Welcome to Tobacco Control Tactics: the debate is not over

Source

The newly launched Tobacco Control Tactics is hot off the press. The press page is here, and the UK press release is reproduced below.

The Debate Is Not Over; The Science Is Not Settled

Adult consumers are fighting back against the actions of and the unfounded allegations made by the Tobacco Control Industry which are ruining lives, damaging health and trashing the economy.

Unfunded and unsupported grassroots members of consumer organisations across the world have cooperated in creating the Tobacco Control Tactics Wiki which challenges the claims and tactics used by the recently unveiled University of Bath’s Tobacco Tactics website.

This informative and objective website for people wanting to know the truth about tobacco has been written and compiled by unpaid volunteers. It includes such things as:

• A list of scientists who have distanced themselves from the outrageous claims of SHS after their retirements and have become sceptical of the methods and practises of the Tobacco Control Industry in pushing an ideological rather than health agenda.

• How the Tobacco Control Industry often masquerades behind the mask of “charities” but is fed by corporate and competing pharmaceutical industries, acts as a front group to push through Government political policy, and could not survive alone due to minuscule public donations and support and their dependence upon highly-paid staff.

• Background as to why the ETS debate is NOT over.

• Examination of the failure of pharmaceutical nicotine cessation using NRT products which have shown success rates lower than 1% in some studies – in contravention to wild success rates claimed by the Industry.

• Demonstration of how the Tobacco Control Industry is out of control and causing more harm than good.

• Exposure of the 10 biggest lies pushed to achieve the aim of tobacco eradication rather than constructive harm reduction, thereby increasing, rather than decreasing, harm and deaths.

• Analysis of how the deliberate Denormalisation/Stigmatisation programme of the Tobacco Control Industry is causing significant harm to many smokers, up to and including encouraging attacks from extremists on smokers who refuse to follow the agenda by quitting their enjoyment of a legitimate product.

In the UK, England, Wales and Northern Ireland are now five years on from the smoking ban, and Scotland has endured it for six years. It was initially imposed supposedly to protect the health of bar workers – even those who smoked. Since then we have moved too far into the territory of interference in informed personal adult choice, individual consumer rights, and family life.

The Tobacco Control Tactics Wiki, formally launched on June 28th, is the product of a combined effort by tobacco consumers and their supporters from many different countries. It exposes the tactics used by the Tobacco Control Industry to further exclude adult tobacco consumers from their communities by encouraging unfounded discrimination intended to hound them out of homes, jobs and decisions that affect their own families. Even something as seemingly superficial as the current push for “plain packaging” is largely driven, in reality, more by a desire to further stigmatize adult tobacco consumers than by the claimed desire to “protect children from smoking” – a claimed result that has no real scientific or rational support behind it.

[ENDS]

Tobacco Control Tactics directly mirrors Tobacco Tactics, a recent example of Tobacco Control's attempt to portray the ordinary public as apologists for the tobacco industry. It has been in production since the beginning of June, and provides a valuable resource for researchers on tobacco control issues.

How the smoking ban kills communities that cannot arrange an exemption (Cornwall and St Louis)

Several interesting snippets here:

Much more disturbing though, is the new culture of home alcoholics which is now way out of control. Still, out of sight, out of mind eh? When you went to the pub, you knew when you'd had enough.

And:

In my area alone, two village pubs have just closed, and another is in receivership. I'm aware of many others that have gone under, including working men's clubs throughout Cornwall. They are all the social hub for so many and a necessity to keep the community spirit that brings people together for numerous occasions.

Town establishments are also suffering big time. One place I work, also doubles as a coffee house by day for the shoppers. It's 700 cups down per week. And what of the ladies who liked a ciggy with their morning coffee? Another little luxury lost. Wading through crowds smoking outside on the pavement with cigarette ends everywhere, while avoiding traffic at the same time has become an art form. It's increasingly difficult for the entertainment industry with venues still closing at the ridiculous rate of 16 per week even after four years. I support non-smokers' rights to the hilt, but there is absolutely no need for this, with so many people suffering, including the enormous loss of jobs. The negatives are endless. It's all so absurd. 

