Irish showdown over e-cigarettes shows lack of logic

Watch Clive Bates calmly demolish the logic of tobacco control in the Republic of Ireland:




The anti-smokers describe the need to classify e-cigarettes as medicines and then scratch their heads as to whether these 'medicines' work, when e-cigarettes have never been described smoking cessation medication by their manufacturers (and yet they clearly do work miles better than pharmaceutical alternatives). Kathleen O'Meara manages to suggest that unless smokers use e-cigarettes to give up smoking they are using them simply to 'get round the smoking ban' by using them in places where tobacco smoking is banned – even though no smoke is involved. Far from getting round the smoking ban the smokers concerned are in full compliance with the smoking ban – if the likes of Kathleen O'Meara can't tell the difference between smoke and water vapour that's not the fault of users.

For further remarks see Dick Puddlecote's review.

And more again: Carl V. Phillips explains why the tobacco control community should no longer be able to say 'we just don't know' the effects of e-cigarettes. 

Arguing with Simon Chapman!

To persuade fellow tweeters that making packs look identical speeds up transaction times, Simon Chapman first pointed at the study referred to here:

The study in question is Carter O, Mills B, Phan T, Bremner J. Measuring the effect of cigarette plain packaging on transaction times and selection errors in a simulation experiment, Tobacco Control, 21, 572–577, 2012.doi:10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2011-050087.

I expressed doubts that removing the branding would make cigarettes easier to identify, but he had none of it, posting the video below to prove how quick it is to pick out a plain pack from behind a screen:
This of course is not proof of anything, it is a video of a single transaction, without any consideration of how sales environments vary.

Professor Chapman has so much faith in this study that it resolves all the plain packaging dilemmas for him (to my mind serving times are nowhere near the crux about why this is a bad idea). To him this is a 'non-issue'. I asked him why he was bringing the issue up, when the study was over a year old.

After a few minutes I managed to find the response from Dick Puddlecote to the study: BMJ's official attempt to 'prove' that plain packaging makes shop service quicker. But I couldn't share it with Simon since he had blocked my response with the following comment:

Simon Chapman‏@SimonChapman6

@Belinda64 Study was done in Nov/Dec 2012. I talk about it because of the oceans of nonsense that BigTobacco & its goons (like you?) spout.

 

Well, no hard feelings, Simon! I have never been in correspondence with this man before but within a few exchanges of tweets he calls me a stupid person or a thug, and terminates the connection. More to the point, he hasn't persuaded me that he has a case using that study (incidentally he is also wrong about the date: the BMJ published the study in September 2011).          

EDIT: please see comment below 12 February from second Anonymous commenter: my mistake, seems I was the one got the studies back to front.                       

Australian budget forecasts no drop in tobacco revenue

Just when you thought that Australian tobacco revenue might be expected to fall in the wake of plain packaging legislation that the government expects to introduce at the end of this year, no downward change is projected in budget forecasts. Indeed, an increase in revenue is predicted. From Martin Cullip, writing for Hands Off our Packs.

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.

More on the blatantly one-sided plain packaging consultation

Over the last two days, even more reasons to feel this whole consultation arrangement falls far short of a transparent and all-inclusive consultation.

1. The study commissioned as an 'independent academic review' is not only authored entirely by tobacco control professionals, but as DP points out, it relies on a collection of studies that are not only specifically tobacco control studies and funded as such but nearly half of them are authored by the authors of the so-called independent review.

2. (h/tip Xopher, from his own consultation response)

Previous consultations have been criticised as quoted below :

 “The Government has been accused of fixing the outcome of public consultations on health policy after it emerged that reviews were flooded with block votes from groups funded entirely by the taxpayer.”  

“…….. said the disclosures summed up Labour's "cavalier" approach to consulting the public.” 

…… said: "It will come as no surprise to us if the Department of Health has funded organisations that provide the responses to consultations that the Government is looking for.” 

"The public are understandably cynical about the way Labour consults the public - it's time we had a Government that treats the public and their views with the respect they deserve." 

Can we be assured that this consultation will be impartial and free of the above criticism? I hope so since these are the words of Andrew Lansley MP who in his current Government role has a full oversight of Health Department activity and as an elected Member of Parliament is duty bound to uphold democracy in this Country. 

What's the difference between being in Opposition and being in Government? Quite a lot, it would seem.

Of course Action and Smoking on Health (and now ASH Scotland) both know that there are reasons the public cannot be trusted with fully open consultations. Action on Smoking and Health recently published its tobacco company stooge list, which included the CBI, major trade unions and everything in between. Sheila Duffy today publishes an opinion piece in the Scotsman, explaining why Scottish ministers should fully implement Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

Article 5.3 of the FCTC recognises the “irreconcilable conflict” between public health and tobacco industry interests and requires governments to engage with the industry only so far as is absolutely necessary to organise effective regulation. 

