The latest Cochrane Review finds more evidence than ever that e-cigarettes are the best tool for giving up smoking. It also found “no evidence of increased serious harm from using e-cigarettes”.

“We have very strong evidence that regulated nicotine e-cigarettes are substantially less harmful than smoking,” says Dr Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, senior author of the review from University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Based on the consistency of the findings here, it’s clear that they are a proven and viable option for people wishing to quit traditional cigarettes.”

But one word of caution…

“It’s worth highlighting that our review looks at regulated e-cigarettes containing nicotine, but many of those available on the market do not meet these standards,” says Dr Hartmann-Boyce.

There will be plenty of more once the vape tax takes effect in October and the new slew of anti-vaping policies next year.

In the news

Lottery boss has links to the gambling industry shocker

It is apparently news - to The Guardian at least - that a man who has experience of working at the top of the gambling industry has been appointed to run the lottery.

National lottery faces questions over new boss’s record in gambling industry

The national lottery is facing questions over its new boss’s record in the gambling industry, including a lucrative role in the 24-hour slot machine sector [AKA amusement arcades - CJS] singled out by the prime minister as a blight on British high streets.

To be fair, it is quite newsworthy that an appointment like this didn’t go to someone from a state-funded charity or NGO.

Everything in the state, nothing outside the state

Dame Prue Leith, who presents The Great British Bake Off, is sick of parents having a say in what their children eat.

“I’m being much more draconian… I think we should ban lunchboxes because you can’t police what parents put in,” Dame Prue said.

… Dame Prue also said she would like to see free school meals for every child, and for the meals to be compulsory.

It’s a bit of a leap from free school meals for those who can’t afford them to compulsory school meals for all, isn’t it? That’s because it’s not about making sure children are fed. The purpose of free school meals, breakfast clubs and holiday clubs isn’t to stop children going hungry. It is to remove parental influence so that the state can feed children what the state thinks they should be eating.

Meanwhile, sugar sales depend on Leith’s brain-dead programme continuing to be broadcast.

300 not out

Australia reached the milestone of 300 tobacco turf war fire-bombings this week. Congratulations to all those ‘public health’ charlatans who made this possible.

From the desk of Dr C. J. Snowdon

I am tired of the government’s unpaid apologists telling me not to complain about every unnecessary inconvenience it piles upon me. I wrote about it for The Critic…

It has been estimated that Europeans waste a total of 575 million hours per year clicking on cookie consent buttons which, when monetised, amounts to €14.3 billion. Those who defend GDPR don’t seem to mind this, although they suddenly find that their time is incredibly precious when the non-EU queue is longer than the EU queue at passport control. It then becomes the turn of the eurosceptics to say “It’s only a queue, mate! What’s the big deal? You don’t mind queuing at the supermarket, do you?”

And that is one of the problems with the “stop whining and get on with it” defence. It can easily be repurposed. It could even be used to defend laws banning certain people from sitting at the front of the bus and laws forcing people to wear yellow stars before they leave the house. “There are plenty of other seats available, lol! Are you too lazy to walk a few more steps?” “It’s just a badge, mate! It only takes two seconds to put it on!”

“Worse things happen at sea” is not the appropriate benchmark by which to judge public policy.

The bootlicking gimps were out in force two weeks ago when the British state decided to set off the mobile phones of everyone in the land to tell them not to have a barbecue. I wrote for Spiked about why this was overkill.

The nauseating thing about the national alert was how many bootlicking gimps came out in support of it. It’s just another text message, they said. You probably get notifications all the time, they said. True, but they are notifications from people I want to hear from and they don’t have the audacity to override the mute button. I don’t want to hear from the government on a sunny Friday evening. I don’t even want to be reminded of its existence. In the immortal words of Javier Milei, my contempt for the state is infinite. National alerts are another encroachment into our lives from a state that has already encroached too much.

