Right next door to Hell

I'm going to Geneva to shadow a WHO conference

The WHO’s big biennial tobacco conference kicks off this week in Geneva. A global tobacco conference wouldn’t be a bad idea right now. In a sane world, governments would be getting together to discuss how things are going so badly wrong and how to correct their mistakes.

Led astray by fanatics, a growing number of countries are seeing unintended consequences that are too disastrous to deny. Australia is the most dramatic example, but the black market in tobacco in Britain is also now a major source of criminal activity. Here are just some of the BBC stories from the last month involving the illegal sale of cigarettes:

Mini market closed after illegal cigarettes seized

Man jailed over illegal cigarettes and tobacco

£30,000 of illegal tobacco and vapes seized

Illegal vapes and cigarettes worth £60,000 seized

Illegal goods worth £280k netted in city shop raids

Arrests made and goods seized in police raids

Mini-mart crime network a ‘pull factor’ for illegal migrants, say MPs

Illicit cigarettes found under fake shop floors

Hundreds arrested in High Street crime crackdown

High Street action uncovers £75k of illegal goods

In countries such as France and the Netherlands, the illicit trade is similarly spiralling out of control. In Eastern Europe, balloons are being used to smuggle tobacco into neighbouring countries. In India, a WHO-approved ban on vapes has predictably led to a “rampant unregulated gray/black market”.

Tobacco duty receipts are declining, but in many countries smoking rates are holding steady. In the EU, the smoking rate has barely budged in a decade.

Faced with the consequences of its own actions, the anti-smoking lobby has shoved its head deeper into the sand. The secretariat for the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has set out its stall for the eleventh Conference of the Parties (COP 11) by proposing some “forward-looking measures” that are just different flavours of prohibition. The real solution is to make smoking reasonably affordable while encouraging the use of low and ultra-low risk nicotine products like pouches and vapes. Instead, under the influence of Mike Bloomberg’s billions, they are demanding ludicrous policies such as putting health warnings on individual cigarettes and banning cigarette filters.

A newly minted tobacco control lie is that the very concept of harm reduction is the invention of the “nicotine industry” and that harm reduction is an “industry narrative”. This is now the line that loyal foot soldiers must take, despite the WHO’s definition of tobacco control being…

“a range of supply, demand and harm reduction strategies that aim to improve the health of a population by eliminating or reducing their consumption of tobacco products and exposure to tobacco smoke”.

It is hard to believe that the WHO will get away with this shameless volte-face but through sheer repetition they will probably achieve it. Expect to hear this lie repeated again and again during COP 11 until it becomes the new truth.

The WHO is no longer very interested in reducing people’s “consumption of tobacco products”. It is now focused on reducing people’s consumption of products that contain no tobacco, do not produce “tobacco smoke”, and are substitutes for tobacco products. It is debatable whether this is even within the remit of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control - given the WHO’s own definition of “tobacco control” - but it is certainly counter-productive and a threat to individual liberty. As I argued recently, it is quite possible that there would be fewer smokers around today if there had never been an anti-smoking movement.

As with the last two COP meetings, I will be in town with an impressive array of experts to have a reality-based discussion about what governments should do to heal their self-inflicted wounds, cut crime and improve health. The public and media are always banned from attending the conference (!), and it is anyone’s guess who will be on the UK’s delegation, but we’ll be doing our best to report on what’s happening and will be live-streaming a series of interviews and panel discussions throughout the week, so keep an eye on YouTube if this is your kind of thing.