The fatuous rhetoric of the "tobacco playbook"

I've been studying policy-making a lot recently, contrasting the economist's public choice approach with the activist-academics' 'public health' approach. I have a study in the pipeline for later this year and have published two reports with the IEA this year - People vs Paternalism and The Corporate Playbook. The latter came out yesterday and looks at the idea that there is some distinctive playbook, sometimes known as the 'tobacco playbook', that various 'unhealthy commodity industries' work from. 

It's a fatuous, self-serving myth. The supposed playbook is defined so broadly that every industry that engages in the policy-making process is bound to follow large parts of it, as is any other interest group, including all the 'public health' lobby groups. It's meaningless rhetoric designed to stigmatise anyone who opposes state paternalism.

A nice example of the 'playbook' phrase being thrown around appeared in the BMJ last week. I have written about it for The Critic and mentioned it in this video.

 

These studies contribute nothing to the field of political science, but they do serve several purposes. The first is to make political pygmies feel as if they are taking on Big Tobacco when they ban adverts for ice cream. The second is to discourage policy-makers from engaging with business; these studies often conclude with an appeal for certain industries to be excluded from the policy-making process. The third is to divert attention from the people who are really following a playbook. HFSS food advertising will be banned online and on TV before 9pm in October. The BMJ article makes the case for banning it everywhere else. This is what happened with tobacco and is what the “public health” lobby hopes will happen with alcohol and gambling in due course. 

There is an anti-tobacco blueprint that is being inexorably applied to other products: ban advertising, raise taxes, apply warning labels, demonise industry, stigmatise consumers, put it in plain packaging and then go for full prohibition. It is all so predictable because we’ve seen it rolled out before. That is the real playbook. Everything else is projection.

Do read it all and download The Corporate Playbook.

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Drinking guidelines and cancer warnings

I've written about the push towards 'no safe level' for alcohol for Spectator USA.

 

In December, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a rigorous 230 page report titled Review on Evidence of Alcohol and Health which confirmed what has been apparent for fifty years. It concluded that those who drink alcohol in moderation have a 16 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who have never drunk alcohol. They also have a 22 percent lower risk of having a heart attack, an 11 per cent lower risk of having a stroke and an 18 percent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

A few weeks after the National Academies report was published, the Surgeon-General effectively spiked it by publishing his own report calling for cancer warnings to be put on bottles of booze. Heavy drinking can certainly cause some forms of cancer, although the only form of the disease that the National Academies report associated with moderate alcohol consumption was breast cancer, with a relatively modest risk increase of 10 percent. Crucially, overall mortality was lower among moderate drinkers of both sexes. Would you rather be 10 percent more likely to develop breast cancer or 16 percent less likely to die prematurely?

By ignoring the big picture and focusing on cancer, the Surgeon-General was deliberately muddying the water and changing the subject. Liver disease is by far the biggest health problem associated with drinking, so why warn people specifically about cancer? He was taking a page straight out of the anti-tobacco playbook. The modern crusade against smoking started with mandatory cancer warnings.

This explains the concerted effort to downplay the health benefits of moderate drinking. The claim that there is “no safe level” of drinking (a choice of words borrowed from the anti-smoking lobby) rings hollow when teetotallers are significantly more likely to die prematurely from some of humanity’s most serious diseases.  

 

Do read it all. If you're not a subscriber, you can get three articles free each month just by registering.

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Banning filters?

ASH want to ban cigarette filters and various other things. They're completely out of control. They even want a consultation on banning vaping in 'public places'.

They also call cigarette filters a fraud. I have written about this for The Critic.

 

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill hasn’t become law yet, but Action on Smoking and Health have already announced their next set of demands. Via the All-Party Parliamentary Group that ASH set up and run, they are calling for a ban on smoking in the tiny handful of cigar lounges that are still allowed to permit it, a £700 million a year levy on the tobacco industry, health warnings on individual cigarettes, and a ban on cigarette filters. 

