture.”

 

It's not an unreasonable leap to suggest that The Sunday Post will publish any old bollocks and present it as news. This hunch from an activist-academic at the Insti­tute for Social Mar­ket­ing and Health - a slush fund/lobby group founded by the lunatic Gerard Hastings - was reported under the headline: 'Stub­bing out the cigar­ettes helped hos­pit­als cope with pan­demic'!

 

Forest sent them a few quotes, as requested, and pointed out the now-established fact that smokers were less likely than nonsmokers to get Covid during the pandemic. They didn't print any of it.

 

 

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Economic nationalism in 'public health'

Some 'public health' academics have given a surprising endorsement to economic nationalism, as I discuss in The Critic...

 

After botching their modelling on minimum pricing, the Sheffield Addictions Research Group have turned their hands to economics. In a paper published in the journal Addiction this week, they accidentally invented mercantilism, the zero-sum misunderstanding of the economy that was discredited by Adam Smith 250 years ago. 

The authors say that the British government should do more to stop us spending money on “tobacco, gambling and sweets” because “shifting that spending toward domestic sectors like retail, recreation or trades, money stays within the UK for longer.” This, apparently, is the path to prosperity. 

By the same logic, the government should announce a crackdown on foreign holidays. That would undoubtedly make money “stay within the UK”, but it would come at the cost of preventing people from doing what they want to do. From the perspective of the Sheffield Addictions Research Group, preventing people from doing what they want to do is the whole point, but they can’t say that out loud so they have resorted to a weirdly jingoistic approach to economic planning. 

 

Read it all.

 

What I don't mention in the article is that although they reckon that less spending on gambling, tobacco and sweets will boost the UK economy, the reverse is true of alcohol. So enjoy the weekend in the pub with a clear, patriotic conscience.

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What the hell is Impact Unfiltered?

Last November, I reported on the EU’s plan to force member states to levy punitive taxes on e-cigarette fluid and nicotine pouches. The European Commission launched a public consultation which received 18,480 responses, overwhelmingly from consumers who were against. Having lost the numbers game, anti-nicotine NGOs went running to Politico who published an article claiming that the consultation had been “swamped with pro-industry feedback”. Citing an unpublished analysis from a mysterious new “tobacco control consultancy” called Impact Unfiltered, it alleged that “thousands of the posts use terms created only by the [tobacco] sector”, including the phrases “harm reduction” and “illicit trade”.

As I noted at the time, Impact Unfiltered is an offshoot of the smugly named School for Moral Ambition which is run by the equally smug left-wing polemicist Rutger Bregman who inexplicably gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures last year. Neither organisation is on the EU’s Transparency Register, but Impact Unfiltered only seems to have two employees and they are both graduates of the School for Moral Ambition’s “Tobacco Free Future” internship courtesy of money from the fanatical anti-nicotine billionaire Michael Bloomberg via two of his many front groups.

Read the rest at The Critic.

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Minimum pricing in Wales - a textbook example of policy failure

As in Scotland, minimum pricing in Wales had a sunset clause so it could be repealed if it didn't work. As in Scotland, it didn't work but the minimum price has not only been kept, it has been increased. 

I can only assume that the journalists who wrote this for the BBC had a wry smile on their face when they filed it... 

 

Independent research commissioned by the Welsh government suggests the policy could prevent more than 900 alcohol-related deaths over 20 years and reduce the number of "harmful drinkers" by nearly 5,000.

The policy was introduced in Wales in 2020 and the price increase follows a public consultation.

Public Health Wales figures show between 2019 and 2023 there was a rise of more than 50% in alcohol-related deaths.

 

Great success!

 

The "independent research" comes from - you guessed it! - the guys at Sheffield University who always get these lucrative commissions. I recently wrote about them here.

 

And I wrote about the failure of minimum pricing in Wales, which has seen the biggest increase in alcohol-specific deaths of any part of the UK since 2020, here.

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Drink beer, smoke tabs

Studies like this are so contrary to 'public health' dogma that it's amazing that they get published at all these days. But every now and then someone has the balls to do it.

