The anti-gambling slush fund

I said that the gambling levy would provide a slush fund for spongers and activists, and it has.

 

Dozens of pieces of research have already been commissioned. Since many social scientists specialise in woke postmodern guff, that kind of thing is well represented. Projects include “Intersectionality in gambling related harm” (£48,670), “Menstrual change and gambling: a hybrid review” (£51,092) and “A rapid evidence review of gambling harms in ethnic and faith minority communities” (£50,420). A review into “gambling and its spatial footprint” (£51,088) is being led by an economist who only seems to have taken an interest in gambling in 2024 when he received funding to conduct a study which came to the earth-shattering conclusion that “people living in close proximity to gambling establishments are more likely to visit in person”. 

A study of the “aetiology and treatment of disordered gambling” (£164,481) is being led by a psychologist who has been publishing gambling research for years, which sounds promising until you see that the first line of his proposal says: “Gambling is acknowledged as a mental health disorder.” It is not, but such claims will serve him well in “public health” where the distinction between gambling and problem gambling is being deliberately erased. A study about gambling and suicide is being led by an academic who is an expert on suicide but has never published anything about gambling. Her proposal begins with the nonsensical claim that “almost half of adults have gambled within the past four weeks and around 40% within the last year” before claiming that the gambling industry in Britain is expanding (it is shrinking) and that rates of problem gambling have “escalated” (they have not).

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

Introducing Action on Gambling

Action on Smoking and Health's former CEO Deborah Arnott famously insisted that...

 

"the 'domino theory' i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false." 

 

As a staunch denier of the slippery slope, it must have pained her when Consensus Action on Salt and Health was set up as a tribute act to her organisation, later followed by Action on Sugar. 

 

Another new campaign group has recently been moulded in ASH's image. Action on Gambling is now a thing. Amongst their members are the Labour MP Beccy Cooper, whom I wrote about two weeks ago. Her bio reads:

 

As a public health doctor Beccy has been a leading proponent of stricter regulations on the tobacco industry – a skill set she is putting to work to curb the harm caused by gambling. 

 

Even ASH have stopped pretending that the slippery slope isn't real. The webpage that gave us Arnott's immortal quote about the domino theory has been taken offline and their new CEO, Hazel Cheeseman, has some warm words for Action on Gambling...

 

 

We've gone beyond denying the slippery slope now, haven't we? We are now at the "Of course there's a slippery slope, what are you going to do about it?" stage.

ASH always denied being prohibitionists too, but we now know for a fact that they were lying. 

 

So there's a slippery slope and it ends up with prohibition if we let them. This is no longer up for debate. The anti-gambling people will claim that they don't want to ban gambling and the anti-alcohol people will claim that they don't want to ban alcohol. They will say whatever they have to say to get public support, but they are explicitly following the anti-tobacco blueprint that ends with prohibition. 

 

Don't get fooled again.

Australia's tobacco tax disaster

I knew things were bad in Australia but this graph really show how dramatically the black market has grown since the tobacco turf war took off in 2023.

 

The green and yellow lines show the government's projections from the last few years. Each time, the government forecasts that revenues will flatten out somewhat but they just keep plummeting. It won't be long before the Australian state is spending more on enforcement than it gets in tobacco duty!

What a fiasco. It's great that Simon Chapman has lived long enough for him to see it happen.

 h/t Ed Jegaothy

Omnipotent government

I wrote this last week for The Critic...

 

Not since the early 1980s has the government had such a stranglehold over economic life in Britain. It is well known that taxes are at a record high and that the state is spending a larger share of GDP than at any time since the Second World War, but these statistics do not do justice to the full extent of the government’s interference in the economy. The price of gas, electricity, water, bus tickets, train tickets and, in Scotland and Wales, alcohol is controlled by the state. So too is the price of labour — since 2010, the minimum wage has risen from half of the average wage to two-thirds. Listed companies are ordered to “comply or explain” why 40 per cent of their board members are not women. Captains of industry are summoned to Downing Street to receive bollockings over non-existent “price gouging”. Businesses are given targets to sell more of one product and less of another. 

We lack the words to describe our current economic model. The left call it neoliberal but neoliberals have had no meaningful influence on British governments for thirty years. The right call it socialist but neither the Tories nor Labour have shown much interest in seizing the means of production. Keir Starmer’s government is more left-wing than he wants you to believe, but even if he renationalises the rail and water companies, it will be a nostalgic gesture rather than a heartfelt effort to control the heights of industry. Only on the fringes of the left is there any desire to return to the days when British Airways, Jaguar and Thomas Cook were under “democratic control”.

On the face of it, the post-Thatcher settlement has held, but there is nothing Thatcherite about this government, nor the ones that preceded it. “State capitalism with British characteristics” would be one way of describing it, but that doesn’t really fit. Under state capitalism, as practised in China, the government owns the major industries but allows them to use the price mechanism and other levers of the free market to compete. What we have in Britain is almost the opposite of that. Businesses are allowed to stay in private hands but with so many instructions, targets and, increasingly, price controls that it could perhaps best be described as a capitalist command economy. 

 

I go on to discuss the government fining companies for selling too much of a product which is, I think, completely new for this country. Everything else I mention has probably been tried before because every terrible economic policy has appealed to governments at one time or other. But it is the mix of these policies that is unique for the UK. It is no longer a question of being more socialist or more capitalist.

 

Upon publication, some people said what I was describing was corporatism or crony capitalism but I don't think that is right. Someone pointed me to Mises' Omnipotent Government, which I had not read, and said that a capitalist command economy is similar to what Mises called "the German pattern of socialism", i.e. the economic policies of the Third Reich. Certainly, there are similarities: private companies were kept private but threatened and bossed about to achieve the regime's goals. But Mises distinguished the German pattern of socialism with what he calls "interventionism". It is "interventionism" that is closest to what I am describing.

 

He wrote:

 

Nor should interventionism be confused with the German pattern of socialism. It is the essential feature of interventionism that it does not aim at a total abolition of the market; it does not want to reduce private ownership to a sham and the entrepreneurs to the status of shop managers. The interventionist government does not want to do away with private enterprise; it wants only to regulate its working through isolated measures of interference. Such measures are not designed as cogs in an all-round system of orders and prohibitions destined to control the whole apparatus of production and distribution; they do not aim at replacing private ownership and a market economy by socialist planning.

