Simple Simon Blatantly Lies To Australia

As I touched on in the last article, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) yesterday decided to continue with their ban on e-cigs containing nicotine. Part of their flawed reasoning cited evidence from the US which is hardly surprising.

You see, one of the prime Australian 'experts' in tobacco control Down Under is the vandal-turned-clown Simple Simon Chapman, whose prejudice against e-cigs runs so deep that he has scoured the globe for straws to clutch in his attempt to obstruct vaping.

Increasingly he has been drawn to the US where the CDC continues to lie about the subject by classifying e-cigs as a "tobacco product" despite containing no tobacco. That way, they are able to pretend that tobacco use remains unchanged as more youth vape and fewer smoke.

I highlight 'tobacco use' because it is a clever manipulation of statistics, however it's quite clear when you look into the data that youth smoking in the US has been falling to record low levels. For example, here is a graph taken from CDC data by Reason's Jacob Sullum in April last year.

Yesterday, though, Chappers appeared on Australian national broadcaster ABC's PM show and declared this to the nation.

"The fall in youth smoking that we saw for many many years in the United States last year, for the first time, stopped falling; and while that was happening, e-cigarette use was rising dramatically."

As you can see above, even if the CDC may try to argue that tobacco use remains overall the same if you fraudulently include e-cigs in the same category, it is completely untrue to say that youth smoking has stopped falling.

It's the same if you look at National Youth Tobacco Survey data, as Chris Snowdon did last month ...

... and also if you look at US Monitoring The Future surveys.

Contrary to what Simple Simon told Australia yesterday, nowhere is there a hint that youth smoking rates have stopped falling in the US. Yet if you're an Australian citizen who is largely uneducated on the subject of e-cigs, yesterday you would have heard someone called Professor something-or-other declare a falsehood as fact on Australia's state broadcaster.

In many professions, this kind of behaviour would be punishable by suspension or even dismissal. But in the unregulated Wild West world of 'public health' - where you would think accurate information should be far more important than in any other sphere - Chappers will get away scot-free with deliberately lying.

Sadly, he is just one small part of a broken and corrupt profession in which lying is viewed as an acceptable tactic, and which is actively harming social cohesion and liberty the world over. 

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.

Mad Stan And His Agnotology

"There's your Minister of Science; honor-bound to expand the frontiers of knowledge, except that he's also chief Defender of the Faith!" - George Taylor, Planet of the Apes, 1968

On Wednesday, Clive Bates alerted us to the imminent publication of a piss poor review of e-cig studies by Mad Stan the wobble-bottomed aircraft engineer. Entitled Who will be duped by error-strewn ‘meta-analysis’ of e-cigarette studies? (since updated), Bates mused in the article as to which medical journal would be naively credulous enough to publish such a load of scientifically-illiterate garbage which had been floating around for a while, thereby strongly suggesting it had been rejected elsewhere.

Well, the gullible journal turned out to be The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, and it may not have been such a good idea on their part. Because being up to Mad Stan's usual standard - as in absolute codswallop - the meta-analysis was immediately ripped to shreds. Here are some rave reviews from his colleagues in tobacco control.

“Publication of this study represents a major failure of the peer review system in this journal.” 

"Its conclusions are at best tentative and at worst incorrect" 

“This review is grossly misleading in my opinion" 

“This review is not scientific"

Now, I'll stick to the point here and not muse as to how many of those detractors have cited Mad Stan's science-phobic policy-driven wibble in the past and probably still would when it comes to tobacco, but instead wonder how such a world-class crank is still taken seriously by anyone at all considering he produces 'research' which is about as reliable and trustworthy as a knitted condom.

This is because, you see, Glantz the aeronautic spanner-monkey is still - incredibly - a bit of a God in tobacco control industry circles and one which many will not be able to touch. He is the go-to man for e-cigs advice according to the WHO - his previous review of e-cigs was heavily relied upon by the WHO when recommending vaping bans everywhere in 2014 - and therefore ASH will have a difficult time if they criticise him considering their prominent role in the WHO's Framework Convention Alliance.

Yet all he does these days - in fact all he has ever done - is produce garbage to prove a pre-conceived policy recommendation, and he's not afraid to corrupt evidence and misreport genuine researchers in the process.

Just a thought, but it's easy to conclude that e-cigs don't help smokers to quit when you deliberately exclude smokers who have successfully quit using e-cigs, and it's difficult to see how this is supposed to be remotely considered 'science' or even believable research that The Lancet should be publishing.

But then tobacco control has long since departed from having anything to do with science, it is in fact anti-science and its journals are increasingly also of the same mindset. It's a cult to which you are either within or without. Glantz is one of the cult leaders so is duty-bound to promote whatever quasi-religious anti-nicotine hegemony that his colleagues wish him to, and at the moment in the US it just happens to be an ignorant and quite absurd dislike for e-cigs based on no reasonable foundation whatsoever.

Therefore he lies. He is the Defender of the Shonky Faith and also the chosen one, installed by the WHO as Minister of Dodgy Science.

Now, in the very recent past we have seen quite a lot of this anti-science from 'public health'. On e-cigs especially they have become the "merchants of doubt" they have long-accused the tobacco industry of being.

A merchant of doubt explains merchants of doubt

From deliberately misrepresenting their own studies and refusing to apologise when they get found out, through making up demonstrably false assertions to what Glantz is doing here, purposely perverting evidence to suit an agenda designed to blur the truth and to create confusion. The Chief Morality Officer has done precisely the same with alcohol guidelines and abandoned science in favour of a religious approach to drinking.

So it was quite timely that the BBC recently came up with a word for such deliberate misinformation, ironically from a career tobacco control buddy.

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge?

Proctor had found that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology. 

“We live in a world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth cuts through the noise,” says Proctor. Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed, he warns. 

Proctor found that ignorance spreads when firstly, many people do not understand a concept or fact and secondly, when special interest groups – like a commercial firm or a political group – then work hard to create confusion about an issue.

How ironic is it that someone still banging on about the behaviour of tobacco companies in the 1960s can so brilliantly encapsulate the actions of tobacco control doubt-spreaders in 2016?

