Tuesday 26 March 2024

Looking back on the WHO and looking forward to prohibition

I caught up with Martin Cullip and Lindsey Stroud on their podcast Across the Pond last week. I was with them in Panama in February to shadow the big WHO anti-nicotine conference. We looked back on events over there and discussed Rishi Sunak's looming crackdown on vapes and tobacco.



Monday 25 March 2024

Temperance 2.0

There's a good article in the wine trade press titled 'How Neo-Prohibitionists Came to Shape Alcohol Policy' by Felicity Carter looking at temperance groups masquerading as 'public health' NGOs. Give it a read. 
 

Movendi International describes itself as "the largest independent global movement for development through alcohol prevention."

Founded in upstate New York in 1851, it began as a temperance group that was heavily influenced by the Freemasons-complete with regalia and rituals. Originally called the Independent Order of Good Templars (I.O.G.T.), it spread rapidly across the U.S., Canada, and England. By 1900 there were groups in places as far-flung as Sri Lanka, Burma, Nigeria, and Panama. Everywhere the I.O.G.T. went, it inspired the founding of other temperance groups.

The efforts of such groups culminated, of course, during Prohibition, yet the unpopularity of Prohibition caused membership to fall, while the rise of Alcoholics Anonymous made such groups less relevant. After World War II, the I.O.G.T. turned to southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

It dispensed with the regalia in the 1970s and rebranded as Movendi International in 2020. Movendi is a portmanteau of 'modus vivendi,' meaning 'way of living;' it presents itself as a human rights, "heart-led" organization and says it is not against alcohol12. Instead, "...we advocate for every person's right to choose to live free from alcohol." Yet anyone who joins must agree13 that "I lead a lifestyle free from the use of alcohol and other drugs."

Movendi's worldview is simple: There are no artisans, small producers, or vignerons connected to land and history. There is only 'Big Alcohol,' which uses propaganda words like "moderation" and "craft" to conceal its true nature.

And Big Alcohol is an ally of Big Tobacco14Movendi links alcohol to tobacco whenever it can.

But while Movendi and other groups are busy mischaracterizing the alcohol industry as one united group, they go out of their way to hide their own origins.

Take Movendi's Swedish branch, the IOGT-NTO15, which presents itself as an anti-poverty organization-solving poverty by solving alcohol. It was formed in 1970 after the Swedish branch of I.O.G.T. merged with a Christian temperance group.

Ironically, the Swedish branch is partly funded by a lottery16; in 2018 they were taken to court17 and threatened with a fine of 3 million kroner (about $260,000) if they didn't stop using deceptive practices. Specialists have long recognized that gambling is an addiction, making this a curious choice of funding for a temperance movement.

Other temperance groups use similar tactics. Take the Institute of Alcohol Studies18 in London, for example, which has a stellar line-up of doctors and scientists advising it, but which is funded by Alliance House19, a temperance group headed by religious figures.

 

 



Friday 22 March 2024

Dan Malleck on drink, drugs and prohibition

I forgot to mention that we've started a new series of The Swift Half with Snowdon. Check out the entertaining episode with the anarcho-capitalist Charlie Amos here.

The Canadian historian Dan Malleck was in London recently so I got him to come on The Swift Half again. Dan is one of the few people to have publicly spoken out about the zany new alcohol guidelines that have been proposed in Canada. We discussed how that was going and talked about drink, drugs and prohibition generally. Give it a watch.






Wednesday 20 March 2024

Greg Fell - Britain's most pointless man?

Our old fiend Greg Fell has been busy getting billboards banned in Sheffield in what even he admits is a pointless endeavour. 
 

There are over 130 directors of public health in England and it is nice work if you can get it. The job comes with a six figure salary and you don’t need a medical degree. So long as you can turn up to meetings and drop phrases like “health inequalities” and “commercial determinants of health” into conversation, you’re in clover. Not knowing much about infectious diseases proved to be a handicap when COVID-19 emerged in 2020 and public health directors were left twiddling their thumbs while they waited for instructions from central government, but Greg Fell spotted an opportunity. When Boris Johnson closed the pubs on 20 March, he suggested that “whilst we are implementing emergency legislation why not go really far and ban tobacco sales”. Exactly four years later, the government brought forward legislation to do precisely that.

With COVID-19 in the rearview mirror, there is a palpable sense of relief among directors of public health that they can get back to lobbying for petty interventions in private lifestyles. Last December, Wakefield’s public health director complained that legal action from Kentucky Fried Chicken was “thwarting efforts to stop fast-food outlets near schools” in his area. There was happier news in Sunderland where the council managed to prevent a Mexican takeaway shop from opening and the public health director’s annual report focused exclusively on the “commercial determinants of health”. They are so back!

