We've got the perfect Last Orders guest on the show this month. Have a listen.
Wednesday, 19 October 2022
Monday, 17 October 2022
A swift half with Marewa Glover
After a hiatus of a few weeks, the Swift Half with Snowdon is back. I was delighted to chat to Dr Marewa Glover, a harm reduction advocate from New Zealand, who told me how authoritarian her country is becoming. Saint Jacinda is serious about banning cigarettes very soon and makes no secret of the fact that vaping is next.
Scary stuff. Check it out below.
Wednesday, 12 October 2022
The smoke-free 2030 target
More Westminster rumours.
This time it's reckoned that health secretary Therese Coffey is shelving the unpublished 'smoke-free' plan. Some say that she doesn't even know that the government has a target of making England 'smoke-free' by 2030 because she's been too distracted trying to run the health service.
Is this true? Who knows? But there shouldn't be target for how many people smoke in 2030 because it's none of the government's business. The target was only created by Theresa May to give her some sort of legacy. It wasn't even in the last Conservative manifesto.
I've written about this for the Spectator...
A pack of cigarettes costs £13, you can’t smoke them anywhere except outdoors and in private dwellings, they haven’t been advertised for 20 years, they are hidden behind shutters in shops and have been in beige packaging with gruesome photographs since 2017.
Everyone has got the message that smoking is bad for you and the government would rather you didn’t do it. Having exhausted every sensible idea to deter people from smoking – and several half-mad ones – we have surely reached the point at which the individual’s right to choose is respected. My body, my choice, as they say.
What is the argument for turning the screw on this beleaguered minority yet again? In a paternalistic editorial, the Times acknowledges there is ‘a balance to strike between individual freedom and public health’ but that ‘smoking reduction has long moved beyond this binary tension’ because there is ‘common consent that reducing smoking is the right thing to do’. In other words, the freedom of individuals no long matters once the rest of society disapproves of them. This is what John Stuart Mill meant when he talked about the tyranny of the majority. If your mind is clouded by a dislike of tobacco smoke, try substituting ’free speech’ or ‘religious freedom’ to see what an ugly and dangerous sentiment this is.
Tuesday, 11 October 2022
How libertarian is the government?
Nick Timothy reckons that the British government is hooked on 'libertarian ideology'. He says this like it's a bad thing. I look at the evidence for this so far at Spiked today...
A libertarian government would have immediately abolished the Online Safety Bill, scrapped the sugar tax, repealed the smoking ban, privatised the NHS and legalised cannabis. None of this has happened and very little of it looks likely to happen. Instead, we have a colossally expensive energy price cap and rumours that random drug testing could be introduced in offices.
Friday, 7 October 2022
What is gambling-related harm?
In the ongoing process of turning gambling into a 'public health' issue, it is necessary to identify some harms to be addressed. This is not as easy as it sounds since gambling per se does not cause any harm to health. On the contrary, it can improve wellbeing, as Public Health England acknowledged in its evidence review:
‘The highest levels of gambling participation are reported by people who have better general psychological health and higher life satisfaction. And people who have poorer psychological health are less likely to report gambling participation.’
Moreover, whilst pathological gambling is a mental health problem by definition, it does not directly harm health.
This week, the Gambling Commission drew up a list of 27 gambling-related harms. Some of them are relatively severe impacts associated with problem gambling, albeit indirectly, such as:
- loss of sleep
- feelings of stress and anxiety
- incidence of self-harm
- needed assistance from mental health services or help with your physical health
- had thoughts of taking your life or made an attempt to take your life.
- divorce, ending or loss of a relationship
- experiencing social isolation
- experiencing violence or abuse (including physical, emotional and financial abuse)
Some of them are pretty trivial...
- feeling like a failure
- increased consumption of alcohol and tobacco
And some of them are ridiculous. For example...
- reduction or loss of spending on recreational expenses such as eating out, going to the cinema or other entertainment
What?! This 'harm' comes about when you spend your money on literally anything. If you go to the cinema, you will suffer a 'reduction or loss of spending on recreational expenses such as eating out'. In a world of finite resources any expenditure on X means less expenditure on Y. The question is whether you'd rather spend money on X than Y.
The same principle applies to the following alleged 'harm'...
- spending less time with the people you care about
I suppose that if you go to the casino on your own, you are using time that could be spent with your children, but maybe you don't want to spend all your time with your children. The school system means parents spend less time with their children but no one would describe that as a harm (if anything, it's a benefit).
The implicit message here is that gambling - not just problem gambling, but gambling in general - is a waste of time and money. If we're going to start redefining opportunity costs as harms there will be no end to the 'public health' campaign against gambling. 'No safe level' here we come...
Wednesday, 5 October 2022
Smoking and drugs at the Tory conference
I was in Birmingham earlier this week for the Conservative Party conference. I was on two panels, one about drugs and the other about smoking. You can watch them below.
Tuesday, 20 September 2022
Snus is safe and e-cigarettes are miracle products
There were a couple of studies published last week that are worth bookmarking. They don't tell us anything we don't already know, but they contradict what a lot of people think they know.
The first looks at smokeless tobacco and oral cancer risk. It finds that the kind of smokeless tobacco widely used in Asia, such as gutkha, is strongly associated with oral cancer (partly because these products contain many other ingredients in addition to tobacco), but there is one notable exception.
Except snus, all SLT [smokeless tobacco] products sold in different WHO regions are strongly associated with OC [oral cancer] incidence.
Readers of The Art of Suppression may recall that snus was banned in the EU because it was assumed to have a similar risk profile to other smokeless products. It doesn't. Not even close.
The other study looks at a remarkable feature of vaping that I have mentioned before - its extraordinary ability to help people quit smoking even when they have no intention of doing so.
Overall, 12.7% of smokers quit smoking. Smokers not initially planning to quit within 6 months experienced higher odds of smoking cessation when they took up daily vaping (32.4%) versus no vaping (6.8%; adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=8.58, 95% confidence interval [CI]:5.06-14.54).
... Uptake of nicotine vaping appears to be strongly associated with cigarette smoking cessation among smokers with no initial plans to quit smoking.
The difference between a 6.8% quit rate and a 32.4% quit rate is enormous. The awesome power of vaping to get unmotivated smokers to quit deserves more attention, especially since only half of British smokers say they intend to quit.
Imagine being an anti-smoking campaigners and being opposed to e-cigarettes...
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