I also had the dispiriting experience of reading all the Impact Assessments for the government’s latest anti-vaping policies. I gave my verdict to The Critic, with added commentary for subscribers of this Substack.

Plus…

I’m on holiday this week but we pre-recorded an episode of Last Orders with Miriam Cates in which we discuss why France is freer than Britain, the unintended consequences of banning gambling advertising and that stupid national phone alert.

And I took my regular seat on the IEA podcast last week discussing the widening pay gap between the public and private sectors, the real cost of net zero, and the economics of gambling sponsorship in football.

I’ve written about this for The Critic today…

The costs of the display ban alone will be substantial. According to the Impact Assessment, it will cost £2.2 million to familiarise staff with the new law, £22.6 million to print and update price lists and £27.6 million to buy the appropriate drawer units and display cabinets. Longer transaction times are expected to add costs of £43.1 million and the extra time it will take to assess and replace stock will add a further £185.1 million. Once you include the lost profits that DHSC expects to result from the policy, there are £872.5 million of costs, mostly to independent retailers and specialist vape shops.

… The display ban is just one of a number of anti-vaping policies the government is threatening to introduce thanks to the Sunak-Streeting School of Virtue Signalling. Plain packaging for vape juice will cost the country £641.1 million, according to the government’s Impact Assessment. Extending the smoking ban to e-cigarettes will cost another £531.8 million. Forcing manufacturers to only produce vapes that are an “opaque matt achromatic colour (black, white, grey) with no variation in shades” is going to cost £330.9 million.

The costs range from businesses having to make unwanted purchases, such as buying storage cabinets, to making staff less productive (e.g. by slowing down transaction times).

There is a lot more to say than I could squeeze into one article so I thought I’d expand on it here.

One peculiar aspect of the display ban consultation is that it doesn’t include the cost of purchasing new cabinets and gantries if they are paid for by ‘industry’.

It is assumed that convenience and small shops will opt for additional storage with a smaller footprint and up-front cost. This could include under counter storage or drawer units rather than additional display cabinets. Additionally, industry may provide funding for small retailers for storage similar to when the previous display regulations were introduced. Based on this, cost of display storage for convenience and small shops is taken as an average of:

• £0 where industry funds the cost of the storage, £99 where under counter storage is used, and £372.01 where additional drawer units are used. Each option is assumed equally likely.

Elsewhere in the Impact Assessment, they say…

… profit losses to tobacco manufacturers are not considered to be in the total costs, whereas profit losses to vape manufacturers are.

How can this be allowed?! You can’t just ignore a cost because it is paid by a business of which you disapprove!

And it is very clear that the authors disapprove of not only the tobacco industry but the vaping industry. That’s why they refused to get any information from them…

Several of the assumptions have not been tested with industry at this stage. The UK Government is committed to upholding Article 5(3) of the FCTC which requires FCTC members to protect public health policy from the vested interests of the tobacco industry. Whilst some vaping organisations have taken steps to remove Tobacco Industry influence this is not the case across the industry as a whole and it can be difficult to verify where stakeholders are free from Tobacco Industry influence unless this is stated and proven outright.

This gold-plating of Article 5(3) is a red flag for activism. Article 5(3) says that “in setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, Parties shall act to protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry”. It doesn’t say that the government should never speak to the industry, nor that it shouldn’t collect data from the industry, and it certainly doesn’t say that the government shouldn’t speak to other industries just in case they might have associations with the tobacco industry.

You expect this kind of thing from ASH or from Bloomberg’s puppets at Bath University, but to hear it from DHSC in an Impact Assessment is proof of ideological capture.

As a result of not speaking to ‘industry’, DHSC has even less of a clue about the market than it would otherwise have. It has no idea how many pouches the average consumer uses, for example, and it doesn’t know anything about “the growth rate in the market”.

In the absence of sufficient data and evidence, we have assumed that this [the growth rate] is constant across the appraisal period. We realise that in practice this may not be the case.