These are the last desperate squeals of an organisation that has made itself obsolete. The idea of a tobacco industry levy has been repeatedly rejected by HMRC because the tax will ultimately be paid by consumers and we already have tobacco duty for that. Banning smoking in luxury cigar lounges is just petty, and health warnings on cigarettes, as recently introduced in the anti-tobacco basket case that is Australia, are preposterous. 

The only interesting proposal is the ban on cigarette filters — and not in a good way. ASH will have half an eye on the House of Lords, where the Tobacco and Vapes Bill will arrive later this month. Since the average peer is even more intolerant and puritanical than the average MP, ASH will be hoping that they add yet more bells and whistles to this appalling piece of prohibitionist legislation. In the reading in the Commons last month, an amendment to ban cigarette filters (proposed by one of those freedom-loving Conservatives, natch) got more than 100 votes. The amendment referred to “plastic cigarette filters” so Caroline Dinenage — for it was she — may have thought that this was a minor piece of environmental regulation. Perhaps she didn’t know that all cigarette filters are made of plastic; cellulose acetate to be precise. A ban on plastic filters would be a ban on all filters and, unless the UK is going to repeal EU laws on tar and nicotine yields, possibly a ban on all cigarettes. 

 

Read it all.

 

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The smoking ban

The tobacco ban went through the House of Commons today. Barely anyone even noticed. It will take years for it to bite, by which time taxes will have turned most of the market illicit anyway and some health secretary will no doubt have taken the "brave and bold" step of taking the nicotine out of cigarettes or banning them for people of all ages.

I have said enough about this stupid prohibition for now, so here's someone speaking the truth about the 2007 smoking ban which some people naively believed represented the anti-smoking lobby's final demand. The account is called Britain's Lost & Living Pubs. Give them a follow.

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Is smoking making a comeback?

Smoking is on the up in the south of England, according to a study this week. Perhaps it is. We'll see. It wouldn't be surprising for three reasons I discuss at The Critic.

 

There have been four large increases in tobacco taxes since 2021 which have had the effect of lowering the de facto price of cigarettes for millions of people. Last October I wrote about how legal tobacco sales fell by 30 per cent in just two years despite a much smaller decline in the number of cigarettes smoked. The figures for 2024 were published recently and show that sales fell by 45 per cent between 2021 and 2024 despite the number of smokers falling by less than one per cent. For those with eyes to see, this is conclusive proof that the black market for tobacco has grown at an astonishing rate in recent years thanks to the government pricing smokers out of the legal market. The going rate for a pack of cigarettes is now effectively £5. 

While it has become cheaper to smoke, the hysteria about vaping has grown. A mere 13 per cent of smokers in England know that vaping is less harmful than smoking. More than a third think it is worse than smoking and 37 per cent think it is equally harmful. This represents a staggering failure of public health messaging and should be borne in mind whenever you see an opinion poll showing support for anti-vaping legislation. Ignorance about the relative risks of smoking and vaping is endemic among both smokers and nonsmokers and gets worse every year. It would be hardly surprising if smokers are taking a “better the devil you know” approach.

Read the rest.

 

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Not Invented Here syndrome

This week, the IEA published Not Invented Here, a short book looking at why single-issue pressure groups often object to practical solutions. It features nimbies, environmentalists and lots of 'public health' types. You can read it here. We also had a good event at the IEA on Wednesday. I'll upload the video when it goes live.

In the meantime, we've got a nice Substack now so do bookmark it and/or subscribe. We have a little exclusive coming out on Monday. 

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How slushy ice drinks became a health hazard

The UK sugar tax has had an unexpected consequence for health.

 

A study in Archives of Disease in Childhood identified 21 cases of children in the British Isles developing hypoglycaemia and suffering from what the authors describe as ‘an acute decrease in consciousness’ after drinking ‘slush ice drinks’ such as Slush Puppies. None of the children had a history of hypoglycaemia. None of them had an episode like this again, apart from one child who became ill after drinking another slushy ice drink.  

The cause of their collapse was glycerol intoxication, and the finger of blame falls on the sugar tax.

 

Read all about it at the Spectator.

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