 

Impact of Alcohol Intake on Parkinson's Disease Risk and Progression: A Systematic Review and Dose–Response Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies

 

Spoiler: it's good news for drinkers. And although the title of the systematic review doesn't mention them, it's even better news for smokers.

 

One reason why smoking isn't in the title may be that the protective effect of smoking really isn't in any doubt. As a 2024 study said: "The link between smoking and a lower risk of Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the strongest environmental or lifestyle associations in neuroepidemiology." The only question is about the biological mechanism (it doesn't seem to be nicotine).

 

The new study is equally unequivocal...

 

The association between alcohol consumption and Parkinson's disease (PD) risk remains unclear, whereas smoking has an inverse relationship with the disease.

 

The authors looked at the entire scientific literature on alcohol and PD and found that... 

 

Using abstainers as the reference group, a pooled analysis showed a significant inverse association between total alcohol consumption and PD risk (RR = −0.45, 95% CI −0.58 to −0.32, I² = 50%, P = 0.739).

 

That's a 55% reduction in risk, but don't drink too little because... 

 

Sääksjärvi et al. reported that light drinkers (<5 g/day) had an increased PD risk compared with non-drinkers (RR 1.81, 95% CI 1.12–2.93), indicating that former or low-level alcohol intake may not offer protection, or that early disease symptoms lead to reduced alcohol consumption. 

 

Unsurprisingly, Mendelian Randomisation has been used a couple of times in the hope of erasing these findings. Those two studies found "inconsistent results" (surprise, surprise) but one of them found a protective effect from genetically-predicted alcohol consumption and both of them found a protective effect from genetically-predicted smoking. 

  

So far these results are most satisfactory.  

 

Compared with non-drinkers, protective associations were observed in both men and women across all consumption levels.

 

Happy days. And it gets better...

 

Using non-drinkers as a reference, the lowest risk was found among ever-smokers who drank alcohol (LRR = −0.37, 95% CI −0.54 to −0.20), suggesting an additive protective effect. 

...Although the inverse association between smoking and PD risk is well established, few previous meta-analyses have assessed the combined or interactive effects of alcohol consumption and smoking. In contrast, our review included two prospective cohort studies that evaluated joint exposure. Both studies consistently reported the lowest PD risk among participants who both drank alcohol and smoked, suggesting a potential additive or synergistic effect of these habits.

 

So if you want to avoid Parkinson's Disease, smoking will help enormously but you'll also want to drink alcohol, and plenty of it.

 

That, surprisingly, is not the authors' conclusion.

 

Neither alcohol consumption nor smoking can be recommended for PD prevention because of their established overall health risks.

 

But that's just their opinion. 

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Money for almost nothing

Last week I wrote for The Critic about the Sheffield University alcohol research group continuing to get government grants rolling in despite having been wrong about everything for the best part of 20 years. I also wrote for the Spectator about the deranged war on non-alcoholic drinks by people who supposedly want us to drink less alcohol.

These two themes converged when I saw this article in the BMJ by Sheffield’s John Holmes - who is now a “professor of alcohol policy” - and three like-minded souls. It is titled ‘How should public health respond to rise of alcohol-free and low alcohol drinks?’, to which the answer should be either ‘nothing’ or ‘throw a little party’. Instead, the four amigos - who think they represent ‘public health’ - drone on at great length about the trivial concerns of pointless academics.

 

Read the rest on my Substack. 

 

 

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Selling zero-alcohol drinks to kids

Labour is weighing up a crackdown on people under 18 buying ‘no and low-alcohol’ drinks. On current form, this means Keir Starmer’s government will launch a public consultation, commit itself to a ban, endure weeks of mockery and abuse from the public and then perform a humiliating U-turn. But when the inevitable climbdown comes, what will be the main reason? Let us consider the options.

Firstly, it is impractical. Where do zero-alcohol drinks end and soft drinks begin? The very definition of a soft drink is that it has no alcohol. Assuming that the government doesn’t want to ban teenagers from buying Fanta and Pepsi Max, it is going to have to make a legal distinction between a non-alcoholic drink and a soft drink. It could do this on the basis of branding, but if a non-alcoholic beer removes the word ‘beer’ and calls itself a soda, what is the government going to do about it? Conversely, what if a company decides to call its brand of apple juice a non-alcoholic cider?

