Why are we paying for this? (part 1)

Dave Atherton has some news which contradicts an answer given in the House of Lords last April when we were told that ASH had not applied for government funding and there were no plans to give them any.

ASH did not make a grant application to the department’s Third Sector Investment Programme: Innovation, Excellence and Service Development Fund for 2011-12. The department currently has no other plans to provide ASH with funding in the next financial year.

Now, however, Lord Howe has told Mr Atherton:

At the time of Lord Howe’s statement, no decision has been made about whether to award a Section 64 grant to Action on Smoking and Health for 2011-2012. A grant of £150,000 has subsequently been awarded to ASH for work to support the delivery of some of the commitments in the Tobacco Control Plan for England, published last year.

And so taxpayers are once more compelled to fund a pressure group whose views may be at odds with their own. Ministers of Health have repeatedly denied that these grants are used to lobby, but ASH does not seem to do anything except lobby. A legalistic defence could perhaps be made by referring to 'advocacy' (which is permitted under law), but no one seems to be able to provide a convincing explanation of how advocacy for new laws differs from lobbying.

The coalition government has cut its spending on charities in the last two years. Many of these charities are political by nature and do not provide charitable services as the public generally understands the term. What they do would be illegal in countries like the USA, where lobby groups cannot be funded by the state.

What we have seen in Britain over the last fifteen years is a politicisation of 'civil society' and the rise of state-funded astro-turfing. Under the leadership of Suzi Leather, the Charities Commission has actively encouraged NGOs to campaign while the government has encouraged them to take statutory funding. It should be no surprise that this subverts and undermines democracy. That was surely the intention. When businesses do this, we call them what they are: front groups. A change of government at a time of austerity might have done something about this, but it seems that the Department of Health remains a law unto itself.

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ASH: The government in drag

I recently mentioned the possibility that ASH (England) may have lost its government funding. Maybe they have, maybe they haven't, but the anti-smoking pressure group was certainly sucking on the teat of the state in 2010/11, as its latest accounts show.

Department of Health: £220,500

ASH International: £152,657

Supporting charities: £393,833

Donations: £15,365

Total: £782,355

ASH International is funded by Pfizer, which perhaps explains ASH's eagerness to promote Pfizer's psychotic stop-smoking drug Chantix/Champix.

The supporting charities are the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK, so if you don't like indirectly funding neo-prohibitionist pressure groups, you might want to avoid them in the future and donate to other charities.

The Department of Health grant is for a project called 'Capitalising on Smokefree'. This is the third year in a row that taxpayers' money has been diverted to this mystery project. Although we pay for it, no details have ever been made public. If I was a cynic, I would say that it involves ASH being given money to manufacture support for Department of Health policies.

And that leaves £15,365 of donations from the public, meaning that one of the country's most powerful and influential "charities" gets less than 2% of its income from the general public's voluntary donations. However, it gets 28% from involuntarily donations through the tax system and a further 50% from donations given to different charities which are then diverted to ASH.

I do believe that means that ASH continues to be what it has always been: a fake charity. They are the government in drag; they are the Department of Health's sockpuppets; they are the state lobbying the state. Why are smokers being forced to pay for their own vilification?


UPDATE:

Number 11 in ASH's list of 'objectives' for 2010/11 is:

To be sensitive to the concerns of the smoker.

Wow. Just wow.

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Direct from the ASH bunker

You may have heard about the recent meeting in Parliament to discuss amending the smoking ban. As word spreads that there is an easy way to accommodate smokers and nonsmokers without killing off thousands of pubs, ASH's latest press release is a masterpiece of denial and disinformation.

Four years on: More smokers support than oppose smokefree law - no evidence of adverse impact on hospitality trade

On the fourth anniversary of England's smokefree law, new figures show that public support for the measure remains high with 78% of the population in favour of the law. Significantly, almost half of all smokers (47%) support the law.

Or to put it another way, a significant minority of the public—millions of people—still oppose the ban four years after it was brought in and less than half of smokers support the law.

The very fact that a large number of people, especially including those who are most directly affected, oppose the ban is precisely the reason why it should be amended it so that everybody can be happy. Everybody, that is, except the lunatic fringe of the anti-smoking movement that is represented by ASH.

The survey complements an independent Government-commissioned review of the impact of the smokefree law which found no significant decrease in the number of people visiting pubs or restaurants before or after the legislation.

I'm going to start invoicing ASH for all the coffee soaked keyboards they've made me ruin with statements like this. If I remember correctly, the review in question was actually ditched by the Coalition when they came to power but the Department of Health produced it anyway because they had spent three years manufacturing the evidence to support a law they themselves had lobbied for. It was entirely written by Linda Bauld, a professional anti-smoker who is a member of the ASH Advisory Council, a member of the Smokefree South West Programme Board and a member of the International Network of Women Against Tobacco. It would be hard to imagine anyone less qualified to produce an "independent review". We shall come back to her in a moment.

These findings stand in stark contrast to the claims made by the 'Save Our Pubs' campaign - a tobacco industry funded font group...

You know what these font groups are like. They start off campaigning against the use of Times New Roman, the next thing you know they want a ban on Comic Sans.

...that the smokefree law is causing pubs to close. The real agenda behind this campaign is to amend the law to allow smoking in pubs 

Oh no, they've been rumbled! And they would have got away with it too, if they hadn't put 'Amend the Smoking Ban' on every single piece of campaign literature.

However, the pro-tobacco lobby's claims that the smoking ban has led to pub closures are unfounded. In 2007, the year England went smokefree, the number of licensed premises for "on sales" of alcohol actually increased by 5% and there has been a net increase in the number of people reporting going to pubs since the smokefree law came into effect.

It's actually quite sad how ASH cling to this factoid as if it was proof that pubs aren't closing in huge numbers. As everybody keeps trying to tell them, the number of on-licenses is completely unrelated to the number of pubs. A license is required to sell alcohol and there has been a steady rise in the number of licenses granted since the Licensing Act relaxed the licensing laws in 2005.

The number of pubs, on the other hand, has fallen year after year since 2007, when the smoking ban came in. Nobody—other than the terminally self-deluded—disputes that there has been a massive and unprecedented fall in the number of pub since 2007. It has been one of the most thoroughly reported business stories of the last few years. People have come up with alternative explanations for why the pub industry has crashed but only ASH deny that there has been a crash at all.

If ASH had the slightest interest in seeking the truth, they could easily have consulted figures from the British Beer and Pub Association which show that over 4,000 pubs have closed since the ban came in.

Or they could have looked at the survey from the British Institute of Innkeeping, which found:

• The proportion of smoking customers dropped from 54% to 38%;
• 66% reported that their smoking customers were staying for shorter periods;
• 75% reported that smokers were visiting less frequently;
• 47% of businesses had laid off staff, although 5% had recruited additional staff;
• Income from drinks fell by 9.8%;
• Income from gaming machines fell by 13.5%.

They didn't do any of this. Would it really hurt them to at least acknowledge that thousands of pubs have closed? Do they really have to deny everything?

But wait, what's this? Is Deborah Arnott about to hint at the truth?

Commenting on the findings, Deborah Arnott, Chief Executive of ASH, said:

"Pubs, like all small businesses have been hard hit by the recession...

Nice try, but the recession didn't begin until late 2008 and it doesn't explain why Scotland and Ireland suffered a similar loss of pubs when they brought in their bans in 2004 and 2006. Since pub numbers declined at a similar level in different countries in different years, there really can be only one explanation for the phenomenon.

But the tobacco lobby group assertion that thousands of pubs in England and Wales are under threat of closure due to the smoking ban does not stand up to scrutiny.