The tobacco industry have long since abandoned any pretence that their product is harmless, but some in tobacco control are employing exactly the same doubt creation methods now towards e-cigs! They have become everything they have spent decades condemning. They propagate ignorance; they obscure truth in the noise of purposely-created media headlines based on junk science; and they deliberately create confusion.

When science is handed over to the Defender of the Tobacco Control Faith, when headlines are created by an aircraft engineer who is quite willing to lie and undermine colleagues, when medical journals are so gullible as to publish quite risible bullshit, and when the world's health overseer actually trusts pretend scientists over sound objective evidence, they have spectacularly abandoned the moral high ground.

Or, as one of their own repeatedly points out ...

I don't recall any previous tobacco-related public information campaign as dishonest and deceptive as this one since the tobacco industry itself battled to undermine the public's appreciation of the health hazards of smoking.

Quite.

Meet Mendacious Martina

OK, we all know tobacco controllers lie, it's just what they do. It is module one of the induction course before they learn other essential skills such as hurling ad hominems, publishing junk science, ignoring the public and blaming everything on Big Tobacco.

But I don't think I've ever seen or heard an article where the tobacco controller lies from start to finish before. Not till yesterday anyway.

E-cigarettes will no longer be sold to children and adolescents, according to a new draft law in Germany. And rightly so, says Martina Pötschke-Langer of the German Cancer Research Center.

Well, actually, Yale University recently concluded that bans on youth access to e-cigs increased smoking rates, so she's not off to a good start. But then, the tobacco control industry normally only take note of 'science' if it's the junk kind they produce themselves, so no surprise there.

If you've never heard of Pötschke-Langer, she is a tobacco controller of the most vile kind, whose hatred of e-cigs can only be because they look a bit like smoking. She is a spiteful bereaved East German tobacco control moon-howler of the first water who "fights for laws" so - it won't surprise you to know - has been working as adviser to the pharma-funded but unelected WHO since 1999. She claims not to need 'science' to ban e-cigs because "we do not need a new nicotine product available on the market", so was an obvious choice as "curator of the knowledge" by Linda McAvan when she was rigging the EU's Tobacco Products Directive to drive through policies to kill off vaping for good.

Monumental Liar, Mad Martina, via Flickr

Since then, the absurd woman has been busy trying - unsuccessfully - to attack e-cigs and those who sell them through various German courts. Defeats on demanding they be classed as medicines and on vendors using her quotes have followed, which is perhaps why she is so pissed off. How else can we explain some of her other ludicrously astonishing claims in yesterday's article?

That does not mean that they are steady smokers but the products have actually been sold to children.

Yes, very strong on the children line, Martina, tobacco control industry school taught you very well.

Of course, children may have gotten hold of e-cigs but it's highly debatable that they were all 'sold' them. Only an incredibly unscrupulous vendor would do such a thing and throughout Europe e-cig sellers have been voluntarily implementing bans on sales to under 18s. Insofar as there might be a problem with e-cigs being sold directly to children, it is a vanishingly small one. This, of course, doesn't fit the narrative anti-smoking lunatic Pötschke-Langer wishes to create, though.

They are mostly propylene glycol and glycerin, flavoring, and nicotine.

No dear, that is all of what is in them, nothing else.

Carcinogens have been detected in some of the aerosols in these products, i.e. substances that cause cancer.

You forgot to say "in quantities too small to cause any harm whatsoever", dear.

The product range is great and also very appealing to children. Some of these products are purchased mainly by children. 

The product range is appealing to everyone, and no, there are no categories which are "mainly" bought by children.

Are e-cigarettes mainly produced for children?

Yes, the marketing is definitely geared towards youngsters, especially because children like the flavors, like bubble gum.

Definitely?

I sometimes wonder what rattles around inside the heads of idiotic people like this. I expect they imagine the scene in an e-cig manufacturers office as follows:

Evil E-Cig Exec: We need to sell as many of these as possible, how do we go about it?
Henchman: Well, there are tens of millions of adult smokers in Europe and many more around the world we can reach via the internet. Tobacco control say that 70% of them are desperate to quit smoking so it is a huge and willing market to tap.
EEE: How easy would it be to sell to these adult smokers?
H: A doddle. They already spend massive sums of cash on cigarettes due to taxation, so they would actually be saving money buying our products instead. We would also be seen as the good guys for helping them quit tobacco. It's win/win all round.
EEE: Nah, fuck adults and all their cash, let's sell to kids instead. They have next to no disposable income, have no natural need for the product and are almost impossible to advertise to, that's much more likely to turn a profit. Plus I like scandalising the public, it's all I'm in the game for.
H: Yes, good point, why didn't I think of that before, Master? 

Said no e-cig company board members, ever.

Only someone who wished to bankrupt themselves would run a business along those lines, but for certain cretins in the tobacco control industry - whose own business model is to merely scrounge from taxpayers - this is apparently how businessmen think. It beggars belief that governments give cash to such superlative simpletons, doesn't it?

E-cigarettes were actually designed to replace tobacco cigarettes to help smokers gradually give up smoking. Why have children been targeted as consumers?

Producers have used unscrupulous strategies to build up a market made up of children and adolescents. That was intentional and we have studies on the subject.

The most credulous interviewer in history believes her shit but still mad Martina goes even further. "A market made up of children", and "intentional and we have studies"? No it isn't and no you don't, you big fat fucking liar.

Is second-hand smoke from e-cigarettes just as dangerous as tobacco cigarette smoke?

Emissions clearly worsen indoor air quality, especially if several people in one room are smoking e-cigarettes. There is a high increase of respirable particles that remain in the lungs and are then absorbed by the rest of the body. In indoor air measurements, carcinogenic substances have been found: acetaldehyde, formaldehyde and metals. E-cigarettes must be treated like tobacco cigarettes.

Is there proven harm from e-cigs to bystanders? Well, no, of course there isn't, nor will there ever be. And she knows that, so instead she just spreads innuendo from a bunch of fundamentally fraudulent studies which have been effortlessly debunked - all of which only studied only active use of e-cigs - and pretends that they apply to non-vapers too. Erm, which they don't.

This is such a blatant lie that she should be hauled into a court and banged up for it. But in tobacco control circles you get a pat on the back for being a disingenuous liar, so she'll probably receive another award instead.

