Jewel Robbing Spotted In The Sunday Express

The Sunday Express has developed my article on Tuesday to produce this front page today.

You can read the whole story here, which details madness towards alcohol learned directly from the tobacco control template.

So many astonishing quotes in there, but here's a taster.

[Professor Peter Anderson, of Newcastle University, said:] “Alcohol is a carcinogen and I doubt that the alcohol industry would want to be caught out producing and selling a carcinogen without warning its consumer. 

“We know cigarettes cause cancer, and cigarette packets carry warning labels that cigarettes cause cancer. 

“Consumers surely deserve the same information on drink bottles."

Let me, at this point, remind you of something Deborah Arnott said last year.

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

Of course, dear. Nurse!

See also: Previous jewel robbing spotted in the Mail, on the BBC and in the Guardian.

Link Tank 08/06

Once more unto the links, dear friends.

WHO admits it's never been about health

You're addicted to caffeine, time for the state to step in?

Life imitates The Simpsons as Krusty Burger and Moe's Tavern open for real

Ex-Microsoft manager plans to create first US marijuana brand

Smoking alcohol to avoid the calories, public health's worst nightmare

Beer fridge takes down an Australian neighbourhood's mobile phone network

Should restaurants be allowed to ban kids?

Earliest signs of French winemaking dated to around 2,500 years ago

Porn movie premieres are slightly different

The frog that didn't croak after all

Spooky

I signed up for a forum today and the captcha phrase on registration was this.

I feel like they know me already.

A Victory For Impatience

It's taken me a while to write this as I thought it best to calm down first. Because my exasperation at yesterday's news was off the scale.

Motorway tailgaters and middle-lane hoggers are to face quick justice with on-the-spot penalties under new measures announced by the government. 

From July, police will be able to issue £100 fines and three points for careless driving offences that would currently have to go to court.

So middle lane hoggers are 'dangerous' now, are they? Sorry, but that's quite a stretch, and that so many have swallowed this flimsy justification.and nodded along approvingly just shows how our country's definition of 'danger' has deteriorated in the past decade, and also how blasé about civil liberties our population has become.

Being in transport, I fucking hate middle lane hoggers very much more than most. They are ignorant of the guidelines of the motorway as well as being astoundingly ignorant people in themselves for their lack of courtesy for other road users. There have been times where I've struggled to comprehend how anyone can be so very unaware of what is happening around them.

However, when thinking rationally about them, they do little more than hold me up for a minute or two and cause me to execute a manoeuvre I'd rather not be doing. When driving professionally for as many years as I have, you learn to stay calm about many stupidities you see on the road, lane hoggers being just one of them.

But the public - who have all been mildly irritated by a hogger at some point - are quite happy about this legislative expression of vindictiveness despite it presenting the abandonment of road safety as a premise for state enforcement of punishment. Those few minutes added to a 200 mile journey are enough to break out the penalty charge version of torches and pitchforks, while the precedent ceded to those who simply shouldn't be allowed it is ignored.

Are politicians really now saying being a bit annoying on the road merits a £100 fine? Yes, it seems they are. We all hate lane hoggers, don't we, so it's fine and MPs will be lauded ... there may even be a lot of votes in it, eh? It's nothing to do with road safety any more, even though some will try to say it is.

The issue comes down to safety, Heydecker says. While he doesn't accept that lane hoggers significantly reduce motorway capacity, they do raise drivers' blood pressure by their behaviour.

So the 'danger' would appear to be the road rage it might cause in impatient drivers. If you want safer roads, wouldn't it be better not to validate drivers who are prone to raising their own blood pressure for something as easily - even if inconveniently - countered by simply "mirror, signal, manoeuvre". If that's too difficult, perhaps they shouldn't be on the road either.

We've seen public health laws based on pretend health threats to satisfy the intolerant; now we're seeing the DfT invent road dangers to pander to the impatient.

A driver happy about the new rule, pictured yesterday

Of course, we could just eradicate the problem entirely by allowing undertaking as was being discussed by politicians only a few years ago - if it's legal in the US and Australia, how difficult can it be? But that would mean the ratchet going the wrong way. We don't liberalise in this country any more, merely pass legislation to punish.

I mentioned civil liberties because it's something that no-one spoke about in all the blanket coverage yesterday.

Objections were almost exclusively about how it would be difficult to enforce, not that it shouldn't be enforced in the first place (and I hope it won't be, just like the ridiculous child booster seat nonsense).

The nation's foremost state-funded road safety fake charity, BRAKE, were quick to say that they loved the idea ... except that the fine should be £1000! Well, I suppose they would, it was like government handing them a blank cheque for future grant applications, just imagine the studies they can commission; the criticism they can lay on authorities which don't levy enough fines. They also called for lane hogging to be made a criminal offence which, of course, leads to a criminal record and all that it entails.

That smug schadenfreude doesn't look too clever now, does it?

Meanwhile, no-one seemed to worry that the police are now to be judge, jury and executioner on who is lane hogging and who isn't. If they simply don't like you for any reason, wham! £100 fine for being in the middle lane 30 seconds too long sunshine, have a nice day.

The unintended consequences this silly idea will facilitate are simply not worth appeasing the misplaced superiority some road users think they wield over others. It won't make anyone safer, either.

Middle lane hoggers can go to Hell as far as I'm concerned, but I hope this Westminster stupidity goes the same way well before them.

