Let's Make The Harmful Stuff Cheaper

Jesus H Christ!

I've seen some pretty moronic stuff from the tobacco control trough-snorting gravy train in my time but this really takes the biscuit.

I've written before about how this daft idea of forcibly making tobacco companies reduce the level of nicotine is monumentally stupid.

One can only assume that the people endorsing it are either corrupt or mentally compromised. 

The US FDA seems to think this is a great idea though. They will mildly relax regulations (perhaps) around vaping while at the same time taking an innocuous ingredient - nicotine - out of cigarettes but leaving all the other crap in. They couldn't be more crazy if they announced that they were to embark on an expedition to find out where unicorns live. 

This is the end result of decades of tobacco control lunatics having the ear of government.

But take a look at this. Not only do these dangerous maniacs think that lowering nicotine in cigarettes so smokers self-titrate by taking in far more nasties than they would otherwise is a good thing, they seriously recommend making the more lethal option cheaper!

The results indicate that smokers' response to price points when purchasing cigarettes may extend to [low nicotine cigarettes] if these were commercially available. Differential cigarettes prices based on nicotine content may result in voluntary selection of less addicting products.

They actually want to dangle a carrot in front of smokers by making it cheaper to smoke products with less nicotine which they would obviously smoke more of. It is truly staggering how much of a bastard industry tobacco control has become.

The FDA has proposed a rule that would reduce nicotine content in commercially available cigarettes. However, it is not known how smokers may respond in an environment where products of differing nicotine content and of differing prices are available. This study demonstrates that price may be an important factor that could lead smokers to select reduced nicotine products voluntarily, even if those products are rated as inferior or less satisfying.

Yes, and for a smoker, if a cigarette is not satisfying, they will light another one. Good fucking grief.

In 1976, in advance of the roll-out of nicotine patches and gum, Michael Russell wrote that "people smoke for nicotine but they die from the tar".

Now that e-cigs have turned up, the tobacco control mantra - in the US at least - seems to be people smoke for the nicotine, so we'll take that out so we can keep our salaries.

By crikey I hope these people rot for eternity. 

The VLNC Junk Science Fest Gathers Pace

As I have written a couple of times recently, the FDA's announcement that they are viewing very low nicotine cigarettes (VLNCs) as a possible policy tool is extremely sinister.

Tobacco controllers have been banging on about this over the pond for quite some time now and, I repeat, it's daft and nothing but a rent-seeking scam.

It's not just questionable, it's insane. One can only assume that the people endorsing it are either corrupt or mentally compromised. 

The US FDA seems to think this is a great idea though. They will mildly relax regulations (perhaps) around vaping while at the same time taking an innocuous ingredient - nicotine - out of cigarettes but leaving all the other crap in. They couldn't be more crazy if they announced that they were to embark on an expedition to find out where unicorns live. 

So, why are they doing this with cigarettes? Well, apart from being subject to an almost Calvinist religious cult of a tobacco control industry in the good old US of A, there are also many financial pressures which mean they are reluctant to rock the boat. 

What I find absolutely astonishing above all else though, is that US-based tobacco control are even considering this. For years, they have been painting the tobacco industry as animals for producing low tar cigarettes. The fact that this was partly due to legislators forcing them to doesn't seem to matter. 

But now the tobacco control industry has had this fantastic idea that reducing nicotine in cigarettes is a brilliant new initiative, what went before seems to have been conveniently forgotten, at least in the USA. Fortunately, we are not subject to as much ignorance in this country.

But now it is being looked at by the FDA, the big wheels of the global tobacco control junk science machine are starting to turn. Grant dollars will be shovelled at the subject with the express purpose of hoodwinking the FDA into believing it is a good idea.

The latest - and by no means will it be the last - is this study released last week on the effect of VLNCs on smokers with psychiatric disorders.