Kids can buy drinks that have up to 0.5 per cent ABV. One option is for the government to drop this limit to zero. But there is a reason the current limit is 0.5 per cent. Sugars in soft drinks can ferment slightly, meaning that they might contain minute traces of alcohol; less than 0.1 per cent, perhaps, but not nothing. Some fruit juices can contain up to 0.5 per cent alcohol. Even ripe bananas are slightly alcoholic because natural fermentation converts sugars to ethanol.

 

Read the rest at the Spectator. 

 

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Waking up to the reality of tobacco's black market

There's a website called Tobacco in Australia: Facts and Issues which is written by a few anti-smoking activist-academics. It provides lots of tobacco-related statistics and a bit of editorialising. 

The website has a whole section devoted to criticising "industry estimates of the extent of illicit trade in tobacco". It is an article of faith in tobakko kontrol that industry-commissioned research into the illicit trade is a tissue of lies, despite the industry having a lot more skin in the game than anti-smoking activists when it comes to tackling black market tobacco. Industry figures are routinely portrayed as being vast exaggerations designed to scare governments away from excessive taxation and regulation.

 

As has occurred in New Zealand¹ and the UK²,the major tobacco companies operating in Australia have commissioned the production of many reports over the past 15 years claiming alarmingly high estimates of the extent of illicit trade in tobacco in Australia.^3-6

 

Perhaps that's because the extent of the illicit trade in these countries is alarmingly high?   

 

Industry estimates suggest that illicit tobacco consumption as a percentage of total consumption increased from 11.8% in 2012 to 23.5% of the total tobacco market in 2022. This contrasts to the 2022 estimate from the Australian Taxation Office of 14.3%.

 

Perhaps it's the Australian Taxation Office that is wrong?

 

Industry figures are usually based on empty pack surveys which most governments can't be bothered to conduct. The authors of Tobacco in Australia try to debunk empty pack surveys on the basis that...

 

People most likely to buy packs originating from overseas—being travellers, recent migrants and international students or special visa workers—are much less likely to be motorists and much more likely to be walking and using public transport. The packs they use are therefore much more likely to enter the litter stream in public places than are packs used by cigarette consumers who do not travel frequently overseas.

 

Right. So all those packets of Manchester and Top Gun, which are not legally sold in most countries, are all being brought in by tourists - tourists, who by the way, are limited to bringing in no more than 50 cigarettes by law. Not packs of cigarettes. Cigarettes.  

 

If that doesn't sound very plausible, don't worry because...

 

Between 2015 and 2022, estimates of the extent of illicit tobacco used in Australia prepared by the Australian Taxation Office were consistently substantially lower than those included in the reports produced for tobacco companies by KPMG LLP.

 

Who you gonna trust? A government agency or consultancies commissioned by the tobacco industry?

 

As it turns out, you should trust consultancies commissioned by the tobacco industry. Last October, the Australian Taxation Office put out a statement saying that its estimates of the tobacco tax gap are "unreliable" and that the real figures must be "significantly higher".

 

This year, the ATO has performed its traditional analysis on the total tobacco gap using the existing channel-based bottom-up method. However, preliminary data from a University of Queensland research project that is looking at the biomarkers of tobacco leaf consumption in samples of waste water throughout Australia suggests that the total tobacco market and therefore the total illicit market is significantly higher than what we have previously estimated.

With this information, we now assess this tobacco tax gap estimate as unreliable and are undertaking a review of the methodology. We caution using this information as it is no longer a sufficiently credible or meaningful estimate of the illicit tobacco market in Australia.

 

The ATO's most recent estimate says that 25% of Australia's tobacco market is illicit. That is still a huge proportion but, as it now admits, it is an under-estimate. 

 

According to Australia's Illicit Tobacco and E-cigarette Commissioner, in a report published late last year, the real figure is between 50% and 60%. This is higher than the estimate of 39.4% from the industry-funded FTI Consulting report. So much for the industry exaggerating the scale of the problem!

