On illegal tobacco undermining legitimate sales

Sheila Duffy once more attempts to make a case that tobacco retailer groups are only arguing against tobacco control because they are supported by tobacco companies. And fails.

After a long and loud campaign telling their members that counterfeit tobacco is damaging local shops, the TRA asked shopkeepers whether they thought their shop was at risk of closing due to counterfeit and smuggled tobacco. 

We are not told how those involved made sure of an unbiased sample or whether they just relied on their existing friends and contacts.

Of those who responded, 92 were from Scotland.

So the dramatic “one in ten” headline is based on nine individuals across Scotland giving their personal opinion.

That kind of survey sounds like the way thirdhand smoke was invented: the difference being that the fairy story about high taxes making opportunities for black market traders is written by the Tobacco Retailers Alliance, and the other story is created by somebody wanting to create a bad press around tobacco, and using the 'scientific' press to achieve it.

It is true of course that people giving opinions does not make fact. The argument that illicit tobacco results from high taxes has the benefit of being plausible. The hypothesis that higher taxes on tobacco creates opportunities for illegal traders cannot be argued by suggesting that it is generated solely by tobacco companies and their associates. Black market opportunities arise when there is a large gap between the production cost and the official price, and that gap is deliberately enlarged in the case of tobacco, since high taxes are meant to be a deterrent, especially to the young. The larger the gap between production and retail costs, the more illegal traders will be able to live comfortably off the margin. Tobacco control advocates must show evidence to refute this logic – it is not enough simply to deny it simply on the grounds that tobacco companies claim it to be true.

Nor is it convincing to say that HMRC deny any increase in smuggling. How can HMRC comfortably give estimates about how much illegal trading goes on, when it is by definition part of the mission of the illegal trader to slip under the radar? And how can HMRC confidently state that less smoking goes on? (or that people are not abandoning tobacco in favour of more dangerous substances)? Nothing appears straightforward in the world of illicit tobacco detection.

In the world of Smoke Free North East, the story that tobacco smuggling is under control no doubt has a robust following. The number of smokers is declining too (isn't it?). An independent survey that Smoke Free North East commissioned gives heartening news about the decline in illicit tobacco that you can read here. Deborah Arnott of ASH throws in her wisdom:

This survey is important new evidence that Britain is getting to grips with the illicit tobacco trade. Thanks to hard work by customs, trading standards, police, health and tobacco control groups around the country the level of tobacco smuggling is continuing to fall. Every independent survey shows this.

Can this be interpreted to mean that any survey not showing the UK getting to grips with the illicit tobacco trade is by definition not funded appropriately and is not to be trusted? Surveys (which produces a limited range of answers on a basis of self-selection) do feature reliable results sometimes, then, in the eyes of tobacco control?

Paradoxes of harm reduction

Michael Siegel has attacked robustly and deservedly a paper from the World Health Organization that recommends the banning of e-cigarettes (which it describes pompously as ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery systems, even though some are used without nicotine). The ground for banning them is that they 'resemble' smoking and so hinder the 'denormalisation' of smoking. Believers in tobacco harm reduction, including Michael Siegel, consider that e-cigarettes provide an alternative to smokers that gives them nicotine less hazardously, and that banning e-cigarettes will seriously hamper many people's efforts to stop smoking.

I share this position to the extent that clearly banning cigarettes will make it harder for many people to quit smoking if that is what they want to do. I can't get excited personally about quitting smoking as an objective. I smoke very occasionally, have never smoked heavily and never succeeded in getting addicted (seriously, an anti-smoker told me that I wasn't trying hard enough!). I feel that enough people do give up smoking to demonstrate that it is possible given the willpower and the right circumstances (hence am sceptical about the addiction narrative), but don't share the idea that everyone has to give up.

But for those people who do have this conviction that smokers must give up, it makes absolutely no sense to ban e-cigarettes, simply because of their physical resemblance to the 'real thing'. It leaves medicinal nicotine the only alternative available, and this is a choice that many people simply will not make. There is also abundant evidence of its abysmal success rate.

E-cigarettes are a new kid on the block, and represent unexpected competition in the nicotine market. The power and influence of pharmaceutical companies in supporting tobacco control could be a strong factor in the reluctance of groups like Action on Smoking and Health to embrace Tobacco Harm Reduction.

ASH Scotland appears to be sitting on the fence. But Deborah Arnott sees some of the merits of e-cigarettes, as she explains here. She warns that the end game of tobacco will not be possible unless smokers have a real alternative – and, in my view, she presents e-cigarettes as the only potential subtitute for smoked tobacco that can satisfy smokers. Her tone is: 'Like it or not, smokers will only take what they want'.