Evidence or STFU. Pubs have closed and will continue to do so until their numbers have fallen to the level needed to satisfy the lowered demand for smoke-free venues. ASH's assertion—for that is all it is—contradicts every piece of evidence from Britain and abroad. It is at odds with what publicans, market analysts, customers, publicans and the stock market have said. It defies reason, common sense and the evidence of one's own eyes for ASH to continue with this charade. It's my view that the case has been proven beyond reasonable doubt. There simply is no other factor can can explain the data. However, even if you don't believe the evidence to be compelling, it is simply a lie to say that there is "no evidence of [an] adverse impact on the hospitality trade." There is plenty.

The British public are enjoying the benefits of smokefree drinking and dining and there is little appetite for a return to the bad old days of smoky pubs."

This a straw man argument. The Save Our Pubs campaign is calling for ventilated smoking rooms adjacent to the bar, not for "the bad old days of smoky pubs" (y'know, those bad old days when pubs weren't closing in their thousands). There has always been public support for a law that accommodates smokers and nonsmokers alike because the British, in general, are a tolerant and reasonable bunch. This makes ASH a profoundly unBritish organisation. As with all extremists, compromise and tolerance are their natural enemy, which is why ASH will fight tooth and nail to make sure that tools of denormalisation and social exclusion remain law.

There is one simple way of testing whether the smoking ban has been popular and successful—get rid of it. If people really don't want to go back to the days of smoky pubs, there is really no reason to have a law forcing pubs to be smokefree. Get rid of the law, let the market decide, and if pubs remain entirely nonsmoking we'll know that ASH were right all along. If, however, pubs decide to accommodate smokers once more, we'll know, if we hadn't realised already, that ASH cannot be trusted.

That, however, is not what is being proposed. All the Save Our Pubs campaign is doing is suggesting that if publicans want to, they should be able to have separate, ventilated smoking rooms on their own property. This would bring us in line with most of the other countries in the world which have smoking bans and would be such a small and reasonable exemption that only a zealot could oppose it.

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc.

...which is run by Peter Kellner, who sits on the board of ASH. Does ASH have any evidence that is not directly or indirectly supplied by people who are members of their organisation?

And this brings me back to Linda Bauld's abomination. I didn't write about her effort when it came out because it didn't get much media coverage and everything in it had been debunked long before the document was published.

Imperial Tobacco, on the other hand, have now decided to tackle it. They've released a report (PDF) which shows very clearly how Bauld misrepresents the truth and ignores evidence that doesn't suit her case. Its conclusions are refreshingly forthright:

We have become used to the public health community and the anti-tobacco lobby groups churning out made-to-measure studies to suit their objectives.

Bauld’s review should be submitted to public scrutiny. Without such transparency how can
anyone have confidence in Government policy going forward?

The report is of interest because it comes directly from the tobacco industry, whose campaign of doubt regarding smoking and lung cancer in the twentieth century has been well documented. There is, then, good reason to treat what they say with scepticism. And on the opposing side, we have an anti-tobacco industry with a dreadful record of using misleading data and junk science in the twenty-first century. Each side have obvious partisan interests—one is financial, the other is ideological.

Who to trust? The answer, surely, is to trust no one and instead trust the evidence—a pretty good rule of thumb in general. You can make up your own mind. Imperial's report is here. The Bauld report is here. From where I'm sitting it looks like a slam-dunk for Imperial.

Of course, ASH et al. will keep squealing "tobacco industry, tobacco industry" as if this somehow changed the facts. In recent weeks, the anti-smokers' reliance on this ad hominem has reached fever pitch. An online squabble at Liberal Vision saw a number of tobacco control freaks emerge from the woodwork, apparently worried that ASH's image as a grass-roots charity is falling apart. Amongst those who added a comment was none other than Linda Bauld who said that ASH is...

"...a small organisation working to reduce death and disease from smoking, not demonise smokers or restrict liberties [sic], as the tobacco industry and its representatives (who have contributed the majority of the posts above) would have us believe."

This is a pretty explicit claim. Bauld is saying that the majority of comments on the Liberal Vision article were from tobacco industry representatives. How could she possibly know this? She can't and she doesn't. She has no evidence for this allegation and it is almost certainly untrue (I know a number of the people who posted and they are certainly not in the pay of tobacco companies). This is how she appears to operate: make a wild claim without any facts to back it up and hope it sticks. The scientific credibility of ASH has been in free fall for years, so we shouldn't be too surprised by any of this, but their increasing reliance on misguided ad hominems suggests an unhealthy paranoia and desperation as they try to defend the indefensible. If they had the facts on their side, they wouldn't have to resort to name-calling.

You can't blame Imperial Tobacco for sticking their oar in on this one. The anti-smokers have produced a document which is effectively one-stop shop for all the heart miracles, bogus studies and distorted facts that have characterised their defence of the smoking ban in the last four years. It positively begs for derision and that, quite rightly, is what it has received.

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ASH: Still strangers to reality

The Independent has published a little puff-piece for ASH which has all the balance and thoughtfulness you would expect from an article which treats Deborah Arnott and Anna Gilmore as authorities. It's mainly about tobacco consumption in the third world but the real intent of the piece is to push plain packaging, as becomes clear in the final paragraphs. The logic is that industry arguments are always wrong and therefore they are wrong on plain packaging. Of all the examples the Independent could have used to decorate this fallacious argument, they concentrate on the damage done to the pub industry by the smoking ban. Or rather the lack of, because to ASH and their useful dupe at the Independent, this is a 'myth'.

A study from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), out this week, scrutinises the credibility of economic arguments used by the industry to fight back against legislation. For example, when Christopher Ogden, chief executive of the Tobacco Manufacturers Association, said in 2010 that the smoking ban had severely threatened the pub and bingo industry because of lost jobs and livelihoods, the reality was a little different.

Really? Then the Independent obviously knows something that the country's biggest bingo operator doesn't.

Gala Coral, operator of Gala Bingo, says growth prior to the smoking ban was running at 10 per cent. "Since the ban, we have seen a very sharp fall in revenue and admissions," says Neil Goulden, chief executive of Gala Coral. "The smoking ban is entirely responsible for that, he adds."

So what's ASH's evidence?

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows a net increase in the number of people visiting pubs since the smoking ban.

No it doesn't. This is what the ONS survey reported:

Three-quarters (75 per cent) of drinkers who visited pubs said that the change had not affected how often they went to pubs. Respondents were as likely to say that they went to pubs more often now than before the restrictions (12 per cent) as they were to say that they went less often now (13 per cent).

The percentage of women who visited the pub about the same amount since the smoking
restrictions were introduced has decreased from 80 per cent in 2008 to 73 per cent in 2009.
Conversely [sic], the percentage of women who said they were less likely to go to the pub following the restrictions has increased from 9 per cent to 14 per cent over the same period.

The survey says nothing about how long people spend in the pub—much less, if beer sales are any indication. Self-reported evidence of this kind can be unreliable because respondents can use it as a chance to express their approval/disapproval of the ban, rather than tell us whether it's actually changed their behaviour. Nonetheless, this survey certainly doesn't suggest an increase in the number of pub visitors. And that's hardly surprising as you would have to be living on Neptune not to have heard that pubs have been closing at the fastest rate in British history. Pubs closing at the rate of 50 a week despite more people going to them sounds rather incongruous, does it not?

We can argue about the reasons for the great pub crash that began in 2007 until the cows come home, and it's clearly multi-factoral, but ASH are not prepared to settle for saying that they don't think the smoking ban has been the main cause. They have to go further and deny that pubs are in crisis at all. In fact, they think pubs are flourishing.