Indeed it may not be. In fact, it isn’t. I wrote in The Critic article about the spurious accuracy of many of its forecasts. For example…

They reckon that the number of nicotine pouch users will fall from 1 per cent to 0.933 per cent (!) under a display ban…

This is risible. The pouch market is small but it is obviously growing and is likely to grow further if the government proceeds with the indoor vaping ban. The current prevalence of 1% is clearly rounded up or down. The idea that it is exactly 1% and will stay at exactly 1% in the absence of further regulation is as ludicrous as the idea that a display ban will reduce prevalence by exactly 0.077 percentage points.

And yet this forms the basis of some further extrapolations…

This equates to roughly 2,400 [fewer] nicotine pouch users in 2028, and around 35,000 fewer nicotine pouch users in 2029 and rising slowly each year up to the end of the appraisal period.

The authors then proceed to lump pouches in with vaping and assume that both products carry 20% of the risk of smoking(!). Based on the standard assumption that a Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) is worth £70,000, they then work out how many people would have to quit, or never start, using vapes, pouches and heated tobacco for the display ban to break even. As shown below, it is a lot. If a more realistic assumption about the risks of pouches and vapes were applied, it would be many times higher. And if a more realistic assumption about substitution effects were applied - i.e. that policies which deter people from using safer nicotine products encourage smoking - every quitter would be an added cost.

However, these alleged benefits are not included in the final tally because…

Due to level [sic] of evidence available on the harms associated with the products in scope there are no monetised benefits.

There is more evidence about the potential harms than the authors acknowledge. Vapes have been widely used for 15 years and the only notable side effects are mild throat and mouth irritation, and since pouches contain no tobacco, they can be considered at least as safe as snus and nicotine gum. The longer term effects are obviously impossible to prove using observational epidemiology but we have plenty of toxicology and biomarkers indicating that the risks are a fraction of those of smoking. The authors didn’t have to rely on five anonymous quacks in Canada. If, as those idiots claimed, vaping was 20% as dangerous as smoking, the harms would already be visible. DHSC’s reliance on this unpublished outlier of an estimate is further evidence of ideological capture. Or perhaps it was simply the only way the policy could be considered even vaguely cost-effective.

From a public health perspective, we must hope that the display ban on safer products fails. The display ban for tobacco didn’t seem to work, although DHSC claims otherwise…

It is estimated that display regulations resulted in a reduction of 37,000 smokers in the UK, equating to health benefits of approximately £2.8bn.

DHSC’s reference for this claim is this study. It doesn’t say anything about 37,000 smokers, nor does it make any claim about saving money. God knows where DHSC got that idea from. But the study did claim that the tobacco display ban worked, based on the data in this graph…

Looking at this data (from the Smoking Toolkit Study), two things stand out. Firstly, all the policies in the late 2000s and early 2010s failed to cut the smoking rate. These included the smoking ban (July 2007), raising the age of sale (October 2007), graphic warnings (2008), the tobacco duty escalator (from 2009) and banning cigarette vending machines (2011).

Secondly, there was no reduction in the smoking rate immediately after the display ban was introduced (as the authors of the study acknowledge). The turning point was vaping going mainstream in 2013. This is equally obvious from the ONS smoking data, as I pointed out years ago.

The authors acknowledge that vaping could have been responsible for the decline of smoking after a long period of stasis but say it wasn’t that. So that’s alright then. Instead they claim that it was a delayed effect from the display ban. I’ll leave readers to make their own minds up about that little theory.

Although a display ban for safer products may fail on its own terms, the risk is that by regulating all nicotine products in the same way as cigarettes, people get the impression that vapes, in particular, are as dangerous as cigarettes. Since most Brits already believe that, this seems sub-optimal. The government should be countering misinformation, not consolidating it.

The authors of the Impact Assessment pay lip service to this problem, but say that DHSC is mitigating the risk by incrementally banning cigarettes. We are governed by fools.

