Please Forget Australia Exists, Says BBC

So the big 'public health' news today - according to the BBC and just about no-one else - was about plain packaging saving imaginary lives.

All the evidence suggests standardised cigarette packs would save lives by reducing the number of people who start smoking, the journal Addiction reports. 

Its summary of the scientific evidence suggests stopping one in 20 people from taking up the habit would save 2,000 lives in the UK each year.

"All the evidence"? Well not really, no. And to say this is 'scientific' evidence is a bit of an overstatement considering none of it has been produced by anyone who could remotely be called a scientist.

Sociologist, perhaps. Lobbyist, maybe, but no. The studies referred to are, of course, solely produced by people whose job it is to produce studies to support tobacco control legislation.

You see, a real scientist would occasionally produce a study which didn't agree with whatever the political anti-smoking lobby was, err, lobbying government for at any particular time. But in the world of tobacco control 'science', this never happens (because when it does the researcher is bullied, vilified, and drummed out of their profession).

Incredibly, though, today's BBC article was prompted not by a scientific survey of all available evidence (there is plenty that would not even have been considered, as is the usual case), but rather by an opinion piece written by plain packs advocate Ann McNeil and promoted by Robert West, another committed pro-plain packaging advocate. We have become accustomed to the grubby tactic of 'science by press release' from the tobacco control industry, but now it seems we are seeing the introduction of 'pretend science by opinion by press release'.

@Dick_Puddlecote @cjsnowdon This is the 'upmarket' version of 'someone told me in the pub' ... the pubs that are still open of course :)
— Smoking Hot (@N2Declare) February 17, 2015

What's more, West should know better than to descend to this level - he is an admirably staunch advocate of e-cigs so would have no doubt been appalled when the Daily Mail did the same thing with vaping. He was pretty pissed off with the WHO promoting their own brand of selective science too, recently.

This is a shocking piece of deception from @WHO. Someone at the top in the org needs to get a grip on this. http://t.co/XlMFtHH2it
— Robert West (@robertjwest) February 11, 2015

As always, the shifty, morally-bankrupt purpose is to get a headline published somewhere prominent, knowing that the vast majority of people read no further than that, and certainly never investigate what lies behind it. But for the record, what does lie behind it is this opinion piece in Addiction.

It references 10 studies exclusively written by tobacco control industry activists including arguably the policy creator Simon Chapman, Simon Chapman's right hand girl, long-standing anti-tobacco professional Crawford Moodie (referenced 80 times in the UK's rigged systematic review), plus a stellar cast of other highly partial dedicated anything-for-a-headline career prohibitionists.

Included in the list is a laughable study I commented on this time last week, one by someone using eye-tracking technology which was criticised by a proper eye-tracking scientist, and one which even argued the tobacco industry's case for them. All researchers, as usual, disingenuously claimed they had no conflict of interests {pfft}, handily forgetting the salary they derive from being paid by our taxes to produce anti-tobacco studies.

But the commentary behind all this chicanery was more laughable still!

Arguably, for an addictive product that kills so many of its users, the tobacco industry should consider itself fortunate that, purely through historical precedent, it is allowed to sell its toxic products at all, let alone try to make them attractive through the packaging.

No, it's not arguable at all. If tobacco was banned, government tax receipts would plummet, the FTSE100 would nosedive, pension funds would be decimated, tens of thousands of jobs would be lost, criminal enterprises would blossom and 'arguably' more kids would smoke because control on who buys tobacco would cease to exist. Anyone who seriously believes differently should probably go and live with these guys.

And as for this ...

As a population level intervention, it is clearly not possible, nor ethical, to mount large scale experiments to assess effect on smoking prevalence.

Of course it's possible and ethical to mount a large scale experiment on the effect of plain packaging on smoking prevalence. It's called Australia.

The best evidence to prove that it quite simply isn't working down under is the fact that people like West keep talking about daft and biased concocted science instead of being able to point out how 'successful' it has been at stopping kids smoking in a country which is running a live, real life trial. In fact, he admits as much in the BBC article.

However, he admitted that it was not possible to know if plain packaging had reduced the number of young smokers in Australia.

Which is kinda - no, actually, it is the entire - point.

Well here's a hint, Robert.

Hmm, I wonder why he didn't mention this?