Sport and booze

From a new study in Addiction ...

University students in the United Kingdom who play sport and who personally receive alcohol industry sponsorship or whose club or team receives alcohol industry sponsorship appear to have more problematic drinking behaviour than UK university students who play sport and receive no alcohol industry sponsorship. Policy to reduce or cease such sponsorship should be considered.

This survey-based study claims that students who play sport for alcohol industry-sponsored teams are more likely to be 'hazardous drinkers' than those who don't.

What's a hazardous drinker? It's someone who gets more than eight points in this test. I am one of them, apparently. There's a good chance that you are too because no fewer than 84 per cent of the sportspeople in the Addiction study were hazardous drinkers.

That sounds pretty high, doesn't it? But then people who play sport appear to be a public health nightmare...

Research from the United States, Australia and New Zealand suggests that sportspeople, and especially university students who play sport, drink more hazardously than their non-sporting peers and the general population. Higher rates of drink-driving, anti-social behaviour and unprotected sex were also found in university sports participants

And that's before we get to all those sports injuries and deaths. The answer is plain—ban sports. Either that or we could do the usual thing and try to blame Big Industry.

Yeah, let's just do that...

Sport continues to be a primary vehicle for the promotion of alcohol, with a large proportion of the alcohol industry's advertising and sponsorship budget spent on sport.

Gosh, could that possibly be because people who play (and watch) sport are more likely to drink? Nah, only someone who has the slightest understanding of business would be familiar with the concept of target markets. Instead, let's just pretend that the alcohol industry randomly targets sports and uses its wily ways to draw unsuspecting rugger players into its web of liquor.

The study finds that 89 per cent of the players of alcohol-sponsored teams were hazardous drinkers, compared to 82 per cent of the others. This is not a big difference and I suspect that a little common sense can explain it.

Firstly, what constitutes the 'alcohol industry' in this study?

...participants were asked if they, their team or their club currently received sponsorship (e.g. money, equipment, travel costs, discounted/free alcohol) from an alcohol industry body (e.g. a bar, hotel, liquor store or producer).

OK, so we're including pub teams. That's fair enough. Pubs are part of the alcohol industry. But who plays for pub teams? Generally speaking, it's people who go to the pub a lot. It would be hardly surprising if they drink more than average. 

Secondly, there are thirty six different sports included in this study, but football and rugby are the most popular, each accounting for 18% of the participants. Football and rugby players like a drink, to put it mildly. I don't have the data, but I would put money on them drinking more than those who take part in, say, gymnastics or athletics or swimming. I would also bet that bars, liquor stores and alcohol manufacturers are more likely to sponsor football and rugby than gymnastics and swimming.

I would be amazed if this is not the case but, as I say, I don't have the data, and the reason why I don't have the data is that the authors of the Addiction study don't bother to tell us what proportion of each sport is sponsored by alcohol-related businesses and what proportion of those who play each sport are hazardous drinkers. If alcohol companies sponsor rugby teams more than swimming clubs, then it would not surprise me in the least if there is a statistical correlation between alcohol sponsorship and alcohol consumption, but this only brings me back to my point above—which always seems to fly over the heads of public health folk—that advertisers target people who are in the market for their product.

Perhaps there are people in public health who genuinely believe that football and rugby players drink more than platform divers and trampolinists because the alcohol industry sponsors those sports. In other words, that there are no differences between a gymnast and a forward prop other than their exposure to alcohol sponsorship. To those people, I can only throw up my hands and walk away. Statistical findings are worthless without common sense, and common sense is in desperately short supply in modern epidemiology.


In case the reader is left in any doubt that the Addiction study is policy-based evidence, it ends with the usual political tub thumping, including the obligatory reference to the tobacco industry and a plea to ignore evidence and embrace the ridiculous precautionary principle.

The present study provides some evidence from the United Kingdom, showing that alcohol industry sponsorship is possibly harmful... The tobacco industry has been prohibited from advertising during sports broadcasts and from sponsoring sport in many countries, and there is no evidence to suggest that this has resulted in a decline in sport participation or performance. Similar action has been called for in regard to the alcohol industry, with emphasis on the application of a precautionary principle, in particular on shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of the potentially harmful activity, i.e. the alcohol industry. Secondly, in the absence of strong evidence as to whether the association is likely to be causal which may take many years to develop, public health authorities are compelled to take preventive action until such evidence is available.

Compelled?! The power of public health compels us to attempt to reduce 'hazardous drinking' amongst university athletes from a whopping 89 per cent to a mere, er, 82 per cent on the basis of a naive interpretation of a survey that ignores obvious confounding factors and reverse causation?! Begone with you, stupid people.