I have focused on just one of the three regulatory proposals under consideration but, believe me, the Impact Assessments for the others are at least a bad as this. You can respond to the consultation here. Please do. The Save Vaping campaign run by the New Nicotine Alliance has updated its website to reflect these new threats to the category. Please give them your support.

Sponsorship deals go to the highest bidder. If the highest bidder is excluded from the process then the organisation that is looking for a sponsor will have to take the next highest bid, which will be lower.

The upshot of banning a whole industry from sponsoring football clubs, for example, is therefore that the football clubs will make less money from sponsorship.

With a week to go before the English Premier League resumes, that lesson is now being learned.

Heading into this summer, almost half of the teams in the Premier League found themselves confronting the same commercial headache.

Back in April 2023, all 20 member clubs collectively agreed to end front‑of‑shirt sponsorship deals with gambling firms from summer 2026.

… For years, gambling companies have underpinned the commercial reality of the league’s middle and lower tier, offering inflated sponsorship fees that other industries simply could not, or would not, match.

You can see where this is going…

“Collectively, the gap these clubs had to plug, as we worked it out, was around £80m,” said Mike Haywood, vice‑president at Octagon, one of the world’s largest sports sponsorship consultation firms. “There were between eight and 12 clubs that needed to plug that gap. Some of those clubs are still looking for long‑term solutions, while some of them are waiting for the market to heat up.”

Many football fans will find it hard to sympathise with the big beasts of the Premier League. I’m sure they will be alright in the end. But it is worth remembering that the anti-gambling lobby insists that companies are queuing up to sponsor teams and that football clubs can make the same amount of money being sponsored by more wholesome companies. You hear the same kind of thing from those who want to ban sponsorships and advertising of alcohol brands or so-called ‘junk food’ companies.

It is nonsense. When tobacco sponsorship was banned in snooker, for example, the number of tournaments dwindled to a handful and the amount of money in the game collapsed. It had to settle for the second best bids, which these days are often from gambling companies. If gambling sponsorship is banned, it will have to settle for the third best bid. And so on. Banning the top sponsors inevitably leads to less revenue.

The Premier League ban is “voluntary” because the people who run it thought that they were being clever trying to appease the government of a command capitalist economy.

“There is an element of tokenism with all of this,” explained football finance expert and author of The Price of Football, Kieran Maguire. “When the Premier League were lobbying against the Independent Football Regulator this was seen as something they could do to show that they could self‑govern appropriately. Now, in their eyes, they have the worst of both worlds with the IFR and no gambling income.”

Appeasement rarely works in the short term and never works in the long term.

Maybe they’ll increase ticket prices to make up the shortfall.

The fruits of academia

Damn those unintended consequences

Berkeley, California introduced a soda tax in 2014. A study in 2017 claimed that it led to a 9.6% reduction in soda sales, but this decline (relative to a counterfactual) was only in Berkeley. Neighbouring areas saw a rise in sales because Berkeley residents started shopping more out of town. Among Berkeley residents, calorie consumption from beverages actually increased after the tax was introduced.

This new study finds that the soda tax was associated with a 8.9% decline in the sale of beer in Berkeley despite the price of beer being unaffected by the soda tax. The authors conclude that this was “driven primarily by cross-border shopping rather than by a decline in overall beer consumption”.

It seems that Berkeley’s soda tax increased transaction costs (more travel) and damaged local retailers while doing nothing to improve health.

The Unintended Consequences of Sugar‐Sweetened Beverage Taxes on Sales and Prices of Beer Beverages in Health Economics

The wheel of nutritional epidemiology spins once more

You thought eating protein was good for you? Wrong! Or maybe right. Who knows, but a study published in Cell Press Blue claims that eating less protein could make you age better and live longer - if you are a mouse, a rat, a fly or a fish, at least.