But more astounding than her propensity to lie without missing a heartbeat is her jaw-dropping lack of care for the consequences of her actions. She claims to be someone dedicated to eradicating smoking, yet is actively spreading inaccuracies, misleading statements, half-truths and downright lies because she is a bit piqued that smokers are quitting without the help of obscene corpulent health nazis like her.

I'll say it till I'm blue in the face. It's never been about health with these professional bed-wetting, self-indulgent, mentally feeble, fib-lipped pieces of slug shit.

Anatomy Of A Charlatan

As a perfect example of how 'public health' can be run on ideological lines with no care about health or misleading the public, here is an interesting recent timeline involving the Faculty of Public Health's screaming lefty Director of Public Policy Simon Capewell.

Last week, the Lancet published an editorial designed to sling mud at Public Health England's positive report on e-cigs, I wrote about it here. Now, there would be no problem with a health publication debating some of the conclusions but The Lancet didn't do that, instead it merely hurled innuendo and ad hominems around which didn't really amount to a hill of beans, as described in the Speccie.

With wearying predictability, The Lancet launches into an ad hominem attack on two of the 11 authors of Nutt’s study. The editorial notes that one of the authors has consulted for a distributor of e-cigarettes and another has been a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry. Since Big Pharma does not make e-cigarettes and sees them as a rival to their own nicotine products it is debatable whether the second of these is a competing interest at all, but it is nevertheless there in black and white in the original study, as competing interests always are. 

According to The Lancet, the declared interests of two out of 11 authors of one study cited by Public Health England ‘raises serious questions not only about the conclusions of the PHE report, but also the quality of the agency’s peer review process’. This risible attempt to make a mountain out of a mole hill suggests that The Lancet is less interested in assessing the scientific evidence than in groping around for anything that might help blacken the PHE report’s name in the eyes of the public.

The Lancet editorial was published anonymously but it has been revealed since that Capewell was one of the authors. It created hostile attacks on e-cigs in the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Guardian and much foreign coverage complete with hyperbolic idiocy from activists, such as this from a blinkered nicotine-hater in the US.

“One of the studies used to make this conclusion was done by someone on the e-cigarette payroll,” [Erika Sward, the American Lung Association's assistant vice president of national advocacy] alleged. "What we’ve seen from the beginning since e-cigarettes have come out are unsubstantiated health claims by the industry and this is just one more.”

A quite ludicrous leap to get to that from a baseless slur but thank you for smoking America, do carry on.

Scroll on to Sunday and an obscure American online news source publishes an appalling click-bait article on e-cigs entitled  7 reasons e-cigarettes are bad. Considering it cherry-picked long-debunked junk science to make this misleading point, it was easily rubbished by Jacob Sullum of Reason in his response entitled 4 reasons this article about e-cigarettes is bad. It was also ripped to pieces by Mike Siegel.

The rest of the story is that most of these seven claims are false, all are misleading, all seven points actually demonstrate the public health value of e-cigarettes, and all seven arguments are taken almost verbatim from the propaganda being disseminated by colleagues of mine in the anti-smoking movement, demonstrating that their campaign of deception regarding e-cigarettes is working.

"Campaign of deception" is a very good description, because many in 'public health' are no longer working for the public good, they are just sitting on fat salaries and pumping out any old crap to enforce their absurd snobby prejudices on others, irrespective of health.

One of them is Capewell, who chose not to take into account a response to the Lancet by the authors of the Public Health England study, but instead to tweet to like-minded charalatans and fellow travellers the shite article mentioned above.

7 reasons #eCigs pose dangers to our health? #toxins #addiction #gateway etc @SimonChapman6 @theBMA @martinmckee http://t.co/laEMy0lBEl

— Simon Capewell (@SimonCapewell99) August 31, 2015

The Inquisitr article is utter junk - as Siegel's critique very ably shows - and can only mislead and spread baseless fear and confusion. Yet Professor Capewell decides it is more worthy than the considered views of public health colleagues!

Capewell enjoys a position of power in the UK public health network, yet appears completely uninterested in whether he is adversely influencing the public and seems to delight in spreading fear and confusion.  At the same time, he is aggressive and dismissive towards people who are actually listening to consumers and trying to eliminate the confusion, and doing so by smearing his own profession with ad hominems and deliberate abuse of declarations designed to show transparency. Capewell is not interested in whether or not e-cigs may be beneficial, he is just a policy advocate for the policies a guy called Simon Capewell would like to see.

And what's more, he is unelected, unaccountable and - as was shown in the case of fellow FPH nutter John Ashton - entirely immune to censure by his own organisation. He'll keep his job no matter how much nonsense he spouts and no matter how many people continue to smoke due to his bigotry, despite the Faculty of Public Health claiming to want smokers to quit. It's akin to someone working in KFC, openly spitting in customers' food and being given a pat on the back for it.

I only post this by way of explaining why I often say it's not about health, because a lot of the time it really isn't. It also explains why I sometimes use tags like 'shysters', 'health nazis', 'liar', 'troughers' and 'there's something very wrong with this country', because all of those apply to Capewell and many others who claim to be working for the public.

In reality, they couldn't give a shit.

"Call Me Janus"

David Cameron 2008:

"The era of big, bossy, state interference, top-down lever pulling is coming to an end."

2015:

MPs vote to enforce standardised cigarette packaging

David Cameron's official spokesman said: "The Prime Minister voted in favour of this change. He is pleased that it has gone through."

As leader of the Conservative Party, he's a great advert for UKIP, isn't he?

Mike Daube And His Funding Merry-Go-Round

Note to tobacco controllers: When you are instrumental in taking an appallingly prejudiced and stupid decision which makes global news and embarrasses your country - and you also lie about it - it's very likely to come back and smash your face in.

Last week, Australian anti-smoker obsessive Mike Daube was caught lying about the decision to ban the opera Carmen because it is set in a cigarette factory. To recap:

To cut a long story short, a state government body, Healthway - of which Mike Daube is a board member - forced the West Australian Opera to ditch a production of the 1875 composition because it is set in a cigarette factory. This prompted global hilarity at Aussie state censorship, but had Western Australia's Premier spitting blood about the embarrassment and the Australian Prime Minister chipping in with condemnation too.

