Deluded Debs deep in denial

Chronically deluded neo-prohibitionist Deborah Arnott has popped up in The Guardian whinging about an article which stated the obvious about smuggling (ie. higher taxes = more smuggling). Apparently basic economics do not exist on Planet ASH. The headline says it all:

It is a myth that high duties on tobacco lead to increased smuggling

It would be an insult to your intelligence, dear reader, if I explained why Arnott is talking rubbish. It is Tim Worstall's unreconstructed view that Ms Arnott should shut up and put the kettle on. I also recommend reading the disparaging comments beneath the article itself.

But all you really have to do is take a look at some of the stories reported on ASH's own website in recent weeks:

Two million illegal cigarettes seized in East Lancashire in two months

More than two million illegal cigarettes have been seized in the past two months in East Lancashire. Health chiefs disclosed the figure as they drew up a plan to reduce the harm that smoking and illicit tobacco has on the lives of people in the area. The tobacco, which is illegal because it has either been smuggled into the country or is counterfeit, is thought to be responsible for four times as many deaths as drugs.

Cigarettes seized in tobacco smuggling crackdown in Burton-on-Trent

More than 13,000 cigarettes were recovered from three shops by officers from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Keith Morgan, Specialist Investigation Detection Manager for HMRC, said: “The people who sell these cigarettes are not concerned about where or how they are produced, or even who buys them, including young children and teenagers."

Warnings over sales of illegal cigarettes in South West

147 million packets of illegal cigarettes are smuggled into the South West each year, with an estimated street value of more than £104 million.

Smuggled cigarettes aimed at children

Trading standards officials in the North East are urging the public for help in stopping illegal tobacco after more than 600,000 packets of smuggled cigarettes were seized in the region. An appeal last year led to a surge in public tipoff’s about illegal cigarettes.

Richard Ferry, of the North-East Trading Standards Association, described the response as excellent and urged people to continue providing vital information. Ailsa Rutter, director of anti-smoking organisation Fresh, said: “The sellers have no morals. They will even sell single cigarettes called ‘lucies’ to children.”

Bootleg Russian cigarettes lined with Chinese asbestos

Smokers have been warned that some black market Russian cigarettes contain asbestos. Trading standards officials have revealed that many of the Jin Ling cigarettes contain industrial chemicals and asbestos-lined Chinese plasterboard. They come in yellow packs with the words Jin Ling and USA emblazoned across the front.

The brand has been described by the World Health Organization as ‘the most disturbing new development in the illegal tobacco trade anywhere in the world’.

Treasury counts cost of illicit tobacco smuggling

The sale of illicit and counterfeit cigarettes is estimated to cost the Treasury the equivalent of £10m a day in lost tax revenues. But it is not just government's coffers that are affected, small retailers such as newsagents are too.

Debbie Corris runs a tobacconists in Whitstable, and claims that cigarette smuggling has been hurting her business.

Officers seize 250,000 cigarettes at Newcastle airport

UK Border Agency officers at Newcastle Airport have intercepted more than a quarter of a million cigarettes that were being smuggled into the region.

South Yorkshire: Jail terms for cigarette smugglers

Four South Yorkshire crooks have been jailed for their part in a smuggling ring which helped the Italian Mafia flood Britain with black market cigarettes - while another escaped immediate custody.

Scotland: BBC exposes tobacco crime gangs in Scotland

A BBC investigation is set to expose the organised crime groups controlling Scotland's illegal tobacco trade. A BBC Scotland undercover team secretly filmed the supply chain. The illegal trade is estimated to cost the Treasury billions of pounds in lost taxes.

Northern Ireland: Customs seize 185,000 cigarettes

Ten kilograms of hand rolling tobacco and 185,000 counterfeit cigarettes have been seized in west Belfast. Two men from Belfast were arrested and cash and business records were also seized.

Birkenhead shopkeeper masterminded tobacco-packing scam

A shopkeeper who owned three stores in Birkenhead masterminded a huge tobacco-packaging scam to sell thousands of illegal cigarettes. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) raided his stores and seized £105,000 in cash.

Does Arnott really believe that there is no connection between sky-high tobacco taxes and the growth of a vast smuggling and counterfeiting industry which didn't exist until a few years ago? Since it is hard to believe that anyone could be so dense, I have to conclude—once again— that she is a liar.

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Churnalism.com

An interesting website has just been launched by the Media Standards Trust called churnalism.com. It allows punters to compare press releases to news articles and tells you precisely how lazy/ignorant/overworked the journalists are who produce your daily newspaper.