And:

Publicans know they can cater for everyone with the return of the ashtray and would undoubtedly survive. They did before. Anyone with a miniscule of [truth, logic, compassion and common sense] could have achieved a harmonious conclusion. It's not rocket science to create a two-roomed pub to satisfy all punters, especially with today's technology. Ultimately, it should be the decision of the landlord, not the far-off voice of Big Brother.

Big Brother features as the cause of all the trouble in this article:

Implementing it is a different matter, especially since we've arrived at the point where the evil 1 per cent elite, are now telling their puppet governments to make laws regarding what the remaining 99 per cent can or cannot do on their own property.

This is not an interpretation of the smoking ban that I am familiar with, but it cannot be denied that the smoking ban is open to manipulation by powerful forces in society. The less powerful are expected to be grateful for the restrictions.

Powerful professional clubs in St Louis, Missouri, have proved able to ignore the ban with minimal fuss from prosecutors and it is now possible that they may get a legal exemption. Opponents and supporters of the ban disapprove for different reasons: opponents would prefer the smoking ban law to be fought as a whole, rather than certain establishments seeking exemptions for themelves; and of course ban supporters would prefer everybody to observe the ban.

So there is a model that undermines the notion of equality before the law: if you are a judge, attorney, politician or other 'man in a suit' with access to certain invitation-only venues in St Louis, you can smoke socially (even supposing you don't have the space to do it in a separate room at home). If you don't, then it's a lot harder (but even here there are more exemptions available than in the UK).

Social smoking should be an issue resolved by the people immediately affected (as the Cornwall article pointed out there is plenty of technology to assist with removing the worst effects of smoke). It should not be an issue resolved by the social and political clout you possess with local lawmakers.

Reminder: Plain packaging consultation closes 10 July

The consultation is can be found here.

New video presentation below:



Please see Handsoffourpacks for latest campaign information.

Club Institute Union supports call for smoking rooms

Full credit to Freedom2Choose for reporting this.

The most enduring paragraph is the one that Freedom2Choose itself highlights. CIU Vice President John Tobin's address on the issue is reported:

So-called independent reports had been submitted to the Government to the effect that there was no evidence of overall financial damage  being done to industry as a result of the smoking ban. “What a load of rubbish,” he exclaimed. Less than two years into the ban, local authorities had been instructed to consider claims for reductions in business rates directly attributable to the ban. Bissett Kenning & Newiss represented about 700 clubs making a claim. Ninety-five per cent were successful and the average rebate was 10 per cent of rates  to continue on a year-by-year basis. There is your firm evidence of real and substantial damage caused by the smoking ban.

Even the authorities have acknowledged links between poor performance and the smoking ban.

Shadow Minister for Health: lack of progress in smoking cessation in pregnant women

The Shadow Minister's motion appears to challenge the closure of training facilities for midwives in Scotland. The wording is as follows:

*S4M-03281 Richard Simpson: Birth Rates in Scotland 

That the Parliament notes that the number of births reported by the Registrar General in the most recent midyear population statistics was 52,687 (2001), 51,239 (2002), 51,792 (2003), 53,576 (2004), 54,259 (2005), 54,961 (2006), 56,726 (2007), 59,240 (2008), 59,331 (2009), 58,937 (2010) and 58,766 (2011); notes that, following the low point in 2002, an increase of over 7,000 births annually is being sustained; understands that there are growing concerns regarding births where there are complex needs, such as multiple births or where drugs and alcohol issues are involved; believes that there has been a lack of any substantial progress in reducing the number of pregnant women who smoke or, after having successfully given up in pregnancy, resume smoking; notes what it considers to be the continuing low levels of initial or sustained breastfeeding; understands that there are demographic workforce pressures and these might be exacerbated by new pension arrangements; calls into question the whole basis of what it understands is the decision of the Scottish Government to cut the intake of midwifery students by 40%, with the closure of midwifery training at three university nursing and midwifery departments, and considers that this increasingly appears to be a misguided decision. 