RESULTS: Among the 169 daily smokers included in the analysis (120 women [71.0%] and 49 men [29.0%]; mean [SD] age, 35.6 [11.4] years), reducing the nicotine content of cigarettes decreased the relative reinforcing effects of smoking in all 3 populations. Across populations, the 0.4-mg/g dose was chosen significantly less than the 15.8-mg/g dose in concurrent choice testing (mean [SEM] 30% [0.04%] vs 70% [0.04%]; Cohen d = 0.40; P < .001) and generated lower demand in the Cigarette Purchase Task (α = .027 [95% CI, 0.023-0.031] vs α = .019 [95% CI, 0.016-0.022]; Cohen d = 1.17; P < .001).

In other words, the subjects didn't like them, so wouldn't buy them.

To the rest of us, this means that smokers will, in reality, do anything other than spend their money on VLNC because a large part of the pleasure has been removed. The response to this will obviously be a huge black market in proper cigarettes. We know this because we live in the real world.

But to a tobacco controller, it means the smokers will just quit.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Reducing the nicotine content of cigarettes may decrease their addiction potential in populations that are highly vulnerable to tobacco addiction. Smokers with psychiatric conditions and socioeconomic disadvantage are more addicted and less likely to quit and experience greater adverse health impacts. Policies to reduce these disparities are needed; reducing the nicotine content in cigarettes should be a policy focus.

This is nothing but blatant sleight of hand by people with a vested interest in seeing their pay packets continue for a few more years. Nowhere in the study does it even consider what will happen in the real world, because they don't want to blur the clear message they want to send to regulators; that VLNCs are a brilliant idea with no downsides.

This is how tobacco control 'science' works. Salaries are dependant on policies; this is a policy, so let's do it. It doesn't matter to them if it works or not because they are not a results-driven industry; are entirely unregulated, and accountable to no-one except their funders who generally want the same thing as they do. Screw the public's health, they all just want to get paid.

The BMJ's Tobacco Control comic emphasises this world of flowers and rainbows in an article for their September round of propaganda.

Cigarette makers today keep the nicotine at 1%–2% by weight, having found this to be the sweet spot for creating smoker ‘satisfaction’ (one of several industry code words for nicotine addiction). Reducing this percentage by a factor of ten—to 0.1% or 0.2%—would make it very difficult for cigarettes to create or sustain addiction. Reducing it even further would make addiction virtually impossible. 

This would essentially eliminate the cigarette as an engine of addiction, while preserving many of the other reasons people smoke—to ponder the wafting of the fumes, for example, or to obtain some form of oral gratification. Or to emulate Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley. Smokers would be able to start or quit at will, without suffering the robbery of choice that defines addiction.

And as if to prove my point further, The Lancet also published an opinion piece on the subject just under a fortnight ago.

Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a multiyear roadmap to begin regulating the amount of nicotine allowed in tobacco products. Researchers, including tobacco control advocates, have proposed nicotine reduction as a way of decreasing levels of tobacco use, and the USA may be the first country to seriously discuss using this form of regulation to produce a potentially less addictive form of tobacco. 

Many questions remain, but nicotine regulation may offer a promising tool in global tobacco control efforts.

So, it is apparently a "promising tool" even before they have answered these "many questions"? Isn't it odd how the precautionary principle is strictly applied to e-cigs (The Lancet amd Tobacco Control articles both mention concern that FDA controls which will obliterate the e-cig market are being delayed) and smokeless tobacco such as snus, but when it is tobacco control chasing a policy which could have vastly destructive unintended consequences, it's full steam ahead and nothing to see here?

Of course, if - as the study on smokers with psychiatric disorders did - you don't even address the possibility of the unintended consequences, and instead just pretend that they don't exist, it's easy not to have to answer those "many questions", now isn't it?

This is how it is going to be from now on in US tobacco control (and, I'm sure, consequently in other countries). Talk up the insane policy of VLNCs while stressing and amplifying the far less worrisome fantasy harm of e-cigs.

Now, which way do you think governments will jump under this kind of bombardment from the multi-billion dollar global tobacco control industry? 

Very Low Intelligence

Here is another to file in the "how e-cigs expose the hypocrisy and ignorance of tobacco controllers" folder.

