Everything Changes But ASH

There was a bit of a blast from the past on Twitter today when ASH Wales tweeted this.

It's 2 weeks since final implementation of plain packaging across the UK. Here's a look at the story so far... https://t.co/b3s69lCccE pic.twitter.com/LNn2YABvNg

— ASH Wales Cymru (@ASHWalesCymru) June 5, 2017

"Story" is the operative word here, because - as we have come to expect from tobacco control - it linked to a document containing a succession of fake facts like this, for example.

Some of the industry’s claims, and the facts, used in the campaign include: 

- Standardised packaging (in Australia) has led to an increase in youth smoking 

Data from Australia has been misquoted by the tobacco industry in attempts to substantiate this claim. The data used does not include enough under 18s for the figures to be reliable.

As I have explained before, this is rot. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) did, in fact, describe the data as "considered sufficiently reliable for most purposes".

Still, that's nothing compared with this huge whopper about the cost of tobacco displays

- Shutters to put tobacco out of sight will cost small retailers thousands of pounds 

This is simply untrue and cost-effective covers can be bought for as little as £120.

You'll notice that the link to an ASH London page is a dead one, which is probably for the best because the claim that shutters would only cost £120 is a downright lie which was uncovered by FOI requests in 2009. I wrote about it at the time, as did Chris Snowdon; you can read about how ASH deliberately and grubbily misled politicians in parliament by reading his report, The Dark Market (highly recommended), see the document Lord Darzi used to mislead MPs here, and the email where Debs Arnott was told explicitly that she was misleading legislators here.

Yet here we are eight years later and ASH Wales are still repeating this lie! Shameless stuff.

As it happens, at the time retailer groups told the Evening Standard that a gantry would actually cost around £1,500, and what did it turn out to be? Well, once shops were forced to comply, here was the deal being offered by the National Federation of Retail Newsagents.

Just the fact that the NFRN were offering credit terms to small newsagents should tell you that the £120 figure quoted by ASH - and tweeted again today by their fellow tax-leeching Welsh colleagues - was never even remote true, and they damn well know it.

As a curiosity, the dead link which ASH Wales's reiteration of the £120 fabrication once took you to was an ASH PDF which is still available on the Wayback Machine. The source for ASH wales's £120 is therefore an ASH APPG briefing and was put forward by a retailer from the North East called John McClurey.

During the debate over legislation to end retail displays of cigarettes, I remember seeing lobbying claims from trade bodies claiming that the legislation could cost retailers over £10,000. I’ve just worked out the bill for the curtains I will need to put over my gantry for cigarettes – it comes to only £120.

Isn't it uncanny that he "just worked out the bill" and it came to the exact same false and fraudulent figure that ASH had deceived MPs with, eh?

But then I've written about John McClurey before too. He is the only retailer in the entire country that ASH can find who despises smokers enough to agree with their hideous bullying of tobacconists, hence why they use him for absolutely everything.

In fact, he even turned up today in ASH's timeline too, again bemoaning the fact he has to sell those pesky fags that he makes profit from.

The truth is that selling tobacco for me is a burden not a benefit and one I wish I didn’t have to shoulder. I have to tie up lots of money in stock — money which I could spend more usefully elsewhere, and space which I could put to better use.

Well stop selling them John, you melt, no-one is forcing you! But then, do you think that - just as with the £120 lie he faithfully parroted back in 2009 - someone was putting words in his mouth or, more likely, writing the article for the dozy twat?

I hope the incoming government will continue to prioritise working towards a smokefree future and publish a new strategy to achieve this without delay.

Is this the same 'strategy' that ASH have been screaming about since last summer, by any chance? I think it might be you know.

People say that life moves on and everything changes over time, but perhaps not in the ASH echo chamber. Just as they are still trying to lumber e-cigs with medical registration like they were back in 2010, they are also still using the same useful idiot as they were in 2009 - who is still selling tobacco 8 years on, by the way - to try to pretend that their policies don't hurt newsagents, and are still regurgitating the same £120 gantry lie which was an abuse of the parliamentary process back 8 years ago and has been proven comprehensively to be false in the meantime.

It's astonishing that government is still willing to lavishly fund, with our taxes, such a comprehensively dishonest bunch of self-serving charlatans. 

The Debate Will Never Be Over

Two sound bites you will regularly hear from those in the tobacco control industry is that, when it comes to smoking bans and secondhand smoke, "the science is settled" and "the debate is over". This is classic political rhetoric designed to sway the public into backing the winner, a natural human psychological tendency.

It was, as Debs Arnott of ASH boasted at the time, "a confidence trick".

It is essential that campaigners create the impression of inevitable success. Campaigning of this kind is literally a confidence trick: the appearance of confidence both creates confidence and demoralises the opposition. The week before the free vote we made sure the government got the message that we "knew" we were going to win and it would be better for them to be on the winning side.

Of course, part of the reason they like to say the science is settled is because it simply isn't and they'd prefer you didn't look into it too much; and the reason they say the debate is over is that they simply don't want to debate the issue fairly because they know they'd lose. They even have an international treaty article specifically designed to silence all dissent - which they wield at every opportunity and purposely misinterpret - to con politicians into thinking that they are the only voices which should be listened to. This is necessary only because they know damn well that their case is extremely weak, some would say even criminally fraudulent.

The whole thing is a decades old pack of lies based on deliberately manipulated junk science and massive exaggeration of risk, as I mentioned earlier this week.

Sadly for them, though, the very weakness of their case means that however much they propagandise to the media things that they know very well are bald-faced lies, they will always struggle to get away with it.

Via WalesOnline:

A poll has revealed almost 60% of Welsh people want smoking rooms in pubs but nearly 50% want the habit banned on beaches. 

The survey was carried out by pollsters Populus, who asked 1,000 adults in Wales about their views earlier this month. 

It showed 58% backed smoking rooms and 48% backed beach bans - 46% thought people should be allowed to puff on the sand and 6% did not know.

Ten years on from the smoking ban being rolled out in Wales, this shows that the debate is still live, and it's live because there are significant numbers of people who simply don't believe something as benign as a few wisps of smoke warranted the destruction of the hospitality industry in Wales and subsequently the UK. If it was about health - which it wasn't - there were plenty other solutions which could have been considered, but none would have satisfied the vile bullies in tobacco control.

And bullies is the right word. If you have not seen it, and if you can stomach it, you can read in this document how the tobacco control lobby didn't simply present their junk science and hope that a ban would appear. It is a gleeful account from Arnott and Martin Dockrell about how they forced a government to abandon a democratically-accepted manifesto commitment by using division, chaos, propaganda, personal attacks on opponents and, yes, "a confidence trick".

The truth is that when the Health Act 2006 was passed there was absolutely no appetite for the ban we had inflicted on us in the UK. Only 33% of the public favoured an outright ban, as documented by the ONS [pdf] until they stopped asking the question so as to save the Labour government's blushes.