PS. Elsewhere in Addiction you will find this gem...

Caffeine addiction? Caffeine for youth? Time to act!

Marketing tactics for caffeinated products targeting youth appear as egregious as previously admonished practices of the tobacco and alcohol industries. As researchers we should move more quickly to understand more clearly the impact of caffeine products on youth health and behavior. In the meantime, initiation of actions (e.g. mandatory labeling, retail and marketing restrictions, educational campaigns) to curtail and counter marketing promotions that promise our youth a better life through caffeine would appear the responsible thing to do.

It never ends.

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Dispatches' minimum pricing "experiment"

Channel 4 scientist at work

This has to be seen to be believed. Tonight, Antony Barnett (pictured above) will be doing his bit for the cause of minimum pricing by making a programme about 'binge drinking' (a phrase that already sounds like it belongs in a nostalgia show called I Love 2004).

I dare say that you can expect plenty of footage of drunks fighting and falling over in the street, but don't expect to hear that there has been an 18 per cent decline in alcohol consumption in the last decade, or that binge drinking amongst 16-24 year olds has been falling for years, or that there is less violence today than there has been for twenty years, or that alcohol taxes in Britain are amongst the highest in the world.

What you can certainly expect is the most laughable attempt to 'prove' that minimum pricing 'works' that has ever been broadcast. Dispatches—for it is they—have provided this parody of science in its trailer. I had to watch it twice to make sure I wasn't dreaming. Basically, they got some young adults who like to have a few drinks before they go out (so-called 'pre-loading') and brought them to an off licence.

"We set up a little experiment. We mocked up a few shelves at Mr Shiraz's off licence and applied a minimum price of 50p on similar drinks to those they'd bought earlier."

Okay.

"And we told them they could only spend the same as they'd spent before—up to £8 each."

I beg your pardon?

"...we told them they could only spend the same as they'd spent before—up to £8 each."

Let's get this straight: you get people who are buying cheap alcohol and then you put up the price to see if they buy more or less alcohol, but you prevent them from buying more by capping how much they're allowed to spend.

Are you kidding me? The central question about minimum pricing is whether people will drink less or spend more. If you stop them spending more, obviously they are going to drink less, but it's not very realistic, is it? Or does the minimum pricing policy also involve a dingbat in NHS glasses physically restraining anybody who tries to spend more money on alcohol than they used to?

Having rigged the experiment with an all-important caveat, Barnett concludes with the following triumphant conclusion...

"With the same amount of money there was a difference in the amount of alcohol they bought."

No kidding! It's, like, a miracle or something.

"The results show that a minimum unit price of 50p has led to them buying roughly 30 per cent less alcohol."

Well, that's one in the eye for the sceptics. Get that sucker written up and submitted to the Lancet.

Good grief. If this is the trailer, how bad of the rest of it going to be? Find out on Channel 4 at 8pm.

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The price of beer, water and Pimm's

The Sunday Times ran a shocking exposé about the price and strength of Pimm's at Wimbledon over the weekend...

It seems that Pimm's, which should be served so that it is 6.5% alcohol, is being watered down with lemonade (lemonaded down?) meaning that it is, in practice, merely 4% or even 2.5%. Since the stuff is sold at £7.80, the Sunday Times thinks the Great British Public is being ripped off. It may have a point. It quotes a Wimbledon-goer saying "I'm shocked at how expensive the Pimm's is at Wimbledon."

A few pages later, the Sunday Times reported a shocking exposé of how mineral water drinkers are being ripped off, except that it didn't frame it in those terms. Instead, it expressed outrage at how people are able to buy relatively cheap beer and cider from supermarkets.

The 'beer is cheaper than water' meme always reminds me of Eddie Izzard's comment about blood being thicker than water ("it means we should be nice to our relatives, but custard is thicker than blood so should we have more respect for custard?"). It doesn't really mean anything. Since beer is made out of water, you might conclude that someone is making a lot of money selling water to the gullible. And so they are, but most people drink water out of the tap. If clean drinking water was harder to obtain than alcohol (as it was centuries ago), the comparison might be germane, but it isn't so it isn't.

At 6.5% ABV, one pint of Pimm's is enough for someone to reach their 'daily alcohol limit' although I notice that the Sunday Times doesn't caution readers against buying a second one. As a further aside, 6.5% ABV is exactly the figure at which beer and cider become 'super strength' drinks in the eyes of various local councils and are taken off the market. By contrast, all the beers named and shamed in the Sunday Times for being sold at 'pocket money prices' have an ABV of 4% which, in the other story, is "like a soft drink". Super strength for booze for me, but not for thee? 