Nutritional science is largely quackery so my advice is to eat what you like, just not too much.

Could Eating Less Protein Help You Age Better and Live Longer? in Time magazine

We’ll meet again

Yet another study claiming near-miraculous effects from being born during the Second World War which the authors attribute to sugar rationing. I wrote about this little cottage industry of junk science last week. This new study even claims to have proven causation!

Early-life sugar restriction causally reduces adult cancer incidence and slows biological aging in PNAS

Another desperate attempt to rescue minimum pricing

Numerous studies have shown the minimum pricing for alcohol failed in Scotland. The search for success continued in the Journal of Public Health this week with a study claiming that alcohol-related self-harm declined relative to England after the policy was implemented. The authors admit that hospital admissions rose for a few years but attribute the drop in 2021-23, which was also seen in England, to minimum pricing. I’ll let you be the judge…

Implementation of minimum unit pricing for alcohol in Scotland and subsequent rates of hospital-admitted self-harm: controlled interrupted time series analysis in The Journal of Public Health

Ignorant doctors

A study from the USA confirms that medical practitioners are horrendously misinformed about the relative risks of e-cigarettes and smoked tobacco. I doubt things are much better in the UK.

Healthcare providers’ beliefs about the health effects of nicotine and electronic cigarettes in PLOS One

In the news

Australia’s tobacco turf war continues to follow the blueprint of Prohibition and the war on drugs, with enforcement agencies being infiltrated and corrupted.

The operative handpicked to run its most sensitive operations proved to be compromised, a man the National Anti-Corruption Commission alleges used his unique position fighting the illicit tobacco trade to attempt to orchestrate his own tobacco smuggling operation.

More laughingstocks than legends: The collapse of Border Force’s secret spy unit in the Sydney Morning Herald

From the desk of Dr C. J. Snowdon

For The Critic, I discuss how the Social Value Model in public procurement contracts has become yet another way for politicians to transfer responsibility for their high-minded visions to the private sector. If Andy Burnham slims it down - or, better still, gets rid of it entirely - he should be congratulated.

Under the Social Value Model, any firm that bids for a government contract must demonstrate its commitment to tackling inequality, reducing carbon footprints, saving water, creating green spaces, offering apprenticeships and reducing crime. It is not enough to be able to cut the grass in the park or sell paper towels to hospitals at a reasonable price. The company must ensure that “staff are educated about, and feel empowered to, address their physical wellbeing”. It must have a plan to combat modern slavery and domestic violence. It has to be able to collaborate with “communities and anchor partners”, whatever they are. It has to show that it will “increase the representation of disabled people” and give more jobs to people “from groups under-represented in the workforce”. Government officials are legally obliged to take all these political objectives and more into account when deciding which company wins the tender.

At Spiked, I discuss a worse idea from Mr Burnham. He wants more state control of the high street and has bundled heavily regulated, law-abiding betting shops in with dodgy vape shops and money-laudering barbers.

Yes, the authorities should have more power and resources to shut down illegal operators, but Keir Starmer gave them that in June. A government that was serious about tackling ‘dodgy vape shops’ would not be slapping a £3.60 tax on a £3 bottle of vape juice, as it will be doing in October. A government that was serious about helping legitimate retailers wouldn’t be planning to introduce a display ban and plain packaging for e-cigarettes, nor would it be planning a double tax rise on tobacco.

At Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, I examine ASH’s latest insistence that the black market in tobacco is not growing. No sir, definitely not.

Seen elsewhere

It’s good to see Carl Phillips back and blogging again. Carl is something of a polymath and is one of the world’s leading experts on tobacco harm reduction. He’s just started a series of Substack posts answering the vexed question of whether nicotine is good for you.

Preventing people from using nicotine, by whatever means, for those who would quite like consuming it, imposes enormous deadweight welfare costs that have nothing to do with smoking avoidance.