Just as an experiment I put 'ash press release' into Google and up popped this::

'New report finds major benefits to the health of the nation from increasing tobacco taxes'

(Friday 05 March 2010)

I then cut 'n' pasted the text of the press release into churnalism.com and, voila, I could see how much of that press release was blindly regurgitated by The Mirror and the BBC. In the case of The Mirror, it was 63% cut and 78% paste.

One limitation of the website is that you have to put in the text of the press release to compare it to the news reports, not the other way round. This is a bit of a bugger since the original press releases are not always easy to trace. Another limitation is that its archive seems to be limited to national newspapers. A quick google search found that the press release above was churned out by plenty of other local and regional newspapers.

Perhaps these problems will be ironed out as time goes on with the assistance of its users. If you have a source of press releases, do let them know. In the mean time, it could still be a useful little toy when you want to see how much of what you read is reheated PR guff.

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Nudge versus Shove

Last week the British Medical Journal ran an article about nudging. Regular readers may recall that I'm in favour of nudging as defined in Nudge, partly because if the British government was to genuinely follow its doctrine of 'libertarian paternalism', it would be compelled to repeal a large swath of intrusive and illiberal legislation.

After flirting with Nudge a couple of years ago, the penny has now dropped amongst public health pro's that their agenda of limiting choice, raising prices and restricting availability cannot be dressed up as a friendly nudge. To highlight this, they show a table of nudges versus shoves (or velvet gloves versus iron fists, if you prefer). [Click to zoom]

Most of the so-called nudges would actually require regulation. Pubs are not going to, for example, serve drinks in smaller glasses because there is no demand for it. Others, such as "reduce cues for smoking by keeping cigarettes, lighters and ashtrays out of sight" would be enforceable even if regulated. And still others, such as "designate sections of supermarket trolleys for fruit and vegetables" are just stupid. Still, it gives you an idea of what these people would do if they could.

As for the shoves (regulations), most of them are already in place. Minimum pricing, a ban on trans-fats and raising the minimum age of alcohol purchase are the only policies to which the government has not yet capitulated. The rest would have to go under any government that took Nudge seriously.

The authors would like to see "regulations to limit the availability of alcohol" and "pricing interventions" on food. Since the desire to make it more expensive and inconvenient to eat and drink is at odds with a free society the Nudge agenda—coupled with the fact that the evil Tories have adopted Nudge to some extent—the demagogues of public health have gone off the idea. Their reasoning is that a system that has never been tried has never been shown to work.

Evidence to support the effectiveness of nudging as a means to improve population health and reduce health inequalities is, however, weak.

That's a bit rich coming from people who are still clinging to the belief that...

...increasing the price of tobacco may be more effective in reducing smoking among adults on lower incomes and in manual occupations than among those with higher incomes

There is a vast amount of evidence taken over decades to show that people on low incomes are the least responsive to prices increases. And there is increasing evidence that taxes in places like Ireland, Britain and Canada have already reached the tipping point at which smuggling and contraband make further tax hikes counterproductive.

It looks as if the attack on individual rights will be dressed up as an attack on the straw men of the drinks/food/tobacco industries in the future. And why not? It's a tactic that's been working ever since the Prohibition Party targeted the largely fictitious 'liquor trust' in the 19th century.

Without regulation to limit the potent effects of unhealthy nudges in existing environments shaped largely by industry, nudging towards healthier behaviour may struggle to make much impression on the scale and distribution of behaviour change needed to improve population health to the level required to reduce the burden of chronic disease in the UK and beyond.

This sounds to me like a door slamming. Farewell Nudge, we barely knew thee.

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How thick do ASH think we are?

From Brand Republic:

ASH blames adspend freeze for failures to quit smoking

The number of people who successfully give up smoking has dropped by a third since the Government halted its anti-smoking advertising.

New Department of Health figures are the first to reveal the impact of the Coalition's decision to freeze adspend as part of the £6 billion of cuts it announced last May.

Between January and March last year, the Government spent £861,000 on its anti-smoking campaign and 124,792 people successfully quit the habit with the help of the NHS.

When the budget dropped to just £26,000 between April and June, the number who gave up fell to 85,749. There was a further drop in the next three months to 76,504, when no ads appeared - 38 per cent down on the first three months of the year.

There was a similar reduction of 34 per cent in the number of smokers who set a date for kicking the habit over the same period.

Martin Dockrell, the director of policy and research at Action on Smoking and Health, said: "It has been a false economy. Mass-media campaigns are very cost- effective in terms of life years gained. They quickly reduce the pressure on the NHS."

Look Martin, I know you don't credit the British public with much intelligence but we're not complete morons. The quit-rate peaked between January and March because giving up smoking has been the #1 New Years Resolution since Methuselah was a bairn.