Daube, being a tobacco controller, refused to show contrition for such an absurd outcome, and instead pretended it was nothing to do with him by blaming the opera company instead.

However, such was the absurdity of the decision and the embarrassment of Australian citizens, politicians and media, it didn't take long for someone to leak Healthway minutes which showed that Daube had openly lied to the media.

Leaked minutes of Healthway's April meeting show its arts advisory committee put forward three options to handle problems caused by a longstanding ban on funding performances that contained depictions of smoking. 

The minutes are directly at odds with versions of the funding row given by both Healthway and the WA Opera.  

But the minutes show the bid to water down the policy was vigorously opposed by anti-smoking campaigner Mike Daube.  

"Professor Daube stated there was no pressure for Healthway to change its current position," the minutes say.

Healthway have since been given a severe rap on the knuckles and told not to be so bloody stupid again. But the stink of Daube's actions must still be acrid to Australians because two different news sources have been researching his involvement with Healthway.

The West Australian looked into the funding handed out by the organisation, and the Australian has also run the story. It don't look good.

"TWO lobby groups run by anti-smoking activist Mike Daube have secured $2 million in ­taxpayer-funded grants from West Australian government agency Healthway since the Perth academic joined the board in 2010. 

The Australian Council on Smoking and Health, of which Professor Daube is president, has been one of the biggest recipients of Healthway’s grants over the past three years, receiving $225,000 in 2011, $231,000 in 2012 and $237,000 last year. 

Professor Daube’s campaigns at ACOSH include lobbying to ban smoking in people’s homes, mental health facilities and the nation’s prisons. Another group, the Public Health Advocacy Institute of WA, of which Professor Daube is director, has received $1.28m in grants since 2010. 

Grants made to ACOSH and PHAIWA since Professor Daube joined the Healthway board total $1.97m, according to an examination of the agency’s annual reports.

Healthway insist that Daube was not involved in the actual committees awarding these funds, so I suppose his pet projects receiving huge sums of taxpayer cash from an organisation Daube is a board member of is just an uncanny coincidence.

As a side note, this whole palaver - which could have been avoided if Daube hadn't exercised such a psychotic error of judgement - has also highlighted the insane nature of 'public health' funding in Australia.

The grants were made to two PHAIWA programs that promote public health advocacy through “professional development” and “knowledge transfer”. 

Professor Daube established the institute in 2008 at Curtin University, where he is employed. It lists Healthway as its biggest sponsor. The institute focuses on reducing obesity and alcohol consumption and runs courses to train “emerging leaders” in how to become the “advocates of tomorrow” in areas such as lobbying governments.

Just think about that for a moment. Not only has Daube made himself a decades long career of receiving government money to use for lobbying the government - a stunning abuse of taxpayer funds in itself - he is also using government money to train others how to use government money to lobby government!

And Healthway, of which he is a board member, is the organisation awarding government money to Daube's organisation ... which uses government money to train others how to use government money to lobby government.

Is your mind boggled yet?

Mike Daube's similarly obsessive mates - as we have come to expect of the tobacco control industry - are desperately pretending that the truth didn't happen and that he's done nothing wrong, but they should really be listening to advice from WA Today.

Number one rule, do not lie to the media as it will only come back to bite you. 

Quite. In this case, to the tune of $2 million.

Not News: Aussie Tobacco Controller Caught Lying

As good friend of this blog Mark Wadsworth said to me at an event in January last year, it's not really big news that anti-smoking organisations lie any more - it is, after all, what they do best - however, I still find it staggering how blatant and unashamed they are about it.

The latest to have been caught lying his arse off is Mike Daube over the ban on the opera Carmen, reported on recently by Snowdon. You may remember Daube being the one who thinks passive smoke is more dangerous than exhaust fumes in a drive-in queue; who thinks Cadbury's are evil for sponsoring the Olympics; and who believes e-cigs are a tobacco industry conspiracy.

To cut a long story short, a state government body, Healthway - of which Mike Daube is a board member - forced the West Australian Opera to ditch a production of the 1875 composition because it is set in a cigarette factory. This prompted global hilarity at Aussie state censorship, but had Western Australia's Premier spitting blood about the embarrassment and the Australian Prime Minister chipping in with condemnation too.

Daube then promptly apologised for his organisation's huge error of judgement ...

... no, of course he didn't. The oleaginous creep instead tried to save face by swearing it wasn't Healthway's fault and blaming the opera company!

He told Radio 6PR that if WA Opera had no alternative, Healthway would not have had a problem with Carmen, providing smoking elements were excluded from any potential performance at schools. 

"If we're talking about censorship, this wasn't censorship because it was WA Opera's decision."

This, as it turns out, was a lie from the top drawer; a real tobacco control industry humdinger! You see, not only did Healthway leave the WA Opera no option whatsoever, but it was none other than Mike Daube himself who was the prime factor in ensuring the ban on Carmen went ahead.

Leaked minutes of Healthway's April meeting show its arts advisory committee put forward three options to handle problems caused by a longstanding ban on funding performances that contained depictions of smoking. 

The minutes are directly at odds with versions of the funding row given by both Healthway and the WA Opera. 

But the minutes show the bid to water down the policy was vigorously opposed by anti-smoking campaigner Mike Daube. 

"Professor Daube stated there was no pressure for Healthway to change its current position," the minutes say. 

"He stated that while some art productions may warrant a smoking component, organisations would need to understand that for the season where smoking appears as part of an arts performance, they would be ineligible for Healthway sponsorship." 

"The board provided strong support to maintain Healthway's current position of not sponsoring arts organisations that allow smoking on stage."

So, erm, it was WA Opera's decision only in the sense that they could perform another opera with money, or Carmen without any money.

What's more, it turns out that this isn't the first time it's happened.

WHEN the Blue Room Theatre in Perth staged an acclaimed play about addiction several years ago, lurking in the opening night audience was a bureaucrat who demanded one scene be axed from future performances. 

The man watching the first local production of British playwright Martin Crimp’s The Country was employed by the West Australian government’s health body Healthway, one of the theatre’s main sponsors. 