Is nicotine good for you? Part 1.5 - the social welfare losses of restricting and vilifying nicotine at Carl V Phillips’s epistemic musings

Plus…

There’s a new episode of Last Orders available, featuring the wonderful Patrick Christys. We discuss the not-so-small boats crisis, why bookies aren’t to blame for Britain’s decline and the junk science driving anti-sugar fanaticism.

I was also on the Off the Party Line podcast discussing my new book, the slippery slope and Lucy Letby.

And I took my regular seat on the IEA podcast discussing betting shops, social care and the anti-economics of J. D. Vance.

In one sense, ‘aim to permit’ has never been more necessary. There are far too many puritanical, low-grade politicians who want to ban everything and they need reining in. In another sense, ‘aim to permit’ has never been less relevant because taxes and regulation have already stubbed out any prospect of growth in the sector.

Dawn Butler MP says: “We have to stop this ridiculous proliferation of betting shops and adult gaming centres”. But as you can see from the graphs below (using data from the Gambling Commission), the idea that there has been a “proliferation” of either is laughable.

The number of bookies has been in free-fall since fixed-odds betting terminals were effectively banned in 2019 and hundreds more are closing their doors this year thanks to the sharp hike in gambling taxes announced by Rachel Reeves last year. In both cases, the anti-gambling campaigners who lobbied for these changes insisted that there would not be significant shop closures as a result.

As for Adult Gaming Centres (AKA amusement arcades), there are still fewer of them than before the pandemic when their numbers were at a record low.

The idea that there has been unchecked growth in the betting sector is so preposterous than the Gambling Commission has taken the highly unusual step of defending the industry it regulates. This is one for the scrap books.

The British Gambling Commission rejected the suggestion that betting shops were spreading unchecked as “simply wrong” and criticised the government for lumping together “highly regulated, licensed” betting shops with rogue or criminal businesses.

“Betting shop numbers have fallen by over a third since 2019. Around 3,000 shops have closed and over 15,000 jobs have already been lost,” it said.

If the proliferation of bricks-and-mortars gambling premises is a figment of the political class’s imagination, the proliferation of vape shops and barbers is very real and there is no doubt that some of them are being used for money-laundering and other forms of poor behaviour. As the BBC says:

BBC News has exposed organised crime on high streets across the country, revealing shops selling illegal cigarettes and vapes, selling cannabis and cocaine, enabling illegal working and suspected money-laundering.

This is all highly illegal and yet it feels like the BBC has been doing more to catch the criminals than the authorities have. The inability of the British state to enforce the law even when law-breaking is going on in plain sight is one of the more obvious symptoms of this country’s decline.

Burnham’s answer is to create more laws. He wants local authorities to be able to be give the go ahead before a new hairdressers or vape shop is allowed to open. The details have not been published, but it is going to be difficult to define a vape shop (as opposed to a shop that sells vapes) and if the policy successfully prevents organised crime from using barbers as a front, it is easy to imagine them switching to coffee shops, bars and other retailers instead.

Yes, the authorities should have more power and resources to shut down illegal operators, but Keir Starmer gave them that in June. A government that was serious about tackling “dodgy vape shops” would not be slapping a £3.60 £2.64 tax on a £3 bottle of vape juice, as it will be doing in October. A government that was serious about helping legitimate retailers wouldn’t be planning to introduce a display ban and plain packaging for e-cigarettes, nor would it be planning a double tax rise on tobacco.

There is a more general point here. The high street as you knew it is gone forever. Burnham says that “for many people, the high streets they grew up with have become unrecognisable” and that “the rise of vape shops, betting shops and rogue operators have replaced the shops, services, and community spaces that people are crying out for.”

This confuses cause with effect. Internet shopping (and, before that, supermarket shopping) has killed off many shops and they are not coming back. On the contrary, the closures will continue until the only businesses on the high street will be for things that people have to do in person, e.g. having a pint and having a haircut. A few pharmacies will survive, along with convenience stores and the odd butcher and grocer. Secondhand shops and antique shops could keep going, but the days of the high street being full of banks and shops selling books, electronics, newspapers and games are over.