There has been a lot written about the announcement on Friday that the FDA in Yankeeland has shifted very slightly on the subject of e-cigs.

Of course, this is very welcome, they have frozen their appalling policy designed - most probably at the behest of pharma lobbying - to take as many competitive vaping products off the market as possible by pricing them out. The policy was daft, ignored prevailing and accumulating science and was clearly unsustainable in the long run. Well, actually, it was sustainable only if the US decided to stay a barking mad outlier to the rest of the enlightened first world (Australia excepted, of course), but you get the idea.

This, for me, was the clunky passage that said they are now reluctantly recognising the concept of vaping as a harm reduction measure.

A key piece of the FDA’s approach is demonstrating a greater awareness that nicotine – while highly addictive – is delivered through products that represent a continuum of risk and is most harmful when delivered through smoke particles in combustible cigarettes.

Hardly a succinct sound bite, is it?

But, as others have already said, there is nothing to celebrate too wildly because of the other quite disgraceful announcement made at the same time.

The FDA plans to begin a public dialogue about lowering nicotine levels in combustible cigarettes to non-addictive levels through achievable product standards. 

Yep, this is the first country ever to try the extremely daft idea of reducing nicotine in cigarettes (Very Low Nicotine Cigarettes (VLNC)) to somehow stop people smoking.

There is nothing in that which recognises that nicotine is not the problem. In fact, it cleverly avoids saying that nicotine is benign. Shall we revisit that Michael Russell quote that the tobacco control industry embraced when they were promoting pharmaceutical patches and gum but seem to have completely forgotten since e-cigs emerged?

‘People smoke for nicotine but they die from the tar’

That was in 1976, and Russell was seen as a visionary back then, but he also said this in the same paper.

The logic of expecting people who cannot stop smoking to switch to cigarettes that have hardly any nicotine is questionable.

It's not just questionable, it's insane. One can only assume that the people endorsing it are either corrupt or mentally compromised.

The US FDA seems to think this is a great idea though. They will mildly relax regulations (perhaps) around vaping while at the same time taking an innocuous ingredient - nicotine - out of cigarettes but leaving all the other crap in. They couldn't be more crazy if they announced that they were to embark on an expedition to find out where unicorns live.

This is the end result of decades of tobacco control lunatics having the ear of government. Prohibition should have taught America that if you listen to extremist prohibitionists, you destroy society and create black markets, but it seems they are too stupid to learn.

So, why are they doing this with cigarettes? Well, apart from being subject to an almost Calvinist religious cult of a tobacco control industry in the good old US of A, there are also many financial pressures which mean they are reluctant to rock the boat.

What I find absolutely astonishing above all else though, is that US-based tobacco control are even considering this. For years, they have been painting the tobacco industry as animals for producing low tar cigarettes. The fact that this was partly due to legislators forcing them to doesn't seem to matter.

But now the tobacco control industry has had this fantastic idea that reducing nicotine in cigarettes is a brilliant new initiative, what went before seems to have been conveniently forgotten, at least in the USA. Fortunately, we are not subject to as much ignorance in this country.

“The idea of gradually reducing the addictive ingredient of cigarettes, nicotine, looks attractive on the surface,” said Robert West, professor of health psychology at University College London. “But unless nicotine is pretty much eliminated quickly and comprehensively in all available tobacco products – which seems unlikely – it runs a serious risk of making things worse as smokers smoke cigarettes harder in order to get the nicotine they need, leading to more exposure to the harmful tar.” 

Linda Bauld, deputy director of the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies and professor of health policy at the University of Stirling agreed that the move could end up exposing smokers to higher levels of toxins.  

“[The FDA] want to shift people to alternative products like vaping, which is good, but there are a number of risks,” she said, pointing out that reducing nicotine levels could also have other unintended consequences including people smokers smoking more cigarettes, or even an increase in black market activity.

Well, duh!

When 'light' cigarettes were introduced, there was an uptick in the amount of cigarettes smoked due to compensatory behaviour. Why the fucking hell do tobacco controllers think this will be different if nicotine is taken out of fags altogether?