Her concerns are that e-cigarettes are not made by the right people. She fears that tobacco companies will buy them up only to stop making them. Those dastardly Chinese make sofas that burn you so they clearly can't be trusted. They have to be regulated to the hilt (and preferably made by someone who won't just phase them out). But they must be available.

It may not occur to Deborah Arnott that she has a conflict of interest to contend with:

Source (h/tip Jay)

I am not sure that aiming to destroy an industry sits well with an aim to reduce the harms from smoking. It is absurdly ambitious, with profound economic implications. Apart from anything else it is stretching a point to call this a charitable objective.

Ending nicotine addiction at all costs is also stupendously ambitious and may also not be beneficial to health (for instance a person may substitute a far more harmful addiction).

The whole crusade, ridiculously, specialises in a very limited area of health interest, and holds tobacco responsible for virtually everything that can go wrong with someone's health.

Unaccountably this anti-tobacco project has become a global monstrosity, with the result that the World Health Organisation creates its first (only?) multilateral global treaty around similar goals. So confused is the World Health Organisation about its myriad goals that it cannot bring itself to bless e-cigarettes, the most successful smoking cessation method to date, because they look so much like smoking cigarettes that they fear that the wrong message will go out to the public.

Observer continues plain packaging media attack

The Observer reports that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) opposes plain packaging, and plans a global campaign against it.

Many readers of the article took this as a piece exposing how powerful capital interests (they fund the Tea Party, for goodness' sake!) influence UK policy. My take on it was that this was a piece trying to evoke the sense that if ALEC disagrees with it, then it must be an ideologically sound policy, on the grounds that my enemy's enemy is my friend.

I have not investigated ALEC. The detail of their purposes doesn't concern me, and is not relevant in any case to the advisability of the plain packaging policy. What is relevant is that they are US-based but wish to campaign beyond the US:

The organisation's attempts to influence the debate outside its native US has angered health campaigners. "Alec's free-market rhetoric may work in the US but it won't wash here in the UK," said Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash). "The tobacco industry and its lobbyists have money to burn, and they might as well just set fire to it as their campaign against plain packs is going nowhere. Their legal case is weak and the evidence in support of plain packaging is strong."

Money to burn? I wonder what keeps her movement afloat when the nation's hospitals are physically falling apart? And what makes Arnott think that this is not an international issue? Why should anyone limit their campaigns to a single country when the World Health Organisation advocates this policy globally and the companies affected also operate internationally?

Brand packaging exists to protect the commercial operator from threats in the marketplace, like cheap imitations; and also to protect the consumer from the effects of such copying. Removing it, especially for a product that is already strong in the black market, popular especially among the economically deprived and considered to be hazardous, is surely asking for trouble. I don't see why you have to be a 'right-wing libertarian nut-case' to find this idea sensible.

The Observer's piece, linking this organisation in a quotation from Greenpeace to 'climate change denialists', is a blatant attempt to cast its view of the current issue as wrong, because all the other idiot causes it espouses are wrong (also chucking in words like 'billionaire', 'baron', 'oil'). It's hardly a subtle approach that investigates the controversy properly. The less affluent opponents of the policy don't get a mention (people like newsagents).

Observer goes to the bottom of the class, for reporting very unobservantly.

Legal challenge to the display ban

You thought it had been dropped?

Deborah Arnott seems to have done:

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, said: "What a wonderful Christmas present from the tobacco industry. This will bring festive cheer to all those working to prevent children and young people from taking up smoking."

Seems as if someone is already trying to rub Scotland off the map!

The ban on the display of tobacco products in large stores could be delayed for as long as three years due to legal wrangles with tobacco manufacturers, the Scottish Government has admitted.

Good that they didn't ruin Christmas for the ban champions in Scotland, anyway.

Dave Atherton debates Deborah Arnott on passive smoking and denormalisation

The crucial question: Deborah Arnott of Action on Smoking and Health takes on Dave Atherton of Freedom2Choose.

British American Tobacco admits funding newsagents' campaign against display ban

It has emerged at the AGM of British American Tobacco that this tobacco company provided funding and input to the campaign of newsagents to resist the tobacco display ban.

An earlier story by the same Guardian writer quotes Parminder Singh, President of the National Federation of Retail Newsagents:

There is no way that the NFRN could afford the resources and expertise to mount such a high profile campaign to fight on its members' behalf to oppose the tobacco ban without some help towards funding. We are grateful, therefore, to have some help from the tobacco manufacturers to do this.

At stake is the tobacco display ban, legislation enacted already in the Republic of Ireland (a tobacco smuggling hotspot) and voted into law in both Westminster and Holyrood, but not yet implemented. To say the law is controversial understates the case. There is no conclusive evidence that putting tobacco out of sight will make the prospect of smoking any less attractive to young people.