“He came to us afterwards to tell us we had to remove one scene that featured smoking,” recalled Blue Room former executive director Jansis O’Hanlon. 

“We weren't allowed to have smoking or language about smoking, and we weren't allowed to show any smoking paraphernalia ... The play was about addiction and there was also a scene with (heroin) needles, but they had no problem with us showing that.”

Beggars belief, doesn't it?

Ms O’Hanlon said the theatre withdrew from the sponsorship deal rather than compromise its artistic integrity. “It was a big gulp for us to say no,” she said, recalling that Healthway also had demanded to approve all scripts."

This, it seems, is what Daube and the tobacco control industry call 'choice'. It's their way or the highway, with censorship front and centre as a reason for their sponsorship. And if you get caught ... lie. Erich Honecker would be so proud.

As we are on an arts theme, perhaps paraphrasing a Shakespeare meme is in order. Mendacity, thy name is tobacco control.

H/T The ATA

The Times Redefines The Word 'Retaliated'

I've always known e-cigs had the potential for showing up tobacco control for the appalling shysters that they are, but I must admit to not fully understanding how very low they would sink in protecting their grubby, disingenuous and self-serving cartel.

Following FPH President John Ashton's abusive antics at the weekend (see here), you'd think - wouldn't you - that he'd lie low and take his punishment like a man. Of course not, this is a dyed-in-the-wool public health trouser-stuffer we are talking about here - motto being "when in trouble; lie".

From the Times:

Public health chiefs have accused e-cigarette users of a campaign of online abuse, saying that junior scientists are being scared away from research by explicit attacks from “vapers” on Twitter. 

Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, is facing an official complaint after he retaliated, calling one vaper a “c***” and another an “onanist”. 

Professor Ashton was called a “c***”, “asshole” and “jizzweasel” over the weekend for supporting the WHO, while one vaper complained: “I was blocked before I could even take the time to find a fitting insult.”

Retaliated?

Let's do some time checking that The Times hack couldn't be bothered with, shall we? Here are the quoted insults Ashton directed at vapers during his couple of hours of insanity.

Both these were quite definitely posted on Saturday 6th September.

Apparently, though, this was in "retaliation" for - in chronological order - "c***", "asshole", "jizzweasel", and "fitting insult" in the early hours of Sunday morning (that's the 7th) as part of a long jovial thread while vapers were still laughing at Ashton's incredibly funny burblings which had occurred two or three hours previously.

Only in the world of tobacco control - where lies are routinely honoured and considered the height of academia - could a Professor claim to have been prompted into firing off insults in "retaliation" for something which had not yet occurred.

Truly are public health lobbyists the most stunningly dishonest people on the planet.

Times journalist Chris Smyth isn't the first lazy hack to have been punked by an industry packed full of congenital liars - and he won't be the last - but for the love of God can't any of his kind do some proper bloody research once in a blue moon?

Good grief!

Politicians: Please Lie Responsibly

I know it's not an earth-shattering revelation, but a Cabinet minister has been caught lying.

Desperately trying to justify poking her nose in where it has no business, Theresa May came out with this whopper yesterday.

But the Home Secretary Theresa May said: 'Alcohol-fuelled harm costs taxpayers £21 billion a year. It is therefore right that the alcohol industry is taking action to help reduce this burden, without penalising those that drink responsibly.'

Except it doesn't cost the taxpayer that amount at all, nor anything even close to it as Snowdon pointed out when Sarah Wollaston told this particular lie to the House in 2012.

This would be a reference to the British Cabinet Office report of 2003 which found a total social cost of around £18-20 billion. 

Of these costs, £4.7 billion were intangible costs (ie. they are hypothetical - they do not need to be paid by anyone, let alone the taxpayer). 

A further £5.5 billion were lost productivity costs which, again, do not represent a bill that needs to be paid. 

A further £5.1 billion were private costs related to crime which, once again, do not need to be recouped through the tax system, and the author of the report stressed repeatedly that these costs were at the absolute top end of any realistic estimate. 

The only costs which can be considered as "to the taxpayer" are £1.7 billion in healthcare and £2.2 billion in crime and punishment, but since the exchequer receives £9 billion a year in alcohol duty, that hardly makes a compelling case for a compensatory sin tax, does it?

Indeed. And it also doesn't make much of a case for a Tory-led government to applaud choice being restricted for the entire population, on the back of selective lies and a booze epidemic that quite simply isn't happening.

As he has admirably done before, our esteemed blog knight Philip Davies stuck up for common sense over puritanical finger-wagging from his own party, but what good will this petty tinkering do anyway? As was discovered when nicotine was reduced in tobacco, smokers simply smoked more to achieve the same level in their blood. So why would drinkers not react in the same way? Drinkers will self-administer just as smokers do and will simply drink more wine to reach their preferred level of intoxication - whether that be mild, merry, wobbly, shit-faced or comatose.

What I find far more worrying from a societal perspective, is why politicians are so lethally addicted to binge-lying in order to interfere in our personal choices. Perhaps we need a pressure group to wean them off this damaging behaviour by urging them to lie responsibly with a view to quitting the filthy habit altogether.

H/T RooBeeDoo via Frank Davis

The New Flat Earthers

Commenting on the incredible incompetence of the Western Australian government in banning e-cigs, shyster of the week is Roger Magnusson, Professor of Health Law and Governance at the University of Sydney.

Professor Magnusson says it’s breathlessly naïve to assume e-cigarettes will function only or mainly as stop-smoking devices.

“US research suggests these products are a gateway to smoking as often as a gateway from smoking,” he says.

“If they are such a great quit smoking device, they might nevertheless be made available to smokers on prescription. That would give smokers an alternative option, while minimising the creation of a new market for recreational nicotine that may well lead to smoking addiction for many of those new initiates, a great many of whom will be adolescents and young people.

Yes, it's the zombie gateway theory yet again, uttered with absolute certainty despite having been thoroughly debunked on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the US, official statistics showed that youth smoking fell as vaping rose, while another study concluded that "it didn't seem as though [e-cigs] really proved to be a gateway to anything". Meanwhile, back in Blighty anti-smoking fake charity ASH reported last month that "significantly, usage among non-smokers remains negligible" and "there is no evidence from our research that e-cigarettes are acting as a gateway into smoking".