Supported by: Mark McDonald*, Lewis Macdonald*, Iain Gray*, James Kelly*

No doubt this is a party political challenge along the lines of  'we would do better by pregnant women by not closing midwife training facilities'. But he is asking the Chamber to agree that £40 million of public expenditure is failing to persuade a critical target population to stop smoking. It's hard to imagine that £40 million (or more) spent under a different administration will stop people smoking.

I had thought with Give it Up for Baby (the scheme paying expectant mothers £12.50 a week to enrol in smoking cessation and keep off cigarettes for the duration) that they had found the magic bullet. The scheme, started in Dundee, has recently been declared a rip-roaring success and it has been announced that the government wishes to launch it across Scotland. I guess it is a little reassuring that not all the Parliamentarians are fooled by this hype. The facts are:

1. Scottish health boards have other priorities, many of which are far more urgent than smoking cessation;
2. Even if they didn't and the money available to be spent on this was limitless there is no proof that this expenditure would bring down the smoking rate further.

News:  1. There has been a reduced nicotine inhaler on my local supermarket shelf for nearly a month.
2. We are in the middle of the 2012 UK National Smoking Cessation Conference. Tomorrow's programme (i.e. for Tuesday) is here.

Packaging industry lines up to oppose plain packaging

The story is here. Perhaps even now the tobacco control researchers are trying to trace all the links between the packaging industry and the tobacco industry. But it is clear that plain packaging in tobacco (and the clear possibility, which tobacco control fails to recognise, that this is a slippery slope that will take in other products sooner or later) will clearly have ramifications on the packaging industry.

Showing that tobacco growers are also critical of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control

h/tip the Foresteirann blog for this small story. Tobacco growers, through their association the International Tobacco Growers' Association, issued a statement at the end of the ITGA's African regional meeting at the end of May. The declaration expresses opposition for the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, pointing out that it was not meant to eradicate tobacco farming but its implementation has been characterised by a failure to consult adequately with growers.

You can watch the CEO of the ITGA, Antonio Abrunhosa, in televised debate here.

Bath University on high security

Bath University is a part of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies. The report says:

Pro-smoking activists are intensifying the pressure on academics and health campaigners across the UK, as the Government looks into whether cigarettes should only be sold in plain packets.

I can only assume that 'pro-smoking activists' is meant to be some kind of shorthand for opponents of tobacco control – people who oppose the way in which tobacco control advocates restrictions on smoking and proceeds to recommend sidelining just about anyone who doesn't agree with them.

Are these the same people who make abusive calls to tobacco control personnel? No – the suggestion is made in the article that bloggers spend their free time hounding people at work (they are more likely to spend their non-blogging time earning a living), but they make no specific allegation about hate mail against any specific blogger. Bloggers express themselves in strong terms but this kind of thing is hardly a direct threat, nor is it inciting violence or threatening behaviour.

Trying to associate bloggers with threatening calls and hate mail is blaming the messenger. Tobacco control has many opponents among bloggers, and they are people whose life quality has been adversely affected by smoking legislation. These people don't just rant, they investigate developments around them. The mainstream media has every reason to collude with this fiction that the blogging rabble are the ones most likely to terrorise tobacco controllers at work because they don't investigate in this part of the news.

Another example covered by Dick Puddlecote last year concerned the Independent's coverage of the Philip Morris/Stirling University story. Independent writer Steve Connor has just won an award for this coverage, but it took Dick Puddlecote to join the dots and report that Cancer Research UK, foremost in the plain packaging campaign, receives significant grant aid from Pfizer and AstraZeneca: an area that was not covered by Connor's reporting.

That the mainstream media fails to report on this issue fairly accounts for the intensity of blogging on this issue. If the MSM did its work properly it would be smeared and held responsible for acts of criminal threatening behaviour exactly as bloggers are doing now.

Blame the smoker, why dontcha? they bring down aeroplanes now

Medical News Today reports that in-flight smoking crisis cards are to be handed out with the cards that tell you how to deal with an aircraft emergency. They include such invaluable advice as 'taking sips of water, deep breathing and other distraction techniques and setting a quit date'.