Click to enlarge

It doesn't look like things have changed that much since either. A majority of the sane (only 26% of those polled were smokers) still believe there are better options than the hideous result we now have to suffer.

Even the bansturbators themselves seem confused about what the ban was meant to be about, as the WalesOnline article also shows.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of anti-smoking charity Ash, dismissed the poll. 

“The benefits of smoke-free laws are not a matter of public opinion,” she said.

Hmm, interesting. That doesn't stop her and her freedom-stifling ilk from relying on public opinion when there is no threat to health whatsoever though, does it?

“The reason there is a complete ban on smoking in pubs, and smoking rooms in pubs are forbidden is that they do not protect the workers from the harmful effects of smoke.”

Wow! The bar workers get a look-in again! She must have got her feather duster out to clean that argument up, so long is it that we've heard it. Because once the bans were passed in Wales, Scotland and the UK, the emphasis instantly changed and was all about how the legislation would lead to a reduction in smoking prevalence (which didn't actually happen until e-cigs arrived later).

She is also being disingenuous because she knows very well that the studies corralled and tortured to come up with the paltry and largely irrelevant 24% increased risk in the SCOTH report were based on persistent exposure to smoke indoors over decades. They did not, and never will, measure harm from a "separate, well-ventilated designated smoking room" as was the focus of this poll. There's a reason for that, it's because they know that even their trademark brand of fake science has no chance of establishing any significant credible risk, so they'll not even attempt it.

“In England the Department of Health commissioned a report on the impact of the ban on smoking in public places,” she said. 

“It found bar workers’ health increased considerably after the laws came into force and their respiratory function improved. 

“In the first year there were 1,200 fewer admissions for heart attacks, purely because of the legislation.”

This is Debs at her junk-science toting best. Spouting about the now much-derided heart attack "miracle" scams puts her into the same kind of category as anti-vaxxers and people who believe the moon landings were faked. Quite apart from their being quite impossible, heart attack miracles have been rubbished even by those who think smoking bans are a great idea.

Besides, the Welsh authorities have a different, and undoubtedly more accurate, justification for the bans.

The Welsh Government said the smoking ban “played an important part of our efforts to reduce smoking rates in Wales, with the percentage of adults smoking now at a record low.” 

“Welsh Health Survey 2015 showed 19% of adults reported they currently smoke, down from 26% in 2003-04,” a spokesman said.

Yep, bullying smokers to quit, as if we didn't know it already.

So it looks like the debate isn't over, after all. And much as the richly state-funded sock puppets in the tobacco control industry would like to think the science is settled, it isn't because they have only innuendo, sleight of hand and conniving lobbying on their side. It seems that the public have noticed this and are ensuring that however much the liars in tobacco control lie, this is one subject that will not go away. Nor should it. 

Enough Already!

On Thursday, obsessed anti-smoking MP Alex Cunningham will be demanding that the government bully smokers even more than they already do.

Cunningham is the same MP who initiated the ban on smoking in cars which has been such a massive waste of time that the police say they're not interested and which has done the square root of fuck all for the health of the nation. It's such a balls-up that he should be hanging his head in shame for wasting our taxes on such an illiberal and barmy idea.

It is also the same Cunningham who vehemently objected to Channel 4 coming to film in his constituency for their Benefits Street programme.  He professed at the time to be sensitive to his constituents' concerns but it became clear during the show that the ones he was apparently worried about in front of the TV cameras had never seen the berk in their street before. He turned up just to give himself some airtime and got a flea in his ear from the residents for his trouble.

Perhaps if he spent more time visiting them and not wasting his efforts on an irrational hatred for smokers he may be better regarded.

Still, he's going to continue being a one-eyed waste of parliamentary space on Thursday, which is a bit stupid considering the public think his kind should just stop being arses.

Forest released a report today that points out what most people outside of the Westminster bubble already knew; the public are just not interested in anti-smoking rhetoric any more. Here are some takeaways from the polling.

• The public overwhelmingly believe the government has more pressing priorities than tackling smoking – investing in new doctors and nurses, for example.
• There is no appetite for additional tax rises on tobacco products – a huge majority believe that tobacco duty is already about right, too high or far too high.
• A significant majority of the public believe that purchasing illegal tobacco is an understandable response from consumers faced with the high cost of tobacco products.
• Measures to restrict smoking in outdoor public places such as parks and beaches have no popular or scientific legitimacy and would be hard to police.
• Following a dramatic fall in the number of people using NHS stop smoking services a significant majority of the public believe there should be a review of how these services are funded.
• A majority of the public believe the government’s tobacco control policies should be independently reviewed and should not be driven by taxpayer-funded lobby groups.
• Almost a decade since smoking was banned in pubs and clubs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and ten years since smoking was prohibited in Scotland’s pubs and bars, a majority of the public believe that pubs and private members’ clubs, including working men’s clubs, should be allowed to provide a well-ventilated designated smoking room to accommodate smokers.
• More than half the public also believe that actors should be allowed to smoke on stage and screen when smoking is integral to the plot or characterisation of the play they feature in

It is most encouraging to note from the report that, still, there is not a majority in favour of the kind of smoking ban we have had forced on us. 

Despite what state-funded tax-spongers like ASH like to pretend, this has always been the case. There was no majority of public opinion in favour in 2006, nor in 2010, and there still isn't. It shouldn't come as a surprise. Despite an avalanche of propaganda, the public are clever enough to know they are being lied to and more people than not don't believe the hype.

It won't stop extremists like Cunningham from carrying on displaying their single issue contempt in public, though, because that's just what his brand of prodnose do. Even though there is little appetite for further smoking restrictions amongst the public, he's going to waste scarce resources on Thursday blathering on about the subject once again anyway. 

Perhaps, instead, Cunningham should spend more time talking to the people in Kingston Road in his constituency about the issues that they actually worry about rather than using his exalted and highly-paid position in parliament to pursue his own personal prejudices. Just a thought. 

You can read the Forest report here. 

Home Smoking Bans: The Next Confidence Trick

Back in 2009, Deborah Arnott was caught off-guard and revealed the true extent of her prohibitionist ambitions.

It must have caught the fake charities as cold as it caught Forest though, as they were all wibbling at cross purposes.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said the charity was in favour of a ban on smoking in cars.

The risks were not just to children but to adults suffering from conditions like heart disease, she said.

That's the problem with being caught off-guard, Debs wasn't able to tailor her junk science quickly enough to the nonsense in hand so had to just grab what she was working on at the time - the total ban on smoking in cars, with or without children present. An interesting view into the future, I thought.

At the time, she was selling a policy of banning smoking only in cars containing children. She was very clear about that and would have told every MP who would listen that it wasn't an assault on property rights at all, oh no, merely an issue of protecting kids from a mythical exaggerated danger that her and her professional bansturbators fabricated to keep the gravy train going.