In order to grasp the meaning and the effects of interventionism it is sufficient to study the working of the two most important types of intervention: interference by restriction and interference by price control.

And there's a video...

Deluded wowsers

It's time to laugh at the Aussies again. 

 

The article is here. The delusion and hubris is strong in this one. Australia hasn't beaten tobacco. Tobacco is beating Australia. It has unleashed a crime wave, and it seems that the underworld is now expanding into bootleg alcohol. It will be bootleg hamburgers if the wowser who wrote this article gets his way. 

It contains all the usual NPC talking points from someone who has considered the issue for about five seconds. "Let's have a sugar tax!' (They've never worked anywhere.) "Let's ban advertising! (Ditto.) "Let's subsidise healthy food!" (How?) And then there is the usual diversion about TeH iNdUsTrY.

 

There will be predictable objections. Industry will argue that taxes are unfair, advertising restrictions are excessive, and governments should stay out of people’s kitchens. Similar arguments were made about tobacco. But Australia did not become a world leader in tobacco control by accepting industry talking points. It acted because the health and economic costs were too large to ignore. 

 

If Australia is the world leader in tobacco control, send me to whichever country got the wooden spoon. It will probably be safer there. And yes, the government should stay out of people’s kitchens.

 

As for those "industry talking points", they turned out to be correct. Every one of them. The taxes were regressive, the black market did explode and, as this article proves once more, there was a slippery slope. 

Quiet, children. The grown ups are talking.

Accelerationists believe that things have to get worse before they get better and that the faster things get worse, the sooner people will wake up and demand radical change.

I've always been sceptical about this because, as Adam Smith said, there is a lot of ruin in a nation. Some people will never change their minds or admit that they were wrong.

Australian tobacco policy is a prime example. Even the government now accepts that most of the cigarettes and nearly all the vapes in Australia are sold on the black market. The number of firebombings linked to the illicit trade is nearing 300. But, as this article shows, politicians and 'public health' academics cannot tear themselves away from the script that says that the real problem is BiG ToBaCcO.

 

Australia’s illegal cigarette trade has exploded into a full-scale criminal economy, prompting fears within the legal tobacco industry that its industry is being pushed towards extinction.

The debacle is hitting the big tobacco giants hard. So much so that a representative of Philip Morris International privately warned a Senate inquiry this week that its days were numbered in Australia.

... At the centre of the crisis is Australia’s booming underground cigarette market, now estimated to account for as much as 60 per cent of all tobacco sales nationwide.

Authorities say the scale of the problem is staggering. Nicotine is widely accepted to be one of the toughest addictions to crack, and broader cost-of-living pressures have encouraged smokers to look elsewhere as service station packs skyrocket.

The issue has merged into the disposable vape market, which has exploded in Australia over the past decade.

... But despite the massive enforcement effort, the black market continues growing.

Australia’s soaring tobacco excise — which is among the highest in the world — has pushed cigarette prices beyond $70 a pack in some cases, creating an enormous financial incentive for organised crime groups flooding the country with cheap illegal products.

In recent years, the illicit trade has become increasingly tied to gang violence, extortion rackets and a wave of tobacco shop firebombings across Melbourne and Sydney as syndicates battle for control of the market.

 

Oh dear, what a mess. But everyone knows that "world-leading" tobacco taxes caused the problem and, therefore, that cutting taxes is the way to tackle it. The government, the tobacco companies and the public all have an interest in dealing with this issue, but when a representative of Philip Morris said the bleeding obvious, left-wing politicians jumped down his throat.

 

The Philip Morris representative argued during the Senate inquiry that lowering tobacco excise could help undercut criminal operators by making legal cigarettes more competitive again.

That sparked fierce backlash from health advocates and Labor MPs, who criticised Coalition senators for allowing the hearing to take place behind closed doors despite Australia’s obligations under the World Health Organisation tobacco control framework.

The secret hearing turned combative after Coalition senator Jonathon Duniam asked the representative what Australia could face “in this dystopian world in 2030, when all tobacco or nicotine is illegal”.

The company warned organised crime could effectively take over the country’s nicotine supply chain if current trends continued, saying the legal market was becoming “unsafe and definitely unsustainable”.

But Labor senator Dorinda Cox aggressively challenged the company over whether any of its products were ending up in the illicit market.

“Are you able to guarantee to the Australian Senate that none of your tobacco that you produce ends up in Australia’s illicit market?” she asked.

When the representative pointed to anti-diversion controls and counterfeit products, Senator Cox fired back: “How do you know that if you don’t have any production controls in place? That doesn’t make sense at all.”

 

Tobacco companies can't control what people do with their products once they've been sold, but since the big sellers on Australia's black market are Chinese brands and brands like Manchester which are not made by 'Big Tobacco', it seems safe to say that Senator Cox is barking up the wrong tree.

 

But she is a beacon of common sense compared to the man from the Green Party...

 

Greens senator Jordon Steele-John went further still, comparing the company’s appearance before the inquiry to “inviting mosquitoes to give evidence at an inquiry related to the prevention of the spread of malaria”.

 

Sounds like someone's been given his lines by a "public health" activist, doesn't it? It's an analogy that doesn't work well at the best of times and is completely fatuous when the subject at hand is not the spread of smoking but the spread of illegal tobacco products. 

 

He later mocked Philip Morris’s argument that lowering tobacco excise could help weaken criminal operators.

“So, in your infinite wisdom, the best idea you can chuck at us … is lower the amount of tax that you pay,” he said.

 

I imagine he had a smug little smile on this face after delivering that zinger. Except that excise tax is paid by the customer, not the company.

 

“It’s a sophisticated submission that ends in the shocking conclusion that you should pay less tax. It’s not a serious proposal.”

 

They don't pay the tax, dumbass. 

 

Prof Garry Jennings of the Heart Foundation likened the scene to inviting “the enemy into the war room”.

“Big tobacco will simply argue for a reduction in excise so it can sell more cigarettes legally,” he said via the publication.

 

Yes, that's the idea, Garry. We want demand to move from the illicit, untaxed and violent market to the legal, taxed and peaceful market. The Australian government has paid a big enough price for listening to ideological halfwits like you. Now that the thing you said would never happen has happened spectacularly, it's time to listen to the grown ups.