This is so obvious that it barely merits confirmation, but just to be sure, let's check with the NHS:

With regard to monthly quit attempts made, numbers were highest in January (note: the start of the year is the most popular time for people to attempt to quit, e.g. New Year’s resolution), followed by March, then February.

Yup, thought so. The first quarter is the busiest time of the year for smoking cessation services with or without the government spending vast sums of money. And the reason the government spends the most money on smoking cessation in January is because that's when there's most demand for it. Inevitably, the quit rate tapers off in the second quarter and then again in the third quarter.

It's not rocket science and it happens every year.

If we look at the figures from 2009, we can see this quite clearly:

Number of successful quitters in 2009:  2010 figures in brackets (NHS England)

January-March 2009: 120,935 (124,792)

April-June: 89,358 (85,749)

July-September: 79,842 (76,504)

2009, you may recall, was a time when the government was spending money like a sailor on shore leave. Lo and behold, there was a big peak in the first three months of the year, then the numbers dropped in the second quarter and there was a further drop in the third quarter. In fact, we can see that the numbers "dropped by a third" between the first and third quarter, just as they did when not a single penny was spent advertising these services.

So what we have here is a natural experiment. Despite drastically reduced budgets—down to £0.00 in the third quarter of 2010—the quit rate was almost identical to what it had been when Gordon Brown was engaging in his scorched earth policy with the public finances.

This is good news for the taxpayer, because it tells us that we can save money on quit-smoking adverts without reducing the number of people quitting. So thank you Martin Dockrell for bringing this to our attention. All the government needs to do now is stop funding of ASH—whose policies have been consistently ineffective in reducing the smoking rate—and we can really start celebrating.

(I'm pleased to see that no newspaper has felt moved to cover this 'story'. Perhaps bullshit fatigue is finally setting in when it comes to ASH.)

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Drinking league

This really isn't good enough.

Average amount drunk in UK is 16th highest worldwide

Yet again, this once great country fails to make the top 10. We're getting beaten by South Korea now, for goodness sake. The Czechs are making us look positively light-weight. I'm not looking at you, ladies. You've been pulling your weight. But men, especially those aged 16-24, what's happened? Where's your sense of pride? I'm not asking you to keep up with the Irish or the Russians. Let's be realistic. But at least keep pace with the Portuguese and the Slovenians.

This comes from The Telegraph's article about the latest piece of temperance advocacy from the World Health Organisation, which is inviting governments around the world to keep on taxing drinkers:

“One of the most effective is raising alcohol prices by raising taxes."

By how much? Is there no limit? Apparently not, as there is no suggestion in the report that taxes could ever be too high. Alcohol taxes are not immune to the laffer curve and there is a ton of evidence, gathered over centuries, that excessive alcohol taxes result in more dangerous drinking habits and home distilling of strong, unregulated booze. You only have to look at the figures in this very report to the difference between high and moderate tax countries:

Per capita consumption of pure alcohol (litres)

Sweden 

Recorded consumption: 6.70

Unrecorded consumption: 3.60 

United States

Recorded consumption: 8.44 

Unrecorded consumption: 1.00

I use the USA as a comparison because it's not as if they don't have a history of making moonshine when they need to.

"This has the added benefit of generating increased revenues."

If it was truly effective it would result in less consumption, not increased revenue. Touting alcohol taxes as a way of raising revenue rather gives the game away, does it not?

And, dear oh dear, the anti-obesity and anti-smoking factions aren't going to like this...

"Alcohol consumption is the world’s third largest risk factor for disease and disability; in middle-income countries, it is the greatest risk."

That rather depends on what you're measuring. The demon drink came rather lower down the list in a previous WHO report, which showed the number of deaths attributable to various risk factors.

This wasn't sufficiently newsworthy for the new report on alcohol, and since the WHO now seems to be a glorified pressure group, they did what campaigners do and picked the data that best suited their PR people.

This is the chart, showing the number of Disability-adjusted Life Years. Sure enough alcohol now beats both smoking and obesity, and comes top for middle-income countries (or, more precisely I think, middle income people).

The difference comes down to alcohol tending to kill people at a younger age (that's 'kill' in the broadest sense—over 40% of the claimed death toll is due to intentional and unintentional injuries, which can only be partially attributed to alcohol.)

There's nothing wrong with using 'years lost' rather than 'lives lost' to measure the impact of risk factors. In fact, I think it's a better measure, as children dying of starvation and AIDS is clearly a more important preventable death than a 90-year old dying of hypertension.