That unguarded comment in 2009 revealed that she may have had it at the back of mind but we now have proof positive that she was lying to politicians back then; a total ban on smoking in cars has always been her long-term plan.

It was never about children just as it wasn't ever about bar staff, @ASH_LDN are incorrigible liars https://t.co/r3k5KAbvJq pic.twitter.com/vgajR2On42

— Dick Puddlecote (@Dick_Puddlecote) October 1, 2016

It seems that she has now let slip, via The Guardian, another future policy goal; a ban on smoking in private homes.

Deborah Arnott, the director of Action on Smoking and Health, said: “While the ban on smoking in indoor public places resulted in significant health benefits, thousands of children are still exposed to smoke in the home and elsewhere. Growing up in a smoke-free environment is one of the best ways of ensuring that they are not attracted to smoking and lured into a lifelong addiction and ill-health.”

We all knew it was an end-goal no matter the oleaginous weasel words Arnott and her pals like to spew about their respect for personal rights. But that's the clearest sign yet.

Arnott once proudly boasted of the "confidence trick" she employed to con politicians into depriving private businesses of their right to determine their own policies on smoking in their premises. I hear that at the recent Royal Society of Medicine event, which Simon Chapman's fans all avoided, she was equally gushing about how she had conned parliamentarians into going for plain packaging.

Which begs the question. How do you think Arnott is going to convince MPs that banning people who own their own homes from smoking in them is a wholesome and liberty-loving idea?

She'll have a con trick up her sleeve no doubt, liars always do.

Liars Always Get Found Out In The End

Well here's a thing.

We jewel robbers have been insisting for years that tobacco control exclusively employs junk science as a means to mislead politicians, but have been called shills, trolls, accused of working for the tobacco industry and all manner of other insults.

By far the most egregious of these flights of science-free fantasy have been the heart attack "miracles". The first of all of them was - you won't be surprised to hear - imagined and promoted by Stanton Glantz and focussed on a small town in America called Helena. If you're not familiar with it, read the extract from Velvet Glove Iron Fist which explains how the claim that heart attacks declined by 40% following the town's smoking ban was not only garbage, but mathematically impossible.

You know what? Via Michael Siegel, it looks like we were telling the truth all along. Fancy that!

Helena Miracle? Not So Much; New Study Casts Doubt on Conclusions of Anti-Smoking Groups 

This week, a new study was published in the journal Medical Care Research and Review which re-examines the relationship between smoking bans and heart attack hospitalization rates. 

(See: Ho V, et al. A nationwide assessment of the association of smoking bans and cigarette taxes with hospitalizations for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia. Medical Care Research and Review 2016. Published online ahead of print on September 12, 2016. DOI: 10.1177/10775587/16668646.)  

The authors summarize the study as follows: 

"We examine the association between county-level smoking-related hospitalization rates and comprehensive smoking bans in 28 states from 2001 to 2008. Differences-in-differences analysis measures changes in hospitalization rates before versus after introducing bans in bars, restaurants, and workplaces, controlling for cigarette taxes, adjusting for local health and provider characteristics. Smoking bans were not associated with acute myocardial infarction or heart failure hospitalizations, but lowered pneumonia hospitalization rates for persons ages 60 to 74 years."

This merely repeats the findings of another study back in 2009 - the largest ever undertaken - on 217,023 heart attack admissions and 2 million heart attack deaths in 468 counties in all 50 states of the USA over an eight-year period which came to the conclusion:

"We find that workplace bans are not associated with statistically significant short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for myocardial infarction or other diseases. An analysis simulating smaller studies using subsamples reveals that large short-term increases in myocardial infarction incidence following a workplace ban are as common as the large decreases reported in the published literature."

Despite the incontrovertible fact that heart attack "miracles" are impossible and utter junk, these deliberately mendacious studies turn up in every juridiction where smoking bans have been enacted and each is exactly the same; they are all - without exception - an exercise in tobacco control lying.

In the UK, our first taste of it was Jill "Pinocchio" Pell's purposely-created lie that heart attacks plummeted in Scotland by 17% immediately after their ban. Despite being described as one of the 10 worst junk stats of 2007 by statisticians in The Times, it was believed by wooden top politicians and dickheads at the BBC for the simple reason that ASH, ASH Scotland, UKCTCS, CRUK, BHF and just about every other bunch of lying arseholes promoted it as settled science and proof positive that smoking bans saved people from collapsing of cardiac arrest at the bar.

When Pell's gerrymandered and cherry-picked stats were later compared with real data from NHS surveys, it was shown to be a pile of poppycock, but by then the lies the tobacco control industry intended had been accepted as fact and flown around the world. This 17% figure is still, to this day, quoted by politicians in defence of smoking restrictions; and ASH and their pals - despite knowing very well the figure is a blatant lie - continue to let people believe it.

When the same method of lying by junk research was employed in Wales and promptly rubbished by statistician Michael Blastland on the BBC, Public Health England's Martin Dockrell - then at ASH - launched an incredible attack accusing the impartial statistician of being a "conspiracy theorist" and a "dissident".

Indeed, Linda Bauld emphasised these junk studies in a review - and specifically referenced Jill Pell - when she was paid to pretend that smoking bans had had no impact on pubs whatsoever.

International evidence of impact on cardiovascular health

Recent systematic reviews of the international literature on smokefree legislation have also outlined its impact on cardiovascular health, primarily on hospital admissions for MI and other related cardiac conditions (IARC, 2009, Callinan et al, 2010). The recent Cochrane review included ten studies that reported hospital admission rates for MI or coronary heart disease following the introduction of smokefree legislation (Callinan et al, 2010). Five of these were in the USA, three in Italy, one in Canada and the final study in Scotland as cited above (Pell et al, 2008). Ten of these studies showed a significant drop in hospital admissions for MI following the legislation, with the remaining two showing a drop in deaths from coronary heart disease and the Scottish study showing better prognosis following acute coronary syndrome among non-smokers. 

I'll just digress for a minute here and remind you that this is why we are the ones on the side of the angels and why they deserve to be in prison. We expect certain qualities out of people who waste our taxes - deliberately lying to con gullible politicians into illiberal courses of action is not one of them.

Anyhow, back to Siegel ...

When these studies were first published, I warned anti-smoking groups not to use these conclusions to promote smoking bans because I believed that the conclusions were not adequately supported by the data. In particular, I criticized these studies and questioned their conclusions because they did not adequately account for secular trends in heart attack rates that were occurring even in the absence of smoking bans. 

I also argued that it was not plausible to see such large effects in so short a time span because it takes many years for heart disease to develop. In contrast, I noted that respiratory effects might be observed immediately.

In other words, the "scientists" in tobacco control had been told that such studies were carefully-selected poppycock but ignored the advice and ploughed on with the lies anyway. In fact, they did more than that.

