While the country enjoyed a glorious barbecue weekend, the incessant bleating from whey-faced puritans after Friday's decision to shelve plain packaging still hasn't abated, with desperate scrabbling by the tobacco control industry to shift attention away from the fact that it is a nonsense of an idea which has been overwhelmingly rejected by the public.While some are still trying to blame lobbyists for the Conservative party forcing a fantasy U-turn from a policy the coalition government (an entirely different entity) had repeatedly said they had an 'open mind' about, TV doctor Sarah Jarvis (pictured left) has chosen a more unusual argument.
In a debate on Radio 4, it was reasonably put to her that plain packs could encourage an increase in vastly more dangerous counterfeit products, and that there was no decent evidence for such a measure (which there isn't, apart from the stuff her side rigged, of course).
She responded that she doesn't care about counterfeit fags - which the BBC found were "thirty times more toxic than ordinary cigarettes" - nor does she think that sound evidence is needed before heavily interfering with businesses; ignoring public consultations; and riding roughshod over international trade treaties.
Says it all, really. It's the usual anti-smoking fare, a policy without evidence which doesn't require any more justification than the fact that arrogant statist prodnoses demand it.
And as for a doctor not caring about harm from dangerous counterfeits nor about how many criminal counterfeit gangs there are, who is truly surprised? It has never been about health anyway.
H/T Moonrakin in comments here.