 

Someone should delete this section of the Tobacco in Australia website, but I'm glad they haven't because it stands as a testament to a more innocent age, before the firebombings and murders began.

 

A number of academic papers, reports produced by US government research agencies, statements by political parties and research services and newspaper articles, allege that powerful and dangerous criminal gangs and terrorist groups are involved in counterfeiting activities on a massive scale. 

 

.... Such reports have been embraced enthusiastically by think-tanks with a political agenda of keeping taxes very low. The tone of these reports is often highly emotive and alarmist, and are consistent with in the interests of tobacco companies to ‘talk up’ the problem of illicit trade in general and counterfeit cigarettes in particular.

 

Imagine thinking that dangerous criminal gangs could be involved in the illicit tobacco trade on a massive scale! How "alarmist"!

 

One such dangerous criminal has just been arrested in Iraq...

 

In Australia, Hamad’s crew were busy waging a relentless turf war for control of Australia’s multibillion-dollar illicit tobacco trade, a battle involving dozens of firebombings and the gunning down of business and personal rivals. 

 

He's now in prison, but the illicit trade remains and will continue as long as the government creates demand with insanely high cigarette taxes. A tobacco store in Melbourne went up in flames this morning.

Legal sales of tobacco halved between 2022/23 and 2024/25, mirroring a similar decline in the UK. The only difference is that HMRC has not yet admitted that its own tobacco tax gap estimates are hopelessly and demonstrably wrong.   

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Me on the Tom Nelson podcast

I did the Tom Nelson podcast last week. We discussed a range of issues including vaping, nicotine, obesity, prohibition and more. Check it out.

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Clive Bates on Substack

 Clive Bates has started a Substack. His first post is an interview he did a while ago...

 

You are a critic of Michael Bloomberg’s role in tobacco policy, why?

The New York financial services billionaire and philanthropist, Michael Bloomberg, spends hundreds of millions of dollars in this field and serves as a WHO ambassador for non-communicable diseases. Yet his policy instincts are those of an out-of-touch elitist, beset by a range of obvious, harmful, unintended consequences. He remains totally unaccountable for the consequences of his actions and interactions with governments through his giant complex of well-funded activists, academics, PR professionals, and officials. He is surrounded by people who refuse to engage with evidence suggesting he is doing more harm than good. Nowhere is this more evident than in low- and middle-income countries, where his staff and money can make a significant impact with little resistance. Though they like to pretend to be independent academics, journalists or civil society organisations, Bloomberg’s complex of organisations serves the ambitions and policy preferences of one overconfident, unaccountable billionaire and his prohibition agenda. It is the most counterproductive use of philanthropic money in the whole of public health, and it needs to stop before even more people are killed by philanthropic negligence.

 

Go subscribe (it's free). 

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Anti-alcohol plot backfires in the USA

Some happy news to end your week. An attempt by anti-alcohol academics to rig America's drinking guidelines has failed spectacularly.

 

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform does not pull its punches. Its report - A Study Fraight with Bias - concludes that ICCPUD’s Alcohol Intake and Health (AIH) study was a politically motivated waste of money that violated federal law.

 

Read the rest on my Substack.  

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Lowering the drink-drive limit

Lacking anything else to do, the Labour government is planning to lower the drink-drive limit. England and Wales have a higher limit than most European countries and fewer drink-related road accidents per capita than nearly all of them. We also know from Scotland that lowering the limit won't have any effect on road safety but will damage the pub trade. 

The worst people in the country are all in favour of this, namely the anti-motorists ("Just walk lol"), the pub gentrifiers ("I support my pub by going in every now and again for a lime soda") and the people who support every pointless restriction on liberty by saying "What's the fuss? All you have to do is obey the law."

But it is a pointless restriction on liberty. As I say in Spiked, it is the opposite of evidence-based policy. If you support unnecessary restrictions on liberty which damage businesses just so you can feel morally righteous, you are the problem.

Read my Spiked piece. 

