Stony Stratford defers vote after 200 demonstrate

Decision postponed

(i) Stony Stratford Town Council does not condone smoking and the health risks associated with it. This Council seeks to reduce the amount of litter in our streets and to protect our historic town from germs, general nuisance and the possibility of young people in particular being burnt by cigarettes.

(ii) Stony Stratford Town Council wishes to encourage all businesses in the town and, in doing so, to recognize the leading role they and residents can play in preventing the spread of disease, injury, litter, smoke, illnesses such as asthma, lung cancer and the narrowing of arteries, heart disease and its unpleasant other side effects and including the impact discarded cigarettes have on residents of Market Sq and High St in particular and children who have to put up with this 24hrs a day.

(iii) Stony Stratford Town Council seeks the implementation of a full street smoking ban within the Town Council area of Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes.

Until 20 September ... don't let them push it under the carpet!

Air quality standard eliminates need for smoking ban

Bill Gibson of TICAP (The International Coalition Against Prohibition) attended last month's meeting at Westminster supporting an amendment to the smoking ban. His response is published below (Annandale Herald, 7 July):

 

 There is indeed a European-approved air quality standard (EN 13779) as stated in this letter. This standard acknowledges that smoking is an important factor in air quality but simply handles smoky air differently from air in a non-smoking environment. 

It doesn't state that it's impossible to remove smoke from the air, in spite of what the EU published two years after this standard appeared. 'There is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke, and notions such as a threshold value for toxicity from second-hand smoke should be rejected, as they are contradicted by scientific evidence.' Eh? The air quality standard (EN 13779) doesn't even argue that smoke isn't toxic – in fact it  specifies tobacco smoke as an air quality issue that must be resolved in order to achieve good indoor air. The idea that tobacco smoke is the only pollutant that cannot be dealt with effectively by technology is laughable. 

Air Manager is an officially approved air cleaning system. Question 7 of its Frequently Asked Questions reads 'Does Air Manager remove harmful chemicals?' The answer: 'Yes. AirManager is scientifically proven to remove chemicals, VOCs (volatile organic compounds), tobacco smoke etc in excess of 99.999% in a single pass.' I can only repeat, Air Manager is an officially approved system (UK Accreditation Service). Why do they go to the trouble of approving this technology, only to then allow another government department to convince the public that it doesn't really work?

Bill Gibson does right to draw attention to EN 13779 (air quality standard) document and show its relevance in the smoking ban impasse.

Update 9 August: The EC has carelessly lost track of the link to the key document, EN 13779. Courtesy of Freedom2Choose we now have an alternative link to the original document.

Welsh Government awaits guidance from MHRA about whether to continue recommending Champix

The Welsh Government has acknowledged unease about funding Champix following reports of cardiac incidents in people taking it. It is awaiting advice from the MHRA. The study claiming that Champix was responsible for an increased risk of heart trouble found only a small elevated risk. I hope that the Scottish Government will follow suit – not specifically because of the heart attack risk, but for other reasons:

• because there is increasing anecdotal evidence of bad side effects including suicidal ideation and actual suicide. Court action is pending.
• because what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. There is no safe level of secondary smoke, because of the potential effects of inhaling it. There is no safe level of Champix either, because it can lead to terrifying symptoms and behaviour changes that have proved fatal to people taking Champix and their loved ones.
• because there is no reason to fund smoking cessation, certainly not on the scale that it is currently being funded  Wanting to smoke is a state of mind, not an illness.

It is telling that heart problems can make authorities act when the other symptoms have not seemed to worry them. “We are talking about a fairly unhealthy section of the population anyway . . . one in two will die because of smoking," famously said Ailsa Rutter of Smoke Free North East – a shocking equation of long-term morbidity in middle or even old age with the traumatic consequences that smokers have experienced often within weeks of starting a course of Champix – by no means universally experienced in either case. 

Reports of the success of Champix as a quitting aid are quite possibly exaggerated. 

Smoking ban overturned by popular demand, Indiana

Well you have to see their point:



The smoking ban was brought in because smoking is unhealthy and because of the litter. I can't see much litter in the picture.