Simple to answer really. It's because, yet again, they don't understand smokers. In truth, they never have done. This policy is borne out of non-smoking twats believing their own propaganda that smokers only smoke because they are addicted to nicotine. If they would ever actually talk to the people they are trying to "control" they would know this isn't the be-all and end-all of the matter.

I have many smokers work for me for whom giving up is not even an option. They don't consider themselves addicts, they consider themselves as smokers. They have done for years and it's part of their identity. Nothing will shift them. If you take the nicotine out of their cigs they will just feel the urge to smoke more. What sort of perverted 'public health' movement could come out with a policy which drives people to smoke more? It's the very opposite of harm reduction, it is harm promotion.

Even darker than that though, is the idea that the FDA - by mildly relaxing rules on e-cigs - may be doing something benevolent. No. It is not.

The FDA's announcement relents on some e-cig rules but only on the proviso that it might make vaping more attractive to smokers who will be deprived, by force, of nicotine from their combustible cigarettes. That is nothing more than vile coercion and should have no place in a land that claims to be free.

I cannot possibly cheer the FDA's overall plan and I don't think there is anything particularly concrete to be happy about yet anyway. Smokers are being thrown under a bus but apart from that everything else is up in the air and subject to change.

But at least it still shows I'm right in saying that it's never been about health, so I have that. 

A Freedom-Loving Fantasy Frontbench

A new website and app designed, according to its creators, to "empower voters by providing political information in an engaging and accessible format" has been launched today. Fantasy Frontbench carries information on general election candidates' stance on 75 policy issues from which you are invited to create your own fantasy cabinet.

So I've used it to select a dream team of 22 ministers who are sound on lifestyle issues we jewel robbers discuss on these pages.

I've gone for the genial David Davis as Prime Minister, which isn't so far-fetched because he would be if the Tories hadn't had a collective meltdown in 2005 in choosing a bedwetter as their party leader. He'd need an able sidekick, so consummate libertarian Doug Carswell fills the Deputy PM role.

Two ministers stay where they are in my reshuffle, Eric Pickles for having the courage to clamp down on sock puppets in local government, and Chris Grayling for being the most prominent MP to vote against plain packs.

Two Labour MPs are included, in the form of Kate Hoey who has always been uncharacteristically liberal for her party, and Simon Danczuk is Justice Secretary for his dogged work on child abuse. In the regions, ex-Labour brawler Eric Joyce is responsible for slapping some sense into Scotland, while Guto Bebb takes on the Welsh job and Ian Paisley can start work on getting back the 900 jobs lost recently in Northern Ireland thanks to stupid government interference.

At health, I have Mark Pawsey to be a firm hand over the NHS and to ensure e-cigs are kept out of overweening regulation, while Nigel Farage takes Culture Media and Sport to oversee a renaissance for pubs with an amendment to the smoking ban, amongst other fun tasks.

Sound as a pound Steve Baker is my Chancellor for his experience in the City, and last but not least, our esteemed mascot is, of course, Leader of the House.

You can see my choices for all 22 positions by clicking here - it's interesting to note that more than three quarters of these liberal types were not educated at Oxbridge institutions. Perhaps that's where the paternalist streak gets injected, who knows?

You can view all the candidates' voting records and make your own choices for top jobs at http://www.fantasyfrontbench.com/. Do consider sharing your line-ups in the comments, I'm curious to learn if I've overlooked anyone.

Tesco Extra Will Be Thrilled

Oh, good grief.

Cars should be banished from town centres, a Liberal Democrat minister has claimed. 

Transport Minister Norman Baker said drivers should be hit with big increases in parking charges so they are ‘disincentivised’ from parking near high street shops.

This is the Lib Dem solution to the long decline in town centre shopping, is it? Err, isn't the precise reason out-of-town shopping centres are so attractive that there is free parking and easy access?