Pretty conclusive, huh?

For Magnusson - and others like him who cling to their dull-witted imagination rather than real life evidence - to invoke "US research" while burbling such nonsense is comparable to someone pointing to the existence of orbiting satellites as proof that the Earth is flat.

He is either so laughably ignorant of facts surrounding e-cigs that he shouldn't really be approached for a quote, or else he's a monumental liar. You decide.

We Didn't Say That ... Erm, Did We?

Further to yesterday's article here about how Public Health England plans to lobby the government - which pays them half a billion pounds per year of your taxes to do so - to include e-cigs in the smoking ban, it seems that that is not what they were saying at all! Silly me.

Professor Kevin Fenton, PHE’s national director health and wellbeing said: “We have not called for a ban on e-cigarette use in public spaces. PHE is working with our partners to consider the options for supporting safe use of e-cigarettes to reduce harm and support smokers to quit, some of which were discussed by our Board in February.”

Poor Kevin (this is him) looks to have been caught on the hop by ITV and the Indy picking up on his employer's madness. However, if he is telling the truth, perhaps I dreamed reading this long one-sided tirade against e-cigs from Kevin's obscene tax-sponging organisation.

Because using the words "prohibited" and "public places" in item 32 certainly sounds like PHE has "called for a ban on e-cigarette use in public spaces", eh?

Doesn't look much like "supporting safe use of e-cigarettes to reduce harm" to me. Does it you?

"Expert"? Or Liar?

There has been a bit of debate recently about whether Martin McKee can legitimately describe himself as an expert on e-cigs.

Snowdon and Gluggles both believe not, whereas the far left 'public health' community are hanging their hat on him.

@Sempivara They certainly will. @martinmckee is speaking and he is a key #publichealth expert re e-cigarettes.
— Gabriel Scally (@GabrielScally) March 5, 2014

So, an interesting test would be last night's BBC Newsnight where McKee was pitted against Matt Ridley on the subject (from around 38 mins here).

One of the many dubious claims he made was this one.

Now, this rise in the use of e-cigs amongst American youths has been much-trumpeted before by anti-smoking luddites, but they previously did so by omitting part of the story as Jacob Sullum described in November (emphasis mine).

Last September the CDC noted with alarm that the percentage of teenagers who had tried electronic cigarettes doubled between 2011 and 2012. "Many teens who start with e-cigarettes may be condemned to struggling with a lifelong addiction to nicotine and conventional cigarettes," CDC Director Tom Frieden worried. In a Medscape interview a few weeks later, Frieden suggested that fear had already materialized, asserting that "many kids are starting out with e-cigarettes and then going on to smoke conventional cigarettes." Yet the CDC's data, which came from the 2012 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), did not support that claim. In fact, nine out of 10 high school students who reported vaping in the previous month were already cigarette smokers, suggesting that the increase in e-cigarette consumption might signal successful harm reduction. Last week the CDC reported additional NYTS data that further undermine Frieden's claim, showing that smoking among teenagers fell as vaping rose. 

Between 2011 and 2012, when the share of middle school students who reported using e-cigarette in the previous month rose from 0.6 percent to 1.1 percent, the share reporting past-month consumption of conventional cigarettes fell from 4.3 percent to 3.5 percent. Among high school students, past-month e-cigarette use rose from 1.5 percent to 2.8 percent, while past-month consumption of tobacco cigarettes fell from 15.8 percent to 14 percent. Although these trends do not necessarily mean e-cigarettes are responsible for the decline in smoking, the numbers hardly seem consistent with the story Frieden is eager to tell: that the availability of e-cigarettes is leading to more smoking than would otherwise occur.

You see, it's clear that while these students may be using e-cigs more, it is undeniable that their use of tobacco is declining at the same time and at a faster rate.

You could possibly argue that Frieden in the US was unaware of the true situation owing to the later timing of the CDC announcement on tobacco use compared with that of e-cig use. However, McKee can't use that excuse as all the facts and figures were at his disposal months before last night.

So when he said "use of these products by 12 to 15 year olds is going up, whereas there has been no compensatory fall in the use of real cigarettes" he was provably wrong and effectively spreading misinformation on the BBC.

Under the circumstances, then, we have to ask ourselves a question. Is McKee lying here? Or is he quite simply not very much of an 'expert'? You decide.

Either way, it doesn't look good, does it?

Anna Soubry: The Most Incompetent Minister Ever?

When I wrote, in April, that Anna Soubry is not fit for a ministerial post and an embarrassing liability to the Conservatives, it seems that I was vastly over-estimating her talents.

For those who didn't have the time to plough through last week's hour long European Scrutiny Committee grilling of Soubry and DoH puppet-master Andrew Black, here's a handy 3 minute summary of her astounding ignorance of the EU Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) concerning e-cigs.

Stunning, isn't it?

She went to the EU - behind the back of parliament and bypassing all proper scrutiny - to vote on a directive about which she knew virtually nothing. Yet she claims, and I quote:

"I'm not going to pretend that I just did what my officials said because it wasn't like that in any event."

So is she, instead, claiming that she subverted democracy by keeping a parliamentary committee in the dark, only to unilaterally vote on a set of measures without even knowing what was on the table? That would seem to be the only other conclusion to take since she was under the impression that e-cigs had been dropped from the TPD altogether.

So is she the most incompetent minister that has ever set foot in Westminster? Or just a 'repulsive little liar'?

You decide.

Proven Liar Vivienne Nathanson Is Doing It Again

Do you remember proven liar Vivienne Nathanson?

No? Well, she works for the British Medical Association (BMA) which is basically a union for the medical profession. Here she is blatantly lying to the BBC in 2011.



On that radio spot, she was 100% confident that the rubbish she was spewing about smoking in cars had been peer reviewed and was incontestable. She was very certain about it.

It was not the truth at all. In fact, it was such utter garbage that the BMA were forced to quietly issue a humiliating correction a few days later.

It would appear that she hasn't learned from the experience.

"There is some small amount of emerging evidence of some people, particularly children, using [e-cigs] as an access source to get the nicotine hit," said Viven Nathanson from the British Medical Association.

Err, what evidence Vivienne? There quite simply isn't any - not even junk stuff provided by your corrupt friends - to refer to.