The retail trades, including newsagents and convenience stores, have to put their case against the combined wisdom of the Department of Health and all the health charities, with added lobbying from pharmaceutical interests. The government will not give tobacco interests a hearing. This seems a marriage made in heaven: the  newsagents have access to government but no money, the tobacco interests have pots of money but no access.

I have no idea, nor do I really care, how much of the campaign was paid for by British American Tobacco. The reason Health Secretary Lansley will not speak with tobacco interests is that the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control forbids it. Then the health lobby loses itself in moral indignation when the tobacco industry behaves like businesses all over the world, and uses its funds (which it is forbidden by law to use for its own advertising or to sponsor kids to play football) to help business partners.  As far as I'm concerned placing obstacles in the way of tobacco interests attempting to buy influence simply diverts their direction of travel. Tobacco interests have every right to a voice in decisions affecting their product, especially considering the level of taxes levied on their products. Stifling the voice of the tobacco industry and taking the huff when it refuses to lie down and die is just being childish. Here's illustrating:

"For any major company to seek to covertly lobby MPs through the back door is disgraceful, but particularly when it comes to tobacco. The Government has legal obligations to protect public health policy from the vested interests of the tobacco industry and it can only do this if the tobacco industry is transparent about its lobbying activities", said Deborah Arnott, the chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).

Since the WHO forbids tobacco companies from lobbying openly, the inference is clearly that they're not allowed any voice.

"Lobbying by the NFRN was effective in significantly delaying the implementation of the legislation in small shops and it has already admitted that it received support from tobacco manufacturers for this campaign. The question is which tobacco manufacturers. If BAT was involved it needs to come clean."

The inference here is that NFRN's delaying tactics were successful only with tobacco industry funding. Does that mean the newsagents should have been silenced by lack of funding? The alliance with tobacco was enough to discredit the NFRN's campaign completely?

Behind the scenes are the extraordinary demands of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, not least its dictates about who may influence public policy: as if this needs to be decided by a non-elected global body.

Interestingly, outside the doors of the British American Tobacco AGM, was gathered a group of young people demonstrating against child labour in the tobacco plantations. They were photographed with Deborah Arnott, CEO of Action on Smoking and Health and Kevin Barron, the Labour MP who questioned BAT. I hope, but don't expect, that Deborah Arnott and Kevin Barron will be sure to remind these young people that exploitation of children isn't limited to tobacco companies.

Smoking ban in homes

Action on Smoking and Health (in the UK) is getting more fanatical by the day. In this BBC report, Martin Dockrell, ASH's policy officer, concludes:  'There is a strong case for social and private sector landlords designating some entire blocks as smoke-free to respect the choice and the health of the great majority of their tenants.'

This directly contradicts Deborah Arnott's words reported by The Independent only yesterday: 'While we can't pass legislation to prohibit smoking in the home, smoking in cars can and should be prohibited by law' [emphasis added].

The background to Dockrell's urgent about-face? A study led by Jonathan Winickoff (who invented third-hand smoke) declaring that children who live in apartments are more exposed to smoke than children in detached houses. They tested children across the US for cotinine, which is found (but not exclusively) in tobacco.

Researchers limited the sample in this study to children who live in a household where nobody smokes.

No control, then?

Overall, researchers found that 84.5% of children who were living in blocks of flats had a cotinine level that indicated recent tobacco-smoke exposure, compared with 79.6% of children who were living in attached houses and 70.3% who were living in detached houses.

So nearly three-quarters of children of non-smokers in detached houses have a high degree of cotinine in their systems, and children in smoking households were not studied. Exposure to nicotine is measured, but not the effects of exposure, which we are left to imagine. The study carries the authority that one expects from the man who coined the phrase 'third-hand smoke'.

Martin Dockrell should be ashamed to peg ASH's policies on such rotten calculations.

Banning smoking in cars

The Northern Ireland Assembly and Westminster are both under pressure to extend the smoking ban to include cars that carry children as passengers.

Deborah Arnott, of Action on Smoking and Health (unlike her pal Sheila Duffy at ASH Scotland) definitely wants legislation: 'While we can't pass legislation to prohibit smoking in the home, smoking in cars can and should be prohibited by law.'

Reports on Northern Ireland (link above) say that nine out of ten households want a smoking ban in cars. This suggests that most people are likely to consider the perceived sensitivities of children to smoke, and that legislation is not needed.

I adopt the general view that respiratory problems in children have increased while smoking has decreased and see no reason to attribute breathing problems in children to smoking. I don't have children, nor do I drive and only smoke on a very irregular basis so don't have any personal slant on the issue.