It is interesting to note that it was my expression of the above opinions about these studies back in the mid-2000's that led to my "expulsion" from the tobacco control movement, including being thrown off several list-serves, ostracized by many of my colleagues, accused of being a "tobacco mole," being characterized by my hero and mentor - Stan Glantz - as being "a tragic figure," having copyright to one of my articles violated by an anti-smoking organization, no longer being invited to speak at tobacco conferences, not being able to present at tobacco control conferences anymore, not being able to obtain further research grants, and having colleagues refuse to appear with me at conferences to discuss these or any other scientific issues. In fact, it was this censorship that led to the creation of the Rest of the Story in the first place.

Much like the way your humble host was dismissed as a troublemaker, so even were those in the tobacco control industry itself who even attempted to tell the truth.

It's how such cliques in the tobacco control arena roll. If you challenge their decisions, ideology, or even hint at disagreeing with a policy or decision they have made, you are excluded from their echo chamber. Dissent is prohibited, even if you're correct.

Nearly three million page views later, perhaps these groups knew what they were doing because it appears that I may have been right all along. By silencing me, these groups were able to disseminate their pre-determined conclusions widely to the public through the media long enough for the conclusions to be generally accepted. Now, it is too late to undo the damage. The media and the public have already made up their minds, and one article noting the results of this new study is not going to correct or undo 10 years of dissemination of unsupported and errant scientific conclusions.

I do love the use of language there. "Errant scientific conclusions" can be taken to mean scientific incompetence or deliberate lying, it most certainly cannot possibly refer to rigorous evidence produced by objective and honest people.

It just goes to show yet again that if you trust a tobacco controller you must be off your rocker. I've often said that if they tell you the time you should still check your watch, but I'd go further than that these days and say that you should check your watch again immediately afterwards just in case they have stolen it.

ASH's Deliberate War On Vaping

The other day I told you how ASH tried to destroy vaping by lobbying their Brussels buddies. It wasn't their first attempt by any means, they've wanted to kill off e-cigs for a very long time.

Now, if you've been watching closely, you'd have noticed that there was a fatal motion proposed by Lord Callanan to extinguish the statutory instrument which enabled the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD). His motive was to send it back to the Commons so they can think again, as I described last month.

The important word here is annulled. This signals that this is a bona fide 'fatal motion' being presented in the Lords. There are others which are regretful or just want to make a note, but the one presented by Lord Callanan today seeks to (as the name implies) kill the Statutory Instrument (SI) behind the entire EU Tobacco Products Directive (TPD). 

[T]his is an attempt to sling the TPD back in the face of government for having the temerity to even present it. There is no room for compromise, it's a yes/no thing and, if successful, would kill the enabling mechanism in parliament for the TPD to be ratified by the UK.

And the important bit for this particular article.

In practice, it won't be the end of the TPD (sadly) but a vote by the Lords in favour of the fatal motion would force the government to consider re-issuing the SI without the provisions on e-cigarettes.

I'll say that again. The only option for government would have been to re-issue the SI without the provisions on e-cigs. It's quite important because ASH are shrewd political people and they would have been well aware of this.

Yet they went absolutely crazy trying to destroy Lord Callanan's motion despite knowing very well that the government would never dare to eradicate the TPD in its entirety.

Their contemptuous press release once they were faced with Lords who were alarmed at why government policy jarred so blatantly with opinions from advisers such as the Royal College of Physicians and Public Health England was incredibly dismissive and illustrated an extraordinary lack of understanding of how vaping works.

We know that ASH were furiously contacting MPs in an attempt to kill off Lord Callanan's motion, but it wasn't until Labour's shadow health (ha!) spokesperson Heidi Alexander sent out an equally vapid and contemptuous reply to those who had contacted her that we knew how successful their disgusting state-funded lobbying had been.

You can read her slimy response via GlosVaper here and I could fisk every line it's that bad. But the important thing to note is that Labour's top health dog faithfully parroted ASH's ignorant and callous agitprop.

As a result, the fatal motion became dead in the water and was withdrawn through lack of support. This, remember, despite over 50,000 signatures to a petition and every one of the hundreds of Lords being contacted numerous times, many expressing full support by return.

So what, exactly, were Arnott and her vile colleagues protecting?

Well, they know very well how politics works; they know that a fatal motion would merely give the government a chance to re-issue the SI without the clauses which the Lords found toxic. The stupid policies such as banning packs of ten and making sure roll-your-own afficionados could only buy tons of tobacco to smoke instead of a little were never threatened. ASH know this better than anyone because they live in a political environment. Plain packaging wasn't even included in the TPD so they can't cling to that as an excuse either.

No. Killing Lord Callanan's motion was ASH deliberately trying to destroy the vaping market, and nothing else. This is a point that has to be made crystal clear. ASH lobbied hard to oppose the Lords vote not because it would protect their daft smoking curbs (which were never threatened and some of which weren't even covered), but instead solely because they wanted to hamper vaping as much as they possibly could.

Don't ever let them tell you it's about health. Because it isn't.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Huge kudos to Pete Brown for once again calling a spade a spade when it comes to anti-alcohol liars.

Via the PMA:

A new report, picked up by the Publican’s Morning Advertiser (PMA) on 9 March, claimed that alcohol taxes are too low because the revenue collected by Government from alcohol sales is far lower than the cost of alcohol to society. 

The report hinges on the claim that the Government collects £9bn in taxes in alcohol, whereas alcohol costs society £21bn a year. If these stats were true, there would be a strong case to answer. But the comparison between £9bn revenue and £21bn cost is completely erroneous. 

How about with that £21bn? As I’ve written previously, this number seemed plucked from the air. The vast bulk of it consists of ‘intangible’ (and therefore incalculable) costs such as the impact on the economy of the emotional trauma of the victims of alcohol-related crime (£4.7bn of the total.) 

The £21bn figure, even if it was correct, is the total cost of alcohol to society, not just the cost to the taxpayer of health and emergency services dealing with alcohol-related harm. 

And yet in the plus column, this report and others before it only consider duty receipts from alcohol direct to the government. There isn’t an honest accountant on the planet who would accept this as an acceptable balance of cost versus benefit. 

If the IAS were to compare like with like, they would have two options: firstly, to compare the cost to the UK taxpayer of alcohol abuse with the revenue to the UK treasury from alcohol sales. That would be a fair comparison. And it would reveal — as has previously been reported — that revenue would exceed cost to the tune of more than £6bn a year. 

If they want to include every single cost of alcohol to society — including everything from lost productivity due to hangovers to expenditure on alarms to prevent alcohol-fuelled crime — they need to also include the broadest possible range of benefits from alcohol consumption. 

And that would include the contribution pubs make to their local economy, and corporation tax paid by brewers, to the intangible benefit of the stronger social networks, increased community cohesion and stress reduction that moderate consumption gives the majority of drinkers. 

Anti-alcohol campaigners are aware of all this, and yet they continue to quote their figure of £21bn versus £9bn figures as fact.

Very well put.