Unless, of course, she is talking about this from ASH last month (emphasis mine).

Among children regular use of e-cigarettes is extremely rare. Children who had heard of e-cigarettes were asked about their use and knowledge of them. What little use that is reported is confined almost entirely to children who currently smoke or used to smoke. 

• 1 in 10 16-18 year olds who had heard of e-cigarettes (1 in 20 among 11-15 year olds) has “tried e-cigarettes once or twice”.
• 1 in 100 16-18 year olds (0% 11-15 year olds) uses e-cigarettes more than once a week.
• Among young people who have never smoked 1% have “tried ecigarettes once or twice”, 0% report continued e-cigarette use and 0% expect to try an e-cigarette soon.

Is this really the proven liar's 'emerging evidence' of children 'using them as an access source to get the nicotine hit'? 0%?

What the hell is this woman's problem? Why can she never give an opinion based on facts and proper evidence?

Do you reckon the BMA might receive funding from pharmaceutical companies?

Dr Hilary Jones Lies On The BBC

Well, wasn't yesterday fun, eh?

No Smoking Day was forgotten as desperate health lobbyists scrambled to a three line whip by whining, pleading, scaremongering and - most disgracefully - lying about minimum alcohol pricing on every media outlet they could manage.

Thanks to all of you who e-mailed or tweeted the shameful nonsense you'd seen or heard peddled as fact (special plaudits to the two who fired off complaints to the BBC) but I feel I have to pick a winner.

Runner-up for the utter garbage award goes to serial liars the BMA who claimed that minimum pricing is to be implemented in Scotland next month. But stand out liar of the whole day of astonishing mendacity must surely be Dr Hilary Jones who stated on Steve Wright's Radio 2 show that minimum pricing is not only already in force north of the border - which it most certainly isn't - but has also been proven to be a success!

Yes, he really did also say that government should be ashamed of "keeping pubs open".

Was he challenged on any of this demonstrable poppycock? Of course not, it was on "internationally respected news service", the BBC.

Truly we are living in insane times, ladies and gents.

Canadian Minimum Pricing Advocate Is A Serial Bullshitter

Dr Tim Stockwell is a Canadian with a bit of a beef about alcohol. You may remember that he was behind the BBC's heroic claims about minimum pricing earlier this week.

Snowdon described it as "lying with statistics".

It is a bald-faced lie to say that there have been any "significant changes in alcohol-related deaths observed in British Columbia".

Well, via Crampton, it appears this was no fluke. Stockwell turns out to be a serial abuser of evidence and data.

Despite the absurd contortions he was forced to perform in order to reach a pre-determined result on minimum pricing, he has gone on record criticising other researchers who found that moderate consumption of alcohol is largely beneficial.

[...] in a letter to Addiction, he keeps wondering if it's possible ever to derive any evidence of protective benefits from population epidemiological studies because of potential uncontrolled confounding.

His targets have responded by pointing out that Stockwell really should take that plank out of his eye before accusing others.

[...] we sense a desire by some in the field to apply tough standards on protective effects and more lenient standards on other effects, where sometimes the responses to very simple survey questions such as ‘Did your partner’s alcohol consumption contribute to your marriage problems?’ are accepted as causal evidence.

So, it appears he doesn't just lie with statistics. He also lies by emphasising research - however dubious - which agrees with his agenda, while dismissing other research - however strong - which doesn't.

Another dangerous, dishonest crank gets through the BBC's {cough} rigorous, {cough} world-respected health team, then.

When Is A Straight Line Not A Straight Line?

I don't know where the usual half-wits who put their name to BBC website smoking articles have disappeared to, they seem to have been rather quiet of late. As such, today's breathless paraphrasing of a classic case of tobacco control industry 'science by press release' was left to Adam Brimelow to present.

There was a sharp fall in the number of children admitted to hospital with severe asthma after smoke-free legislation was introduced in England, say researchers. 

A study showed a 12% drop in the first year after the law to stop smoking in enclosed public places came into force.

Well, actually, it didn't but I'll come to that later.

In the meantime, let's revisit tobacco control's idea of what is significant and what is not; along with what is solely due to the smoking ban, and what has absolutely nothing to do with it.

You see, Anna 'pay me and I'll say what you want' Gilmore produced a study in 2010 which proved {cough} beyond any doubt that there had been a statistically significant reduction in heart attacks which was entirely due to the triumph of the smoking ban. Here's what it looked like.


Dramatic, isn't it?

Whereas, this is what fellow career anti-smoker, Linda Bauld, described as statistically insignificant after being paid £47,000 by the government to do so.

UK Pub Closures 2004-2009

Pub closures, you see, had nothing to do with the ban whatsoever. In fact, they haven't even been closing at all according to ASH.

However, the pro-tobacco lobby’s claims that the smoking ban has led to pub closures are unfounded. In 2007, the year England went smokefree, the number of licensed premises for “on sales” of alcohol actually increased by 5% and there has been a net increase in the number of people reporting going to pubs since the smokefree law came into effect.

That's correct. The media; the government who are holding crisis debates on the demise of pubs; the public who see them boarded up on a daily basis; and the BBPA who track the numbers, are all deluded. It's just a dream.

So back to today's big news.

Here is what that dramatic reduction in "children admitted with severe asthma" looks like (from the report, not the press release Brimelow churned out). For your safety, please hold onto a fixture or fitting in case this knocks you sideways.

A bit disappointed? Hey, don't blame me, I just pass on this stuff.

You see, contrary to Brimelow's artless reportage, there wasn't a drop at all. There was merely a slight deviation from what some highly-partial professional tobacco controller had predicted (and even that doesn't show a significant reduction). And who was this tobacco controller?

Dr Glantz supervised the statistical analysis, interpreted the findings, reviewed and revised the manuscript, and approved the final manuscript as submitted.

Yes, it's the smoke-obsessed aircraft mechanic Stanton Glantz, arguably the foremost anti-smoking crank on the planet and a man for whom no data is too challenging to torture; no lie too big to tell; and who has never been known to produce anything in the last four decades which could remotely be described as objective science.