 

University of Sydney public health professor Becky Freeman said the illicit trade was no longer a hidden “black market” operating in the shadows.

“It’s clearly an in-your-face market,” she said.

“It’s part of the business model now that retailers just sell untaxed illicit goods.”

 

Yes, we know, Becks. And it is, quite specifically, your fault. 

 

Australian tobacco control has been an absolute disaster but even now, with the fires burning around them, the political class cannot change the record. 'Big Tobacco' only controls a minority of tobacco sales now. The real Big Tobacco in Australia settles its disputes with guns. The legitimate tobacco companies should exit the country and leave them to it.

 

Public health scholars

Some self-described "public health scholars" have called on doctors to stop talking in public about drugs that could save their lives. I look at their backgrounds and possible motivations for wanting to focus instead on BIG FOOD on my Substack...

 

The second author, Grant Ennis, is an Australian with a Masters in Public Administration. He has written a book titled Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment which has been praised by no less a luminary than our old friend Greg Fell. 

He also “lectures at Monash University (Australia) on activism, organizing, corporate disinformation, and the role of subsidies in creating global problems (the content of Dark PR).”

This seems to be only his fourth journal article. The others are titled ‘From Corporate Activism to “Dark PR:” Corporate Discourses and Their Influence on Public Opinion in the Digital Society’, ‘We Do Have Enemies and We Should Know Who They Are: The Commercial Determinants of Physical Activity’ and ‘Calling for a more coherent policy response to driving harm’ (the latter article was co-authored with Mr Fell and tries to apply the Total Consumption Model to motoring).

The third author, the splendidly named Yogi Hale Hendlin, is based in San Francisco and has a PhD in Environmental Philosophy. He is currently writing a book titled Interspecies Solidarity: Valuing difference in the biotic community. He has a keen interest in ‘Critical Plant Studies’ and has written “the first ecohumanities book dedicated to algae”. He’s written a lot of papers but none of them seem to be about obesity. He does, however, have a book in the pipeline titled Industrial Pandemics: The Spread of the Corporate Virus and How to Stop It and he is affiliated with The Center to End Corporate Harm. He is not only interested in ‘interspecies politics’ but also in ‘understanding industries themselves as disease vectors’.

What does this tell us? Firstly, it tells us that anybody can call themselves a “public health scholar” these days. Secondly, it tells us that some people in the “public health” conversation about obesity might possibly have more of a political interest in fighting corporations than a medical interest in making people healthier.

 

Not everything is a public health issue

Is gambling advertising a "public health issue"? And if it is, then what isn't? 

I've written for Spiked about this... 

If your definition of public health is so broad that it encompasses everything that could potentially have a direct or indirect effect on the health of somebody somewhere, then everything can be described as a public-health issue, but what is the point? If everything is a public-health issue, there can be no such thing as a public-health expert. Expertise requires specialised knowledge of a narrow field. A problem doesn’t become easier to solve just by putting it under the umbrella of ‘public health’. What do they teach people in schools of public health that makes them better equipped to solve every social and economic problem than anyone else?

Similarly, what do civil servants at the Department of Health know about gambling that the people at DCMS don’t? What expertise do they have on the three key licensing objectives of preventing gambling from being a source of crime, ensuring fair and open play, and protecting children and vulnerable people? At a push, they might have some ideas about how to protect the ‘vulnerable’, but they would be no more than the usual sledgehammer tactics of taxing and banning. ‘Public health’ academics have shown themselves to be hilariously out of their depth when they attempt to transfer their supposed wisdom to the world of gambling. If they can’t borrow a trick from the anti-smoking lobby, they don’t know what to do.

 

Read it all.

 

NB. Spiked has a partial paywall these days. I recommend subscribing, but if you don't you can still register and read three articles for free each month.

The idiocy of MMT

Emmanuel Maggiori has a book about Modern Monetary Theory out today. It's very good and I was delighted to sit down with him on Tuesday to talk about it. 

There's a danger of giving credibility to this ridiculous theory just by talking about it. It's so idiotic that it feels like punching down, but since it seems to be growing in popularity, it needs to be addressed.

Enjoy!  

The "stickiness" of betting shop customers

It was only six months ago that Carsten Jung from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) was telling the Treasury Select Committee not to listen to those silly gambling industry lobbyists who were warning about hundreds of betting shops closing if gambling duty was hiked up. I wrote at the time...

 

The IPPR claims that its tax rises would bring in an extra £3.2 billion a year which former Prime Minister Gordon Brown says should be used to “solve” the child poverty “crisis”. The government currently spends the thick end of £400 billion a year on social security and yet relative child poverty persists, so it is far from certain that an extra £3 billion would solve anything, but despite the Treasury’s notorious resistance to hypothecation, anti-gambling campaigners have craftily made the two issues of gambling taxation and child poverty synonymous. Whose side are you on? Hungry children or online casinos? And what kind of monster are you anyway?

Cunning though it may be, this plan does rather depend on the onshore gambling industry not being a smoldering ruin after these duties have been hiked sky high.

 

Reassured by the IPPR and the Social Market Foundation that any claims about shop closures and job losses were "scaremongering" and that betting shop customers were "sticky" (i.e. loyal with inelastic demand), the government did pretty much everything the IPPR wanted in the last budget. And lo and behold...

 

Gambling giant blames UK tax rises as they close hundreds of stores

 

Evoke, the owner of William Hill and 888, has confirmed the closure of approximately 270 betting shops across the UK.

This decision aims to offset the financial impact of higher gambling taxes and mounting debts faced by the company.

Evoke reported pre-tax losses more than doubled to £549.1 million in 2025, largely attributed to increased UK duty costs.

The shop closures are expected to result in hundreds of job losses, although the precise number has not yet been confirmed.

 

It would appear that the anti-gambling lobby have outwitted the politicians once again. 

 

The very thing that this sweaty little geezer from the IPPR said wouldn’t happen! pic.twitter.com/UrNKShOZsj

— Christopher Snowdon (@cjsnowdon) April 30, 2026

Democratically Deficient Organizations

With Julian Morris and Roger Bate, I have written a short paper about Democratically Deficient Organizations (DoDOs). We focus on the World Health Organisation and the massive NGOs that fund it.