The problem, of course, is that 'public health' is an inherently dishonest profession. By that I mean that they are not at all interested in truth, scientific integrity or even what is beneficial for the public, and don't even care that much what is good for public health. They only care about their own lucrative tax-sponging nest and how best to feather it for the future.

Brown puts this very well in his denouement.

If you continue to insist something is true when you know it’s not, that makes you a ‘liar’. It’s time the drinks industry went on the offensive against these people and named them for what they are.

Indeed. And the possibility that the drinks industry might very well do that is why the anti-alcohol version of 'public health' is seeking to do exactly what their anti-smoking counterparts have done - silence all speech by anyone who might meaningfully debate them.

Let's just compare something here. Say your employer lied about you to have you sacked, it would be illegal for them not to allow you your chance to debate them. 'Public health' has no such concerns, they can close businesses down on a whim and put thousands - or even millions - on the dole simply to boost their own bank accounts, and without fear of censure or financial penalty.

The 'public health' industry is the most vile, corrosive and damaging drain on the well-being of the public that there has ever been. There is not a single person working in 'public health' today who hasn't, at some point, lied to the public and to politicians. They all, without exception, deserve to be in jail.

But where do the anti-alcohol liars get their methods from? Well, from the anti-smoking liars, of course.

In 2010, a pal of Action on Smoking and Health - Henry Featherstone of the Policy Exchange think tank - peddled an economically bankrupt study in order to 'prove' that smoking costs more to the public's finances than it generates. Their report was destroyed by other economic think tanks and panned into ridicule by the printed media (apart from the Guardian, natch) because it was demonstrable nonsense from start to finish, and the author knew it as much as his pharma funders and his cheerleaders in the tobacco control industry did.

But tobacco controllers - the most corrupt liars of the lot - still quote it to this day and so do their vacuous poodles in parliament. It doesn't matter if it's bollocks, because they know very well it's bollocks but spout it anyway.

No-one from the anti-alcohol bandwagon will sue Pete Brown for calling them liars because - as he points out - they know very well that they are. They know that if they dared to take it to a court case, the court would judge them to be lying scum and scales might fall off millions of eyes.

So they'll just carry on using the £21bn figure even when they know they are lying, just as anti-smoking liars continue to use their own laughable lies when they are well aware that the figures they are quoting are pure fantasy.

If you're not keen on the lies being told about alcohol, fizzy drinks, e-cigs, fast food, chocolate or any other popular product, always remember it started with the liars in the tobacco control industry being allowed to get away with it. They're just copying the tobacco control playbook and destroying people's lives every day that they are permitted by our weak and pathetic politicians to do so.

Surely Some Mistake

Yes, we've had a good laugh about this many times before, but once more won't hurt.

Who said this in response to criticism of plain packaging proposals by the ASI?

[T]he “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false.

Why it was ASH's Deborah Arnott, of course, who is also board member of the Framework Convention Alliance which guides implementation of the WHO's FCTC.

Well, via Snowdon, here is what a patent falsehood looks like, in a document prefaced by Margaret Chan of the WHO.

It goes on to say ...

Existence of a global health treaty (WHO FCTC) as well as effective national and sub-national legislation make tobacco control a model for addressing other pressing NCD-related issues that require better regulations, including harmful use of alcohol and unhealthy diet.

Fancy that!

I'm sure a retraction and apology for deliberately misleading the public will be forthcoming from Debs very soon. After all, it's only the tobacco industry who talk bollocks and make stuff up, isn't it?

Time Confirms Yet Another Tobacco Control Lie

As anyone who has observed their shameless shenanigans over a period of time will have noticed, the tobacco control industry works by creating a melee of inaccurate and mendacious information to place in front of politicians, in the hope that when the truth eventually materialises no-one will notice.

They have done this with smoking ban 'evidence', heart attack 'miracles', and are currently following the same methodology in trying to bully Westminster into adopting pointless plain packaging.

Back in 2009 they were doing exactly that with the tobacco display ban, when the London Evening Standard published this.

The vote is due next Wednesday, and retailers are extremely upset. They say the move will damage their businesses — especially as it could cost £1500 to install a special gantry to store the products. 

The Ministry of Health asked anti-smoking organisation ASH (which is hardly a disinterested party) to check on the cost, and it claimed the figure for the gantries was just £120. This figure was sent by health minister Lord Darzi to every member of the House of Lords. 

When the supplier, 4 Solutions of Canada, heard about this, it pointed out the individual cost would be approximately £450 — and this did not include any of the installation costs, which would be around £1000. They also pointed out that the costs of the gantries for all the outlets in Britain could be over £30 million. 

Neither ASH nor the Ministry of Health has corrected the information they have given to the members of the House of Lords in advance of the vote.

I wrote about it at the time here, and Snowdon wrote up the whole farce in detail. It was also questioned in the House of Lords but the lie was allowed to stand.

Time has moved on and in April all corner shops will have to cover up their displays. A perfect time, then, to look at what small retailers are now - in real life and not ASH's fairy story - getting ready to shell out.

There are a number of solutions available, which will enable you to comply with the legal requirements relatively inexpensively. These include self-installed plastic ‘curtains’ which, for a small gantry, can cost as little as £50 plus delivery, or retrofitted sliding doors costing about £350 plus delivery – however, these require professional installation, which will add another £200 approximately to the cost. 

Both of these options will enable you to fully comply with the law and you may decide that is all you want to do. However, the gantry area is probably the most valuable selling space in your shop and simply covering it up will kill it stone dead as a selling space.

So, unless you're talking about a very basic self-installed plastic sheet, which will adversely affect the business in the long run, the cost is already nearly five times what ASH claimed.

However, Lord Darzi - delivering the happy news to Westminster on behalf of ASH and the tobacco control industry - cannot possibly have been talking about those.

"Removing displays need not be costly—in Canada, even professional covers cost as little as £120 for an area measuring 1 metre by 1.3 metres"

And professional is the operative word. Because professional covers will, indeed, cost the £1,500 which retailers - quite truthfully - said they would when politicians ignored them in favour of state-funded lobbyists.

Fancy that!

More Australian Kids Smoke After Plain Packaging

Snowdon has today pointed out some stunning dishonesty from ASH.

New figures released by the Australian government have shown adult smoking rates have fallen by a massive 15%. Before the measure was introduced in December 2012, daily smoking prevalence stood at 15.1% and has now fallen to 12.8%. 

Standardised packaging is the only new policy intervention over this time period and is therefore the most likely reason for the significant fall in smoking prevalence. The survey was conducted before the Government’s major hike in tobacco tax of 12.5% in December 2013.

As Snowdon explains, this is total bollocks.

There's only one problem. [Deborah Arnott] is lying. Almost incredibly, the date ASH describes as being "before the measure was introduced" was not November 2012 (the month before plain packaging came in). It is not 2012 at all. It is not even 2011. The date they are referring to is 2010, more than two years before plain packaging was introduced. 