The Sunday Times thinks that the supermarkets and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Association are both behaving reprehensibly, but for completely different reasons. The former is selling booze too cheaply, the latter is selling it too expensively. Presumably somebody at the Sunday Times knows exactly how much alcohol should cost. I guess this mystery figure falls somewhere between the 'shockingly cheap' 72p for a pint of Foster's and the 'shockingly expensive' £7.80 for a pint of Pimm's. But where? And how can they possibly judge?

You might say that the boffins and eggheads at Sheffield University (as The Sun doubtless calls them) know exactly how much alcohol should cost and it is 50p per unit, but 50p is only one of a number of options in their model and it is no more 'evidence-based' than a 60p, 70p or 90p unit. On the contrary, from a 'public health perspective' (and what other perspective is there, right?), the higher prices are more evidence-based.

I would argue that the optimum price for alcohol—and every other product in the world—is 'as cheap as possible'. The whole point of economic progress is to make things more affordable through higher wages and lower prices. In paradise, everything would be free, but if things can't be free, they should at least be cheap. The only qualification I would make is that any negative externalities should be captured in the cost of the product with a Pigovian tax. In the case of alcohol, it seems clear that alcohol duty amply covers the financial costs of alcohol misuse and leaves the government with a multi-billion pound profit.

Alcohol tax should therefore be reduced and supermarkets should be congratulated for selling alcohol as cheaply as they can can. The dilution of Pimm's may be a matter for the boys at weights and measures—I don't know—but you are allowed to bring your own alcohol into Wimbledon so my recommendation is to stock up on supermarket beer before you go. As usual, the off-trade can save the day.

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John Dalli's conspiracy theory

Longtime readers will recall that John Dalli, the EU's former health Commissioner, was sacked after his friend, Silvio Zammit, attempted to get a €60 million bribe out of Swedish Match, the snus manufacturer, to overturn the EU ban on snus. Swedish Match recorded an incriminating conversation with Zammit and handed it to the EU's anti-fraud officials at OLAF.

OLAF then looked at Zammit and Dalli's telephone records and noticed that whilst they didn't call each other very often, they called each other a lot on the days that Zammit met with Swedish Match, with another spate of phone calls coming when they found out about OLAF's investigation. OLAF described this as "unambiguous and converging pieces of circumstantial evidence" and Dalli was asked to resign on the grounds that he had failed to report corruption—which he did.

It later emerged that Dalli had also taken "at least two trips to the Bahamas as part of an effort to arrange the transfer of tens of millions of dollars". This, combined with Dalli's weird behaviour and tinfoil hat accusations (which Barroso said were "incomprehensible") can be viewed as being consistent with a man who has something to hide.

Next month—nearly two years after Dalli's resignation—the Maltese politician will be in court to give an account of himself. He is not being taken to court by the EU, rather he is taking the EU to court for wrongful dismissal (despite the fact that he resigned). If a report in the magazine EuroPolitics is any guide, he will claim to be the victim of a remarkably wide-ranging conspiracy.

“The tobacco industry is behind this fraud. They planned and executed it, with the collaboration of the Commission. Swedish Match is connected to Philip Morris. This was not about snus. That was just a façade. It was about derailing the tobacco directive, which they succeeded in doing,” says the elderly Dalli, who does not hesitate to single out senior EU officials.

But, as Barroso has already explained, the directive was not derailed. It has gone through largely unaltered, with no amendment of the snus ban and with some unnecessary and counterproductive regulation of e-cigarettes thrown in. It underwent some amendments, as is usual, but they were mostly minor and had nothing to do with the Dalli scandal. On the contrary, there was pressure for the TPD to be passed quickly and with few amendments precisely because of the Dalli scandal.

Dalli establishes connections among all the protagonists: Swedish Match and Philip Morris had set up a joint venture in 2009 to market snus internationally. So they had common interests. Michel Petite is the Commission’s former legal services director and is today employed by a law firm, whose clients include Philip Morris. He was a very close friend of Commission Secretary-General Catherine Day and President José Manuel Barroso.

“Petite was the connection between the tobacco industry and the high-level Commission officials. [...] He had meetings with the Commission’s legal services about the tobacco directive, and as reported to me by SANCO staff, caused the Commission legal services to change opinions that they had earlier given to SANCO.” 

In other words, some people who work in Brussels know each other. One of them has, at best, a distant connection with a tobacco company.

Dalli asserts that the industry was not happy with his approach to revision of the tobacco directive. Petite therefore alerted Day and Barroso, who arranged to get rid of him.

Really? It's that easy, is it? An obscure, junior staffer tells the EU president to get rid of a Commissioner and the president immediately organises a giant conspiracy to do so?