'... so many golfers opposed to the ban that Brainard decided to reverse the executive order.'

Street smoking ban: Gather at Stony Stratford

Recent enthusiasm for outdoor smoking bans, making it impossible for residents to smoke in the public highway, has reached Buckinghamshire, where town councillor Paul Bartlett has proposed a street ban in Stony Stratford.

Some licensees feel anxious about the proposal, but its ramifications go far beyond the pub sector. Blogger Dick Puddlecote plans a day out in Stony Stratford on Saturday, 16 July, three days before the proposal is made.

Dick invites everyone:

Anyone who objects to  Bartlett's proposed fussbucketing is welcome, and there is a Facebook group set up HERE for inviting like-minded friends. Although we're meeting initially in a bar, let's hope enough turn up to spill into an impromptu party.

Invite all you can – and go, of course, if you're free!

Edit: Dick Puddlecote has posted an update here. Things are gathering pace.

A bingo operator speaks: Impact of smoking ban on trade, Lanark 2008

Following on from the video posted earlier today, here is more: an interview with the same bingo operator Martin Carroll by The Big Yin following the first Annual General Meeting in Scotland, June 2008. In two parts:

Part One




Part Two



Martin offers a rare insight into trading conditions and shows why traditional bingo has been affected so much.

Bingo: A club in decline, Lanark, Scotland

Situated in Lanark, population 8,253, the Vogue is a local institution. Martin Carroll, who owns and runs the current business, was interviewed four years ago by students at Cardonald College. The result is the video below, showing Martin's best efforts to keep the club afloat.

Zyban not a heart risk but ineffective as smoking cessation aid, says study

The story is here. Researchers working with a group of patients with acute coronary syndrome found no significant difference between abstinence rates at one year between patients taking the drug and those on a placebo. They found no significant difference in coronary events between the two groups either.

As we discovered yesterday, even medical attention is turning to the idea that willpower works best:

Varenicline has been shown to modestly increase the chances of a successful quit attempt, compared to unassisted smoking cessation attempts. But overall, the majority of smokers who quit do so without any pharmaceutical assistance at all.

Champix and the heart

A number of media stories concern reports that Champix may be responsible for an elevated risk of heart attacks. The Mail, the Express, the Independent, Medical News Today and others including the Scotsman all carry the story. The increased risk is said to be 72 per cent, which while being around three times greater than the alleged risk of secondary smoke exposure causing lung cancer or heart disease is still not conclusive.

Alone among these stories, the Scotsman makes no mention of the injuries associated with Champix. Not everyone is affected by them, but many disturbing after-effects have been reported, some of which have led to suicide – enough to make many users and their friends call for the drug to be banned.  There are also reports that adverse incidents were reported through 'improper channels' (and here) in order to cover them up.

Study author Singh said: "I think our new research shifts the risk–benefit profile of varenicline. People should be concerned. They don't need Chantix to quit and this is another reason to consider avoiding Chantix altogether." Champix's history has been enough to get the drug withdrawn in France. It didn't need an inconclusive study on heart troubles to conclude that Champix could well be more trouble than it's worth.

Interestingly Medical News Today also states this:

Varenicline has been shown to modestly increase the chances of a successful quit attempt, compared to unassisted smoking cessation attempts. But overall, the majority of smokers who quit do so without any pharmaceutical assistance at all.

Surely this is a cue for a stop to ridiculous claims like this? and thousands of pounds of public money poured into smoking cessation aids, when most quitters don't need them.

Netherlands and Scotland plough different furrows

A short Dutch report tells us that the smoking ban is a far more relaxed affair in Dutch bars, with ashtrays in over half of them (note, you can still get a drink in a non-smoking environment in the Netherlands if that's what you prefer).

In Scotland further bans are still being discussed. Sheila Duffy explains in her (comment-free) blog that ASH Scotland supports a public consultation on extending the smoking ban to private cars (smoking is already banned in work vehicles) – whereas the British Medical Association has called for an overall ban on smoking while driving.

