Sunday Post reports dangers of counterfeit tobacco

To its credit the Sunday Post has published a story on the dangers of illicit cigarettes (the story is not published online). It reports the views of Roy Ramm, former Commander of Specialist Operations at New Scotland Yard, who 'has witnessed the illicit tobacco trade explode from a small-time cottage industry to a multi-billion pound trade of global proportions in his 30 year career'.

The content of these illegal products is, by definition, unregulated. Ramm speculates that 'fake fags can be 50 times more dangerous than normal cigarettes', as they may contain 'arsenic, asbestos or rat poison'. Unlike anti-smoking campaigners he is prepared to acknowledge a difference between a hazardous product that it regulated and a hazardous product that is not.    To the anti-smoking zealot, there is no difference between regulating a product and condoning it. Ramm is able to make this distinction, but the anti-smoker cannot say that fake fags are particularly dangerous without worrying about the implication that 'normal' ones are less dangerous.

 As per usual, Cancer Research UK is quoted in the article denying that plain packaging will have any impact on smuggling. To the extent that the plain packaging policy is not in place anywhere it may be hard to produce tangible evidence for an increase in tobacco smuggling.

But the logic of tobacco control is to denormalise smoking. I reported recently the story of a tobacconist forced by law to stop calling his shop 'tobacconist'. How are shops meant to convey what they have to offer the customer in the face of such laws? And if shoppers cannot find the legal product in their high street or local shop, where are they supposed to go? Anti-smoking campaigners cannot seem to see the hazard to the smoker in such a policy direction – or if they can see it they blame the smoker for wanting the product or the evil bastard who is prepared to supply it.

Nowhere do they blame themselves for failing to accommodate tastes that are more risky than their own. In their blindness they undo all the good work of regulators who have worked out what legal additives may be used in tobacco: first by insisting on extremely high tax levels, and then by hampering the operations of legal outlets, in the misguided hope that it will stop customers wanting the product at all.

Just as banning boxing would not stop people fighting (only ensure they did it without any recognised constraints, rules or etiquette), so this all-but-prohibitionist approach to tobacco will not stop people taking narcotics – especially in this age of economic austerity, where money is tight for so many. If a known risk is made inaccessible, life becomes more precarious and the quantity of unknown risks increases.

Cancer Research should note: it is not enough to say that plain packaging will not encourage smoking. They should absolutely lay off their policy of denormalising smokers and everybody involved in supplying legal and regulated tobacco. Smuggling of tobacco is already on an upward trajectory and plain packaging will do nothing to stop it.

A skeleton of this story appears online today in the Scotsman: perhaps the discussion will shed more light on it!

Plain packaging of shops: banned from calling themselves tobacconists

When the tobacco display ban was first suggested I feared immediately that it would result in more illicit trade. I felt it was important that shops should retain the ability to inform customers that they did in fact sell tobacco: since advertising was banned, this would not necessarily be easy. But I thought the authorities would want people to recognise lawful outlets for tobacco if only for the sake of getting the revenue. I didn't really expect authorities to go to the length of banning the word tobacconist from the signage of shops.

This is why:

The Smoke-Free Environments Act prohibits the display of tobacco products, or advertising that a business sells tobacco products.

 A business must change its name to satisfy this legislation, and this article features a business that has been calling itself a tobacconist for 50 years, since its establishment in 1962.

The proprietor's work in establishing and building this trading name and the business has been set at no value by an Act of Parliament that has denied him the right to use it. No doubt they will claim, as plain packaging advocates in Australia claim, that compensation is irrelevant since the government does not gain by depriving businesses of their trading name.

Well actually it does gain: by forcing businesses to change their names, it appropriates more power at the expense of traders. It would be nice to see a challenge to these powers to see if they are legal – while remembering that everything that Hitler did was legal.

The plan is to stop people from associating tobacco with lawful trade and legitimate shops. It it hard to see anything other than a concerted attempt to push the whole business underground and pretend that this will result in improved health.

They can make laws against tobacco but not against people taking risks with their health – especially in times of extreme uncertainty such as we are living in at present. They may succeed in outlawing tobacco but the health outcomes will not change for the better.