It does, however, demonstrate how statistics can be mined to suit the cause. It is now a three-way battle between the temperance lobby, the fat-fighters and the anti-smokers to keep their pet project in the public eye. This involves vying for position both with the claimed death toll and with the ever spiralling 'cost to society'. Tobacco has traditionally been the undisputed champion in this field. For instance:

Smoking Now Leading Cause of Death Worldwide

The use of tobacco is now the primary cause of death around the world. And the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says not enough countries are taking adequate steps to discourage it.

The World Health Organisation implies the same thing, but note the careful wording:

Tobacco use kills more than 5 million people per year. It is responsible for 1 in 10 adult deaths. Among the five greatest risk factors for mortality, it is the single most preventable cause of death.

You may also have read that obesity is the leading preventable cause of death, at least in America. (Less reliable sources may have even told you that obesity is the leading cause of preventable death worldwide.)

Research confirms obesity is now leading cause of preventable death in U.S.


America's persistent weight problem is now the country's leading cause of preventable death.

For years scientists and health care professionals have warned of the dangers of smoking, and tobacco use is still a major contributor to early mortality. But new research shows that it is is obesity that now causes even more fatal disease.

And now alcohol is well and truly in the race. But, as a point of fact, none of them are the world's leading cause of preventable death. As the data show, the leading cause of lives lost is high blood pressure and the leading cause of years lost is childhood malnutrition. We don't hear so much about these, but then they're not taxable, are they?

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Irony bypass

On Monday, Spiked republished Joe Jackson's 'dog ban' spoof (mentioned in a previous post). The letters have started coming in from dog-lovers who take things literally...

Jackson’s rant about dogs is clearly the ramblings of a deranged weirdo. With any luck he’ll be trapped in a kennels soon and do us all a favour. I have never read so much drivel in my life.

Andy Gardiner, UK

‘Have you ever seen a leg amputated because of gangrene? It’s not funny.’ Funnily enough, I haven’t, but also in my neck of the hemisphere I’ve never heard about anyone getting gangrene from a dog bite. For that to happen there would need to be other exigent causal factors, which we couldn’t really blame on poor, dim-witted canines. I guess Jackson had something to get off his chest, but he’s either got his tongue in his cheek or he’s stretching the bounds (or is that hounds?) of rationality.

Andrew Cox, UK

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A sincere apology to drinkers from the BBC

From the BBC:

In recent years, along with all other media, we at the BBC may have implied that an unstoppable tide of rising alcohol consumption posed a threat to the very fabric of British society. Headlines such as Rising alcohol addiction costs 'could cripple the NHS', Alcohol abuse 'becoming epidemic and Alcohol abuse 'epidemic' warning may have given some readers the impression that there was there was some sort of epidemic of alcohol use.

It is also possible that news stories such as 'Licensing Act to cause mayhem' '24 hour drinking - are you mad?' and 'Please Gordon, reverse this crazy law' may have given some licence-fee payers the impression that the country was going to hell in a handcart thanks to round-the-clock bingeing.

Having finally got round to checking the facts, we now recognise that heavy drinking is falling, abstinence is rising, and young people are leading the drive towards healthier drinking. Contrary to what you may have heard every day for several years, alcohol consumption has been falling since 2002, with drinking by young men falling most dramatically—from 26 units a week in 1999 to 15 units in 2009. Even changing the way consumption is measured can't disguise the fact that drinking has been on the decline for a decade.

Furthermore, what we have been laughably referring to as '24 hour drinking' has resulted in the average pub opening for an extra 24 minutes a day, hardly enough time to have a swift half. We also recognise that 'binge-drinking' is a scare-mongering and virtually meaningless phrase popularised by the tabloid media and is unworthy of the world's most respected news organisation.

We would like to distance ourselves from everything we have ever said and point out that we did not write any of these stories ourselves. They came from press releases from seemingly disinterested and trustworthy parties such as Alcohol Concern and the Alliance House Foundation. At the time, we had no idea that an organisation that used to be called the UK Alliance for the Suppression of the Traffic in all Intoxicating Liquors could have any prohibitionist leanings.

We now acknowledge that these temperance types will say and do anything to further their goals. Why, only yesterday we presented wild guesstimates from Alcohol Concern about the supposedly escalating costs of treating drinkers as a legitimate news story. We now see that the only reason for this story's existence was to encourage more funding for Don Shenker and his colleagues. The person responsible for this has been dismissed and from now on we will only be asking representatives from the Portman Group to comments on our news stories.

Henceforth, instead of illustrating all drink-related articles with this picture of a fat lager-guzzling wreck...

...we will be using this:

We sincerely apologise for any confusion caused in the past and will work hard to regain your trust. Cheers!

Slightly adapted from this.

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