Former MSP attacks ASH Scotland

Yet another attack on ASH Scotland has appeared, this time in The Scotsman:

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(A substantial chunk of this appears here.) Brian Monteith is not the first to find fault with ASH Scotland's calculations of smoking costs. More can be found here, here and on this blog.

In the meantime Simon Clark also has a cautionary note for those who think that ASH (or ASH Scotland) can be challenged on the basis of being 'fake charities', and links to this document by Blad Tolstoy, a veteran campaigner on smoking/prohibition issues. The document concerns the English ASH organisation and English charity law, but the point remains that charity law is not the best line of attack on ASH Scotland. The atrocious quality of their publications and their support of nonsense (like the 17 per cent reduction on heart attacks that supposedly resulted from the smoking ban in Scotland) are good lines of attack, but (says Simon):

Last week I was quoted in a retail trade magazine. 'Tobacco control groups are no longer interested in educating people about the health risks of smoking,' I said. 'Their strategy is to denormalise and stigmatise adults who consume a legal product.'

Today the tobacco control lobby is more interested in coercing people to quit smoking, with groups such as ASH using every "confidence trick" in the book to achieve their goal of a 'smokefree' (sic) world.

Illiberal smoking bans, display bans, claims that smokers are harming (and even killing) those around them - this has nothing to do with health and everything to do with denormalising not only a legal product but the consumers of that product.

Thanks to charities like ASH, many people's social lives have been ruined, businesses have closed and jobs have been lost. I fail to see what's "charitable" about that and for that reason alone I am happy to call ASH a fake charity.

I think that will do for me too.

EDIT: a reply has been printed in The Scotsman letters page today. Please add yours!

ASH Scotland's new nonsense on smoking costs up in smoke

Even an almost erudite sounding website named Egovmonitor takes ASH Scotland's word entirely at face value. Its claims of the smoking costs are laughable, but they are uncritically stated. Smoking costs Scotland £1.1 bn a year, says ASH Scotland's Up in Smoke campaign.

Clearly the whole point of this exercise is to ensure that costs to the economy attributed to smoking minus Scotland's share of tobacco revenue gives a negative balance. Scotland takes £940 million in revenue directly from tobacco. So did ASH Scotland make its point? It makes the following claims:

• treating smoking attributable disease in the NHS costs £271 million
• productivity losses due to excess absenteeism, smoking breaks and lost output due to premature death cost £692 million
• premature deaths due to second-hand smoke exposure in the home cost £60 million in lost productivity
• clearing smoking-related litter from the streets costs £34 million
• fires caused by smoking in commercial properties cost £12 million.

Even the first point raises alarm bells. 'Attributable' does not mean 'caused by'. It means 'could have been caused by'. It is all guesswork, evident where the relevant web page states the costs are 'conservatively, around £1.1 billion'.

But lost productivity because of premature death or disability amounts to a private cost borne only by the smoker (since health care costs are accounted separately). And how do they come by 'second-hand exposure in the home'? How does ASH Scotland know, when they cannot even identify who is dying of the effects of exposure to secondary smoke, 1) where casualties are exposed and 2) at what age they died. Using ASH Scotland's figure of 1,000 deaths from the effects of secondary smoke every year, this means a productivity loss of £60,000 per person who died (assuming all 1,000 died of inhalation in the home). But again, how does this loss affect the economy? The only studies giving even marginal significance to the risks of secondary smoke exposure refer to lifetime spousal or occupational exposure, so even if it could be shown that 1,000 people die annually from secondary smoke exposure, many of them would be beyond retirement age.

This does not equate to a loss over £940 million. Also tobacco is a healthy investment these days, and Edinburgh is a city deep in financial institutions. A few fund managers include tobacco in their investment portfolios, and tobacco features even in some local government pension stocks.

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'By contrast', says ASH Scotland, 'effective interventions to reduce tobacco harm offer excellent value for money'. Sheila can't have read this yet: 'Currently stop smoking services are evaluated on the percentage of 4-week quitters, but around three-quarters relapse after this date.'