 



Tuesday 19 March 2024

Same old ASH

Last week, former public health minister Steve Brine wrote in support of Sunak’s tobacco ban for Conservative Home. Like nearly everyone who goes to the Department of Health, Brine went native and has never recovered. His article is the usual blinkered prohibitionist nonsense - he even denies that the ban will boost the illicit trade - but he starts with a statistic that sounds credible.
 

Two-thirds of adults in Britain back the Government’s smoking ban plan, including nearly three-quarters of Conservative voters, in a representative poll carried out by YouGov for ASH.

 
He returns to this poll in his closing paragraph.
 

The public understand that the Government’s smoking ban will save lives and improve the health and wellbeing not just of individuals and their families but also of our economy. That is why the overwhelming majority of the public and parliamentarians support the legislation.

 
Since 87% of Britons do not smoke and the UK has become an oppresively intolerant country in recent years, this claim wouldn’t surprise me. But I know better than to trust an ASH survey. Before the smoking ban, they conducted several polls claiming that most people wanted a total ban on smoking in pubs. They achieved this by giving people a binary option between smoking everywhere versus smoking nowhere. But when other polls gave people the option of allowing separate smoking rooms, most people were happy with that (and remained so for years after the ban was introduced).
 
The question ASH used in their latest survey is almost unbelievable:
 

How strongly, if at all, do you support or oppose a goal to make Britain a country where no one smokes?”

 
You will have noticed that there is no mention of ban there. There is no mention of any policy, coercive or liberal, let alone the gradual prohibition of all cigarettes, cigars, heated tobacco, shisha and cigarette packs. It doesn’t show that ‘the overwhelming majority’ ‘support the legislation’. It is just an aspiration, a ‘goal’. It would be quite possible for a liberal who supports tobacco harm reduction but hates the nanny state to agree with this ambition.

Read the rest on my Substack (free). And I have replied on Conservative Home today.



Monday 18 March 2024

Prohibition, problem gambling and playing with words

Australia's umpteenth attempt to ban e-cigarettes has been warmly applauded by the renowned wowser and imbecile Simon Chapman. Nicotine-containing vapes have always been illegal in Australia. Importation of these products for personal use was banned a few years ago and now the government is banning all e-cigarettes regardless of whether they contain nicotine or not. 

As dozens of tobacconists are being literally firebombed, the devastating yet predictable consequences of prohibition (for vapes) and neo-prohibitionist sin taxes (on cigarettes) could not be more obvious to Australians. (There's an excellent article by two criminologists in The Conversation that is well worth reading.) But Simple Simon not only refuses to take any share of the blame for the consequences of the policies he spent his life lobbying for, he refuses to accept that what is happening to vapes is prohibition. Why? Because vapers will (in theory) be allowed to get e-cigarettes on prescription.
 


Note the way in which he portrays those who think e-cigarettes should be sold as consumer products like they are in normal countries as 'extremists'. Note also that he is using a photo of an anti-Prohibition rally taken during Prohibition in the USA. This is, of course, the example that comes most readily to mind when people hear the word 'prohibition'. Chapman is keen to distance himself from that kind of prohibition because it was such a notorious fiasco.

However, if he weren't such an ignoramus and didn't suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome, he would know that alcohol was available on prescription during Prohibition (Winston Churchill famously got a doctor's note when he visited the USA). Indeed, the Volstead Act was softer on drink than the Aussie government is on vapes. Ordinary people were never arrested for mere possession of alcohol whereas people are already being arrested for the possession of vapes and vape juice in Australia.

So if Chapman doesn't think the ban on vapes is prohibition, he must think that Prohibition wasn't prohibition either.

Back in Britain, the anti-gambling lobby's rising star Matt Gaskell has also been playing with words.
 

The problem here is that most of these phrases are technical terms with scientific definitions. The exception is 'addict', but the only people who use that word about problem gamblers are anti-gambling activists and the media. Problem gambling does not necessary involve addiction, but problem gambling is definitely a thing. It is recognised by clinicians and researchers around the world and is diagnosed with the PGSI test. PGSI stands for Problem Gambling Severity Index.

A similar but distinct test is the DSM-V. This refers to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is the diagnostic test for the recognised condition of 'gambling disorder' which, in the previous (fourth) edition, was called 'pathological gambling'.
 