His latest wheeze, for example, is to ignore entirely all real life claims as to the effectiveness of e-cigs. Not because they weren't valid, but simply on the basis that they don't fit in with his pre-determined agenda on behalf of the pharma industry.

And Brimelow bought it, probably without even a cursory glance at the report or a Google search on its authors. That's Adam Brimelow of the internationally respected news service known as the BBC.

Allegedly.

Thirdhand E-Cig Vapour: Yes, It's Apparently A Concern

Thanks must go to the kind fellow jewel robber who forwarded me a copy of the aforementioned unavailable study which Raving Mad Stan tweeted about on Friday.

On first skim, it takes itself very seriously so I'll have a closer look at it when I get time. But, for now, I thought you'd like to see this stand-out gem from the preamble.

Another important aspect in the future discussion about e-cigarettes will be the effect of third-hand smoke that mainly describes human exposure against residues of smoking on clothes, furniture, and other indoor surfaces (Matt et al., 2011). In case of e-cigarettes, the solvent of the liquids may remain on available surfaces and be a source for the contamination of residents.

Now, forgive me if I've misread that, but these guys seem to think third-hand smoke - which isn't even a thing - is reason to suspect that third-hand e-cig vapour is a future danger to the population. Yes, water vapour is now dangerous according to the public health racket. Quite remarkable! Think of the children and boil those kettles outdoors from now on please.

The study to which they refer is authored by Georg E Matt, a boggle-eyed fruitcake on the lunatic fringe of even a tobacco control industry which has long lost perspective.

You know you're dealing with someone incredibly deluded when Simon Chapman himself takes time to write a not-too-enthusiastic critique.

Many constituents of third hand smoke can be found in all homes and cars, regardless of smoking

It is important that research documents residuals from tobacco smoke. But it is equally important that consumers and policy makers are not led to believe that the chemical compounds thus located are somehow unique to tobacco smoke. 

The omission of this information in such reports risks harming the credibility of tobacco control.

In fact, he could have been referring to Georg Matt when he wrote this.

Opponents of clean indoor air will be able to point to dubious “endgame” advocacy in nations which have successfully introduced indoor smoking bans, and invoke slippery slope precedents that advocates actually want to ban smoking “everywhere”. This may unfairly brand tobacco control advocates as clandestine extremists with agendas which abandon all proportionality in the formulation of policy.

Proportionality flew out the window years ago, Simon, me old mucker. All that's left is quite astounding fuckwittery.

Probably why, even though this study cites Matt et al as a source - 'research' Chapman has politely condemned - his zealotry still found it perfectly correct to retweet when Nutty Stan made his great revelation to the world of Twitter. 

Not that it was much of a shattering revelation anyway, despite Stan's breathless scaremongery. It's months old and I've mentioned it before.

Still, it's worth looking into further seeing as Stan thinks it's such a cracker, isn't it? What are the odds that the study doesn't show e-cigs are that dangerous, after all? Oh look, it's already been looked into, and no, it doesn't.

Did Sarah Wollaston Lie To The House Today?

Resident Tory cuckoo, Sarah Wollaston - a one trick pony alcohol prohibitionist - was in Westminster today to push the cause of minimum alcohol pricing amongst other dictatorial junk.

Did she lie? Well, we won't know for sure until the transcript is available, but unless she is incredibly stupid and being manipulated by others who are very happy to do so, she did in her article at Politics Home this morning.

Wade through it to find your personal favourite Alcohol Concern-founded sleight of hand stat, but her financial reasoning is extremely easy to debunk. Incontrovertibly.

The fact is that when alcohol is too cheap, more people die or wreak havoc on those around them and the rest of society picks up the tab.

This was as true for gin pricing in Hogarth’s Britain as it is with pocket money alcohol today at around 17p per unit.

She is very much against this, natch, and wants to match or beat the Scottish, as she tweeted earlier today.


She then goes on to say that this is nothing to be worried about. Oh no, this will cost responsible drinkers the square root of peanuts, so it will.

[...] even if the minimum unit price was set at 50p, would only increase the bill for moderate drinkers by £12 per year.

OK, we have the figures as stated by Wollaston, let's now do the maths.

I can't find the product which sells at 17p per unit, but then Wollaston is pretty vague about it too. So let's go for the cheapest supermarket product at mysupermarket.co.uk, Tesco's Value range ant's piss lager, currently selling at 70p for four 440ml cans (at a mind-bending 2% ABV).

This works out at 3.52 units, at an individual price of 19.88p per unit. Sticking rigidly to the government's absurdly low weekly limits - surely the epitome of a 'moderate' drinker - would see an intake of 21 units.

Currently, that would cost a low income family (after all, who else would drink the stuff) £4.17. Under Wollaston's plan, it would be £10.50. Now, last time I looked there were 52 weeks in the year, which would mean an increase - just for one adult member of the family - of £329.16!

Hey! I'm using Sarah's chosen examples, remember. No cherry-picking here.

Not convinced? How about something more realistic, then? Tesco also do a 4% own brand at £5.94 for twelve 500ml cans. This is 24 units, only a tad over the strict individual limits, and would result in a yearly addition to a single man's domestic shopping bill of £6.06 per week, or £315.12 per year.

So, two adults, drinking within government guidelines, would be penalised to the tune of £500-£600 by Wollaston's personal crusade. Far in excess of any annual increase in energy bills advanced by even the most pessimistic of sources in recent months.

Of course, there is one way that Wollaston's figures could add up. That being if she wasn't comparing like with like at all. Even remotely.

The only explanation is that she is using an example of the stuff poor people drink to come up with the 'shocking' 17p per unit, while reverting to what people actually drink - if they have the money - for the nice, calm, £12 increase in annual cost. In which case, there isn't much of a problem to begin with.

Unless her definition of 'moderate' really is less than one unit per week, or half a pint of Carlsberg ... between a married couple!

A Tory MP lying to parliament - or at the very least being a sad sock puppet - and severely punishing lower paid 'hard-working families' should have lefties occupying Twitter for quite some time. But then, they quite like the idea of the control minimum alcohol pricing gives them if they get back into power, so they won't.

If you're a man/woman on modest means - even if adhering obediently to the state's arbitrary guidelines on alcohol - you're in for a financial punishment no matter the colour of the governing party's literature.