The next factoid in the Independent article is only ever used by ASH, so there can be no doubt that it was they who offered it to the clueless hack responsible for the article...

When England went smoke-free in 2007, the number of premises licensed for alcohol increased by 5 per cent, and it has continued to grow every year since.

It is indisputable that Britain has lost more than 6,000 pubs since the ban came into effect in 2007. (The figures are here.) And yet ASH try to imply that numbers have increased. Their figures don't relate to pubs, of course, but to alcohol licenses, and since the Licensing Act came into force in 2005, there has certainly been a big increase in the number of licenses handed out. This is partly because it's easier to get one, and partly because the law now obliges you to get one for even the smallest occasion. ASH might think it's jolly nice that there are more coffee shops and garden fetes that have alcohol licenses, but it's got nothing to do with the smoking ban or the pub industry.

This Canute-like refusal to face reality is only possible in the world of single-issue zealot. As I said last time I wrote about this subject, every fact supports the view that the smoking ban has seriously damaged the pub and bingo industries.

It fits what publicans have been saying:

The readers' poll showed 77% of licensees think that trade has suffered as a result of the ban. Almost two thirds (63%) say business is worse than expected, and 72% predict a "challenging" or "very challenging" outlook for their business. Three out of five licensees said they had let staff go or reduced their hours. In addition, 73% want the ban lifted.

It fits what market analysts have been saying:

Pubs have sold 175 million fewer pints in the past year as a direct result of the smoking ban, according to market analysts AC Nielsen.

It fits what pubgoers have been saying:

There's no need for any fancy statistical analysis of trends over time. Just ask the customers.

It fits what the share prices of the Pubcos have been telling us:

You'll notice that the collapse of the share price began almost on the dot of July 1st 2007. Recession? No—that didn't start until October 2008, by which time the company had lost 75% of its value. Supermarket booze? 'Twas ever thus. Bad management? Perhaps, but the story is the same for all the pub companies.

It fits what economic theory predicts will happen when a externality is imposed on a business; it fits what the pub industry did predict would happen; it fits what has happened in other countries, in other states and in other cities.

The only thing it doesn't fit is the rhetoric of anti-smoking groups like ASH:

"Smoke-free polices are not only good for health, they are good for business. Evidence shows that in countries where smoke-free laws have been introduced, trade has generally increased."

Amanda Sandford, ASH, 2003

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ASH Wednesday (part 1)

Man goes to the doctor to hear the results of his test. Doctor says: "Do you want the good news or the bad news?" The man says he'll take the good news. "You're going to have a disease named after you."

That's how it was yesterday when the government's "new" policy on smoking was announced. I'll come to all the bad news tomorrow in a much longer post, but there was one small silver lining, as the Ashtray blog reported:

In an extremely positive piece of news for the UK electronic cigarette industry the UK Medicines and Healthcare Product Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have announced what they are going to do about the electronic cigarette.

Nothing.

At least for now.

Good news for e-cigarette users. Not such good news for cigarette users (more tax, more denormalisation, plain packing, display ban) and terrible news for snus users (UK will continue to support the EU ban).

Meanwhile, the BBC's medical correspondent Fergus Walsh has expressed his own strong views on the subject of smoking and provides a clue as to why the BBC is prepared to rewrite any old press release from the anti-smoking lobby.

De-normalising smoking is a key part of discouraging the young from taking up the habit.

As I've said before, denormalisation is a sinister term with sinister consequences. Aside from the fact that it suggests that the government can decide what is and is not normal, denormalisation is stigmatisation by another name. Stigmatisation creates hatred and allows the most hateful people to come in from the fringes and be regarded as something close to normal. You only have to read some of the comments to Walsh's piece to see this.

John_from_Hendon wrote:

Passive smoking also needs to be curtailed: so ban smoking in public, in vehicles, at sea etc. even if the only person present is the smoker.

Smokers could then kill themselves with their vile addiction, but not be able to harm others either financially or health-wise.

Alternatively perhaps we could put something in the water (or more rationally the cancer sticks / coffin nails) that made smokers violently sick every time the took a puff (or in every twentieth fag)!

I prefer the option of poring scorn on smokers ghastly habit. Make smokers be subject to sets of practical jokes - for example vile diseased lungs in a packet of cigarettes on a random basis. Illegality with addictive substances only creates a very profitable criminal distribution system.

I would also hope that smokers were put to the bottom of all heath service queues - or that they should fear that this will happen.

ASH must be very proud.

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Deluded Debs deep in denial

Chronically deluded neo-prohibitionist Deborah Arnott has popped up in The Guardian whinging about an article which stated the obvious about smuggling (ie. higher taxes = more smuggling). Apparently basic economics do not exist on Planet ASH. The headline says it all:

It is a myth that high duties on tobacco lead to increased smuggling

It would be an insult to your intelligence, dear reader, if I explained why Arnott is talking rubbish. It is Tim Worstall's unreconstructed view that Ms Arnott should shut up and put the kettle on. I also recommend reading the disparaging comments beneath the article itself.

But all you really have to do is take a look at some of the stories reported on ASH's own website in recent weeks:

Two million illegal cigarettes seized in East Lancashire in two months

More than two million illegal cigarettes have been seized in the past two months in East Lancashire. Health chiefs disclosed the figure as they drew up a plan to reduce the harm that smoking and illicit tobacco has on the lives of people in the area. The tobacco, which is illegal because it has either been smuggled into the country or is counterfeit, is thought to be responsible for four times as many deaths as drugs.

Cigarettes seized in tobacco smuggling crackdown in Burton-on-Trent

More than 13,000 cigarettes were recovered from three shops by officers from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Keith Morgan, Specialist Investigation Detection Manager for HMRC, said: “The people who sell these cigarettes are not concerned about where or how they are produced, or even who buys them, including young children and teenagers."

Warnings over sales of illegal cigarettes in South West

147 million packets of illegal cigarettes are smuggled into the South West each year, with an estimated street value of more than £104 million.

Smuggled cigarettes aimed at children

Trading standards officials in the North East are urging the public for help in stopping illegal tobacco after more than 600,000 packets of smuggled cigarettes were seized in the region. An appeal last year led to a surge in public tipoff’s about illegal cigarettes.

Richard Ferry, of the North-East Trading Standards Association, described the response as excellent and urged people to continue providing vital information. Ailsa Rutter, director of anti-smoking organisation Fresh, said: “The sellers have no morals. They will even sell single cigarettes called ‘lucies’ to children.”

Bootleg Russian cigarettes lined with Chinese asbestos

Smokers have been warned that some black market Russian cigarettes contain asbestos. Trading standards officials have revealed that many of the Jin Ling cigarettes contain industrial chemicals and asbestos-lined Chinese plasterboard. They come in yellow packs with the words Jin Ling and USA emblazoned across the front.

The brand has been described by the World Health Organization as ‘the most disturbing new development in the illegal tobacco trade anywhere in the world’.

Treasury counts cost of illicit tobacco smuggling

The sale of illicit and counterfeit cigarettes is estimated to cost the Treasury the equivalent of £10m a day in lost tax revenues. But it is not just government's coffers that are affected, small retailers such as newsagents are too.

Debbie Corris runs a tobacconists in Whitstable, and claims that cigarette smuggling has been hurting her business.

Officers seize 250,000 cigarettes at Newcastle airport

UK Border Agency officers at Newcastle Airport have intercepted more than a quarter of a million cigarettes that were being smuggled into the region.