So, while every other trade or consumer body advocates attracting high street customers with affordable or even free parking, this guy thinks the answer is to restrict choice and make it more difficult to get there. Instead, you should ride in and hang your bags on the bike handlebars, or carry your new TV home on the bus.

Where do the Lib Dems find such dogma-deluded buffoons?

State Control Of What You Eat - The First Foray

Things have been awfully busy in Puddlecoteville, so it's taken me a while to get round to highlighting this.

Yes, it's those lunatics in California again (emphases mine).

“This bill, known as the Public Health Epidemic Protection Act of 2013, would require the department, for every product intended for consumer consumption for which it has credible evidence that the product significantly contributes to a significant public epidemic, to conduct a risk assessment evaluation to determine whether the product contributes significantly to a significant public health epidemic, as defined, and whether the adverse public health risk would have a fiscal impact on the state of $50,000,000 or more. The bill would authorize the department to charge the manufacturer of the product for the reasonable costs of producing the risk assessment and would create the Public Health Fund, to be used by the department, upon appropriation by the Legislature, to fund the program. If the department determines that the criteria are met, the bill would require the manufacturer to create, for approval of the department, a public health impact report (PHIR) containing specified information, including a list of adverse public health impacts and a mitigation plan for those impacts. The bill would authorize the department to enforce the PHIR and would authorize the department to restrict or suspend sales of the product in the state if the PHIR is insufficient or if the manufacturer is not complying with the terms of the PHIR.”

I think you may have worked out what they are driving at here.

That means the initial targets in California would include food items thought to promote heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes.

Yep, lefty food snobbery at its most pernicious.

The implications of this proposed law are massive (cost for each of these risk assessments is rumoured to be in the region of $50,000 per product). Thousands upon thousands of jobs lost; businesses rendered insolvent overnight; and those who survive charging higher prices through increased cost of regulation plus the wholesale extinction of their competitors.

Of course, the businesses to survive would be big concerns with multiple outlets who would be able to withstand such a regulatory assault on their industry. Small operations would go to the wall almost instantaneously. Why are lefties so utterly moronic that they help big business while vehemently asserting in election literature that they ... err, hate massaging of big business?

In a far less damaging way, Puddlecote Inc. has witnessed this phenomenon before with dozens of our competitors being shorn from the sector due to ridiculous bureaucracy and over-regulation which can only ever punish the end consumer and taxpayer.

This, however, is different gear. This is the state appropriation of the fast food industry, no less. If you sell food unapproved by government, you will be financially crippled. If you sell mung beans and alfalfa soup, you have the freedom of the city.

Fundamentally, this is the Californian government undermining personal choice by forcing private businesses to only serve what the state approves. And with enormous sums directed from private companies to bureaucratic state departments, it's near as dammit the nationalisation of restaurant food supply.

And no, it's not a spoof. Here's the text of the bill, they're deadly serious. I can imagine some self-advancing UK-based food cranks getting a hard-on imagining the power this would bestow on them if/when the idea crosses the Atlantic..

Let's Quadruple The Scope Of The War On Drugs

Some statist lunacy for a Saturday night from ReasonTV.

200 B&H and a solicitor please, white van man. Good grief. 

Progressing To The 1950s

As we approach the festive season, with all the culinary delights it entails, here is a seasonal message of goodwill from public health talking shop, the Conversation.

Interestingly, during the years when rationing was enforced, the prevalence of obesity was negligible in the United Kingdom. And waste was minimised as both individuals and government agencies were busy finding new ways of reducing the waste of food resources to a minimum (sustainable consumption). 

Is it conceivable that some form of food rationing and portion control may help address the dramatic rise in obesity and the sustainability of our foods supply? If we continue to over-consume foods in unsustainable ways for both our health and our planet, we may be left with no other choice.

When you've picked your jaw up off of the floor, we'll continue.

It is interesting to note that political groups who like to call themselves 'progressive' are the most enthusiastic towards bans and restrictions on lifestyle choices such as this. A sizeable majority of public health professionals, too, would willingly describe their agenda as 'progressive', though how a return to 1950s food control can be remotely linked with progress is entirely beyond me. I wonder if this rationing will be suspended for Christmas time? Whaddya think?

