In defence of disposable vapes

I've written a short briefing paper with Reem Ibrahim about the risks of banning disposable vapes for the IEA. A few stats:

 

• 35 per cent of adult vapers use disposables and a ban could result in some returning to smoking cigarettes.


• 7.6 per cent of 11-17 year olds are current e-cigarette users, while four in five have never used an e-cigarette.


• Cigarette use among people aged between 11 and 15 has dropped from four per cent to just one per cent since 2012.


• 11–15-year-olds are twice as likely to drink alcohol regularly than they are to vape regularly.

As I say in the press release...

“Banning a product because it is sometimes consumed by people who are already banned from buying it is a poor basis for legislation,” write report authors IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon and Communications Officer Reem Ibrahim. “We do not ban cider just because some teenagers drink it. We do not ban 18 certificate films because some teenagers watch them. We do not even ban cigarettes because some teenagers smoke them.”

 

Have a read.

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First, tell the truth

Dr Mike McKean, vice-president for policy at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, has hit out against the well publicised fact that vaping is at least 95% safer than smoking. 

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Dr McKean said: "Vaping is not for children and young people. In fact it could be very bad for you," although he stresses that it is not making lots of children very sick, and serious complications are rare.

"Vaping is only a tool for adults who are addicted to cigarettes."

He says the 95% safe messaging was "a very unwise thing to have done and it's opened the door to significant chaos".

The "chaos" is, presumably, the youth vaping "epidemic". It is very easy to exaggerate the scale of underage vaping in Britain - 80% of 11-17 year olds have never tried a vape and only 3.7% of them use an e-cigarette more than once a week - but there has undoubtedly been an increase in recent years, with most teenager vapers using disposables.

There are several problems with McKean's argument. 

 

Firstly, it implies that public health agencies shouldn't tell people the truth. There is no way of discussing the relative risks of vaping and smoking honestly without admitting that vaping is much, much less hazardous to health. Morally bankrupt organisations like the WHO and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids lie by omission by only focusing on the potential unproven harms. 

Secondly, as Carl Phillips explains at length in this study, consumers weigh up costs and benefits before deciding what to do. Health risks constitute part of the costs. If the health risks fall sharply, as with vaping as compared to smoking, while the benefits remain similar, you would expect consumption to increase. To counter that pull factor among children, the state introduces push factors such as banning people under the age of 18 from buying e-cigarettes, but the only way the state could mask the underlying change in the risk-benefit calculus would be by lying to the public.

 

One could draw a parallel with safe sex campaigns. Fear of sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy discourages sexual activity to some extent. If teenagers have access to condoms, there will presumably be more teenage sex. This is bad news if you're against teenagers having sex but good news if you're against unwanted pregnancies and the clap. Only a fanatic would respond by calling for condoms to be banned.

Thirdly, there is no evidence that the rise in youth vaping in the last three years has been due to teenagers knowing that vaping is at least 95% safer than smoking. On the contrary, like every other age group, teenagers have become more and more ignorant about the risks thanks to unscrupulous journalists and dishonest academics. Only a third of 11-17 year olds understand that vaping is less dangerous than smoking at all, let alone at least 95% less dangerous. Public understanding is at an all time low.

It should also be said that the USA and Australia had their own teen vaping 'epidemics' before the UK did, despite their public health agencies systematically lying to the public and, in the case of Australia, despite banning e-cigarettes.

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How big is the black market in tobacco?

I came across an empty pack of Manchester cigarettes at the weekend and it got me thinking about the black market in tobacco which has supposedly shrunk in the last 20 years. Maybe it has, but it would be nice if we tried to measure it properly, as I explain in this article for The Critic.

 

I first heard about Manchester cigarettes when Australia introduced plain packaging and Manchester became the country’s biggest selling illicit brand. It’s still doing well there. Last December, a man was jailed for smuggling three million of them into Melbourne. The interesting thing about these cigarettes is there are not counterfeits. The big tobacco companies have often borrowed English place names — Pall Mall, Mayfair, Richmond, Marlborough (they later shortened that one) and even Chesterfield — but they have never made a cigarette called Manchester.

When plain packaging was introduced, the worry was that counterfeiters would find it easier to counterfeit the plain packs. Instead, the black marketeers swung in the opposite direction, apparently deciding that if smokers did not like plain packs then they would appreciate an old school pack. Australia was suddenly deluged with “illicit whites” made in China and the Middle East that are principally, if not wholly, produced for illegal sale.

Finding a pack of Manchester cigarettes on a British pavement is a firm sign of industrial scale tobacco smuggling. I haven’t smoked for over a decade so my firsthand knowledge of the black market is limited to what other people smoke and which packs are left on the street, but I have noticed that a lot of them fall under the umbrella of what HMRC calls “non-duty paid”.

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There's still time to scrap HS2

Paul Johnson from the IFS was on Times Radio yesterday talking about HS2. 

 

“This whole thing just makes me want to weep. It makes me despair. I mean, the original sin, as it were, was agreeing to do it in the first place. It was obviously going to be hugely expensive, with relatively little gain from it relative to pretty much anything else you could have done with the railway or transport system, whether that’s making rail connections across the North vastly better or actually building a bunch of bypasses and improving the roundabouts in the road network. 

“And we knew that, that this was not the best way you could spend that amount of money. We also know how difficult we find it to build these projects. 

“So the original sin was doing it in the first place. Now the question is, once we have started and we’ve already spent many billions on it, what’s the best way forward from here? And there you just need to take a view as to how much additional benefit you get from taking it into Euston or taking it beyond Birmingham to Manchester. 

“And actually, that’s where I don’t know whether they’re making the right decision, because the question is, once you’ve got the bit from Acton to Birmingham, how much extra value do you get from the connection to Euston? And I suspect relative to the cost of the total project, probably quite a lot. And the same, I suspect, goes from the bit from Birmingham to Manchester. 

“So it rather looks like we’re going to totally waste the money on this in producing a rail at the cost of tens of billions, which will get you from Birmingham to central London less quickly than you can do at the moment.”

 

I have to concur. In fact, I said something similar on GB News over the weekend. The best time to scrap HS2 was 13 years ago. The next best time is now.

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Last Orders with Anthony Warner

 The new Last Orders is out, with Anthony 'Angry Chef' Warner. It's good. Have a listen.

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The snus saga summarised

I've got a short article about snus in this week's Spectator. John Dalli's trial is still going on, 11 years after the alleged crime. His alleged accomplice died last year. The journalist who kept the closest eye on him died several years ago. Snus is still illegal in the EU.

 

Events took a dramatic turn in 2012 when the EU health commissioner John Dalli resigned after being accused by the European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) of knowing about a €60 million bribe from the snus manufacturer Swedish Match to overturn the ban via his aide, the Maltese restaurateur Silvio Zammit. A much-delayed criminal trial against Dalli, who is also from Malta, finally got underway in February last year, with Dalli pleading not guilty to bribery and trading in influence. Zammit died a week later, aged 57, nearly a decade after he had first been charged, but with his own trial still unresolved. 

 

Have a read.

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Last Orders live

I hope you're coming to this year's Battle of Ideas. If you do, come along to the first ever Last Orders Live where me and Tom will be talking to some special guests about the stories of the day.

If you don't, you can always listen to the podcast later, but you won't have as much fun.

Tickets here. There's an early bird offer until next Monday.

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