As we have seen, there has been no “rise of betting shops”. If there is a perception that there are more betting shops it is because high street rents collapsed and bookies came out of the side streets and became more visible to middle class observers. Charity shops proliferated for the same reason (and because they get a huge discount on business rates). Why did rents fall? Because demand fell. There aren’t enough businesses to fill the high street any more. You can blame taxation and regulation - and they certainly aren’t helping - but social change is the underlying reason. The British public had the choice between using it and losing it, and they chose to lose it.

The idea that the high street can be revived by killing off the few remaining businesses that are able to operate on it is just silly. These companies are not taking up shopfronts that WH Smith (now TG Jones!) is desperate to use. They are on the high street because WH Smith has gone.

The high street of the future will have fewer shops and those shops will be devoted to services - pubs, coffee shops, key-cutters, ice cream parlours, repair shops, cafés and, yes, barbers. The rest should be turned into residential housing.

This morning I awoke to find this on the BBC homepage:

Wow, that must have been a long running study. I wonder how they did it?

The research analysed the impact of the end of sugar rationing in the UK which led to a rapid increase in the amount of sugar in people’s diets.

The results suggest those who were toddlers during sugar rationing had a 23% lower risk of dementia.

Surely there must be more to it than that. Surely they didn’t just compare rates of dementia among people born during the Second World War to those born after the Second World War and attribute any differences to sugar rationing?

Alas, that is what they did and that is all they did. The study is here and the press release is here.

This comes from the latter…

Of 15,025 who experienced sugar rationing before birth and during their first year of life, 388 developed dementia. Of 15,256 who experienced sugar rationing before birth and during their first two years of life, 456 developed dementia. Of 23,774 born after sugar rationing, 504 developed dementia.

How very scientific! But why sugar rationing? Why not meat rationing? Why not flour fortification (1941)? Why not anything else that happened in the next 80 years? One might just as well claim that being bombed early in life reduces the risk of dementia. That would make more sense than “experiencing sugar rationing before birth”, whatever that means.

(Update: As a reader pointed out to me via e-mail, the figures above indicate a rate of 2.6% for the first cohort, 2.5% for the second cohort and 2.1% for the last cohort, thereby suggesting a decline in dementia rates after sugar rationing was abolished. The claim that rates rose is based on adjusted data.)

Even the BBC has to admit that this is not slam-dunk evidence…

The study cannot provide definitive proof, but experts say a healthy diet is good for the brain anyway.

That’s the spirit! Who cares if the media is flooded with garbage so long as it sends the right message?

"They may be onto something," said Rachel Richardson, the methods support unit lead for evidence production and methods directorate at Cochrane, an independent non-profit network that gathers and summarises medical research.

Archie Cochrane must be spinning in his grave.

No sooner had I finished reading that article (which, unusually for the Beeb, doesn’t conclude with some gobshite from Action on Sugar demanding more regulation) than I saw a tweet from the journalist Gareth Corfield alerting me to some exciting news from the vibrant field of gambling research.

According to an unpublished study commissioned by Gambling Harm UK, there are “around 3.71 million drivers [who] could have, at some point, gambled or thought about gambling while driving.” A terrifying statistic, I think you’ll agree, but it gets worse. There are 1.06 million motorists in Britain who have driven “while feeling tired as a result of gambling” and there have been “530,000 collisions where gambling may have contributed to the collision” (timeframe unspecified).

To deal with this hidden epidemic of gambling-related car crashes, Gambling Harm UK is calling on the government to “Commission urgent independent research into gambling harm and road safety, “Ask the Department for Transport to review collision investigation guidance” and “Establish a cross-government taskforce”. This all sounds rather expensive and it is unclear what it would achieve, but the big message is that gambling is not just a ‘public health’ issue but a public safety issue.

