Strange unintended consequences

Some saucy news from Manitoba, Canada...

After smoking in public places was banned in 2004, happy hour crowds dwindled in bars across the province.

Lies, all lies! Stanton "black is white" Glantz has conducted studies into this and has proved that smoking bans are good for business. Why do bar-owners around the world continue to deny this? The fools!

In a bid to woo customers back to his lounge, Ron Petryna, the owner of the Headingley Hotel, began running conventional Friday night bingo games.

And why not?

"We started off giving away pretty tame stuff -- cases of pop or boxes of candy," Petryna says. Then he recalled a Ladies' Night promotion he`d witnessed south of the border -- one that climaxed with a few rounds of "naughty bingo" where female participants went home with vibrators and such.

"So we began to introduce adult toys into our own bingo games," says Petryna. "Next we added special martinis and cocktails named after the games. This all evolved from there."

Oh, I say.

"This all" refers to the fact that Manitoba has quietly become the undisputed erotic bingo capital of the world. Sure, you can find comparable goings-on in places like Toronto, Ont., Portland, Ore. and Orlando, Fla. But "dirty bingo" or "X-rated bingo" or however it's billed in those burgs isn't a standard occurrence. Not like it is at Dick's Dylan's, the Stock Exchange Hotel and the Riverside Inn, to name a few local nightspots that now host erotic bingo on a weekly basis.

Tis a frenzy of x-rated bingo in Manitoba.

"Last weekend was the busiest it's ever been, in fact; we had a 28-girl bachelorette party and a soccer team from the U of M. We ended up having to seat people at the pool tables so that everybody could play."

A full house, if you will.

"My first reaction was that it sounded kind of skanky," says Kaisaris. "We don't do strippers here -- we're not that kind of place -- but I quickly discovered that erotic bingo isn't like that at all. It's good clean fun." (Good, clean and free: none of the bars we visited charges people to take part.)

Nowadays, erotic bingo at "The Nob" is definitely a family affair...

Steady on. You're just being silly now.

You can read more of this smut here.

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Ireland's illicit tobacco trade

Pinch, punch, first of the month. Blogging may be light for a few days as I catch up with some writing. Meanwhile, I recommend this quite entertaining, and certainly informative, documentary about the illicit tobacco trade in Ireland.

I can't embed it so click to view.


PS. On another note entirely, this just in from the BBC:

Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics for the British Medical Association, said: "We have to start de-normalising alcohol."

Be afraid.

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Regressive taxation

I'll be damned if I can find anything in the news to blog about today, so here's a link to a study that was tweeted by Ben Goldacre yesterday:

Smoking and Ill Health: Does Lay Epidemiology Explain the Failure of Smoking Cessation Programs Among Deprived Populations?

The resistance of disadvantaged groups to anti-smoking advice is remarkable. In relation to the study of differing cultures, there is a long-standing academic tradition assuming that behavior that may otherwise be difficult to understand is indeed rational within particular cultural contexts.

Persistent smoking among the most deprived members of society may represent a rational response to their life chances informed by a lay epidemiology. Health promotion initiatives designed to reduce smoking among members of these groups may continue to fail unless the general health and life chances of such individuals are first improved.

The study (from 2003) confirmed the fairly obvious observation that those on the lowest incomes are most resistant to anti-smoking campaigns. There is a strong social gradient to smoking prevalence which didn't exist fifty years ago.

Although not explored in this study, one result is that taxing cigarette is about the most regressive form of taxation imaginable. Anti-smoking campaigners argue that those on low incomes benefit disproportionately from higher tobacco duty because, since they are least able to afford it, they will be most likely to quit smoking. They say that "a disproportionately number of lives of the poor are likely to be saved by a cigarette tax." It's a nice piece of rhetoric and for most products it would hold true (price relative to income affects consumption).

But tobacco is not most products and this simple economic formula does not take into account why people smoke. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and history is a better guide than economics on this issue. Decades of experience have shown that raising tobacco duty widens both health inequalities and financial inequalities. And while smoking is obviously linked to poor health, so is poverty. 

Few politicians are eager to acknowledge, let alone address, this thorny issue. Tobacco duty raises around £13 billion a year in the UK.