South Yorkshire: Jail terms for cigarette smugglers

Four South Yorkshire crooks have been jailed for their part in a smuggling ring which helped the Italian Mafia flood Britain with black market cigarettes - while another escaped immediate custody.

Scotland: BBC exposes tobacco crime gangs in Scotland

A BBC investigation is set to expose the organised crime groups controlling Scotland's illegal tobacco trade. A BBC Scotland undercover team secretly filmed the supply chain. The illegal trade is estimated to cost the Treasury billions of pounds in lost taxes.

Northern Ireland: Customs seize 185,000 cigarettes

Ten kilograms of hand rolling tobacco and 185,000 counterfeit cigarettes have been seized in west Belfast. Two men from Belfast were arrested and cash and business records were also seized.

Birkenhead shopkeeper masterminded tobacco-packing scam

A shopkeeper who owned three stores in Birkenhead masterminded a huge tobacco-packaging scam to sell thousands of illegal cigarettes. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) raided his stores and seized £105,000 in cash.

Does Arnott really believe that there is no connection between sky-high tobacco taxes and the growth of a vast smuggling and counterfeiting industry which didn't exist until a few years ago? Since it is hard to believe that anyone could be so dense, I have to conclude—once again— that she is a liar.

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How thick do ASH think we are?

From Brand Republic:

ASH blames adspend freeze for failures to quit smoking

The number of people who successfully give up smoking has dropped by a third since the Government halted its anti-smoking advertising.

New Department of Health figures are the first to reveal the impact of the Coalition's decision to freeze adspend as part of the £6 billion of cuts it announced last May.

Between January and March last year, the Government spent £861,000 on its anti-smoking campaign and 124,792 people successfully quit the habit with the help of the NHS.

When the budget dropped to just £26,000 between April and June, the number who gave up fell to 85,749. There was a further drop in the next three months to 76,504, when no ads appeared - 38 per cent down on the first three months of the year.

There was a similar reduction of 34 per cent in the number of smokers who set a date for kicking the habit over the same period.

Martin Dockrell, the director of policy and research at Action on Smoking and Health, said: "It has been a false economy. Mass-media campaigns are very cost- effective in terms of life years gained. They quickly reduce the pressure on the NHS."

Look Martin, I know you don't credit the British public with much intelligence but we're not complete morons. The quit-rate peaked between January and March because giving up smoking has been the #1 New Years Resolution since Methuselah was a bairn.

This is so obvious that it barely merits confirmation, but just to be sure, let's check with the NHS:

With regard to monthly quit attempts made, numbers were highest in January (note: the start of the year is the most popular time for people to attempt to quit, e.g. New Year’s resolution), followed by March, then February.

Yup, thought so. The first quarter is the busiest time of the year for smoking cessation services with or without the government spending vast sums of money. And the reason the government spends the most money on smoking cessation in January is because that's when there's most demand for it. Inevitably, the quit rate tapers off in the second quarter and then again in the third quarter.

It's not rocket science and it happens every year.

If we look at the figures from 2009, we can see this quite clearly:

Number of successful quitters in 2009:  2010 figures in brackets (NHS England)

January-March 2009: 120,935 (124,792)

April-June: 89,358 (85,749)

July-September: 79,842 (76,504)

2009, you may recall, was a time when the government was spending money like a sailor on shore leave. Lo and behold, there was a big peak in the first three months of the year, then the numbers dropped in the second quarter and there was a further drop in the third quarter. In fact, we can see that the numbers "dropped by a third" between the first and third quarter, just as they did when not a single penny was spent advertising these services.

So what we have here is a natural experiment. Despite drastically reduced budgets—down to £0.00 in the third quarter of 2010—the quit rate was almost identical to what it had been when Gordon Brown was engaging in his scorched earth policy with the public finances.

This is good news for the taxpayer, because it tells us that we can save money on quit-smoking adverts without reducing the number of people quitting. So thank you Martin Dockrell for bringing this to our attention. All the government needs to do now is stop funding of ASH—whose policies have been consistently ineffective in reducing the smoking rate—and we can really start celebrating.

(I'm pleased to see that no newspaper has felt moved to cover this 'story'. Perhaps bullshit fatigue is finally setting in when it comes to ASH.)

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Oink

As reported by Iain Dale, ConservativeHome and others, FOREST have produced a report showing the scale of public funding involved in Britain's anti-tobacco industry (if that doesn't work, try this). It's comprehensive and is worth downloading, reading and keeping for reference.

As is apparent from Iain Dale's post, many people remain unaware that the 'health groups' and 'charities' who petition for anti-smoking (and other neo-prohibitionist) legislation are quangos in all but name. The fact that charities like ASH raise next-to-nothing in the way of public donations speaks volumes about how little grassroots support these organisations have.

Some of the figures are bafflingly high. Smoke Free North West (who contributed the bulk of responses to Labour's dodgy consultation on display bans) received £1.9m from the taxpayer—ten times more than ASH (England). ASH (Scotland) receives £1.4m to serve a population ten times smaller than England, while employing a staggering 27 people. The UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies—the home of Anna Gilmore and a lobby group in all but name—has been given £3.7m.

In any bonfire of the quangos, these astroturf groups should be the first on the list. I can think of no reason at all why the taxpayer should be forced to fund lobbyists. It is a throwback to the worst excesses of the last government, which routinely used public money to manufacture support for its own policies. Unless the coalition puts an end to this dubious practice, it will be seen to be condoning the Machiavellian tricks of the previous administration while making a mockery of its claim to be the party of responsible spending.

It's really pretty simple. If these groups are providing a public service (such as smoking cessation), they should be incorporated into the Department of Health where they will have to be accountable (and, importantly, subject to the Freedom of Information Act). This is what is happening in Ireland.

If they don't provide a public service (and most are purely lobbyists), then there is no case for them to be funded by the government they are lobbying. If ASH et al. are going present themselves as charities then they should act like charities and do their own fund-raising instead of forcing hardworking people to graft to keep them in the manner to which they have become accustomed. As Longrider said recently:

Well, firstly, if these charities do things that people want, they will fund them voluntarily. If they fail due to lack of funds, then people don’t want them and they will deservedly disappear. If they are providing essential public services, then why are they charities at all?

Quite so. This is an open and shut case. It's time for the anti-smoking lobby to stand on their own two feet.

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ASH launch new campaign

Campaigners call for desert island smoking ban

Anti-smoking campaigners have called a smoking ban on desert islands "the next logical step" in the war against second- and third-hand smoke. Deborah Arnott, director of Action on Smoking and Health, is leading a campaign for a total smoking ban across the world's islets and archipelagos: "It is a common misconception that smoking on a patch of land in the middle of the ocean poses no threat to others," she said.

"But we know there is no safe level of secondhand smoke. Cigarettes contain 4,000 chemicals which can travel hundreds of miles, contaminating nonsmokers, especially children, in neighbouring countries and pose a particular risk to passing sailors, especially children. There is overwhelming evidence that toxins remain on the torn trousers of shipwrecked travellers for years, which poses a serious health threat to potential rescuers, especially children."

At the moment there is little evidence that secondhand smoke can travel over international waters but scientists at the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies have promised to study the issue. "We'll get the evidence, don't you worry about," Arnott said. "For too long people have used loopholes like living thousands of miles from civilisation as a way to get around the hugely popular smoking ban. We need to send a clear message to smokers: we will track you to the ends of the earth."

ASH's new campaign has received high profile support from Glasgow-born millionaire Duncan Bannatyne and former desert island resident Man Friday.