What was Barroso's motive? He doesn't have one. What was Petite's motive? He doesn't have one either, really. The closest thing Dalli can find to a motive is the fact that Petite now works for a law firm that has a tobacco company on its books. What was Day's motive? She is, supposedly, a 'close friend' of Petite's. Pretty powerful guy, this Petite, isn't he? What is he, a hypnotist?

And how did OLAF become involved in this devious plot?

“They got [OLAF Director-General Giovanni] Kessler involved, I suppose by promising to appoint him as the future head of the European public prosecutor’s office." 

He supposes.

"Kessler was therefore personally out to get me,” says Dalli.

Sure he was. Everyone's out to get him.

He also highlights the connections among all the protagonists: “[Lobbyist] Johan Gabrielsson was hired by Swedish Match in October 2011, when everything began. That was no coincidence. I think he was hired because he knew [lobbyist] Gayle Kimberley [they had both worked at the Council’s legal service on enlargement]. Kimberley had an extra-marital relationship with one of Zammit’s friends, who knew me. Kimberley was possibly also the bait. But I have no proof. That is simply my interpretation.”

This is just a stream of non sequiturs and free association. The only thing missing is a reference to the Freemasons and the 'zionists'. It all sounds bonkers to me, but this could be the trial of the year.

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Off to Warsaw

I'm off to Warsaw for the Global Nicotine Forum. I hope to be tweeting, if not blogging, for the duration. In the meantime, I'll leave you with two depressing stories.

This man has had his tobacconist raided by the New Zealand rozzers because the name of his shop—Discount Cigarette Supplies—violates some ridiculous anti-smoking law. He has been forced to paint over the offending word 'cigarette'.

The world is now a safer place.

And then there's this bullshit on the front page of the Daily Mail (and the Telegraph)...

We can take a little comfort from the fact that the UK's "chief obesity adviser" (as the Telegraph describes her despite there being no such role) didn't go quite as far in her comments as the headlines suggest. Nevertheless, it is a sign of these pitiful and puritanical times that people are being encouraged to fear fruit juice. I have always found it goes perfectly well with some spirits.

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Siegel on Chapman and Glantz

From Michael Siegel's blog...

...in the anti-smoking movement, you don't need to be honest and truthful. As long as your intentions are good, you can get away with lying and with making false and defamatory accusations. The ends are all that matter, and if you use defamatory means to reach those ends, it's perfectly acceptable.

And he's in the anti-smoking movement!

The subject of his blog post is the latest lies being spread by the Laurel and Hardy of tobacco control, Simon Chapman and Stan Glantz. Go read it.

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That Aussie plain packaging data again

More on that plain packaging/tobacco sales controversy—which really shouldn't be controversial...

As Terry McCrann says in the Herald Sun, "the mindless and usually vicious stupidity of the left has been on vivid and utterly dependable display in what might be termed the cigarette packaging war over the last few weeks."

The facts are pretty clear and they can be seen in this graph that shows seasonally adjusted tobacco sales (see previous post for more details).

This really requires no further comment, but I'm happy to let McCrann take it from here for those who need further explanation.

Hell hath no fury like another leftist “feel-good-idea-at-the-time” policy exposed as a failure. A torrent of abuse was unleashed from the left, initiated by former, ahem, Gillard adviser and, in his all-too inadvertently accurate words, “one of Australia’s leading economic visionaries”, Stephen Koukoulas.

... In the usual cocktail of stupidity and dishonesty, the Kouk cited official statistics showing the volume of tobacco consumption in the March 2014 quarter was 5.3 per cent lower than in the December 2012 quarter when the law came into effect. What he did not point out, and as our graph from the Macrobusiness blog shows, virtually the entire fall came in the March quarter itself — which just happened to follow a thumping 12.5 per cent excise increase. What the Kouk is also unable to comprehend is that the ABS figures he cited are merely a proxy for actual tobacco and cigarette volumes; no one who understands statistics would claim they literally measure actual volumes.

... You don’t have to have any particular knowledge of statistics to pick up the clearest signal from the graph. That over the course of 2013 — after plain packaging, the spend on smokes arguably rose and at worst went sideways. This interrupted an equally unambiguous downward trend in the spend. That trend either resumed this year, or because of the big excise thumping.

I don't know why Koukoulas has decided to keep flogging this dead horse (loyalty to Gillard is McCrann's theory) and I was none the wiser after he started a conversation with me on Twitter this week (you can see it here). He seems to have mentally blocked out the whole of 2013 in his analysis. It's remarkable.

There's no helping those who have eyes and fail to see, but if the plain packaging lobby get away with persuading people that the graph above—which shows that tobacco sales were higher in three out of four quarters after plain packaging came in than they had been before—proves that the policy works, then the scoundrels can get away with anything.

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