 

In tobacco control and pandemic governance, foundation funding, WHO authority, NGO advocacy, and academic research reinforce one another to produce policy consensus insulated from scrutiny. Law & economics frameworks help explain the result: incentives favor persistence over performance. The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has not accelerated global declines in smoking, while discouraging harm-reduction approaches that have succeeded in countries such as Sweden. Proposals to expand WHO authority in pandemic preparedness risk replicating the same institutional failures revealed during COVID-19.

The problem is not insufficient resources, but weak accountability. The brief proposes reforms to restore it: rebalance WHO funding toward assessed contributions, strengthen transparency and conflict-of-interest rules, open governance processes, embrace harm reduction, and return policymaking authority to domestic democratic institutions. Without such changes, the continued expansion of the DoDO model will deepen existing failures—with consequences measured in human lives.

 

You can read the whole thing for free. I also interviewed Roger for the IEA podcast last week...

 

Drinking on the job

 “Churchill tries to find luck in drink, but the bottle distorts the view.” - Nazi propaganda, 1942

 

The online British public are having one of their fits of moral outrage because they have discovered, seemingly for the first time, that there are bars in the parliamentary estate and MPs use them. I have written about it for The Critic. 

 

After the latest attempt to assassinate the President of the United States on Saturday, an attendee at the White House correspondents’ dinner was spotted making off with a couple of bottles of wine. As several people noticed, many Americans seemed to think that this was a greater outrage than the shooting itself, whereas British observers were firmly on the side of the minesweeper. 

Perhaps the difference is that Americans can afford to turn away free booze, but it seems more like another manifestation of the USA’s strangely prudish attitude towards alcohol. It is still less than a hundred years since Prohibition ended. The Anti-Saloon League is no more, but its place has been taken by “sober influencers”, gym bros and longevity-obsessed billionaires who preach the gospel of total abstinence. Last year, the number of drinkers in America fell to an all-time low, with barely half of the adult population touching a drop. 

We Brits cannot afford to be complacent. As another viral video released over the weekend showed, the American culture of puritanism has spread to these shores. Hannah Spencer, the recently elected Green MP for Gorton and Denton, has exclusively revealed that members of Parliament can be a bibulous bunch. In an interview with Politics Joe, she said: “Like, there’s a room where I walked past and I doubled back and looked in because people are just sat having a drink.” That room, I fancy, is what is known as a “bar” and there are nine of them on the parliamentary estate. There are also several pubs within walking distance which, rather wonderfully, have a bell that rings when MPs need to stagger back and vote. 

 

Read the rest. (NB. The Critic has put up a paywall for magazine articles and old articles, but you can continue to read mine for free when they come out. Although I do recommend getting a subscription.) 

The EU Tobacco Tax Directive

The European Commission is pressing on with its plans to have an EU-wide tax on nicotine pouches and e-cigarette fluid, in addition to a sharp increase in the minimum tax rate on tobacco. Epicenter's experts at the EU Regulatory Observatory have been assessing the proposals and are unimpressed. 

I've written a short briefing with Constantinos Saravakos outlining their views and discussing some of the main dangers.

The main findings are:

• The TTD’s extension of minimum taxes to low-risk nicotine products conflicts with the EU’s goal of reducing smoking prevalence.
• Taxing safer alternatives will likely increase consumption of more harmful cigarettes.
• Higher minimum tobacco taxes will stimulate the illicit market, particularly in Eastern Europe.
• The proposal is highly regressive and fails to account for income differences across member states.
• The principle of differentiating taxes by relative risk is sound and should be strengthened, not diluted.
• A risk-proportionate reform would impose minimal or zero EU-level taxes on e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches to maximise substitution away from smoking.

 

Why 'public health' hates the public

I was in Brussels for the World Nicotine Congress last month and had a chat with my pal Peter Beckett from Clearing the Air about vaping. Video below.

 

The least conservative Conservatives

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill will very soon become the Tobacco and Vapes Act. I've written about it for Spiked.

 

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which is soon to receive royal assent, is the most empty-headed and illiberal piece of legislation passed in my lifetime. It is a pathetic epitaph for a vacuous political class, a sad fart from the rotting corpse of Blairism, and a new low for the nanny state. Waved through by the political pygmies in the House of Commons and cheered on by the freedom-hating gibbons in the House of Lords, it has given a quick dopamine rush to self-righteous windbags as the British state crumbles around them.

Most people have been only vaguely aware of what the new law says, but the media coverage yesterday alerted millions to the fact that the so-called generational smoking ban has nothing to do with smoking in pubs (which was banned in 2007) or selling cigarettes to children (which was banned in 1908). Instead, it will create an almost surreal two-tier society in which people born after 2008 become permanent children in the eyes of the law. 

 

Read the rest. 

 

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has described the generational tobacco sales ban as the least conservative policy of the last 14 years (it was put into motion, lest we forget, by Rishi Sunak). Most of the 41 MPs who voted against it yesterday were Conservatives (all the Reform MPs voted agin and there were four liberal Lib Dems), but there were quite a few Tories who didn't, including Sunak himself and a few obvious ones like Bob Blackman (ASH's man in parliament) and Caroline Johnson (horrendous nanny statist). Former ministers such as Jeremy Hunt and Steve Barclay did the walk of shame to join Labour MPs in voting for prohibition and a two-tier society (no Labour MPs voted against). 

 

The rest of the alleged conservatives were: 

 

John Glen

Geoffrey Clifton-Browne

Peter Fortune

Helen Grant

Damian Hinds

Neil Hudson

Alicia Kearns

John Lamont

Robbie Moore

Andrew Murrison

Joe Robertson

Neil Shastri-Hunt

David Simmonds

Graham Stuart

Martin Vickers

Mike Wood

 

They all voted for a policy which their leader says, correctly, is profoundly unconservative. None of them had to do it - the Bill was bound to pass. They did it because they wanted to. This is the kind of thing that really gets them going.

 

I'm not necessarily saying that all these freedom hating authoritarians should be kicked out of the party, but how is Caroline Johnson - who is not only an anti-smoking zealot but also a crank about vaping - the shadow health secretary?! So much for the party being under new management.  