Speaking at a press conference organised by Pfizer, Mr Friday said: "For most people, a desert island is a place to get away from it all and listen to their favourite records. They forget that for people like me it is a workplace and we deserve the same protection as other workers. By their very nature, desert islands tend to be unregulated and it is people like me and the fat kid with glasses from Lord of the Flies who end up paying the price."

But critics accused campaigners of going too far. Simon Clark of the smokers' rights group FOREST said: "This is just another example of the nanny state gone mad. Many desert islands are already struggling to attract ship-wreck survivors and this proposed legislation will finish them off. And it's unenforceable. This is just the precursor to banning smoking across whole countries."

In response to the accusation that ASH's real goal is to ban smoking indoors and outdoors in every country in the world, Arnott said: "Have you been reading my diary?"

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Which way will ASH go on snus?

That cradle of democracy, the European Union, is allowing citizens to sort of vote on the Tobacco Products Directive. There are only seven questions so it's worth making your voice heard.

The main issues are the legalisation of snus, regulation of e-cigarettes, graphic warnings, plain packaging and bans on vending machines and tobacco displays—all the things that tobacco controllers have been getting excited about over the past few years, basically.

The snus issue is particularly important (see question below—and note the possibility of banning all smokeless tobacco products!) Click to enlarge.

Of all the suggestions put forward in the EU document, repealing the ill-conceived and scientifically unjustifiable ban on snus is the only one which would have a positive impact on health. The only EU country currently allowed to sell snus is Sweden. Not coincidentally—since snus is 99% safe—Sweden also has the lowest rates of smoking-related diseases.

ASH (UK) will doubtless submit its views to the consultation, but which way will it go? In 2004, an ASH press release said:

ASH believes that there is no logic to the banning of snus, when cigarettes, which are far more deadly, are on general sale, but that snus should not simply be de-regulated.

That was six years ago, however, in the days before ASH developed a cosy financial relationship with pharmaceutical companies who also happen to make 99% safe oral nicotine products of their own. The "independent" anti-smoking charity has been quiet about snus in recent years.

ASH was originally set up, in part, to find ways of making tobacco consumption safer (an aim now wiped from their website). So will they act in the interests of public health or in the interests of the pharmaceutical industry?

You can respond to the online consultation here.

You can read the proposals here.

And everything else is here.

Meanwhile, GlaxoSmithKline has asked the US government to remove dissolvable tobacco products from the market. No conflict of interest there then.

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Glass onion

After yesterday's discussion of the "secondhand smoke in a car is x times more toxic than in the home", I've been looking again at the origins of this claim.

My first port of call was the ASH website, which has changed its fact sheet on the subject since I last visited in March. It's at the same URL because ASH have a slightly Orwellian tendency to delete old information as if it had never existed. Nevertheless, the old page said:

According to a report by the Ontario Medical Association, secondhand smoke levels in cars can be 23 times greater than in a house.

As I mentioned yesterday, the Ontario Medical Association's figure has been exposed as bogus. On their new page, ASH say:

In 2005, The State of California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) conducted a comprehensive review of studies which measured secondhand smoke particle concentrations in a variety of environments. The review found that in-car concentrations were up to 60 times greater than in a smoke-free home, and up to 27 times greater than in a smoker’s home.

And this time we have a reference: Proposed Identification of Environmental Tobacco Smoke as a Toxic Air Contaminant, a document prepared by the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal-EPA). It is indeed thorough, and although it never uses the "27 times" figure, it does rely on a study that came close to doing so.

The study (Offermann et al., 2002) is one I've seen referenced before but had never found. Today, after much searching, I did. It's obscure because it seems never to have been published or peer-reviewed, but it was presented at the 9th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate (book early to avoid disappointment!) in Monterey in 2002. And in it, Offermann makes a nearly-familiar claim:

The calculated exposure for a five hour automobile trip with the windows closed/ventilation off and with a smoking rate of 2 cigarettes per hour is 25 times higher than the same exposure scenario in a residence.

Given the lack of ventilation and the small size of the smoking environment, this is certainly plausible. Offermann measured respirable suspended particles (RSP) in a moving car under three different conditions and got the following readings:

(1) Windows open/ventilation off: 92 µg/m3

(2) Windows closed/ventilation on: 693 µg/m3

(3) Windows closed/ventilation off: 1,195 µg/m3

(In experiments of this kind, the idea of drivers having the windows open and the ventilation on is apparently considered too far-fetched to be worth studying.)

It is worth noting that although Scenario 1 says 'windows', it is clear from the text that only the driver's window was open. The driver also held the cigarette in his right hand despite being in a left-hand drive vehicle. And RSP levels fell to nearly zero within 60 seconds of the cigarette being extinguished.

In any case, it is not Scenario 1 that Offermann focuses on; he prefers to dwell on the much more unlikely Scenario 3. This is what he bases his "25 times higher" figure on.

Offermann's unpublished study forms the basis of Cal-EPA's own figures. Offermann didn't measure RSP in the home, but Cal-EPA found some other studies to piece the picture together. Their summary is shown below (click to enlarge):

As you can see from the top line, average RSP concentrations in smokers' homes were found to be between 44-125.6µg/m3. Average RSP levels in nonsmokers' homes were between 20-87.8µg/m3. The reason these two sets of figures are so close together is that a smoker's home is not necessarily a home with a smoker smoking (and there are other sources of RSP other than cigarettes). Studies in rooms with people actually smoking found much higher RSP concentration of between 160-5,500µg/m3—much higher than anything recorded in Offermann's car (actually it was a minivan, but let's not get bogged down in the detail.)

As I said, Cal-EPA never use any of this to say that smoking in a car is x times worse than smoking in a home or a pub. But let's speculate for a moment and say that someone (from ASH?) looked at these figures, picked the lowest home reading (44µg/m3), compared it with the highest vehicle reading (1,195µg/m3) and did a quick calculation. 1,195 divided by 44 = 27. Bingo!

And let's say they picked the lowest nonsmoking home figure (20µg/m3) and did the same thing. 1,195 divided by 20 = 60. And so, once we unravel all the layers, I think we may have found the original source of what was written in The Guardian yesterday:

Second-hand smoke can be 27 times more toxic in a car than a smoker's home, it says in a report published today.

And, to be fair to the UK Faculty of Public Health, they did mention that this was a completely unventilated car:

In a closed car, levels of second-hand smoke can be extremely high – the concentration in cars can be up to 60 times higher than in a smoke-free home, and up to 27 times greater than in a smoker’s home.

It's cherry-picking, of course, and the words "up to" should always ring alarm bells when statistics are involved. Such calculations make no attempt to find the average readings under average (real life) conditions. We could use the same set of figures to make the claim that there is nearly as little secondhand smoke in a smoky car (92µg/m3) as in a completely smoke-free house (87.8µg/m3) and, even then, only while the cigarette is burning. After that, a smoky car is less smoky than a smokefree house! 

That would be a dodgy use of statistics as well, and—lest we forget—it all hinges on an unpublished study which neither ASH nor the Faculty of Public Health appear to have read (ASH only reference the Cal-EPA report, the Faculty didn't even do that.)

Nevertheless, I owe ASH and the Faculty of Public Health an apology. I accused them of falling for someone else's bogus figure. In fact, they came with their own.

The frustrating thing is that even after all this we are no closer to getting to the source of the "23 times" claim that conquered the world on the back of a brief report in Rocky Mountain News. Offermann's study came out in 2002 and the Cal-EPA report is from 2005. But Rocky Mountain News published its story back in 1998 and the trail has long-since gone cold. Some mysteries are destined never to be solved.