My big question is, if they suspect that secondary smoke is dangerous, why have they left protecting children so late in the day? They have been campaigning on secondary smoke since the 1970s:

... the last 40 years have seen an incredible amount of expenditure on studies, press releases, TV ads and such things all designed to play up the fear of wisps of smoke in pursuit of the strategy laid out at the 1975 World Conference on Smoking and Health chaired by Sir George Godber.  The consensus of that conference was that to achieve the public support needed to eventually eliminate smoking it would first be necessary 'to foster an atmosphere where it was perceived that active smokers would injure those around them.'

Since they had all this ammunition at their disposal, the simplest thing would have been to protect the children by first of all campaigning about them. They didn't do that: they decided to protect adults instead, and run the risk of further exposing children in the process. Now their strategy is to come back and say: 'the adults are protected: it's only right that now we protect the children', yet bydoing things in this order they have left children 'exposed' for years.

Their objective is and always has been opposing smoking, not protecting health. Had children's health been a factor they would not even have run the risk that parents would smoke more at home. Given the number of pub closures over the past four years it is very hard to believe stories like this: but even if they are true, the possibility of displacing parental smoking to the home, given the dangers now posited, should have made the smoking ban untenable.

I really doubt whether home smoking has done very much damage. I was brought up in a 'smoking household', in that my father smoked until I was ten. But we lived in a big draughty house. I have lived in houses where the smoke was more noticeable. One was a converted flat, where condensation on colder mornings would gather in puddles on the window sills and drip on to the floor. Someone did smoke there, but the problem was not smoke, it was over-tight windows, no chimney, etc.

We were brought up learning that damp housing hurt people's health. Substandard housing and bad air will hurt children's health. The debate on cars must be left to people with more experience of children's health and car interiors, but really the call to ban smoking in cars has come far too late in the day to take seriously as a major health risk. Dame Helena Shovelton of the British Lung Foundation declared: 'Smoking just one cigarette, even with the car window open, creates a greater concentration of second-hand smoke than a whole evening’s smoking in a pub or a bar.' By not tackling this stupendous problem before tackling smoking in pubs, they have ruined their own case.

Department of Health delays display ban decision while ASH says nudge isn't enough

In a Channel 4 News interview (below), Deborah Arnott of the English Action on Smoking and Health says that nudge is not enough when it comes to children's health. Regulation was necessary to bring in the smoking ban, a necessary law that everyone likes. Her opponent in the debate Nadhim Zahawi MP supports the 'nudge' doctrine but since he considers the smoking ban a form of 'nudge', a benevolent way to present issues in order to persuade people to make the 'right choices'. Does this man have constituents?



Deborah Arnott feels that regulation is essential alongside a 'nudge' approach. But nudge seems to be what Health Secretary Andrew Lansley seems to be interested in. Claiming to discard the nanny state, he wants to hand responsibility for public health to local councils and encourage them to compete on performance levels and hand out vouchers for walking to school. It may be a matter of semantics, but this kind of nudging seems a bit nannyish to me.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University London said: 'Firstly, the hype around "nudge" as the best way to change behaviour should be treated warily. It's an individualised approach to what ought to be addressed at a population, society-wide level. The term nudge is in fashion, but no substitute for public policy. There is a danger that the nudge will become a fudge.'

The wish to change people's behaviour seems to dominate everyone in public life – effectively there is no difference between nudge and the nanny state. Politicians understand 'nudge' as imposing a smoking ban, a display ban, the imposition of plain packaging and the banning of vending machines simply because none of these measures actually amounts to a prohibition of smoking. They simply have no concept or concern for the impact of their little nudges on traders, any more than they are concerned about the consequences of denormalisation. Christopher Snowdon was right when he said on The Moral Maze last week that in the smokers' world, nudge went out years ago: all these restrictions amount to 'shove', rather than nudge.

What will the Health Secretary do about the tobacco display ban? Deborah Arnott says the matter of stopping people from smoking is too important to be left to 'nudge' and needs regulation (at least she acknowledges that regulations are more serious than 'nudge'). Supporters of the legislation clearly feel that Lansley will let them down and bow to tobacco interests. Local shopkeepers point out that both Coalition parties opposed the legislation before the General Election, and criticise continued delay in a policy announcement, as well as the announcement that plain packaging might be on its way:

Minister[s] must act now to provide reassurance to retailers. We remain convinced that the best option is to abandon plans for a display ban, and there is now an unanswerable case for an immediate freeze on the projected compliance deadlines.

Their demands seem fairly reasonable to me:

Ken Parsons, chief executive of the Rural Shops Alliance (RSA), said, “This is an area where actions really need to be based on evidence. Suddenly this [plain packaging] proposal has come out of the woodwork, with no evidence to back it up one way or the other.

Retailers are being left without any guidance as how this might affect the tobacco ‘going dark’ issue. At the very least, if the minister needs longer to reach a decision, then he must postpone the proposed timetable for implementing display restrictions. It is the retail industry being kept in the dark, not tobacco.

I don't envy Lansley.