Audit the Gambling Commission

It has been nearly six years since the Social Market Foundation, a leftish think tank, came up with the brilliant wheeze of banning people from spending more money on gambling than they can afford. They proposed a £23 a week cap on gambling expenditure and said that anyone who wanted to exceed this “socially acceptable gambling budget” would have to prove that they were good for it. They did not explain how this would work in practice, but in a submission to the Gambling Commission in 2021, their gambling regulation spokesman, Dr James Noyes, said that the checks should be “non-intrusive” and “based on the data already held” by the company. 

The idea of “frictionless affordability checks” was supported by the the Gambling Commission, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Gambling Related Harm, the House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Social and Economic Impact of the Gambling Industry and every anti-gambling group worth its salt, but it was a mirage. Background checks for County Court Judgements and past bankruptcies are insufficient to show whether a person is spending beyond their means. Customers can be phoned up and asked if they have an adequate income, but nothing compels them to tell the truth. When push comes to shove, you need bank statements and pay slips, but two-thirds of punters are unwilling to show these to a bookmaker. 

And why should they? Gambling companies use all sorts of methods to identify problematic patterns of play and intervene with questions and advice, but they cannot look into their customers’ souls. If they ask too many questions, there are plenty of unregulated and offshore websites for punters to bet on. And since those websites do not pay tax, they often offer better odds. When General Betting Duty rises from 15 per cent to 25 per cent next year, “black market” sites will gain a further competitive advantage over the companies that are regulated by the Gambling Commission.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

Sheffield modellers join temperance group

Two of the leading Sheffield alcohol modellers, John Holmes and Colin Angus, have joined the Institute of Alcohol Studies' Expert Panel. The Institute of Alcohol Studies is almost entirely funded by the Alliance House Foundation whose key objective is "to promote alcoholic abstinence" and bring about "an alcohol free society". They set up the IAS in 1987 when they closed down the UK Temperance Alliance. All these groups are direct descendents of the prohibitionist United Kingdom Alliance for the Suppression of the Traffic in all Intoxicating Liquor. When the IAS went whining to the press regulator about The Times describing them as part of the "anti-drink" lobby they lost, because they obviously are.

 

By contrast, the Sheffield Addictions Research Group (SARG), as it now calls itself, is supposed to be an impartial group of egghead mathematicians doing careful modelling for governments. 

 

But that conceit has never been very persuasive... 

 

SARG has worked closely with the Institute for many years – our researchers have been involved in a wide range of IAS outputs, while senior colleagues from the IAS have sat on Steering Groups for SARG research projects. 

 

Fancy that. 

 

Reflecting on the appointment, Professor John Holmes said:

"Having worked closely with the IAS for many years, providing informal advice and supporting their research, I am delighted to take up a formal role on the panel. The IAS plays a vital role in ensuring that public debate on alcohol is informed by the best available evidence, and I look forward to supporting their mission over the next three years."

 

It's nice to finally make it official. I'm sure they'll be very happy there. 

    

"Through donations to NGOs and bribes, Bloomberg interferes in politics"

The Mexican newspaper El Universal has reported allegations that Bloomberg Philanthropies have used donations and bribes to influence policy. Bloomberg's pet policies are sugar taxes and e-cigarette flavour bans.

The article says that Bloomberg Philanthropies have funnelled nearly 300 million pesos (£12.8 million) to the NGO El Poder del Consumidor which is supposed to be a consumer's right group but has ended up lobbying for anti-consumer policies.

 

The documents indicate that Bloomberg Philanthropies uses its multimillion-dollar financial support to influence and promote regulatory and fiscal changes in Mexico and other countries, focusing on imposing restrictions, high taxes, and strict regulations that directly affect large U.S. companies.

To achieve this, it funds public institutions —such as health research institutes—and civil society organizations, mainly those dedicated to consumer protection and public health , creating a coordinated ecosystem that includes the production of “scientific” studies, media campaigns, political pressure, and strategic dissemination.

To carry out these irregular acts, the documents reveal that the Bloomberg Philanthropies foundation triangulates funds through intermediaries such as Fernwood Group Fund. 

 

It is no secret that Bloomberg has used his billions to take over NGOs, create media outlets from scratch and influence the WHO, but the claims made in Mexico seem to go beyond that.

 

... Bloomberg's funding of El Poder del Consumidor is so extensive that it ends up paying million-dollar salaries to those close to Alejandro Calvillo, the leader of this NGO.

For example, his brother Jorge Luis Calvillo Unna received a total of 7 million 800 thousand pesos from 2020 to October 2025; while Suzanne Elaine Kemp, wife of Alejandro Calvillo, received more than 4 million 285 thousand pesos in the same period.

 

 Moreover...

 

Several payments were also found to former federal government officials, such as Alfonso Guati Rojo, who served as Director General of Standards at the Ministry of Economy (SE), leading the design, defense and legal strengthening of the new [food] labeling system in the face of business injunctions.

Five months after leaving office in 2022, payments began for “consulting” and “monitoring of injunctions” from El Poder del Consumidor (The Power of the Consumer), coinciding with the review of key cases in the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation ( SCJN). These payments totaled more than one million pesos for the former federal official.

Based on public documents, the dates and concepts indicate that the consulting functioned as a piece of parallel strategy: while the government legally defended the regulation in courts, Alfonso Guati Rojo transferred technical knowledge to El Poder del Consumidor to strengthen its political, communicational and public pressure action in support of the defense against the injunctions before the Court.

 

Curiouser and curiouser. This seems like the kind of story that The Investigative Desk and the School for Moral Ambition would be interested in...

 

You can read the English translation here. 

Illiberal liberalism

I've written about Adrian Wooldridge's new book, Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, for The Critic. I agree with much of it and it's very good as a history of liberal thought, but when he offers a prescription for change, he is more centrist than liberal. A lot of it doesn't offer change at all...

 

Under the heading “The case for liberal paternalism”, he makes such a shallow and uninformed case for lifestyle regulation that one starts to doubt whether he has read On Liberty. In addition to making a number of factual errors, he puts forward a series of hoary old chestnuts that he seems to think are argument-winning zingers. So you think you like freedom, eh? What about the drunk driver that kills someone? (Drink driving is banned.) Why should thin people have to pay for the healthcare of fat people? (The obese take less out of the welfare state than the thin because they don’t live as long.) He cites Richard Thaler’s work on behavioural economics to justify “nudging” and “soft paternalism” and then lists a slew of anti-smoking policies that Thaler would consider to be unacceptable because they impose costs and cannot be opted out of. 