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Ignore the food police

As I mentioned on Wednesday, a common defence of arbitrary nutritional targets is that they can't do any harm. In Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, I gave the example of George Lundberg, former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who published a junk science article which showed that eating fish halved the risk of coronary heart disease. When the study was exposed as garbage, he glibly replied: "People are told that eating fish once a week is not a bad thing. What harm can it do?" That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the public health crusade. The harm, surely, is to science and to the truth. You would hope the editor of a medical journal would appreciate that.

Sometimes, however, the harm is more tangible. In the case of dietary advice, it seems that parents have been giving their children the kind of meals that would be more appropriate to a food faddist on detox. From the BBC:

"Parents are aware of the importance of ensuring their child eats healthily to avoid obesity and health problems in later life, but this can sometimes lead to parents making requests that their child follows a strict diet, such as skimmed milk and low-fat foods," says [the National Day Nurseries Association's] chief executive Purnima Tanuku.

It is the madness of public health to paint some foods as good and some as evil. Against this background of fear, parents can hardly be blamed for avoiding 'evil' foods such as fat and carbohydrates while turning to trendy alternatives. But they really shouldn't...

"Children under five have specific needs, and should not have low-fat diets as their growing bodies need fat and carbohydrates."

Growing rapidly, this age-group needs a diet which is - proportional to their size - much higher in calories than that of an adult.

An obvious point, that. Children are not adults. They need calories and plenty of them. But while a small number of parents allow their children to grow fat, many other parents have gone in the opposite direction, giving their kids meals that are only suitable for an office worker on a diet. Just as the 'evil' foods are essential for children, the 'good' foods are nothing of the sort.

Studies have shown that children burn fat much faster than adults - and so skimmed milk and other low-fat dairy products should remain off the menu until they are much older.

"And parents really shouldn't feel too anxious about puddings - sponge and custard is a good dessert to offer, surprising as that may sound," says Jessica Williams, a paediatric dietician.

And don't listen to the vegans and quacks, give them some meat.

"There have also been problems with the messages about red meat. It's a shame some parents feel so worried about it as it really is the best source of iron, and iron deficiency anaemia among toddlers in particular is common."

And what about the totally arbitrary 5-a-day target?

"And while the five-a-day message must certainly still be there, a child's portion does need to be smaller so they have room for the other, more substantial items on their plates. They simply won't get the calories they need from fruit and vegetables, even in large quantities."

The risks of following public health dogma are very real. More real, indeed, than the hysteria about childhood obesity.

There are in fact concerns that the plight of the underweight child has been forgotten amid the intense focus on childhood obesity.

Studies have shown that being persistently underweight as a child can cause problems over a lifetime, from cognitive impairment to skeletal disorders.

"Poor nutritional status in toddlerhood can be linked to permanent cognitive damage and a child never reaching their full potential, as well as shorter stature in adulthood."

But isn't all this based on sound science?

"I think that we are in danger of overlooking these children in the obsession about obesity - and I am not convinced that we have good measures of bodyweight in small children in terms of later risk," says City University's Helen Crawley, director of the Caroline Walker Trust which promotes good diet. "We should be much more careful."

As is revealed time and again, the people who issue advice about diet make it up as they go along, often swayed by their own obsessions (primarily vegetarianism). No sooner has policy been based on one study when another study comes along and says the opposite. At the very least, there should be a recognition that the available data are a mass of contradictions and that the diet which has made us the longest-living people in history remains the best bet. 

Public health has become hopelessly corrupted by the idea that 'strong messages' need to be sent out. It willfully misleads people and then refuses to take the blame for pandering to people's neuroses. In the case of diet, that means demonising some types of food (salt, fat, carbohydrates, sugar) and glorifying others (wholemeal bread, skimmed milk, broccoli). It may not be their intention to terrify parents into feeding their kids rabbit food, but it is such an obvious consequence of their actions that it can barely be called unintended.

If you want to know what to feed your children, listen to your grandmother before you listen to anything from the zealots, quacks and food faddists who now dominate the public health movement.

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More unintended consequences

I'll be away until Monday so I shall wish you a good weekend and leave you with two things.

Firstly, Leg-iron has a message for those who want to ban e-cigarettes:

All you antismokers cheering, consider this. We are going to smoke. If we can't have Electrofag any more we will go back to tobacco. Those who have switched completely from tobacco to Electrofag will switch back. Gum and patches are no good, it's the action of smoking that smokers enjoy. The gum is as bitter as an ASH activist and the patches are as irritating as a fake cough. Especially the fake cough produced by the hideous old bat who passed me in the street as I was rolling a cigarette. Cough cough cough. Pathetic. At least wait until I light it before pretending it bothers you.