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Food advertising ban introduced - what's next?

The "junk food" advertising ban came into full effect on Monday. As I argue in The Critic, the whole thing is built on lies: a policy based on quack science designed to tackle a problem that has been wilfully exaggerated to reduce costs to the NHS that don't exist. And where has the opposition been?

 

It takes wilful blindness not to see that food is being dragged down the same slippery slope as tobacco, with a full advertising ban being the next step. Where is the food industry in all this? Where are the advertising platforms and TV companies? The Food and Drink Federation hasn’t put out a press release since mid-December and hasn’t tweeted for over a month. In an unbelievably tepid quote given to the BBC, it said that it was “committed to working in partnership with the government and others to help people make healthier choices” and claimed that its members’ products “now have a third of the salt and sugar and a quarter of the calories than they did ten years ago”. Whoopee. Where has that got them? With the most hostile business environment in the developed world, that’s where. And there is undoubtedly more to come. I don’t expect a trade association to call for the head of Wes Streeting but it could at least say that it is disappointed with the government and call for a ceasefire. Instead they essentially boasted about shrinkflation.

As for the broadcasters, they have spent years whipping up hysteria about food and are now sowing what they reaped. The boss of Channel 4 has said that the ad ban could cost her company £50 million a year. She should have thought about that before she commissioned all those Jamie Oliver documentaries. ITV has been no better with its scaremongering about “ultra-processed food”. These companies were perfectly placed to put out an alternative viewpoint and had years to do so, but they never did, even though it would have been justified in the name of balance.

 

Read the rest.

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The stakeholder state

We need to strip funding from all politically active NGOs, charities and pressure groups. We need a true bonfire of the quangos. We need to - for want of a better word - purge those “arm’s-length bodies” and government departments that have been “captured” by ideologues. Above all, we need to repeal or significantly amend a number of laws, including the Climate Change Act, the Equality Act, the Children and Families Act, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act, the Town and Country Planning Act, the Employment Rights Act, and the Human Rights Act. We probably need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Much of this will be unpopular, and not just with the “stakeholder state”, because all this legislation sounds nice (governments never call a law ‘The Anti-Growth Act’ or ‘The Business Suffocation Act’). Some of these laws have only just been introduced.

The government - this government, the last government and the next government - is in a strait-jacket of well-meaning but badly drafted laws that have been exploited by activist judges and single-issue campaigners. There is no point complaining about the judges and the campaigners. The only way out of the woods is do the one thing that politicians can do and change the law.

 

Read the rest (free) on my Substack.  

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Michael McFadden RIP

Some sad news to start the year. The writer and activist Michael J. McFadden passed away just before Christmas aged 75. His 2004 book Dissecting Antismokers' Brains was ahead of its time in critiquing the tactics, arguments and evidence of the prohibitionist tobacco control lobby. He usefully divided anti-smokers into nine categories: the innocents, the neurotics, the truly affected, the bereaved, the ex-smokers, the controllers, the idealists, the moralists and the greedy. 

 

Michael went on to write another book about the coming prohibition of tobacco (TobakkoNacht – The Antismoking Endgame), but could mostly be found in forums and "below the line" in a Sisyphean struggle against online misinformation. He was kind enough to read an early draft of my book Velvet Glove, Iron Fist and provided many helpful comments, particularly with regards to the situation in his native USA. He continued pinging me occasional e-mails with encouraging words for the rest of his life. 

His background surprised some people:

 

Michael J. McFadden grew up in Brooklyn in the ’60s, studied Peace Studies and Peace Research at Manhattan College (BA) and the U of PA’s Wharton Graduate School, and then moved to being an activist/trainer in a nonviolence commune, canvassing door-to-door for an anti-nuke group, organizing bicycle activism, and eventually writing two books aimed at fighting the antismoking movement.

So how does a hippie peace/bicycle activist become a pro-smoking activist and writer?

The answer is that I’m NOT a “pro-smoking” anything: I’m a pro-freedom, pro-science, anti-overpowering-government-control, anti-manipulation-through-dishonest-propaganda activist and writer.

He'll be missed. 

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