He rejoices in people being banned from smoking not only inside but outside and then says that similar tactics need to be used against people who eat “fattening foods”. He celebrates governments that put “comprehensive taxes on unhealthy food” and cheers on Japanese companies that “measure the waistlines of employees to make sure that they are not getting too fat”. “We should go further”, he says. “Why not use the proceeds of food taxes to subsidize healthy foods?” (Because the government doesn’t control the price of food.)

The problem with this is not so much that the policies he proposes are ineffective, though they are (Britain’s sugar tax, which Wooldridge thinks is wonderful, did absolutely nothing to reduce obesity and nor did the warning labels put on “unhealthy” food in Chile.) The real problem is twofold. Firstly, whatever else they might be, policies that “demonise” (his word) consumers of tobacco, cast them out from private buildings, extort money from them through sin taxes and restrict where they can buy the product are not liberal; a word that, as the author helpfully reminds us, is derived from the Latin word libertas, meaning liberty. Wooldridge is right to say that John Stuart Mill was comfortable with more state intervention than some libertarians care to admit, but when it came to state-sponsored paternalism he was crystal clear. “To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained,” he wrote, “is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition; and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price; and to those who do, it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste.” Laws restricting where alcohol can be sold, said Mill, are “suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages.” If banning people from smoking outdoors and having the government define and prohibit “misinformation” is Wooldridge’s idea of liberalism, we can only be thankful that he never developed an interest in fascism.

The second problem is that if Wooldridge wants a government that will take on populism by hassling smokers, meddling with the food supply and censoring the internet, he has already got it. Under Boris Johnson — the supposed populist “strongman” — the UK put into legislation the most stringent restrictions on “junk food” marketing and promotion in the world. His successor, Rishi Sunk, announced the total prohibition of tobacco, albeit over a timeframe that is almost surreal. Both policies were eagerly pursued by Keir Starmer when he became Prime Minister, as was the Online Safety Act. The House of Lords recently tried to ban social media for under-16s, Kemi Badenoch has already said that the Conservatives will enact such a ban, and it is only a matter of time before it becomes official Labour policy. Is it any wonder that populists talk about the Uniparty?

 

Do read it all. 

A discussion about Anti-Capitalism and "Public Health"

I spoke to my friends at the Sloavkian think tank INESS (the Institute of Economic and Social Studies) recently. We talked about my 2025 paper Anti-Capitalism and Public Health and you can watch the video below.  

Chris Whitty, the man who broke Britain

The i newspaper asked me to write about someone who broke Britain so I wrote this about the joyless Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty. Here's a sample...

Flattening the curve – i.e. allowing the virus to circulate while suppressing it enough to stop the health service being overwhelmed – was as much Whitty’s plan as it was anyone’s, but when he pivoted to supporting full lockdown in March 2020 he essentially never looked back. By May, the curve was flat but the country would remain in lockdown for another two months. The belief that everything is more important than the economy and nothing is more important than “public health” had taken hold.

Whitty seemed to become obsessed with the idea that epidemics are always halving or doubling. Since the only time the infection rate (the infamous R number) went down in the first 18 months of the pandemic was during lockdowns, this meant that he could always foresee the Tiber foaming with blood. The only solution was more lockdowns. Longer lockdowns. Lockdowns to prevent lockdowns. For the rest of the pandemic, every piece of advice from Sage, which was co-chaired by Whitty, was nudging the government towards that end.

Politicians decide, but their decisions are based on the advice and evidence given to them by experts. During Covid, the evidence presented appeared partial and excessively pessimistic and the advice seemed relentlessly illiberal. A few examples should suffice.

In October 2020, the NHS was nowhere near being overwhelmed. There were more empty hospital beds than there had been a year earlier. Things were worse in parts of northern England but local restrictions seemed to be working in the northwest and infection rates were falling in the northeast. Nevertheless, Chris Whitty appeared on television at Halloween with some graphs and Boris Johnson capitulated with a four-week lockdown. When that ended, Sage used out-of-date infection data to justify putting nearly every English county into the top two tiers, thereby extending lockdown in all but name and crushing the hospitality sector.

In December 2021, the Omicron variant was causing renewed panic around the world despite all the evidence showing that it was significantly milder than its predecessors and that hospitalisation rates in South Africa, where it had originated, were a small fraction of what they had been before. On 15 December, more than a fortnight after the chair of the South African Medical Association told us that we were “panicking unnecessarily” about an “extremely mild” variant, Whitty appeared on television to warn about the “misinterpretation” of the South African data and saying: “I want to be clear, this is going to be a problem.” He argued that South Africans benefited from high levels of immunity, seemingly forgetting that the British had been repeatedly vaccinated for the last year. “There are several things we don’t know [about Omicron]” he said, before adding inaccurately, “but what we do know is bad”. It seemed like every effort was made to bounce Boris Johnson into a fourth lockdown that Christmas. It is to his credit that he resisted. It was not until 23 December that Sage finally admitted that Omicron was indeed much milder. In February, Whitty conceded that Omicron’s impact on mortality had been “much more muted” and was “essentially not visible”. The government spent £9.3bn on lateral flow tests that winter.

Whitty was not alone in pushing lockdowns at the drop of a hat. It took a team effort to lay waste to Britain’s economy and inflict an injury to the nation’s psyche from which it has yet to recover. Weak politicians, flawed modellers and hysterical journalists should all be held accountable. But if the finger has to be pointed at a single individual, it is the man who has never apologised and who was knighted when in my view he should have been sacked. Chris Whitty, the softly spoken boffin, the unassuming technocrat, broke Britain with Powerpoint. 

 

We used to think that Whitty never smiled because he is a serious man. It turned out that he is just a misery-guts who hates the idea of people enjoying themselves, as he has proved by whispering terrible, illiberal ideas into the ears of politicians ever since. A pox on him.

Gamban canned

Gamban, the app that blocks gambling sites on the devices of problem gamblers (at their request), has been turned down for funding by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID). 

Loyal readers will recall that the gambling industry used to pony up many millions of pounds for treatment, research and education. The puritans at the Department of Health decided that this was tainted money that could only be made clean by taking it from gambling companies by force. Most of the long-term recipients of this cash went along with the idea of replacing voluntary donations with a compulsory levy because they assumed that it would guarantee them funding for life. 