It's the action of smoking that bothers you people. Not the smell. Not the health. Not the pretendy science that backs up every damn report ever issued. It's the sight of someone enjoying something that you don't like.

Secondly, via F2C, the curse of the smoking ban has struck again. First Ireland, then the USA, then Italy and now...

Imperial Tobacco reports first rise in British cigarette market in four decades

Imperial Tobacco said yesterday that the annual duty-paid cigarette market in the UK had increased by 1 per cent to 45.5 billion cigarettes in 2009, while the fine cut tobacco market grew by 21 per cent to 4,650 tonnes. It is the first time that the number of cigarettes sold in the UK has risen in almost four decades.

You can lead a horse to water...

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Rumblings of sanity

"During times of universal deceit", said George Orwell, "telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." 

The following stories appeared in the last week. All of them involve statements that are so transparently truthful that they are obvious to anyone who does not have a vested interest in saying otherwise. Consequently, in the early days of 2010, they are considered controversial.

Outdoor Smoking Bans Spread Without Science

WeHo News 

West Hollywood, California (January 11, 2010) - Half a dozen LA County municipalities have banned smoking near their outdoor dining facilities, with a few banning it from publicly-owned property - sidewalks, medians etc. - across their city entire.

All did so citing public health concerns, but none did so based on scientific evidence that second hand smoke (SHS) near an outdoor area poses a health risk, because no such peer reviewed study existed.

Smoking defended by Quebec doctor

CBS News

A Quebec psychiatrist has sparked controversy with a new book that comes to the defence of smokers and even promotes some benefits of smoking.

The former president of the province’s Association of Psychiatrists said smoking can be helpful for those suffering from deep depression.

"Sometimes antidepressants aren’t enough — it is an individual approach for everyone," Bourque said in an interview with Radio-Canada.

Bourque said the concerns about the dangers of second-hand smoke are overblown.

"The idea that is promoted by the Quebec government, that second-hand smoke is more dangerous than the smoke inhaled by someone who is smoking, is completely off the rails," Bourque said.

'Shaming' smokers makes it harder to quit: study

Tom Blackwell, National Post

Years of anti-smoking laws and campaigns have amounted to a public shaming of smokers that could make it harder for them to quit, a group of UBC researchers argue in a new report.

Katherine Frohlich, a public-health expert at the University of Montreal, said studies by her research group found that poorer smokers feel the policies have discriminated against them by, for instance, restricting their social interaction and isolating them at home.

"We shouldn't dismiss the fact these interventions have been incredibly successful," she said. "[But] we have to take into consideration the fact that there are some pretty serious unintended consequences."

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Game theory and cigarettes

Watching QI last night, I was reminded of John Nash and game theory. Nash was the troubled mathematical genius portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind. He didn't invent game theory per se, but he did invent an off-shoot of it - the Nash equilibrium - which, to put it simply, is where both players in a game are aware of the other player's ability and motives, and therefore play in a predictable way to maximise their own advantage. 

In game theory, neither player will do better by changing their strategy - even if both would do better by collaborating - and, therefore, neither player will change their strategy even if it means losing out if the other player plays the same way. 

In popular culture, game theory can be seen in TV shows such as Goldenballs (or its earlier incarnation Shafted), where players can choose to take or share the winnings. If both players share, they share. If they both choose to take, neither gets anything. If one takes and the other shares, the taker gets it all.

The Cold War is the classic example of game theory in action, which brings me to Adam Curtis's fascinating documentary The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom. In it, Curtis describes a game Nash invented called Fuck You Buddy, which could only be won if the player betrayed his partner. The whole documentary is on Youtube. This is the most relevant part...

Nash believed that humans were inherently suspicious of each other, hardly surprising since he was a paranoid schizophrenic. His was a gloomy and pessimistic view of the world, but it did not apply to the mass of humanity. In reality, we are more likely to collaborate than Nash thought. We do not always act in naked self-interest.

So what's this got to do with tobacco? Well, as Stephen Fry pointed out on QI, game theory can be applied to advertising. If one company is advertising, all the rest must do the same. But if no companies advertise, they can save money. And in the case of tobacco advertising, the state intervened to remove the competition. In effect, the state forced the tobacco companies to collaborate. 