In case this juxtaposition of smoking cessation advice and instructions about how to behave in a forced landing seems in any way melodramatic, the report points out, 'Washroom smoking is thought to have caused at least one multi-fatality airliner crash and put other flights at risk'.


Words fail me. 

Tobacco Control gets Wiki site to monitor industry and associates

The site is here. As far as I know it's just reached the attention of the bloggers, and some interesting observations have already been made: here, here and here, for example.

Other than being disappointed not to be included on its list of bloggers, two things have struck me.

One is that one of their pages is entitled Smear campaign. My understanding of this expression accords largely  with Wikipedia's:

A smear campaign, smear tactic or simply smear is a metaphor for activity that can harm an individual or group's reputation by conflation with a stigmatized group. 

I was surprised to read about it as a tactic of the tobacco industry, because it was my impression that tobacco control uses this tactic frequently on us – that is, on what is called by everyone outside tobacco control the 'pro-choice' side – by claiming that we are in the pay of tobacco companies or simply pursue their interests because we have no specific view of our own. Indeed on looking at the page on smear campaigns, we find it does not concern smear campaigns at all. It talks about discrediting and threats, but these are very different from a smear campaign. (It didn't refer to being compared with Hitler or Nazi Germany either, which is the only relevant comparison I can think of that is frequently directed at Tobacco Control.)

The other is the disclaimer:

Disclaimer. Some of the research for TobaccoTactics was funded by Cancer Research UK Limited and Smokefree South West. These funders have had no input into the research reported on this website or its conclusions. They are not responsible for the content or the publication, nor do they necessarily endorse it. Published by the University of Bath. Read the General Disclaimer.

The disclaimer says:

None of the authors, contributors, sponsors, administrators, sysops, or anyone else connected with TobaccoTactics.org or the University of Bath will be responsible for the appearance of any material considered defamatory, offensive, inaccurate, unlawful or misleading, nor will they be responsible for your use of the information contained in these web pages, or the pages TobaccoTactics links to.

I am not the only one to be a little sceptical about the legal validity of this disclaimer. It was my understanding that writers on internet sites were fully responsible for the accuracy of their content. What really surprised me however was that CRUK, a cancer charity (in case anyone had forgotten) and Smokefree South West are using donated funds/public money to publish material whose accuracy they cannot guarantee.

Tobacco control: use this site at your own risk!

WHO anti-tobacco campaign contravenes its constitution

This is the constitution of the World Health Organization.

• Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. [...]
• The achievement of any State in the promotion and protection of health is of value to all. [...]
• The extension to all peoples of the benefits of medical, psychological and related knowledge is essential to the fullest attainment of health.

Just for starters. 'Complete physical, social and mental wellbeing' is arguably incompatible with a denormalization agenda policy towards the social act of smoking. Denormalizing smoking is (beyond argument) part of the World Health Organization's agenda (see WRPO Blue Ribbon Campaign at this link).

Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco and Health is arguably at odds with the statement that promoting and protecting health 'is of value to all'. Article 5.3 states that governments 'need to be alert to any efforts by the tobacco industry to undermine or subvert tobacco control efforts and the need to be informed of activities of the tobacco industry that have a negative impact on tobacco control efforts'. If public health is a matter of common public concern, there should be no call for sidelining people from the public policy process by reason of their employment. (Like this.) 

On 'medical, psyhological and related knowledge', I have found a paragraph on tobacco labelling, published by The Union. 

To date, several countries have stopped requiring quantitative emission information from packages and instead require descriptive information about toxic constituents in smoke and their effects on health. Preliminary research suggests that this information is more meaningful to consumers and less likely to result in misperceptions about the relative risk of different cigarette brands. Further work is required to examine what types of descriptive product information are most useful to consumers. The extent to which information about additives or design features (such as filter ventilation) might serve as effective consumer messaging is also unclear, mainly because these approaches have yet to be explored. Several suggestions of approaches to descriptive product information that may be effective are discussed in section 2.