It didn't quite work out that way. GambleAware were the first to be cut loose after the hardcore anti-gambling twunts and Jolyon Maugham tried to blacken their name. Despite playing up their anti-gambling credentials, the charity couldn't deny that it had received industry funding in the past and that is an unwashable sin now that gambling is a 'public health' issue.

Others have been simple victims of government incompetence. OHID is so useless that it can't even give away money without cocking it up. As Zak Thomas-Akoo has reported, treatment services, including Gordon Moody and GamCare, are in chaos because bureaucrats can't get them their grants in time. 

And now Gamban has been given the cold shoulder because it is (brace yourself) a business.

 

This year, the UK government’s Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) oversaw the distribution of funding and decided to exclude Gamban on the basis of its entity status being a limited company.

This was not a reasonable basis to omit the best available gambling… pic.twitter.com/l9Qid6c4HU

— Gamban (@gambanapp) March 31, 2026

It is very tempting to laugh about this because it is Matt Zarb-Cousin's business and Zarb-Cousin is a Corbyn-supporting turned Polanksi-supporting socialist who is endlessly attacking industry. If only Gamban had been nationalised, eh Matt?

 

But it is seriously bad when 'public health' agencies are so anti-capitalist that they blacklist providers for trying to turn a profit, even when those providers could not be more ideologically in tune with the zealots who run the agency (and when their service is valuable, as Gamban's is). Can that really be all there is to this or is something else going on? 

Scottish sockpuppetry

The Sunday Times published a thorough article about Scotland's state-funded NGOs this weekend. I recommend reading the whole thing if you can, but the section on neo-temperance groups may be of special interest.

 

Chris Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the right-leaning think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said Scotland was “in a league of its own when it comes to funding its own pressure groups”. He believes another flagship SNP policy — minimum unit pricing for alcohol — is an example of the public debate being influenced by charities which the SNP chose to fund well.

He cited Alcohol Focus Scotland, which last year received more than 85 per cent of its £792,000 annual income direct from the Scottish government in the form of a “core grant”, and Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems, entirely government funded. He said both groups acted as “the Praetorian Guard of the SNP” when it came to minimum unit pricing, a contentious policy introduced in Scotland in 2018.

After the policy was introduced, alcohol deaths in Scotland increased, with some evidence emerging that it had forced those addicted to drink to go without food. 

A report by Public Health Scotland said there was “strong evidence” it had reduced deaths compared with how many would have died had it not been in place. However, it also acknowledged “negative health and social consequences at an individual level” including driving up debt, reduced spending or even alcoholics turning to “acquisitive crime”.

In 2024, after lobbying from charities heavily funded by the SNP, the minimum price was increased, from 50p to 65p. The SNP cited charities to back up its policy. 

In February 2024, Sandesh Gulhane, a Scottish Tory GP, pointed out in Holyrood that despite minimum pricing, alcohol deaths were at a 14-year high, and only one out of 40 studies had claimed it led to a reduction in deaths. In response, Shona Robison, then the deputy first minister, quoted the chief executive of another charity, Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol & Drugs, accusing the MSP of being “the only person in the room who does not believe the evidence”. 

It is another charity that the SNP has chosen to fund well because of its ideological position. Last year, it received almost £1.9 million in government, 17 times more than it received in donations. A decade earlier, it received only £447,000 from the devolved administration. Snowdon said: “It is creating a fake level of putatively public support that wouldn’t exist, or at least wouldn’t have any amplification, if it wasn’t for government money.”

Charities in England protected

A paper Snowdon wrote almost a decade and a half ago, “Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why”, led to changes in England.

Under David Cameron, the government banned charities from using government money to lobby the parliament or government, although they remained free to do so using income from other sources. SNP ministers rejected the idea, arguing that it would amount to “gagging” clauses against charities.

Last year, the Labour government introduced what was known as the civil society covenant, which explicitly states charities that criticise government policies cannot be penalised “by excluding them from policy discussions or funding opportunities”. Again, no such contract is in place north of the border.

 

The article notes that charities in England and Wales get 24% of their income from the government but that this figure is 47% in Scotland.

 

In Scotland, there are claims that the SNP has in effect shut down criticism from the charity and voluntary sectors because of a system that leaves them umbilically tied to its political objectives and fearing grave consequences if they step out of line.

There are never explicit threats — and never anything put in writing. But according to numerous sources, a dependence on public funds has meant scores of charities in Scotland have been co-opted into becoming proxies for the SNP. Those with the same objectives as the SNP have been given millions of pounds in funding, allowing it to use them as advocates for its policies. 

According to Alex Neil, who served in SNP governments under Sturgeon and Alex Salmond, including as health secretary, the administration would regularly ask “friendly” charities to support it publicly with controversial policies. He said any link between funding and the requests, often made by SNP special advisers, was always implied, but that it was understood their dependence on the government meant they would almost always fall into line.  

 

Unsurprisingly, the Scottish government is very happy with this arrangement and has no plans to change it. 

 

A Scottish government spokesman said: “We are improving the way we provide funding to the third sector through our commitment to fairer funding”, a reference to a policy intended to make the awarding of grants more transparent and making them over several years.

He added: “The Scottish government agrees with the regulator’s position that political campaigning, such as advocating for or against changes in government policy or legislation is a legitimate way for some charities to pursue their aims. Charities play a vital role in civil society and it is right that they have the ability to advocate for change that aligns with their charitable purposes.”

 

 

A reponse to ASH on the black market

Earlier this month I reported that legal cigarette sales fell by 52% between 2021 and 2025 in the UK. These are official clearance figures from HMRC and show a rate of decline which far outstrips any estimate of the decline in smoking. The conclusion is obvious: more and more smokers are buying tobacco from illicit sources.

The state-funded pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) have responded by claiming that things are not as bad as they look. The accelerated decline since 2021 is, they say, “consistent with a long-term downward trend”. While they acknowledge that “the illicit trade may also be a factor” and that “ongoing cost of living pressures may have pushed some smokers, particularly those on lower incomes, to seek out cheaper, illicit alternatives”, they insist that “declining tobacco clearances appear to be driven mainly by falling smoking prevalence and reduced consumption among those who still smoke”.