UPDATE: This is a comment from Carl V. Philips, e-mailed to me after he was unable to post in the comments section:

[This is an attempt to recreate a comment I wrote but somehow managed to lose rather than submit. I am not going to redo the calculations, so I will try to do it from memory, and also try to write my long comments offline from now on!]

First, I want to say that this is great research work, Chris. Thinking of the silly attempt to hush you up re: The Spirit Level Delusion, I have to say that if half the people publishing in health science journals were even half the scientist that you are, the field would be improved enormously.

As for the ventilation in cars study itself, if you are taking this further I think there must be some problems with the numbers. Such problems do not compare to the extremists lying about what the numbers mean, of course, but it is a separate problem.

I know this is not my field, but the statistics should be pretty straightforward, and they do not seem to add up. Comparing tests 1 and 2, the air exchange rate is very similar. The half-life for a bit of air (and thus a bit of smoke) is somewhere between half and 3/4 of a minute for both of them (assuming perfect mixing). That is, a particular smoke molecule has a 50% chance of being gone in that much time. It does not seem plausible that there would be such a difference in concentration then.

But the more important one is the difference between test 3 and 2. If 3 is really right, and it is the one that the antis want to say is right, then 2 and 1 do not seem plausible. The air exchange rate in 3 translates into a half life of about eight minutes. If someone smokes a cigarette over the course of four or five minutes then the vast majority of the smoke is still in the car at the end of the period.

This compares to the other scenarios when, by the time of the last puff, almost all the smoke from the first few puffs is gone and even half the smoke from the previous puff is gone. It does not make any sense, then, that the concentration is only reduced by half in 2 compared to 3. This suggests that the numbers for a ventilated car – i.e., the worst realistic-case scenario, since as you point out, no one turns the ventilation off – are exaggerated.

An interesting comparison is that the air exchange rate (according to what I looked up) for a room in a house is in the order of 10/hour (a pub is in the range of twice that). So, though the space is much larger, the smoke lingers a lot longer. Thus, it is not entirely clear to me that the exposure in a car is actually worse. Since in a realistic car situation, the smoker who is not trying to annoy others in the car at least cracks the window, holds the cigarette near there, and exhales toward the opening (harm reduction!), typical exposure will be even lower than the best case of the tests run. It may be that momentarily the concentration is higher, but drops lower than a room fairly rapidly. The question would be “is it worse to have a higher peak exposure or lower exposure for longer” – an interesting question, but one we will never know the answer to because the millions of dollars spend studying these matters are never directed at anything practical. (Actually, we might know. There is physiologic research on effects of smoke being done by industry, even though the “health” people are not interested in gaining useful knowledge about reducing effects, and so someone might find something relevant.)

Anyway, the bottom line is that the actual difference between smoking in a car with someone or a room of a house is not actually large and it is not even clear which is a greater exposure under realistic conditions.

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New Zealots

Having mentioned yesterday the anti-tobacco extremism in the Antipodes, it is timely that ASH (New Zealand) have popped up to make my point for me. New Zealand is one of the few places in the world where anti-smoking campaigners don't even bother pretending not to be prohibitionists, hence...

Smoking: Majority of NZers want sales banned

The majority of New Zealanders support an end to commercial tobacco sales by 2020, a UMR Research survey has found.

You can guess who commissioned this survey.

ASH spokesman Michael Colhoun said the results released today showed the public believed "enough is enough" and it was time for strong action to be taken on tobacco.

"The momentum has been built up over the past year, including the tobacco excise increase and I think we've reached a tipping point," said Mr Colhoun.

Now then. It is possible that the majority of New Zealanders do want smoking banned in the next 9 and a half years (although the comments to this article suggest that perhaps they don't). Admittedly, it would make New Zealand rather unusual since every survey since the 1960s has shown that only 30% or so of the population harbour such prohibitionist thoughts.

But even if there is now a Kiwi majority, I'm not convinced that this question is sufficiently robust to separate the hardcore from the merely confused:

The survey, for anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), asked 750 respondents if they agreed or disagreed that "New Zealand should be a completely Smokefree nation by 2020. This means smoked tobacco would not be widely available for sale."

Fifty-nine percent of respondents "agreed" or "strongly agreed" with the statement, ASH said.

"Tobacco would not be widely available for sale"? What the hell does this mean? It wouldn't be widely available in playgrounds? It wouldn't be widely available in tobacconists? And didn't New Zealand become a 'smokefree nation' when it brought a smoking ban in back in 2004? Weren't they told, like we Brits were, that that was what 'going smokefree' meant?

To ASH, it seems, "not widely available" means completely illegal and "smokefree" means banning the sale, purchase and consumption of smoked tobacco. So if that's what they mean—and if that's how they're going to spin it in a press release—why don't they ask people if they want tobacco to be completely illegal? Could it be because they wouldn't get quite the same answer?


UPDATE

These people are deadly serious.

Mr Colhoun says while the crackdown on tobacco will be heavy; people who wish to grow their own tobacco can continue to do so.

“At the moment you can grow up to 15kg a year for personal use; people who want to put tobacco plants in their backyard – they can do that and we’ll never end that,” he says.

Of course not. Why, that would be excessive.

So there you have it—a cast-iron guarantee from ASH (New Zealand) who, 25 years ago, were calling for a smoking ban on domestic flights. Not on international flights obviously. Or in bars and restaurants. That would have been excessive.

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ASH: throwing stones from their glass house

ASH (UK) have produced a profoundly underwhelming report (The Smoke Filled Room) about the shadowy world of tobacco industry lobbying. But, as Taking Liberties and Dick Puddlecote have pointed out, it's not really that shadowy and ASH have failed to unearth anything that wasn't already common knowledge. Did anyone ever doubt that organisations like the European Cigar Manufacturers Association or the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association were funded by the tobacco industry?

Like a middle-aged pop group playing their greatest hits to a declining fan base, ASH are trying to relive the glory days of the 'Mr Butts' documents. Those documents were fascinating at the time and continue to be a useful resource. Back in the mid-90s, they shone much light on the workings of America's tobacco industry, but ASH haven't found any new secret papers and instead resort to reprinting things like this...

Call this article lobbying if you like, but it's hardly covert or underhand. It's clearly written by the General Manager of Imperial Tobacco and the Imperial logo is in the bottom corner. It even says 'advertorial' at the top.

There's an air of desperation to this effort. Under the category of "front men, moles and advocates" we find people like Chris Proctor who, we are told, was "a senior research scientist at BAT during the 1980s." Well, yes, and he is still is, as he makes clear in every letter he writes to the press (including the one reprinted on the back cover of ASH's report):

Dr Chris Proctor,

Chief scientific officer, British American Tobacco

I have a copy of Proctor's book—Sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette. (If you're interested in the industry's attempts to make cigarettes safer, you'll find it a very interesting read, with a lot of information you won't find elsewhere.) His biography on the dust-jacket begins "Chris Proctor is the Head of Science and Regulation for British American Tobacco" and he starts the book by explaining who he is and what he does for a living. This seems pretty transparent to me. What exactly is the problem? 

The problem seems to be not that there is a secret underworld of lobbying, but that the industry is allowed to have a voice at all. But griping about lobbying is a bit rich coming from ASH who, until recently, were one of the most effective lobbyists of them all. For them to imply that their opponents in the tobacco lobby are the ones pulling the strings in the world of politics is just plain daft, as Simon Clark (of FOREST) points out:

“In the past decade the government has banned all tobacco advertising and sponsorship. Smoking is banned in all enclosed public places, and the previous government was planning to ban the display of tobacco in shops and prohibit cigarette vending machines. For ASH to complain about the influence of big tobacco on health policy is laughable and absurd.”