As Fry said, it should have been predictable who the real winners would be:

If neither of them advertised, they could keep the money and the market would remain the same. So what it resulted in is the bizarre situation where they banned tobacco advertising, and it was to the benefit of the tobacco firms because they were suddenly saved money which they were otherwise wasting.

It is almost heretical to say this, but the purpose of tobacco advertising is to make people switch brands (or to stick with the brand they are already smoking). Anti-smoking groups have long disputed this, saying that tobacco advertising exists to make people start smoking, but they have never produced any credible evidence to show that this is the case.

It is likely that the anti-smoking groups are wrong. The US has a lower smoking rate than the UK, for example, despite cigarette advertising (in print) being legal in the former but not the latter. Cigarette sales also happened to go up in both countries after cigarette commercials were banned on TV.

In truth, cigarette advertising does little more than give different brands a chance to compete. As I said in Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, the biggest winner from the clamp-down on cigarette advertising in the 1970s was Philip Morris, because they happened to be top dog at a time when competing brands were prevented from gaining market share. It is no coincidence that Marlboro has been the world's top-selling brand since the early 1970s. Other brands simply cannot compete on anything other than price (eg. Lambert & Butler). 

There are cigarette companies that would love to see tobacco advertising reintroduced, but not the big ones. As so often happens, the anti-smoking groups have inadvertently done Big Tobacco's work for them.

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Daylight robbery

Prohibition creates lawlessness. Few dispute the fact that organised criminals, smugglers and thieves are the main beneficiaries of prohibition. This is true of total prohibition, as seen in America in the 1920s, but is also true - albeit to a lesser extent - when prohibition is brought in by degrees.

Putting a 'sin tax' on a product is a prohibitionist measure. It is explicitly designed to make the product prohibitively expensive. In theory, this should reduce consumption most amongst the poorest members of society. Anti-smoking advocates refute the obvious economic argument that high cigarette taxes are regressive by saying that, actually, they benefit the poor most because they are the ones who will quit smoking. It's a nice bit of rhetoric, and clever, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Every piece of evidence collected, not just over decades but over centuries, tells us that the poor are the least responsive to tax rises on tobacco. We also know that people are quite prepared to buy smuggled or counterfeit tobacco if they feel the tax burden is too high. It happened under Jame I in 1604 and - as I mentioned yesterday - it's happening now.

An excellent article by Wat Tyler on the Burning Our Money blog shows us that as cigarette prices are rising across the whole of the European Union, there is less incentive for smokers to go day-tripping to France and Belgium for cheap cigarettes. Consequently, and predictably, organised gangs are now turning to robbery.

Just in the last few months, small shopkeepers have been hit in Croydon, Oxfordshire, Glasgow, Sussex, Devon, Gloucestershire, Liverpool, Yorkshire, and back in Sussex again. AND THAT'S JUST THE FIRST PAGE FROM HUNDREDS OF GOOGLE RESULTS.

This is a massive crime wave.

One of the most damaging effects of alcohol prohibition was that it turned normal people into criminals and undermined respect for the law. The criminals who rob the shops may be, as Wat Tyler describes them, "thieving scum" but their customers are otherwise law-abiding people. 

Yesterday, I quoted ASH Ireland's Luke Clancy, who said:

"If we are serious about becoming a nation of non-smokers, the government has to start paying attention to the data. Price increases stop people smoking and deter young people from starting."

But as Frank Davis said in the comments:

Who the hell is this Clancy anyway to decide that the Irish are to become a nation of non-smokers? I mean, really, the sheer, mind-bending arrogance of it! Why the hell should anyone pay a blind piece of attention to someone who seems to have appointed himself into an unaccountable public role as adjudicator of a nation's pastimes?

Smokers everywhere are expressing a similar sentiment, in action if not words. Just as Americans in the 1920s were never consulted about the introduction of prohibition, no one today - beyond a self-selecting elite of 'health professionals' - has been asked if they want a "smoke-free world". When the law comes to be seen as unfair, punitive and unnecessary, people feel no guilt about breaking it. To quote Wat Tyler again:

Fundamentally, with tax now accounting for three-quarters of the price of cigarettes, even normally law abiding folk like the parson and the clerk can convince themselves such taxes are onerous and unnatural, and that it's reasonable to resort to the black market. After all, it isn't as if the black market is real crime, like murder or something.

We have moved beyond the realms of workable taxation. High taxes become the excuse for criminality.

It has always been thus. I've said it before and I'll say it again: no man-made law will ever be as powerful as the law of supply and demand.

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