Read the rest at IEA Insider

Had enough of 'experts'

Things will be bad enough after the government doubles the price of vaping in October with its new vape tax without going full prohibition, but the “ban it harder” mentality always seems to prevail. It is this kind of displacement politics that paves the road to anarcho-tyranny. You want to tackle systematic child exploitation in the Midlands? Sorry mate, the best I can do is regulation of vape flavours. 

Australia, as ever, has taken things to tragicomic extremes. In the latest episode of its ongoing tobacco turf war, a gunman opened fire in a Melbourne shisha café this week, injuring a 49 year old man. In Melbourne alone, there have been over 130 arson attacks and several murders since the tobacco and vape market fell into the hands of organised crime. E-cigarettes have always been illegal in Australia and it has the highest cigarette taxes in the world. According to official estimates, between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of tobacco products are now sold on the black market. 

On Thursday, a government minister came up with a brilliant new ruse to put an end to this: banning tobacconists. “Health advocates are doing interesting work”, he said, “asking why our society continues to permit standalone tobacconists.” Would those be the same “health advocates” who got Australia into this mess? The ones who swore on a stack of Bibles that there is no link between tobacco taxes and the illicit trade? The ones who lobbied for e-cigarettes to be banned in the first place and who successfully lobbied for the ban to be extended to nicotine-free vapes and imports for personal use? Sure, let’s hear what those guys have to say. 

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

Secondhand vaping: the studies

I've done a deep dive into the science of 'secondhand vaping' on my Substack (which you should subscribe to if you haven't already). I look at all the studies that the UK government's vaping ban Impact Assessment refers to, directly or indirectly. Here's the conclusion...

 

Most of the studies are from researchers who are actively looking for risks and who write up their work in a way that emphasises the “potential” harm. They generally fail to provide adequate context by referring to typical readings among active vapers, let alone active smokers, and they rarely refer to the safe thresholds of the substances they are examining (the 2021 study by Amalia et al is one of very few exceptions). That is because the levels recorded are generally considered safe by regulators in workplaces and outdoors (which is where the regulations tend to be applied). Unable to show that the measurements are unsafe or abnormal, the researchers focus instead on an increase in one substance - usually cotinine - and imply that any increase above the baseline must be hazardous.

It should be noted that these are the studies mentioned by organisations such as the WHO who want vaping banned indoors. Weak as it is, they presumably think that it is the best evidence to support their position, but other evidence is available. For example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sampled the air in a vape shop (where e-cigarette use was obviously heavy in a confined space) it found that all chemicals in the air were below the occupational exposure limit. It expressed concerns about detectable levels of two chemicals (diacetyl and 2,3-pentanedione), but both of these are banned for use in e-cigarette fluids in the UK (and EU).

Similar studies have found that even in very high exposure conditions in a small, non-ventilated vape shop, nicotine concentrations in the air were undetectable and those chemicals that were detectable were at very low (and legal) levels.

A systematic review of the evidence found “no evidence of potential for exposures of e-cigarette users to contaminants that are associated with risk to health at a level that would warrant attention if it were an involuntary workplace exposures” and “no evidence that vaping produces inhalable exposures to contaminants of the aerosol that would warrant health concerns by the standards that are used to ensure safety of workplaces.” And that is to the users of e-cigarettes! “Exposures of bystanders are likely to be orders of magnitude less, and thus pose no apparent concern.”

Public Health England said in 2016 that “there is no evidence of harm to bystanders from exposure to e-cigarette vapour and the risks to their health are likely to be extremely low.” They also said that “e-cigarette use is not covered by smokefree legislation and should not routinely be included in the requirements of an organisation’s smokefree policy”. Why? Because there is no risk to bystanders and vaping bans discourage smoking cessation.

As Prof Peter Hajek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) says:

“While health risks of e-cigarettes to vapers themselves have been estimated at up to 5% of health risks of smoking, health risks to bystanders are most likely reduced by a much bigger margin, and most likely altogether. This is because e-cigarettes release no chemicals into the environment themselves, only what users exhale, and such exhalation has so far not been shown to generate any toxicants at levels that could conceivably affect the health of bystanders.”

There has been a concerted effort by anti-vaping academics to find evidence that ‘secondhand vapour’ is harmful to bystanders. Despite using a variety of methods, they have come up empty-handed, with the partial exception of a few studies that have looked at air quality in unrealistic laboratory conditions. The levels of chemicals measured in the atmosphere and in the bodies of people ‘exposed’ to vaping in everyday situations are not only vastly lower when compared to tobacco smoke, but are lower when compared to everyday activities such as cooking and are consistently below the safe level for indoor and outdoor air quality.

Chris Whitty vs fat jabs

Our fun loving Chief Medical Officer thinks fat people shouldn't rely on Ozempic and should wait for "public health" to save them instead.

 

Speaking at the Medical Journalists’ Association annual lecture last week, the Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty took at pop at “fat jabs” such as Mounjaro and Ozempic. Thrashing away at a strawman of his own construction, he asked: “Does anyone in this group believe that the correct answer is to allow obesity to rise because of pretty aggressive marketing of obesogenic foods to children and then stick them on GLP-1 agonists at the age of 18?” 

“Just relying on the drugs seems to me the wrong answer,” he said. To which we might ask, who is just relying on the drugs? Not the public, most of whom manage to avoid “living with obesity” by controlling their appetite and doing a spot of exercise, and certainly not the politicians, who have saddled Britain with the most extensive set of anti-obesity policies anywhere in the world. 

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

People are different. Get used to it.

I've written about how people are different for The Critic. It is a point that seems to elude those who talk about the gateway effect.

 

Most social scientists pay lip service to the old adage about correlation not equalling causation, but the temptation to find a deeper meaning in statistical relationships can be hard to resist. In Australia, which is becoming a centre of excellence for human stupidity, an anti-vaping program was recently launched on the basis that: “Studies have shown that engaging in unsafe sex, other substance abuse, drink driving, texting while driving and driving without a seatbelt are associated with increased e-cigarette use among youth”. I dare say they are, but a campaign to reduce unsafe sex by clamping down on e-cigarettes (which, incidentally, are already illegal in Australia) is as doomed to failure as a campaign to reduce drownings by clamping down on ice cream sales. 

 

Do read it all.