It's richly ironic that the document is titled 'The Smoke Filled Room' when, thanks to ASH's lobbying, there are no smoke filled rooms, even in cigarette company offices. Despite the supposed influence of Big Tobacco, they were all made illegal in 2007.

ASH evidently object to tobacco lobbying even when that lobbying is perfectly transparent and regardless of what is being lobbied for. For example, under the heading of 'front groups' they include the European Smokeless Tobacco Council (ESTOC), noting that their objective is "the worldwide legalization of Swedish snus and other smokeless tobacco products, based on a regulatory framework." 

Well yes, but so what? As I have argued here before, the legalisation of safer tobacco products is good public health policy. Last time I checked, one of ASH's objectives was to legalise snus as well:

ASH believes that there is no logic to the banning of snus, when cigarettes, which are far more deadly, are on general sale, but that snus should not simply be de-regulated. 

Director of ASH, Deborah Arnott, said “If oral snuff is legalised as a result of the legal challenge to the EU by Swedish Match, it should be regulated so that standards are set for the levels of toxins and carcinogens in all tobacco, whether it is smoked or not. Consumer Information and labelling of such products should be strictly controlled by the regulator to prevent them from being promoted to attract new users.”

That was in 2004, and ASH have been strangely quiet on the subject in the years since. Seeing as ASH no longer lift a finger to fight for safer tobacco products, it is left to groups like ESTOC  to lobby for a policy that could help bring lung cancer rates down to the levels seen in Sweden. Regardless of their funding source, this is something that should be welcomed by anyone who is more interested in public health than in fighting tooth and nail with Big Tobacco.

A cynic would say that ASH's recent silence on the snus issue is due to their friends and sponsors in the pharmaceutical industry, who view it as a threat to their share of the nicotine market. And this is the great hypocrisy of the ASH report. It takes a brass neck to publish 48 pages of ad hominem on the subject of industry lobbying and conflicts of interests when you don't offer full disclosure of your own funding sources. Twice in the report, ASH declare their funding thus:

There is no mention of the cash they receive from government, nor any mention of the pharmaceutical companies who fund ASH International, ASH Wales and various anti-smoking conferences (such as this one coming up in Glasgow). ASH's accounts show:

ASH International is funded by Nicorette manufacturer Pfizer. ASH, meanwhile, receives very little money in donations from the public, is not staffed by volunteers, holds charitable status and is primarily a lobby group. By its own definition, then, ASH could be described as an 'industry funded front group.'

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the report is that despite a worldwide press release, it has yet to be picked up by a single newspaper. This is partly due to inept handling by ASH. It must have seemed a canny idea to publish it on World No Tobacco Day, but in Britain that also happened to be a bank holiday—never the best time to get media coverage. 

But it must also be seen as a sign of the media's weariness with ASH and their ever escalating demands. There is no real appetite for plain packaging and tobacco display bans (which is what this report is really about), and editors seem to have little desire to help ASH scrape this particular barrel. Whoever funded this report didn't get their money's worth.

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Another ASH myth goes up in smoke

In October 2007, ASH published a document entitled Myths and Realities of Smokefree England. The ban had been in force for only 3 months and ASH wanted to portray 'the hospitality industry and pro smoking organisations' as fear-mongerers for predicting negative effects from the smoking ban. 

In retrospect, we can see that ASH were the ones making poor predictions. Amongst the 'myths' they listed were things like 'It will be bad for pubs', 'It will be bad for bingo' and 'Working men's clubs and shisha bars will close'. I have a bridge I'd like to sell anyone who seriously thinks none of this came to pass.

One of the other 'myths' was:

Myth: There will be heavy handed enforcement with undercover officers and covert filming.

'Heavy handed' is a subjective term, but it seems reasonable to apply it here, in the light of Nick Hogan being sentenced to 6 months imprisonment for flouting the ban. 

As for 'covert filming', ASH denied that it was ever on the cards and said:

Reality: What has happened in practice is that council officials have approached the situation as they said they would, in a reasonable manner applying a 'softly softly' approach with relatively few being issued. 

But, as reported in The Times and the News of the World, the reality has been rather different, with councils using anti-terrorism laws to spy on smokers.

Smokers and tramps join 8,000 council surveillance targets

Councils carried out more than 8,500 secret snooping operations on members of the public during the past two years,including spying on dog owners, fly tippers and loan sharks, according to a report published today.

Secret surveillance operations also took place against smokers, suspected benefit fraudsters, vagrants buying alcohol for under-18s and people repairing vehicles in the street.

Councils in North Norfolk, Chesterfield, Nuneaton & Bedworth, and Merton, southwest London, used Ripa powers to snoop on people suspected of lighting up in a no-smoking area.

Councils spy on dog owners, charity donors and smokers

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) was passed nine years ago to fight terrorism. But access to these Big Brother weapons has gone to 653 bodies - with nearly 1,400 new spying missions EVERY DAY.

Dastardly criminals in the camera sights of these state-approved nosey parkers include:

SMOKERS who light up in the wrong place. Chesterfield, Falkirk, Merton, North Norfolk and Nuneaton & Bedworth councils have their beady eyes on you.

Myths and Realities of Smokefree England already has the makings of a fascinating historical document. With one or two possible exceptions that can be argued over, all of the so-called 'myths' have turned out to be true and all of ASH's 'realities' have turned out to be myths. And it took less than 3 years. 

With the review of the smoking ban coming up in July, one would hope that the chasm between what ASH said would happen and what actually happened might come under scrutiny. It should certainly make policy-makers question ASH's credibility when it comes to passing further laws. 

But since the Department of Health has all but admitted that the 'review' will be a sham and that the only serious question that will be posed is how far to extend the ban, ASH's track record will likely be ignored. 

Throughout June I'll be writing a series of articles contrasting ASH's 'myths' and 'realities' with the real situation for smokers, nonsmokers and businesses since the ban came in. Call it an unofficial review. Watch this space.

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Targeting celebs: ASH versus Albarn

From Das Bild two months ago:

The EU has declared war against smokers! Brussels wants to eliminate cigarettes with a ‘smoking police’, ashtray bans and high-publicity legal processes against celebrities who enjoy a puff.

• Celebrities who smoke will also be targeted and exposed publicly as smoking offenders.

Which was based on this EU document...

When active enforcement begins, many jurisdictions recommend the use of high-profile prosecutions to enhance deterrence. By identifying prominent violators who have actively defied the law or who are well known in the community, by taking firm and swift action and by seeking maximum public awareness of these activities, authorities are able to demonstrate their resolve and the seriousness of the law.

Which brings us to Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz...

Prosecute Damon Albarn over on stage cigarette urges anti-smoking charity

An anti-smoking charity called today for Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn to be prosecuted for smoking a cigarette on stage on the first night of a tour.

Bass guitarist Paul Simonon, formerly of The Clash, also smoked during the show in front of an "intimate" audience of about 500 fans.

Now the anti-smoking charity Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) has called for Albarn and Simonon to be prosecuted to make an example of them.

Spokeswoman Amanda Sandford said: "There can be no excuse for that as it is an indoor place and the law is very clear."

"No-one is allowed to smoke on stage unless it's relevant to the act. They should be fined. It's not just the artist, it's the premises where the act is held. I would expect the local authority to take the appropriate action. It's not just illegal but more importantly it's about the message it sends out to fans."

"People in the public eye have a duty not to promote smoking. It's very irresponsible - I suppose they think it's rebellious and they may get some extra kudos from it and maybe some extra publicity."

Hmm. Who do you think is trying to get "extra publicity" here? Unpopular, state-funded pressure group ASH or world famous musician Damon Albarn? 