If Scottish ministers were fully to implement Article 5.3 that would mean agreeing to transparency in all contacts with the industry. 

It would involve a policy of disinvestment of public money from tobacco shares. It should require a special declaration of any tobacco interests from any individuals and organisations engaged in public health policy discussions.

In the real world where the rest of us live, the world is full of interests that can endanger health if left unchecked. It is not only bad products but corrupt practices that contribute to poor public health outcomes. For example from the US (just to illustrate) an executive from Monsanto has undue power in the FDA. This is of no concern to the Sheila Duffys of this world because they are still in the nursery where food is good for you and tobacco is bad for you.

Sheila also has a go at defending the current consultation process but does not begin to address the issues. One suspects that she does not really understand them.

Over the last month a joint UK and Scottish Government consultation on requiring tobacco to be sold in plain packaging has been met with industry-funded opposition, scaremongering stories and misleading information.

There is nothing misleading in what Dick Puddlecote, the Hands off our Packs Campaign, I or anyone has said in pointing out that the Department of Health wants to listen only to tobacco control and they attempt to make a virtue of this one-sidedness by invoking article 5.3 of the FCTC.

Children discuss pretty boxes for CRUK study

Are these the kids whose confidentiality Gerard Hastings was so keen to protect last summer?



Oh they can't be, they're too young.

Robert Dow comments again in another letter to the press.

Do these clowns really think this is evidence that these children will take up smoking in ten years' time – just because they find the boxes attractive? I hate to cast any doubt on the integrity of the researchers (the whole project is ridiculous anyway) but it is hard to imagine that they presented these packs to the kids without hinting at what was expected of them. But that is almost beside the point. All this proves is that the kids have somehow managed to blind themselves to the pictures of diseased organs and babies in incubators (how does that make any kid 'almost happy'?) seeing only the 'pretty' packaging. It tells us nothing about the likelihood of their smoking later in life.

Dick Puddlecote has covered this issue in depth:

Nonsense about serving times as a consequence of plain packaging
Brand awareness claims not upheld by CRUK study

Networking: tobacco control, social marketing and real friendship on Facebook

From Dick Puddlecote and CAGE Canada, reporting the disappearance of Stirling University's Freedom of Information Request page yesterday.

As if to demonstrate further the Ivory Towers mentality of tobacco control comes this letter from tobacco control advocates Simon Chapman and Becky Freeman, down under ... leading to this Facebook group. You get in only if you have the right attitude and probably the right friends.

Social marketing in, commercial marketing out ... fair enough to a point, but what's with all the secrecy? For the record, ' We don’t welcome anyone with tobacco industry ties and those who are regularly offensive.' I don't have any ties to the tobacco industry, but I won't waste their time by applying.

Everybody but everybody has got a part to play. Sometimes.

H/tip to Dick Puddlecote who picked up an opportunity missed on the recent Panorama documentary about drink. The investigator berated UK Health Secretary Anne Milton for the presence of alcohol industry representatives in policy discussions on alcohol. He neglected to remind her that her own policy document on tobacco directly contradicted this sentiment.

10.1 The government takes very seriously its obligations as a party to the World Health organization’s framework convention on Tobacco control (FCTC). The FCTC places obligations on parties to protect the development of public health policy from the vested interests of the tobacco industry. As a result, the tobacco industry has not been involved in the development of this Tobacco control plan.

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control recommends preventing tobacco industry interests from influencing health policy. Earlier this year, the policy was applied to alcohol at a summit in Scotland hosted by Alcohol Focus Scotland and ASH Scotland. Meanwhile south of the border, according to Panorama, health bodies withdrew from the consultation discussions on alcohol policy because they felt the alcohol industry had too much influence. Said Anne Milton to the investigator:

"We have to talk to people that we disagree with, but it's really important because, actually, when you look at public health - and alcohol as a public health issue - what we need to do is employ every tool in the box. And everybody, but everybody, has got a part to play."

The expectation among health bodies now appears to be that industry should get pushed out, and that the correct answers on alcohol involve price, marketing and availability. While Anne Milton is correct that all parties have legitimate interests, the logical conclusion of her position is that the demands of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control makes inclusive decision making impossible. However Panorama's reporter clearly shares the health lobby's view that the alcohol industry's presence in policy discussions gives it too much influence. The way to modify this influence however is for 'health' groups to stay involved, and not walk out of discussions just because they don't get their own way.

Chris Snowdon provides some historical perspective on drinking rates.