Duffy in print

Sheila Duffy has excelled herself today by producing a leader column in the Scotsman entitled 'Restricting tobacco industry will improve health' (this was not published online), and another in the Herald: 'Health levy will bring huge benefits to public health and the economy'.

Does tobacco control have some special status for our national media that ASH Scotland's opinion gets placed next to the editorials at the centre of the Scotsman?

In her column, Duffy applauds the Australian effort to bring in plain packaging and makes her support for this legislation very clear. She refers to the recent UN summit on non-communicable diseases and the 'fundamental conflict between the tobacco industry and public health. She promotes plain packaging as a global strategy endorsed by the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control – an undemocratic measure that seeks to over-ride national democratic processes.

In the Herald she writes about the proposed health levy on major supermarkets, in reference to a previous article in which the Scottish Retail Consortium warned that the levy could fall on an increasing number of retailers with time. She huffs, 'well, they would say that, wouldn't they?' because they are 'keen to protect their members' interests'. Well – it takes one to know one.  This is the old story –  there is a dispute and both sides lobby. One does it out of sheer altruism and the other out of sheer self-interest. Sheila wants this levy because it is destined for 'preventive work': in more prosaic terms, to sustain the health promotion business.

The 'denormalisation' process is also at work here. Duffy echoes the words of Margaret Chan of the World Health Organisation who criticises the tobacco industry's efforts to gain support against plain packaging legislation, especially for the effrontery of employing lawsuits to challenge tobacco control legislation. God forbid that tobacco companies, having been marginalised from the policy-making process, should be allowed to make the public aware of their view of the situation.

Sheila clearly has a vested interest in the health levy. No doubt she will point to all the benefits of smokeless pubs such as a 17 per cent drop in heart attacks, a 13 per cent drop in childhood asthma admissions, better respiratory health in bar staff (based on a comparison of their health between February and June) and other fantasies. Her stock figures are 13,500 – the annual Scottish death rate from tobacco – and one in four, which is the proportion of Scots that are killed by tobacco. These figures are used in 2009,  but if we go back to 2005 we see very little change (in fact the rate for smoking-related deaths is only 13,000, but they have probably changed their method of counting). It rather looks as if the money spent on ASH Scotland has got very little result over the last six years.

Edit: Scotsman piece now online.

Saving Lives

ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Scotland today celebrates the news that the public supports 'legislation to support the country's tobacco-related death toll'. Their press release, describing polls which apparently give anti-tobacco a ringing endorsement, declares full public support for all anti-tobacco measures including the tobacco display ban (pending the results of a Court judgement). Sheila Duffy declares:

There is much we can do to reduce the 13,500 deaths caused by smoking each year, prevent young people starting, and help smokers to quit. 

Her figure for smoking related deaths should be noted. I am not clear how these figures are gathered. Another piece of writing from 2004 looks forward to the ban. In it, Dr Mac Armstrong declares that it would save 1,000 lives a year in Glasgow alone. The toll for 'estimated' smoking-related deaths at 13,000, however, is lower than the one supplied by Sheila Duffy, two years before the ban came in.


Both figures have in fact been floating around for the last few years, but there is no sign of 1,000 lives a year being saved. (Whether by coincidence or not, this figure was also given as the toll of passive smokers killed every year by secondary smoke: the ones the legislation was meant to protect.) And let's not forget this story, that heart attack rates went down 17 per cent following the smoking ban: now made nonsense by the fact that the English are claiming only a 2.4 per drop in heart attacks as a result of the smoking ban.


It is not known exactly most people die, and it is impossible to come up with precise numbers for a potential factor in a death, like smoking. What is certain is that the smoking ban hasn't dramatically altered the death rate in any of the ways we were led to believe it would.