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The Policy Exchange make fools of themselves

It has long been recognised that tobacco brings in far more in tax revenue than is spent on treating 'smoking-related' diseases. What is less well recognised—because few people are so indelicate as to say it—is that the government has a financial interest in seeing people die at the age of 65, or as soon as possible thereafter. It's not a nice thought, but it's simple economics. Between the ages of 16 to 65, most of us are net contributors to the state. Before and after that, we are an expense.

 

From a strictly economic perspective, the government's ideal citizen is someone who works all their life, pays a lot of tax and then dies not too long after retiring. Smokers, for instance.

 

This is an uncomfortable fact for tobacco control. Nonsmokers must be taught to believe that smokers hurt them both physically and financially. They don't, but they've done a good job of convincing them on the first count, and now it is time for the second.

 

Enter the Policy Exchange. This think-tank has released a report which makes the astounding claim that British smokers cost the state more than the £10 billion they pay in tobacco tax each year. They do so using the most appalling methodology.

 

The fundamental problem—and this is a feature of all such studies—is that they assume that if a smoker doesn't die from a 'smoking-related' disease, he won't die from anything. Or at least not anything that costs money to treat. This is, shall we say, rather counterintuitive. 

 

It also assumes that the money to treat these diseases shouldn't come from the 11p in the £1 National Insurance contribution that every Briton is compelled to pay, but from additional tax on tobacco. In effect, the smoker's National Insurance contributions are given to a nonsmoker. Again, this seems a tad unfair and is hardly in the spirit of the NHS. 

 

Once you've swallowed all that, you are asked to believe that smoking costs the NHS £2.7 billion. This figure is often bandied around and the usual source is a 2008 ASH document called 'Beyond Smoking Kills'. This, in turn, cites another ASH document: 'The Cost of Smoking to the NHS' by C. Callum. But this document does not seem to exist. There is no trace of it on the ASH website and, for all we know, the £2.7 billion was plucked out of thin air. All that is left is this vague leaflet, also from ASH. 

 

But it'll do for the Policy Exchange, who slap another £200 million on and...

 

Ker-ching: £2.9 billion in healthcare costs.

 

So far, so good. But a lot more is going to be required if we are to get beyond that pesky £10 billion mark. 

 

To that end, £4.8 billion is conjured up for 'lost output'. This is the contribution smokers would have made to society had they not died during their working life. Matthew Sinclair spots the problem with this at ConservativeHome:

That loss is clearly mostly to the smoker themselves (the income they miss out on), that means it isn't a societal cost but a private one and can't justify Pigovian taxation.

Quite so. Let's not forget that the government does not own its citizens' bodies or their lives. We do not have a duty to work for the state or to maximise our productivity. You would hope that a supposedly centre-right think tank might recognise that.

 

The Policy Exchange assumed that these smokers wouldn't have any other health problems (rather unlikely), and that they would have worked to the age of 74 (what?!!). This second assumption is crucial because only a fairly small proportion of smokers die before the age of 65. 

 

They did, however, find 757 smoking-related deaths amongst the 35-39 age group (really? Who are they?) who each 'cost' society £750,000 (!) by dying young.

 

Better still, they assumed that none of these smokers would have had a life on the dole or on incapacity benefit. As a result, they didn't have to face the awkward task of showing a smoker saving the state money by dying.

 

Nor do they mention any of the pensions, benefits, prescriptions, hip replacements, meals on wheels, geriatric care and operations that won't have to come out of the pot thanks to smokers dying prematurely. And that's a damn good job, because that amount alone would dwarf all the rest of the figures combined and lead the reader to the unpalatable, but truthful, conclusion that smokers are net contributors to the economy. 

 

Oh, and stick another £713 million for deaths from passive smoking, even though they only exist on an epidemiologist's lap-top.

 

Ker-ching! £4.8 billion

 

Then there's litter collection. Everyone in Britain pays to have the streets cleaned but, according to the Policy Exchange, smokers should pay twice. The cost of collecting cigarette butts is, they reckon, £342 million. Stick it on the price of fags.

 

Ker-ching! £0.3 billion

 

And what about those cigarette breaks? They must be costing the country a fortune, right? The Policy Exchange estimates that smokers spend 5 to 10 minutes smoking while at work. Just imagine all the wealth they could be creating in that time! It's not as if everyone takes a break at work, especially since two 15 minute work breaks are mandatory under European law. Nah, let's pretend it's unique to smokers and call it 'lost productivity'.

 

This is pure baloney, as Mark Wadsworth points out:

How on earth is a smoking break a 'cost to the taxpayer'? That's like saying that since most people don't work at weekends, weekends cost the economy about £400 billion per annum

Never mind. Call it a cost and let's get to that £10 billion. And let's slap another £2.5 billion on because smokers are supposedly absent from work for 33 hours more than nonsmokers each year. This 33 hour absenteeism might have nothing to do with smoking, and probably isn't. It might not even be true at all, but it's grist to the mill. Okay, someone else estimated that the cost was less than half of that, but let's go with the highest figure we can find. Hence...

 

Ker-ching! £5.4 billion

 

The only problem is the tobacco industry's undoubted contribution to the economy. British American Tobacco alone turned over £33.9 billion in 2008 and is a significant employer. Without smoking, these people won't have a job, won't pay tax and will be claiming benefits. The same is true of their suppliers, distributors and retailers. This is a tangible economic benefit and the Policy Exchange does not want benefits eating away at their figure. So how to skirt around it? 

Smoking impacts on business in a variety of ways, and, when viewing our current paradigm, losses should be considered alongside benefits.

Agreed. Off you go then.

Previous studies have demonstrated that, were people not to spend money on cigarettes, they would direct their expenditure elsewhere. Other leisure industries support greater workforce, and have a significantly lower tax profile. This leads to an aggregate increase in employment, with consequent economic benefits. Indeed, they estimate that the benefits of to be derived from leisure spending going elsewhere would significantly outweigh the detrimental effects.

In other words, ex-smokers will spend their money elsewhere, thereby helping other industries which will then create new vacancies for those redundant tobacco execs and newsagents to fill. Well, yes, probably. But there is no guarantee that those industries will be in the UK. 

 

More to the point, the fact that people might find work elsewhere (though doubtful with over 8 million unemployed) is not a reason to ignore the costs of unemployment. I don't seem to recall many people in the 1980s telling the miners that their plight didn't matter because new industries would emerge. Nor have I noticed UNISON telling their members not to worry about mass redundancies because the money saved will be spent elsewhere.

 

A cost is a cost. Any financial spreadsheet needs to show that.

For these reasons we exclude the role of business from our calculation.

How very convenient. We wouldn't want the "role of business" to intrude on an economic analysis, would we?

 

And that, my friends, is how the Policy Exchange does its sums. They get to a figure of over £13 billion and want a 5% increase in the price of cigarettes which, by a remarkable coincidence, is exactly what ASH were demanding two weeks ago. 

 

Its lead author, Henry Featherstone, seems to be rather chummy with ASH, as Dick Puddlecote has noted. He is already utilising the fallacious arguments of that 'charity', turning up with a false dichotomy at ConservativeHome where he accuses his many critics of "defending smoking"—ie. anyone who criticises the 'good guys' must be helping the 'bad guys'. 

 

It's not defending smoking, Henry, it's defending reason.

 

Funnily enough, I was at the Policy Exchange last night. They were talking bollocks then as well.

 

UPDATE:

 

Mark Littlewood (Institute of Economic Affairs) attacks the notion that it is our duty to maximise our productivity for the state here.

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