Matt Gaskell is the Clinical Lead for the NHS Northern Gambling Service which is part of the NHS's National Problem Gambling Clinic . When it opened in 2020, he said:
 

"Gambling addiction is a new public health crisis. It’s causing serious harm to thousands of people across the UK. This includes mental health problems, serious debt, breakdown of relationships, loss of employment, crime, homelessness and, tragically, sometimes suicide.

"Through my work in mental health and addictions treatment over the years I’ve seen the harms that problem gambling can cause people. However the chances of recovery from addictions like problem gambling can be very good with proper treatment." 
 
Running a problem gambling clinic without uses terms like 'problem gambling' and 'gambling disorder' is like being an oncologist and banning the terms 'cancer' and 'tumour'. So why this sudden retreat from recognised scientific terminology that no one has had a problem with in the past? It all comes back to what I was writing about last year - the 'public health' takeover of gambling policy and research. Under the new ideology, everyone is at risk from gambling, every gambler is harmed and gambling is inherently dangerous. 

Put simply, the existing literature correctly sees problem gambling as a complex mental disorder (“gambling disorder”) that is best dealt with by clinicians and augmented by harm reduction policies. By contrast, the “public health” approach is to stigmatise gambling, demonise the gambling industry and use tobacco-style regulation to deter as many people from gambling as possible. The difference between the two approaches is that the former is based on evidence and works whereas the latter is based on wilful ignorance, creates negative unintended consequences and fails.
 
The new wave of anti-gambling activists take issue with anything that implies that the psychological condition of gambling disorder only affects a relative handful of people (which it does) or implies that individuals can do anything about it (which they can). It's going to be difficult for people who treat problem gamblers to maintain this conceit because the first step to recovery is getting people to admit that they are responsible for their actions and can change their behaviour, but I'm sure they'll manage it.
 
 


Thursday 14 March 2024

The menthol cigarette ban - another 'public health' win!

Menthol cigarettes were banned in the EU in May 2020 and, as usual, the UK government decided against using its new freedoms outside of the bloc to allow more freedom to people in the UK.

A study in the junk journal Tobacco Control by the usual career anti-smokers (Linda Bauld etc.) now claims victory because...
 

The current study shows no increase in illicit purchasing 3 years after the ban in GB and is an important contribution to the literature assessing the longer-term impact of menthol cigarette bans; it is another example of how the industry’s oft-predicted surge in illicit cigarette purchases as a result of tobacco control measures did not materialise.

 
Big Tobacco in the mud! Take that!

However...

Despite being banned in 2020, one million adults continue to smoke menthol cigarettes in GB. The prevalence of menthol cigarette smoking only decreased slightly and non-significantly among adults who smoke, from 16% at the end of 2020 to 14% at the beginning of 2023.
 
Oh dear. Still, let's not allow the total and utter failure of the policy to achieve its goal distract us from Big Tobacco being wrong about the illicit trade. They're in the mud!
 
According to the authors, people who smoke menthol cigarettes were no more likely to buy from illicit sources than those who smoke normal cigarettes, although that's not what their own data shows (see table below).
 
 
Nevertheless, it is clear that a lot of people have been buying menthol (or menthol-ish) cigarettes from legal sources. The authors explain various ways in which this can be done, all of which could have been predicted by someone who is a genuine expert on the tobacco market rather than a rent-a-gob prohibitionist.
 
There are several reasons why people in the UK may continue to smoke menthol cigarettes despite the ban. First, it is possible to buy factory-made cigarettes or roll-your-own tobacco with menthol flavour in countries without a ban and bring them back to the UK either within the legal limits for personal use or through illicit means. Second, people can purchase menthol accessories, such as filters or capsules inserted in a hole in filters of factory-made cigarettes, infusion cards for cigarette packs to spread menthol aroma and flavour or menthol-flavoured filters for use with roll-your-own tobacco. These accessories are not covered by the ban and some of them seem to have been placed on the UK market in direct response to the ban. Another tactic that the tobacco industry used to circumvent the ban is to produce cigarettes that may be perceived as mentholated, while the manufacturers claim that the flavours are not characterising and are therefore allowed.

So the reason there has not been a booming black market in menthol cigarettes is that the legislation was so badly drafted that a black market wasn't necessary. And this is supposed to be a win??
 
Incidentally, all the data used in this study starts in October 2020 and ends in March 2023, despite the ban taking effect in May 2020, so it doesn't tell you anything about what happened when the ban was introduced. Tobacco Control really will publish any old rubbish.