Well, considering über-progressive George Monbiot was arguing last week that we should make Christmas presents out of sticky back plastic and egg boxes, I suspect not.

Good grief.

H/T MyChoice Australia

UPDATE: I've just noticed that Snowdon was quick off the mark with this public health claptrap.

Scared? They Should Be

As always, it begins in California.

(Reuters) - Beverage industry groups are planning ways to oppose a proposed soda tax in the California city of El Monte because of fears other U.S. cities across America might adopt similar taxes on sugary drinks.

The El Monte city council on Tuesday approved a measure that would add a 1 cent tax for every ounce of "sugar sweetened" drinks. The proposal is scheduled to be voted on by city residents in November's election.

In case you're baffled by the US system of measuring liquids, a 16 ounce drink is the equivalent of around 475ml. So, this would mean adding 16 cents to the selling price of a bottle smaller than the standard 500ml version sold in Tesco Express over here (a portion, incidentally, which is deemed as too much by New York's Mayor Bloomberg).

This, according to Cali-based jewel robber David G who pointed out the article, on top of the existing 9.5% state sales tax and 5% recycling tax. Too right the soda industry is trying to fight the idea.

Because, despite their protestations, those who dedicate their lives to pissing all over yours very much love a precedent. Just ask arch-bansturbator Simon Chapman, the geriatric control freak who conned Australia into banning colours because of his personal prejudice.

"The dominos are lining up," Chapman says, referring to the countries that are seriously considering enforcing plain packs inside their own borders. Seventeen states, including Britain, attended a recent World Health Organisation meeting in Brunei on plain packs. New Zealand will be next, then Thailand and Panama, and possibly Canada, Chapman reckons.

Sure as California is home to the most sinister nest of deluded, financially-illiterate hippies in the world, once a soda tax is implemented in El Monte, it will spread like a plague.

In the digital age, some mentally-challenged MP will see the daft proposal via the medium of global kneejerk idiocy and advocate it here. Nothing will be gained for the health of the nation once a soda tax is brought in, but government will have more of your cash and further rights as to what you do with your own body.

With the Mail publishing panic-mongering rot like this, I give it five years.

Quick! Blow More Tax On TV Ads!

Considering today's breathless horror - led by Chief Medical Adviser Professor Dame Sally Davies - at the thought of a cigarette being smoked near a child, we can surely expect a government-funded advertising campaign soon condemning people who allow kids to attend barbecues. Yes?

A study by the French environmental campaigning group Robin des Bois found that a typical two-hour barbecue can release the same level of dioxins as up to 220,000 cigarettes.

Dioxins are a group of chemicals known to increase the likelihood of cancer.

The figures were based on grilling four large steaks, four turkey cuts and eight large sausages.

If a few cigarettes deserve several hours of furrow-browed BBC coverage, 220,000 of them must require commandeering of the entire BBC network for best part of a week, I should imagine. Plus another afternoon to lecture on the dangers of red meat.

For the love of all that's holy! Get to it, Dame Sally, before another summer of slaughter is upon us!

Personal Safety Ban Logic

Friday night is smoky-drinky-curry night at a friend's gaff, but afore I go ...

"Everybody is aware of the risk of cell phones and texting in automobiles, but I see more and more teens distracted with the latest devices and headphones in their ears," says lead author Richard Lichenstein, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and director of pediatric emergency medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center. "Unfortunately as we make more and more enticing devices, the risk of injury from distraction and blocking out other sounds increases."

Headphones as a safety hazard. Hmm, interesting.

Researchers reviewed 116 accident cases from 2004 to 2011 in which injured pedestrians were documented to be using headphones. Seventy percent of the 116 accidents resulted in death to the pedestrian. More than two-thirds of victims were male (68 percent) and under the age of 30 (67 percent). More than half of the moving vehicles involved in the accidents were trains (55 percent), and nearly a third (29 percent) of the vehicles reported sounding some type of warning horn prior to the crash.