ASH even gives the reference to the Australian report in its press release so that anyone can check it. I urge you to do so. It very clearly shows a steady and gradual downward trend in smoking rates going back to 1993. There is no increase in the rate of decline in 2013 and no effect from plain packaging. The rate has not "fallen by a massive 15%" since plain packaging came in, as ASH claims, and there has not been "a massive decline in smoking prevalence in Australia following introduction of standardised packaging". 

Do go read the rest to get a proper idea of how utterly disgraceful ASH's press release really is, because there are no ifs or buts about this, they are lying.

It would seem incredible in any other area that an organisation could claim a policy to have begun working two years before it was implemented, but that is what ASH expect us to believe in the case of plain packaging in Australia. Apparently, Aussie smokers heard rumours about plain packs and just threw the towel in. It's the kind of bilge you'd expect from a two-bit fairground Gypsy Rose Lee, but here are ASH stating it with a straight face.

You see, here's the spectacular decline that ASH are talking about since plain packaging has arrived.

Can you see the dramatic effect the policy had? No, neither can I. In fact, even the producers of the statistics refute ASH's nonsense claim that plain packaging had anything whatsoever to do with the expected long term decline.

[The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s Geoff Neideck] said it was too early to tell whether specific government policies like plain packaging were behind the downward trend. 

“It is quite evident that there are a range of government policies to minimise the harms to do with smoking and alcohol,” he said. 

“Plain packaging came in between 2010 and 2013, in what was a fairly strong drop in the daily smoking rate, but it would be a stretch to say this data shows that was a key factor.”

What it does show, of course, is the sheer panic and desperation within the tobacco control industry as they furiously scratch around for some tiny scrap of evidence that plain packs has been a success ... and fail miserably. After a campaign packed to the gills with rigged evidence, gerrymandering, fraud and corruption, ASH are now topping it all off by lying through their teeth.

More than that, though, because if you check the data behind the report, there is one statistic which leaps out of the excel file and smacks you squarely in the kisser. Because, do you remember that they said plain packs was essential - urgent, in fact - solely to discourage children from smoking? You do remember it was all about the poor 'ickle kiddies, don't you?

Well, these new stats show that the number of children smoking has increased from 2.5% to 3.4% in the same time frame.

That's correct, there has been a huge 36% increase in daily smoking amongst Australian kids since 2010 which - if we use ASH's twisted methodology - can only be attributed to plain packaging, no?

Of course it can't, but what is certainly very clear is that plain packs are not turning kids away from smoking, and could arguably be said to have had the opposite effect. If the UK government do decide to follow suit, on this evidence they will have proven themselves to be stark staring mad.

And We're Supposed To Trust Cancer Research UK?

At a time when Cancer Research UK's most compelling argument against objections to plain packaging is to say that tobacco companies lied 50 years ago so therefore they can't be trusted, shall we look at how trustworthy Cancer Research UK are, eh?

In October 2012, CRUK press released this report accusing tobacco companies of lying about the level of illicit trade.

Rates of tobacco smuggling into the UK have fallen despite earlier claims from the tobacco industry that tax rises would prompt an increase in the illicit trade, official figures show. 

An estimated nine per cent of cigarettes consumed in the UK in 2010/11 were illicit, compared with 11 per cent in the previous year, according to HM Revenue & Customs. 

Robin Hewings, Cancer Research UK's tobacco policy manager, commented: "The tobacco industry claims that cigarette smuggling is 'booming', 'set to grow' and that the UK is becoming the European 'hotspot'." 

"Today's figures show the opposite. This is yet another instance of the tobacco industry making claims that turn out not to be true."

Deborah Arnott chipped in too.

She added: "Once again it is clear that there is no reason to believe tobacco industry propaganda about the relationship between illicit trade, tobacco taxes, plain packaging or other tobacco control measures."

As I mentioned at the time, they were all very aware that what they were saying was just ad hominem based on old data. One might even say they knew they were lying themselves ... unless I'm being harsh and they're merely stupid.

I think you can see the problem there, can't you? Yes, the figures are almost two years out of date. 

Since then, we have had two budgets. In 2011, duty was raised by 50p per pack and earlier this year, by a further 37p per pack. 

It looks like [the tobacco industry] were entirely correct, because the latest figures - you know, not two year old ones - show exactly that. 

THE trade in illicit cigarettes has exploded in the past year - with nearly 16.5 per cent of all fags now fake or counterfeit. 

Shock figures last night revealed the black market rise - and piled pressure on to ministers. The proportion of “illicit” cigarettes smoked in the UK has soared by almost a FIFTH over the last 12 months, up from 13.8 to 16.4 per cent. 

That looks like confirmation that the illicit market was 'set to grow' and that it is now 'booming', wouldn't you agree?

The senile Sydney stuff-up was especially cocky back then, of course.

Oh dear. Looks like the mathematical genius got his figures wrong again because UK tobacco tax rises were very definitely followed by rises in 'illegal' tobacco use in 2012. We know this because the government has now categorically admitted it.

From the BBC:

Tobacco smuggling: MPs criticise 'lack of action' 

The number of illicit cigarettes smoked in the UK rose by 49% to a billion in 2012

49%? That makes the figure of 16.5% a massive under-estimate, doesn't it? The only thing "untrue" - according to Cancer Research UK - about the tobacco industry's warnings is that they weren't alarming enough!

Naturally, politicians are very keen to blame anyone but themselves, they're hardly scrupulous types who will hold their hand up to making mistakes after all. So therefore they will never admit that smokers buying elsewhere in a free trade EU zone has anything whatsoever to do with sky high taxation imposed by them, but that's how this obscene anti-smoking circle jerk works.

Politicians lie; fake charities lie; anti-smoking lobbyists lie; and then they all say that the tobacco industry is dishonest.

So, since we now know the truth about 2012's illicit figures, and we know that CRUK were entirely wrong about them ... and the tobacco industry entirely correct, if anything, the tobacco control lobby should be retracting their 2012 comments and apologising (a million to one chance, I know).

And considering what we know about their previous baseless smears, why should anyone trust Cancer Research UK now?

More Than Half Of Cigarettes Sold In New York Are Black Market

Just the other day, we learned that organised criminals are latching onto the sky high price of tobacco in Australia and making a mint. It's a simple basic economic fact that the more a state raises prices, the more human beings will look kindly at cheaper sources from whatever source - of course, this is always denied by professional tobacco prohibitionists and denounced as a tobacco industry fabrication.

Anyhow, following on from that, it seems that the same 'fantasy' scenario is happening in New York too.

The boom in smuggling to avoid cigarette taxes

More than half of the cigarettes sold in New York State are smuggled in from other places to avoid the Empire State's taxes on smokes, which have soared nearly 200 percent since 2006, according to a report issued by the conservative Tax Foundation. 

