It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that a medical journal has been writing about gambling again. This time it is an anonymous editorial in The Lancet titled “Gambling: a harmful commodity”. Gambling is not actually a commodity. The inspiration for this title was almost certainly the modern temperance textbook “Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity”. Alcohol isn’t a commodity either.
This Government believes in letting you live your life the way you want to.
The Panamanian public has been outraged at the recent award of a rumoured $400 billion contract with a Canadian mining company to exploit three square miles of Panamanian rainforest to extract copper. Protesters have been on the streets throughout the country chanting and waving banners with slogans such as “Panama is not for sale”. In Panama City itself, crowds of 30,000 protesters have clashed with the Police and Army using tear gas and what the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office travel advice page calls “riot control munition”.
There are ongoing protests and demonstrations in Panama City and across the country. These can include roadblocks and the suspension of public transport. Protests can be unpredictable and may escalate quickly. Clashes between protestors and security authorities have resulted in injuries. The authorities use tear gas and riot control munition to control protests.
The WHO has had a run of extraordinarily bad luck with COP meetings in recent years. Prior to COP6, there was an Ebola outbreak in Africa and the Russians shot down a passenger plane just before Director General Margaret Chan travelled to Moscow to talk about tobacco with Putin. New Delhi saw the worst smog in living memory which closed 20,000 schools in the week the WHO turned up in the city to talk about the dangers of vaping at COP7. The pandemic wrecked plans for COP9 which had to be delayed by a year and held virtually. Now this for COP10.
Copwatch would like to say we have sympathy for such bad luck but, unlike the WHO, we don’t want to mislead you.
The Last Orders podcast was recorded live at the Battle of Ideas at the end of last month with the Telegraph’s Madeline Grant and GB News’s Patrick Christys. It was a good laugh. Listen here.
When Foxon and Shiffman confined their analysis to people who could be reasonably described as smokers, they found the opposite of what Glantz claimed.
Kevan Jones: To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of Government policies on ending cigarette sales to those born on or after 1 January 2009 on the sale of tobacco products in the black market.
Neil O'Brien: No assessment has been made. History shows whenever we introduce new tobacco control legislation and regulations, illicit tobacco has decreased, due to strong enforcement. Consumption of illegal tobacco has gone from 17 billion cigarettes in 2000/1 to three billion cigarettes in 2022/23.
It would not be a black swan event if the prohibition of a popular product led to a certain amount of under-the-counter activity. You may have heard about what happened with alcohol in the USA between 1920 and 1933. You may be familiar with the war on drugs. You may even know what happened when Bhutan banned tobacco (it didn’t go well) or when South Africa temporarily banned cigarettes during the pandemic (ditto). Banning the sale of tobacco without assessing the impact on the black market is like giving car keys to a drunk without assessing the impact on pedestrians.
Swedish MEP Charlie Weimars has blown the whistle on the EU's plan to ban nicotine pouches. In a tweet (translated below), he provides a screenshot from a leaked report that crossed his desk.
 |
A secret report I shouldn't have landed on my desk. In the report that will be presented to EU member states this week, there are two notable writings: (1) praise for how successful the snus ban has been and (2) a recommendation that the EU should extend the snus ban to the tobacco-free white snus (nicotine pouches).
That the EU's snus ban is a success is completely wrong. It is actually snus that makes Sweden the only country in the EU that is on the way to reaching the UN's goal of a smoke-free society (defined as less than 5% smokers), which has saved many lives. A ban on white snus would have been a hard blow to the attempt to eradicate smoking in the EU. Unfortunately, the Swedish exception for tobacco snus does not apply to nicotine pouches.
If the EU Commission and the member states accept the report's recommendation, white snus will also be banned in Sweden. Men have largely opted out of smoking in favor of snus, while women looking for less dangerous alternatives choose white snus more often. Therefore, such a ban would hit women extra hard.
The report has been written by consultants who work for DG SANTE (EU health bureaucrats) and the writings probably would not have crept into the report if they did not have the support of the bureaucrats. Most likely this is a test balloon from the bureaucracy. If the proposal falls to the ground at the meeting with the member states, the bureaucrats can blame the consultants and if the proposal does not meet resistance, the bureaucrats can interpret it as a clear support and work on with a sharp proposal.
This is how you often work in the EU's bureaucracy. The government must therefore already make it clear at the meeting this week that our country opposes a ban on white snus and work to ensure that citizens continue to have the opportunity to choose the least harmful way to use nicotine. Our negotiators are also welcome to raise the issue of the risks to public health of having too many do-gooding bureaucrats in DG SANTE.
The EU just can't help itself. Nicotine pouches contain no tobacco and are surely the safest recreational delivery devices ever invented. The European Commission claims that the "growing popularity of nicotine pouches raises serious public health concerns and represents an increasing challenge for the internal market". This is nonsense. The public health impact of these products is positive and the internal market is irrelevant, as the snus carve out for Sweden shows.
These people are trying to eradicate nicotine from the world. They are nuts.