The idea is that quantitative emission information misleads people into thinking that some brands of tobacco are less toxic than others. Customers could be persuaded to change brands rather than doing the right thing, namely quitting the habit. The received wisdom is that instead of being misled by quantitative emissions, customers should be given generalised information. In my view, this kind of information is already all over the packet. Ingredient information is just that. What customers do with it is entirely their business. It is proposed that instead of quantative information they are to be given just more health advice. This is not compatible with the provision of full information.

This post came from a remark by Greg Burrows on Facebook:

After reading the World Health Organisation's Constitution, I believe with their methods prescribed in tobacco control they are fundamentally in conflict with their own constitution in regard to this statement: "The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition."

The definition of social condition is the state in which a person finds themselves in a particular society.

I am not a lawyer but to my mind the whole emphasis or goal of WHO FCTC has been to force their version of what our (smokers) social condition is, whether we like it or not, this is against their constitution.

I agree entirely with Greg that the spirit of the WHO has been abandoned in the current public health drive directed at smoking. It seems to me that the constitution of the World Health Organization was written at a time before the organization was dominated by ambitious, globalist campaigns.

Allies retaliate against prohibitionists in the Lancet

I was trying to think of a suitable and concise word to describe the collection of people who fight most visibly against the smoking ban and related tobacco control measures. I hope nobody will be offended by the use of the word Allies! It's only a name after all.

The original Lancet letter was written last December by STIVORO, the Dutch tobacco control outfit, and a collection of professional tobacco control activists who are appalled at official Dutch resistance to the collective tobacco control wisdom: Robert West, Stanton Glantz ... see for yourselves. Its chief exhibit of evidence is a diagram that purports to show that the Dutch public is less aware of the dangers of tobacco than the rest of humankind: this diagram is used as the basis of a claim that tobacco control spending should be going up rather than down. The reply, signed by a handful of anti-tobacco control activists on both sides of the Atlantic, points out that nowhere has any significant reduction taken place following smoking bans, and that the proposed cuts in smoking cessation activities by the Dutch health authorities will mostly remain intact.  It includes a table showing the smoking figures, complete with sources.

Two of the authors of the Lancet letter acknowledge competing interests, although all are associated with tobacco control and public health charities. Personally I find the Allies' response far more persuasive and supported by a better quality of evidence.

Tobacco control campaigners complain of hate campaign

Let's remember in part what we are talking about here. Hate campaigns. The opening of this film includes snippets from an anti-smoking advertising feature (withdrawn by the NHS after protest from Freedom2Choose), which showed a young man's smoking habit compared to him being viciously and wantonly assaulted:


THE ANTI by wes_hrv

The Guardian reports a personalised hate campaign against personnel from Action on Smoking and Health by bloggers and campaigners. One such report, on the blog affiliated with the UK Freedom2Choose, was removed shortly after publication. It was a direct retaliation to the story linked above in Simon Clark's blog, which jokingly speculated that if smokers faced the threat of being randomly shot down by a sniper, they might be keener to give up. I don't remember anyone taking seriously the idea that smokers might feel under threat from crazed members of the general public as a result of either this, or pictures of a smoker being hammered to a pulp (metaphorically) by his smoking habit.

The denormalisation agenda has a lot to answer for. While blithely condemning smokers to social ostracism they say: 'An obvious escape from this negativity is to quit smoking'.

While I don't personally agree with threatening people in the course of their work, the authority that tobacco control has assumed, on a global scale, to reshape social attitudes against smokers, ostensibly in order to save their lives, is quite despicable. Seeking to marginalise anyone who has even a passing interest in tobacco-associated trades is profoundly anti-democratic. If tobacco control advocates agree that this kind of behaviour towards not just smokers but people at all degrees of separation from tobacco interests is objectionable, they should distance themselves from it publicly. To paraphrase a summary of the tobacco control position in the BMJ, an obvious escape from the negativity of the denormalisation campaign and the anger it engenders is to condemn that agenda.

As far as I'm concerned, the gloves are off.