New York is the highest net importer of smuggled cigarettes - illegal smokes account for 56.9 percent of the state's total market. New York's cigarettes tax is $4.35 per pack, the country's highest.

So, the tax on cigarettes in New York is the highest in the country, and the level of smuggling in New York is also the largest in the country. You know, I think the two might be linked? Unless, of course, it is just pure coincidence (or a conspiracy) that, out of 50 states, New York handsomely leads in both criteria.

Considering the incredibly weak associations and vague correlation considered by tobacco control to be "compelling" or "overwhelming" evidence of causation, it's hilarious that they still try to lie claim that - even faced with real life evidence like this - basic laws of economics are magically incorrect when it comes to tobacco.

This isn't rocket science. It is simply people doing what the laws of economics have always consistently predicted people will do.

With Osborne announcing a rise in tobacco taxes by 2% above inflation for every year till the end of the decade in his budget this week, we can expect the same proportional increasing rise in the level of tobacco sourced from other countries in the EU. The booze cruise of the 90s, of which I'm sure we all have fond memories, will hopefully become increasingly more financially attractive again - most especially if there is the added bonus of being able to buy properly branded packs instead of plain packs which our daft one party state looks set to approve - except that this time it'll be the 'fag cruise' with a side benefit of stocking up with cases of cheap French wine while we're there.

With any luck, one day we may be able to proudly boast - just like New Yorkers - that over 50% of UK consumed tobacco has not contributed so much as a brass farthing to our hideous government. Bring it on!

H/T Norcal David G

Another Tobacco Control Lie Nailed

Via Snowdon, it seems that Australian authorities yesterday launched a "massive pre-dawn police operation" to crack down hard on an organised crime syndicate.

A total of 27 people were arrested after 700 police swept through 45 properties in Melbourne's north and west on Tuesday. 

The raids targeted a "well known" Middle Eastern family-based syndicate allegedly involved in trafficking firearms and commercial quantities of drugs, Assistant Commissioner Steve Fontana said. 

The syndicate has a history of trafficking firearms and commercial amounts of drugs and police say the bust has given it "a pretty good dent". 

"There's always someone that'll try to move in afterwards and fill the void but we've certainly taken out the significant ringleaders," Mr Fontana told reporters. 

More than 35,000 tobacco plants and what is believed to be a high-powered assault weapon were seized in the raids, which police said disrupted the workings of the gang linked to the Haddara family and its associates.

Interestingly, the article seems to have been completely re-written sometime today, with this part having disappeared (but still included in the Guardian's version).

He said tobacco plants, which were seized from a property near Geelong, were grown to avoid millions of dollars in excise tax.

Now ain't that a thing, eh? Because - if you are to believe the tobacco control industry - this type of natural human behaviour, and a basic principle of economics, is not really happening at all. We know this as one of ASH's editorial board was very certain about it a couple of years ago.

BBC: There must be a tipping point where you are forcing poorer people to buy their cigarettes without paying duty. 

Joyless: Well, it's very interesting because [...] the tobacco companies always say that. If the tax goes up, this is going to increase smuggling. And they say it, it's one of their many deceits as it's not true.

So, nothing to see here. The huge Australian organised crime syndicate is just a clever ruse, it was all just orchestrated by the tobacco industry to fool you.

That, or yet another tobacco control lie being has spectacularly exposed as such. Not that it will put off Osborne tomorrow, though, I expect.

Time For Arnott To Admit She Was Wrong

Simon Clark yesterday posted a speculative article suggesting that ASH is no longer relevant.

So what does ASH do that justifies its continued existence? I'm damned if I know.

Forest may not, ahem, be the most successful pressure group in the world but at least we have a unique selling point and don't cost the taxpayer a penny.

The same can hardly be said of ASH who, let us not forget, spend most of their time pushing on an open door.

"You want to stop people smoking? Come in, m'dear. How can I help?"

It's hardly challenging work, is it?

This is true.

It's also true that ASH, and Deborah Arnott in particular, aren't even very good at disseminating truthful information.

Debs's limp denial of the Adam Smith Institute's suggestion of plain packaging leading to the same treatment in other areas has shown her up time and again to be a bit stupid, so it has. It's time she admitted it.

Being the calm and respectful soul that she is, I take no enjoyment out of this (well, maybe a tiny bit), but from the New Zealand Herald comes the most brutal destruction yet of her refusal to accept plain packaging as a precedent for the same treatment for other consumer products.

The shift to plain packaging for cigarettes should further reduce the already low smoking rate of 15 per cent of the adult population. 

Acceptance of the move suggests the time may be right for an equally simple preventive measure to improve the health of hundreds of thousands of people: plain packaging for soft drinks, accompanied by a ban on advertising them. 

[...] 

Meanwhile, designers have put the soft drinks in bottles adorned with attention-grabbing, headache-inducing graphics - lightning bolts, explosions, rocket ships. 

Imagine if those were all replaced with generic labels that simply bore the name of the drink. 

The usual argument against such a move is that it interferes with certain freedoms and that people have the right to make their own choices.

What a silly ideas that is, eh? Freedom of choice? Pah!

Now, in case anyone hasn't seen Arnott's laughable denial of the bleeding obvious, here it is ... again.

[...] the “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false.

Yes it is still there! The page hasn't been pulled out of embarrassment as it should have been by now. Nor has it been edited despite being comprehensively shown to be the ramblings of an incompetent - or politically mendacious - mind.

So it's time to ask a question of ASH, and Arnott in particular. Why, for the love of God, is this demonstrable horse shit still on your taxpayer-funded website without qualification?

To borrow a couple of ASH phrases, "the debate is over" as far as a slippery slope is concerned. It is quite clear that plain packaging is being considered for a whole host of consumer products even before being forced on tobacco in this country. And "the time has come" for Debs to admit that her assertions are entirely wrong and have been misleading. Not issuing a prominent retraction would suggest she's quite happy being dishonest, and I'm sure ASH don't want anyone to think of their (pfft) fine upstanding organisation in such a way.

We look forward to this little glitch being sorted out soon. Because no-one likes to be seen as deliberately fraudulent debaters ... now do you Debs?

Tobacco Control Proven Wrong Again

This time last year, the tobacco control industry moved swiftly to head off warnings by tobacco companies that levels of illicit and counterfeit tobacco were set to rise.

Cancer Research UK led the way:

Rates of tobacco smuggling into the UK have fallen despite earlier claims from the tobacco industry that tax rises would prompt an increase in the illicit trade, official figures show. 

An estimated nine per cent of cigarettes consumed in the UK in 2010/11 were illicit, compared with 11 per cent in the previous year, according to HM Revenue & Customs. 

Robin Hewings, Cancer Research UK's tobacco policy manager, commented: "The tobacco industry claims that cigarette smuggling is 'booming', 'set to grow' and that the UK is becoming the European 'hotspot'. 

"Today's figures show the opposite. This is yet another instance of the tobacco industry making claims that turn out not to be true."