It's unusual for ASH Scotland not to bid for the most extreme action going on smoking. Ms Duffy claims that household exposure is a more important problem ('likely to be a greater source of exposure for children'), but is 'not an area for legislation'. Does this mean that she takes issue with Dr Douglas Noble's conclusion (quoted here) that:

In cars, particle concentrations are 27 times higher than in a smoker’s home and 20 times higher than in a pub, in the days when you could smoke in public places.

Even if ASH Scotland has not advocated a total ban in cars, the idea will go before legislators. It's interesting to speculate whether, in responding to the public consultation it seeks, ASH Scotland would oppose a smoking ban in cars, or whether it would simply sit on the fence.

A report and summary of last year's study on smoking in cars by NHS Greater Glasgow (with a headline designed to sensationalise the issue) can be found here (same text here with comments). Also discussed here.

We won't know the legislative programme on smoking in Scotland until after the Scottish Parliament reconvenes in September. But it won't resemble the Dutch one.

Lincoln protest, 2 July

See here for coverage.

Pat Nurse, a smoker herself who organised the event, says that public thought about smoking is “moving away from the issue of health and towards the issue of public bullying of smokers, denormalisation, dehumanisation, stigmatisation of smokers.”

Comments are still coming in. Well done to all concerned.

Cider at 51p a can, 2004: supermarket prices didn't kill pubs

Thanks to Dave Atherton for this one. The Guardian (2004) reports concerns about supermarkets selling at much lower prices than pubs at a time when it was planned to regulate drink pricing in pubs and clubs.

This gives the lie to the notion that supermarket prices are killing pubs. Supermarket prices were known to be a factor before the smoking ban was voted in. Also, the Scottish Government account suggests that prices have been a factor over a longer term, rather than just since the smoking ban.

But the increasing affordability of alcohol is not uniform across sectors. While on-sales ( e.g. pubs) prices have generally increased above the Retail Price Index ( RPI) over the last 20 years, off-sales ( e.g. shops and supermarkets) prices have remained more static and below RPI. [para 25]

Supermarket prices cannot explain the rapid deterioration in pub fortunes that followed the implementation of smoking bans.

Knowledge of this threat to the pub sector didn't do much to prevent the legislation being approved in Parliament (or Holyrood). It is hard to understand how licensees and their representative organisations were been led to believe that their fortunes would be improved by the smoking ban, knowing that off-sales were already undercutting them

Job losses and business closures worth it, says Evening News leader

In response to a story in Friday's Edinburgh Evening News that publicans in Scotland's capital had been warned about flouting the ban, its leader today declares: 'on the whole it's a price worth paying'. That is to say, business closures and job losses are an acceptable price of the smoking ban, which is bringing us 'signs of a cut in smoking and cancer rates'.

I don't much care for this piece: it is too early to speak of any unusual change in the cancer mortality rate, and apart from an explosion of interest in smoking cessation there is little to suggest any long-term success rate. As for its conclusion, they have to be kidding – do they really believe this:

Yes, many of the boozers which have closed will be long-lamented.

But those of us who mourn their passing will probably remember them more - for the simple reason that we'll live longer.

I won't bother to mention the impending increase in elderly dementia that faces us over the next few decades.

At least the Evening News is clear that smoking bans damage business, even if it does consider such damage 'a price worth paying'. Neither Action on Smoking and Health nor ASH Scotland has accepted this, both insisting that other factors are more important. Last year ASH Scotland rejected the results of a report commissioned by the Save our Pubs and Clubs Campaign that laid the blame for business closures largely on the smoking ban, blaming its conclusions on the fact that the report had been commissioned by the campaign.

The position of Action on Smoking on Health, as expounded in a press release marking the fourth anniversary of the smoking ban in England, has been covered in Chris Snowdon's blog (Direct from the ASH bunker) – and it also includes a link to a retaliation from Imperial Tobacco. (For good measure, you can also enjoy Amanda Sandford blogging in Left Foot Forward about the spin by tobacco companies.)