News you might have missed
This is going to hurt
First, a public service announcement. If you’re a vaper, you need to stock up on vape juice. The vape tax starts on 1 October. That’s less than a week away. Retailers have until 31 March 2027 to sell their old stock but you don’t know when they’re going to run out so don’t hang around. The tax is £2.64 per 10ml bottle (including VAT) so if, like me, you pay around £1.50 for a bottle, the price is going to roughly treble. And £2.64 is the minimum additional cost. Other business costs caused by the tax are likely to make it more than that.
If you’re in Wales, 1 October is an even bigger day because the minimum price on alcohol is going up from 50p to 65p so stock up and/or move closer to the border.
You don’t hate the state enough.
France has fallen
A politician had a small beer and a neo-temperance group went wild.
A prominent contender in the race to succeed President Emmanuel Macron is facing accusations from anti-addiction groups of violating a law regulating the promotion of alcohol with a video inviting French voters to join him over a beer. Former prime minister Gabriel Attal this week launched on social media what he called the “1,000 bistros” campaign, brandishing a half pint of beer in a traditional café.
“We see Gabriel Attal walking with a beer, sitting down with it, clinking glasses... The problem lies in associating alcohol with conviviality,” said Mickaël Naassila, president of the French Society of Alcohol Studies (SFA).
Mickaël sounds like a lot of fun.
Textbook slippery slope
Adverts for airlines, cruises, fossil fuels, SUVs and “fast fashion” have been banned on advertising sites owned by Bristol’s Green-run council. The Green MP Carla Denyer, who thinks she can speak for 500,000 people, told the Guardian that these products and services “do not align with our community values”. On Twitter, she gave a pitch perfect recital of the slippery slope argument…
The great Mario Rizzo has written some good stuff about the slippery slope. One aspect of it is that people subtly alter the argument for the original policy and then broaden the scope of what’s left. In this instance, one argument for banning adverts for cigarettes was that they are a “unique” product. That obviously has to be erased from the record by those who want to take the ban to the ‘next logical step’ and so they focus instead on health. The health aspect is then broadened to include the notion that Primark clothes are somehow killing us.
The slippery slope is often said to be a logical fallacy, but if you simply call it ‘setting a precedent’ it makes perfect sense.
Plain packaging for alcohol?
Speaking of the slippery slope, an Australian academic has called for mandatory health warnings on alcohol, but that’s not enough for a neo-temperance lobbyist. Nothing ever is.
Dr Hadinata, who co-chairs the Alcohol and Other Drugs Committee at the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, also wants more detailed warnings, but suggests plain packaging similar to tobacco products will also improve health outcomes.
Maybe we shouldn’t have opened that Pandora’s Box, eh?
Poacher turned poacher
The Spectator has unearthed a 2004 Playboy interview with casino entrepreneur turned anti-gambling ‘philanthropist’ Derek Webb. Webb has donated over £1 million to the Labour Party, spearheaded the campaign against fixed-odds betting terminals and is currently funding a crusade against fruit machines. How different from the Derek of 2004…
It’s an extraordinary pivot for a man whose inventions, Playboy notes, are ‘designed, as all casino games must be, so that the longer a gambler plays, the more he or she is likely to lose’.
… The feature concludes with Webb enthusing about his next invention: a machine that, as Playboy explains, can ‘take the elements of a table game and put them inside a slot machine’.
What a good idea!
A magnificent achievement
Australian health minister Mark Butler has been given a gong for his services to tobacco control.
The Public Health Association of Australia announced on Thursday it was awarding Mr Butler with the President’s Award for his contribution to “driving down smoking rates”.
Australia’s illicit tobacco market has exploded over recent years, with criminal gangs estimated to control 80 per cent of the trade.
Well played, sir. Well played indeed.
The fruits of academia
Smoking and carbon monoxide, not as bad as they sound
Smokers are much less likely to get Parkinson’s Disease than nonsmokers. Even the most fervent anti-smoking quacks don’t try to deny that. But why? A new study suggests that it isn’t the tobacco or the nicotine that is responsible, but the carbon monoxide.
Among individuals who never smoked, higher exhaled CO levels were associated with lower PD risk. These findings demonstrate a potentially protective role of CO in PD etiology, which help explain the association between smoking and PD observed in this and other epidemiological studies
It’s an interesting theory, although it doesn’t explain why snus users are also much less likely to get the disease.