Which of course prompted truth-challenged crusty Mr Chapman to chime in with his usual blundering idiocy.

UK tobacco tax rises followed by falls in illegal tobacco use. @batpress how can this be true? cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/ne…
— Simon Chapman (@SimonChapman6) October 22, 2012

ASH's Debs Arnott went even further by claiming that basic economics don't apply to tobacco.

She added: "Once again it is clear that there is no reason to believe tobacco industry propaganda about the relationship between illicit trade, tobacco taxes, plain packaging or other tobacco control measures."

As I commented at the time, this was simply the kind of bunco booth scam we have come to expect from anti-smoking fantasists.

I think you can see the problem there, can't you? Yes, the figures are almost two years out of date. 

Since then, we have had two budgets. In 2011, duty was raised by 50p per pack and earlier this year [2012], by a further 37p per pack.

I took a bit of stick from some tobacco controllers (particularly a beardy one from Scotland) who insisted that they would much prefer to see official figures rather than trust claims by the tobacco industry. But - after years of listening to anti-smoking lies and drivel advocacy - it's pretty clear that the tobacco industry is far more honest than their detractors, hence my confidence in the comments at Liberal Vision in May.

I can’t wait till the govt release figures for illicit for 2012/13, I'm noting all these denialists down so we can have some fun in the future as to how the crooks are using 2 year old figures to try to bamboozle MPs.

And today is the day I've been waiting for. From The Times.

Revenue & Customs said the market share of illicit cigarettes rose from 7 per cent to 9 per cent in 2012-13, costing the taxpayer £1.1 billion compared with £900 million the previous year. 

The illegal hand-rolling tobacco market increased by 1 percentage point to 36 per cent, leading to £900 million in lost revenue. 

Recent tobacco industry data has shown an increase in tobacco smuggling.

Indeed it has, and it has been 100% spot on, as shown by this graph from the, err, official HMRC estimates.

Hmm, so when tobacco companies warned illicit trade was "set to grow", they were right and CRUK were wrong.

When they said that hikes in taxes would lead to increases in smuggling, they were correct and Debs Arnott was wrong.

And when Chapman sarcastically asked how tax increases can lead to falls in illegal tobacco use, he was comprehensively conned by his own side's mendacity. It is quite clear that those budget increases in 2011 and 2012 have led to consumers doing exactly what any economist will tell you that they would do. They have sought to avoid the tax. So he was hilariously wrong too.

Will they admit it? Of course not. The best Arnott can do is weakly quibble on the margins.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, the anti-smoking campaign charity, said the latest figures showed that smuggling was “not rising rapidly as the tobacco industry and its front groups routinely claim”.

It's rising though Debs, innit? As tobacco companies correctly predicted, and your side arrogantly and fraudulently dismissed.

At the start of this year, the Independent's Nick Goodway posed an interesting question.

HMRC data shows that tobacco duty raised £9.1bn in 2010, £9.6bn in 2011 and an estimated £9.7bn in 2012. Could 2013 be the first time total tobacco duty raised actually falls?

On the evidence above, the smart money must surely be on the answer being yes.

More Humiliating Plain Packs Campaign Fail

I'm sure you've seen these quotes about plain packaging before, but just in case ...

Remember Smokefree Action's Myth 7?

Myth #7: It may be tobacco today but other consumer products will follow 

FACT: Tobacco is not like any other product ... Plain packs for tobacco will not therefore set a precedent for other consumer products.

And then there was ASH's Deborah Arnott being even more dismissive.

[T]he “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false.

This must be merely a figment of our fevered imaginations then.

Plain packaging for alcohol could be the next step in tackling binge drinking, according to a marketing expert. 

Experts say plain packaging of cigarettes, which is already in place in Australia and being considered by our Government, will cut smoking rates and reduce the youth uptake of smoking. 

And now Auckland University senior marketing lecturer Dr Bodo Lang has told TV ONE's Breakfast plain packaging of alcohol could have the same affect on binge drinking.

The article even comes complete with video evidence, go have a look.

That's game, set and match for the domino theorists, I'd say.

An LSE Guide On How To Denormalise Alcohol Like Tobacco

As if deliberately trying to embarrass Deborah Arnott and her laughable slippery slope denial, Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling Paul Cairney has written on the LSE website what is effectively a guide to how anti-alcohol miseries can achieve the same as the tobacco control industry in coming decades.

He begins by explaining how prohibitionists 'select' evidence. Or 'lie', as it is known to the rest of us (emphases mine).

Evidence based policymaking (EBPM) is about power: to decide what counts as evidence; to ignore or pay attention to particular studies; to link the evidence of a policy problem to a particular solution; and, to ensure that policymakers have the motive and opportunity to turn a solution into policy. Indeed, an attempt to portray EBPM as a technical or scientific process is often an attempt to exercise power: to rule some evidence in and most evidence out; and, to use particular forms of evidence to justify political action.

Yep, that's about the sum of it. It should, of course, more accurately be called PBEM - policy based evidence-making.

After describing how tobacco was in the same popular position 30 years ago as alcohol is now, he makes observations on how alcohol can follow the same denormalisation route in the future.

The tobacco experience suggests that changes in these factors are mutually reinforcing; major policy change is the result of the complex interplay between all of these processes. For example, an increased acceptance of the unequivocal alcohol-is-harmful scientific evidence would help shift the way that governments ‘frame’ or understand the alcohol policy problem.  The framing of alcohol as a public health problem would allow the health department to take the policy lead and consult primarily with public health groups.  Alcohol control and alcohol use may also go hand in hand: a decrease in drinking rates reduces the barriers to alcohol control; more alcohol control means fewer drinkers (or less drinking).  The replacement of voluntary alcohols with statutory measures would reduce the routine involvement of the industry in government.

He has even provided a very handy visual guide with a doodled flowchart! (click to enlarge)

Now, let's once again revisit Deborah's departure from the realms of reality, shall we?

[...] the “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false.

Course it is, love.

University Professors writing on the website of the London School of Economics about exactly how (and when) it will be done is just part of a vast Big Tobacco funded libertarian conspiracy. 

Nurse!

The 'Myth' That Keeps On Giving

Deborah Arnott is being shown up again.

[T]he “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false. The same argument was used against the ban on tobacco advertising, but 9 years after the tobacco ban in the UK, alcohol advertising is still permitted with no sign of it being prohibited.

Erm.

A charity has called for a complete ban on alcohol advertising at music and sports events.

Alcohol Concern wants the action to protect children and young people from what it describes as "excessive" exposure. 

The charity wants a ban on alcohol advertising in the trailers of films shown in cinemas with less than an 18 certificate. 

Dunno about you, but that looks like a 'sign' to me, especially since every proponent I've heard on TV or radio this morning has referenced tobacco ad bans as their inspiration.

Plain packaging of alcohol is merely a few steps further down the line, that's all.