See also: Another pathetic road rule proposal last year based similarly on nothing but selfishness and intolerance.

A Slippery Slope Predicted

The news - reported here on the 27th of May - that France is to ban e-cigs in public places prompted an article on the subject on the Guardian site four days later on the 31st of May (see what I did there?).

Asking "Is France right to ban smoking to ban smoking e-cigarettes in public places?" it prompted a delightfully smug comment from a Guardian contributor, no less.

PeterGuillam
31 May 2013 8:27pm 

Well it's interesting. In 2011 I published an article on Cif - you can see it here - about e-cigarettes, specifically how and why they were becoming the target for anti-smoking campaigners, and some of the social and historical context of this. 

From the very first comment I was told that this was just paranoid nonsense on my part, and if you have the strength to wade through the 800+ comments you'll see how that charge was made again and again, and how I tried to explain in my responses that there was a growing campaign to have them banned, and that this was consistent with a pattern in which apparently absurd anti-smoking demands gradually became mainstream (and we can see a similar pattern emerging with alcohol, by the way). 

Look at this comment, for example, which amongst other things said "Is there any suggestion that anywhere in Europe is considering such a ban? Anything at all?". 

So here we are, just two years later, and France is enacting a ban. I don't suppose that those who so dismissively sneered at that article will have the grace to admit they were wrong. But wrong they were and although it isn't very edifying to say 'I told you so', in this case - I told you so! 

And let's be quite clear - this is nothing to do with public health. As I explained in that article, it is about a moral scapegoating of smoking and smokers.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

This is concrete evidence of a slippery slope - the thing that anti-smokers say doesn't exist - coming true in a very short space of time, and a reminder that the tobacco control industry and its pharma backers is a disgraceful coalition which will never be satisfied.

Oh yeah, and further proof that it's never been about health. Of course.

Marketers Are Geniuses ... Until They're Not

On Monday, Bucko delivered one of his customarily delightful fiskings of an article in The Scotsman. Very good it is too, as usual, do go have a read.

The author was Professor Amanda Amos of Edinburgh University who seems to be disastrously confused about the merits and/or downsides of advertising and marketing.

ADVERTS for electronic cigarettes could encourage young people to see smoking as a positive thing to do, an expert has warned.

So these adverts for e-cigs are pretty rubbish, then.

You see, they're supposed to be encouraging smokers to use e-cigs instead. Therefore are specifically designed to do the complete opposite of making the target audience "see smoking as a positive thing to do". If - as moaning Mandy states - the ads are having the effect of making tobacco smoking more attractive,  people seeing the advert would smoke instead of using e-cigs, which would be a massive fail for the ad agency.

Yet she then goes on to advocate plain packaging of tobacco.

On the issue of packaging, Prof Amos said tobacco companies were still able to promote their products by using novelties such as slim, colourful boxes to appeal to younger smokers, meaning a move to plain packets was the next logical step.

Err, so now advertising and marketing is incredibly well-targeted and able to hone in on precisely the consumer they wish to attract. Right down to sex and age range to within a year or two either way.

One minute even a fag box is precisely targeted marketing by expert advertising industry professionals designed to suck in teens and women to that exact product.The next, e-cig marketing by the same clever advertising industry professionals is shit and will make people buy something entirely different.

Do you reckon - and I know it's a long shot - that Prof Amos really hasn't the first fucking clue about advertising at all? You know, considering she has spent a lifetime working in public health and not even the briefest of hours in an advertising agency?

The wacky world of tobacco control, eh? I just wish they'd make their very dull minds up.

Two Drinks This Month? You Hazardous Drinker, You!

Following on from yesterday's news of a ramping up of the prohibitionist assault on booze, you might be interested - or, more likely, staggered - to read this document from an EU-funded anti-alcohol group, published in December (emphases mine).

Using the European Food Standards Authority guidance on exposure for human consumption of carcinogens in food and drink products, with a margin of exposure set at 1,000, no one should drink more than about 50 milligrams of alcohol a day, equivalent to 20g or two drinks a year. 

Currently, Europeans drink about 27 grams a day, some 540 times the exposure level. Ignoring alcohol’s cancer causing role, and just considering other health outcomes, no one should drink more than about 0.3 grams of alcohol a day, equivalent to 9g or about one drink a month. Currently, Europeans drink about 90 times the exposure level.

Now, please someone try to make an argument that these people are remotely rational human beings because it's not - I repeat, not - a parody.

This project - I'm sure you won't be surprised to find out - is heartily encouraged by the EU ... using your taxes.

The AMPHORA project has received funding from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement nº 223059 - Alcohol Measures for Public Health Research Alliance (AMPHORA).

It also won't come as much of a shock that four of their 'collaborating institutions' are from the UK.

They go on to make some recommendations, notably these.

6. All alcohol beverage containers should carry consumer warnings that alcohol is a toxic substance, and in particular a carcinogen.

So, a skull and cross bones on every bottle of wine, then (and plain packaging, no doubt).

7. Low risk guidelines for drinking alcohol are, in general, too generous for health safety and should, in general, be reviewed downwards.

To 'one drink a month' or 'two drinks a year' presumably.

And there we all were thinking that the current guidelines of 8 cans of Stella per week (less for women) were ridiculously low!

It's not about health with alcohol either; it's about eventual prohibition but with better planning than last time, no matter how much they lie that it isn't.

* Image above was promotion of this documentary series on PBS in America, I can heartily recommend it as I did in my review of 2011