Consumers like it so let’s ban it
A bunch of ‘public health’ researchers asked some Australians about nutritional claims on alcohol packaging. They were asked whether they had ever seen claims about carbs, sugar, calories, vegan, “natural”, gluten, fruit and preservatives/additives. You can imagine the kind of thing: ‘no added sugar’, ‘gluten-free’, etc. The claims are simple and factual because, as the authors note, “Australian food safety laws prohibit statements that suggest or imply health benefits”.
Most of the respondents said they had seen most of these claims on alcohol at some point. Claims about sugar, carbs and calories seemed to be most common. The majority of respondents also said that it was important for consumers to have access to this information and only a minority (around 10%) thought the claims were untrue.
In general, a substantial proportion of the sample reported favourable opinions of nutrition claims.
Jolly good. Or maybe not. According to the authors, it could be jolly bad.
Overall, these results support previous research indicating that more stringent regulation is needed to limit the use of claim-based marketing messages, so as to enable consumers to make informed decisions about their consumption, and promote better health outcomes in priority populations.
Eh?
The ideal policy scenario from a public health perspective is therefore prohibiting nutrition-related claims while also mandating a health warning label.
People like nutritional information and some people, such as those who are avoiding gluten or carbs, find them very useful. So obviously we should ban them.
The present results indicate that nutrition claims are perceived by many consumers as credible, relevant, understandable and important sources of information about alcohol. Public health policy responses to restrict this subtle and pervasive form of alcohol marketing are needed. Consumers who are seeking health and nutritional information to guide their product selection should have access to objective and evidence-based messaging – especially warnings regarding the harms of alcohol use – rather than relying on biased marketing tactics.
It would save a lot of money if “public health” academics simply published the conclusion of their studies and didn’t bother conducting the research.
Argument ad tobacconum
A striking conclusion in the abstract of this study about ‘ultra-processed food’…
Given the tobacco industry’s well-documented strategy of manufacturing academic doubt about its products’ harms, these findings raise concern that the food industry may be following a similar playbook as evidence for the health risks of ultraprocessed foods continues to grow.
The study found that that studies which criticise the ludicrous NOVA definition of an ‘ultra-processed food’ often include “at least 1 industry-affiliated author”. Are their criticisms valid? Is there anything wrong with a food scientist being affiliated with the food industry? The authors don’t care. It’s much simpler to invoke the spectre of BiG ToBaCCo.
From the desk of Dr C. J. Snowdon
The government has created some incredibly puritanical rules for school meals which I wrote about for Spiked.
My latest IEA publication is The Capitalist Command Economy. It’s a fairly snappy read so please read it.
I reviewed Alvin Roth’s new book Moral Economics for the Economic Affairs Substack.
I wrote about why a House of Lords committee suddenly wants to ban gambling advertising for The Critic.
And finally…
The UK public consultation on e-cigarette regulation closes on 2 October. Please take a few minutes out to tell politicians not to regulate vapes like cigarettes.
Enjoy your weekend, despite it all.
I took a look at that CO paper. It is a great example of just how divorced from scientific reasoning people who do epidemiology are. First, there are tons of occupational studies that look at a lot of people with high CO exposure. You might think that, perhaps, if this phenomenon were true then someone would have noticed it before. Second, just within the bounds of the paper, they do not seem to realize that -- contrary to all that we know -- their results suggestion that serious combustion air pollution is harmless (and beneficial by this one measure), and by extension, smoking must not really be all that bad for you. If having high levels of CO in one's body, and it is caused by burning organic matter (something that is right there in their words, but they somehow forget it), and it does not seem to have bad results, then rural air pollution (from a lack of emission controls and from indoor solid-fuel cooking) is just fine. Gee, I wonder who might like to be able to claim that. Also, so is smoking. And third, the plausibility that oxygen deprivation protects against PD (which is really the only apparent mechanism for the causation they claim) is, well, a bit of a stretch.
I did not read carefully enough to form an opinion about whether this is the result of measurement error and/or confounding (possibly be likelihood of diagnoses across populations), or if there is some kind of survivor bias, or if they just didn't measure smoking well, or if the whole thing was just fraudulent.
"You don’t hate the state enough."
I hate the meddling EU and Swedish state with a passion. In another few years, I'll run out of the 72mg nicotine base that I keep in my freezer. Here in Sweden, a 10ml bottle of EU compliant e-juice is the equivalent of £6.78 per bottle. :o