[...]

"I hope that these results will help to significantly reduce incidence of injuries and lead us to a better understanding of how such injuries occur and how we can prevent them."

Well, we already have a much-vaunted precedent as to how to prevent them, don't we?

Seat belt laws are widely regarded (by politicians, anyway) as being a 100% success despite outlawing personal choice of one's own level of risk. They save lives and - despite what others have claimed - have not merely shifted deaths from those inside the vehicle, to those outside. Nope, not at all.

Cycle helmets are also compulsory in New Zealand and Australia (natch), and there are regular calls for the same policy to be legislated on here. All for your own good, of course. The benevolent state removing your freedoms to save you from yourselves.

So, if it is to be accepted that the state is entitled to pass laws solely for the purpose of restricting our bad choices, then the logical answer to the problem of sensory deprivation by headphones is to instigate spot fines for pedestrians who wear them, surely. Or is that just too obviously illiberal for our omniscient overlords to spin their way out of?

Well, apart from Mayor Bloomberg, of course.

Great Ideas For The Future - Electronic Tagging For Kids

Welcome to this week's edition of Tomorrow's World, and to start off we report on an ingenious breakthrough for future public health screening ... electronic activity tags for kids.

In early 2012, wristwatch-like devices called Polar active monitors will be used by older students in PE classes at all 18 Parkway elementary schools. District officials say the devices should help improve the students' fitness and academic achievement.

Later this school year, the district plans to collect data about activity levels and even sleep patterns for a week at a time. It will have the students wear the devices round the clock.

All rather ingenious, so it is.

The monitors measure activity by tracking every movement of the person wearing them. They display steps taken, calories spent and time spent at various levels of activity. An animated figure on the monitor indicates the activity level. A bar shows the target time for doing moderate to vigorous activity and the amount of time achieved at that level.

Under the pilot program, the three schools each received 25 monitors, which cost $90 apiece. The monitors have been rotated among third-, fourth- and fifth-graders in physical education classes.

Each of the district's elementary schools will receive 25 monitors in January and begin using them in PE class.

However, the focus of the monitors' use will change gradually, so that by the end of the year students will continually wear the monitors for a full week at a time to assess activity levels.

Of course, like any innovation, there are always going to be teething troubles.

Neil Richards, a professor of law with Washington University in St. Louis who teaches privacy and civil liberties courses, said he feels the plan for the devices constitutes "a major privacy issue."

"The school district eventually will be engaging in surveillance of kids' sleep and exercise patterns outside the school day," he said. "Though physical activity is important and obesity is a problem, the district could not require kids to wear them because I think it would be a violation of their and their families' Fourth Amendment rights, which is pretty easily unconstitutional."

Bah! They're only primary school kids, for God's sake. Get with the program, Grandad. Anyway, such worries are being addressed as we speak.

Ramspott said the district plans to share all physical activity and sleep reports with parents [...]

See? The benevolent state is nothing if not generous. Plus ...

Ramspott said Parkway will require parental consent to participate ...

But, of course.

... largely because of the responsibility of caring for the monitors.

Hey, at $90 a pop it's expensive kit!

Still, parents should be asking what data is being collected from those devices and when, Richards said. They should ask what rights they have to control the data, whether data is anonymous, what safeguards will be in place to protect data, whether the district is going to give it or sell it to anyone, when data will be destroyed, and whether the district has a privacy policy available to parents.

"If a university would do this study, they'd need to have lots of approval and consent from our internal review board, because this is a form of human subject research," Richards said. "Though the district should be applauded for ensuring kids are healthy, this kind of biological surveillance seems to go far beyond what they should be concerned with."

For crying out loud! What is it with this guy? Does he not realise that it's essential for the state to concern itself with how children are raised - parents, less so?

He wonders what's next.

"Will they start monitoring kids' nutrition at home or how many hours they spend reading at home?" Richards asked.

Oooh, what a fantastic idea! We'll pitch it to the Department for Education next week.