The study is entirely based on a YouGov survey of 5,639 motorists, a tiny proportion of whom claim to have ever felt distracted, excited or anxious about gambling while driving. The supposedly negative effects of gambling are self-reported and never exceed 2% of the sample. Competent social scientists treat such small numbers with extreme caution because every survey will have a few people who don’t understand the question, answer at random or are simply being mischievous. Instead, the authors extrapolate wildly. Since 1% of respondents claimed to have been in a collision that involved thoughts of gambling, they assert that 530,000 car crashes have resulted from gambling.

Strangely, there were more people in the survey claiming to have been distracted at the wheel by worries about somebody else’s gambling than about their own. The authors inevitably interpret this as meaning that “around 2.12 million drivers could have, at some point, experienced some impact on their driving behaviour resulting from concern.” Perhaps the solution lies in getting people to chill out about gambling and understand that it is an enjoyable and normal leisure activity?

This is preposterous stuff, but we can expect more junk science like this now that anti-gambling research is being funded to the tune of £20 million a year via the gambling levy. Gambling Harm UK - has already received £1,248,620 from the levy.

The project was named Health Hub: Systems Approaches to Commercial Determinants of Health and Equity. The reference to “commercial determinants” was a clue that this was going to be another slush fund for anti-capitalist ‘public health’ academics of no fixed ability. The academic literature in this space is ideological quackery that illuminates nothing.

The unique selling point about this project was that it would look at local problems and local solutions. This was made very clear in the original press release.

£8M secured to improve population health at local level in the UK

A major research project led by the University of Bath has been funded to investigate the under-researched issue of how the commercial sector influences public health at the local level and what can be done to harness positive impacts and address the negative impacts. It brings together researchers, NGOs, public health professionals, local people and local government for the first time to do this.

Despite growing evidence that the commercial sector has major impacts on health and equity, how that influence occurs at a local level is poorly understood. While local businesses create jobs and contribute to the economy and health in positive ways, certain commercial actors have a disproportionate and negative impact on population health.

The local angle must have appealed to UKRI for them to hand over such a large sum of money, but Anna Gilmore was not the obvious person to give it to since she focuses obsessively on transnational corporations. In any case, she already has plenty of cash, not least because she’s on Michael Bloomberg’s payroll, as I said two years ago…

In 2018, she got $20 million from Mike Bloomberg to set up an ‘industry watchdog’ and in 2019 she got a grant from SPECTRUM to research ‘unhealthy commodity industries’. SPECTRUM is the preposterous acronym for Shaping Public hEalth poliCies To Reduce ineqUalities and harM. It was funded to the tune of £5.9 million by the UK Prevention Research Partnership, a largely taxpayer-funded body created in 2017 to provide yet another source of cash for nanny state quackademics.

Gilmore is also the co-director of something called the Centre for 21st Century Public Health which doesn’t have much to say about itself but is more than likely paid for by you and me.

But perhaps I misjudged these people. Perhaps they didn’t use these millions of pounds to pursue their personal hobby horses and agitate for nanny state policies. To find out, let’s look at their output, starting with the first study to be published by the group.

If this doesn’t sound like it has much relevance to local communities in Britain, it’s because it doesn’t.

Let’s look at some others…

In which some nanny state academics complain about people occasionally saying mean things about them. It has no academic merit and has nothing whatsoever to do with localism, although parts of it are quite funny…

Much of the discreditation focused on undermining individuals and organizations. Researchers were publicly labelled as ‘extremists’ (Landman et al., 2002; Malone, 2002; Knight and Chapman, 2004; Yang and Malone, 2008; Avery et al., 2016; Johnson, 2020), ‘fascists’ (Smith and Malone, 2007), ‘nazis’ (Schneider and Glantz, 2008), ‘zealots’ (Daube, 2015), ‘demons of overzealous and moral righteousness’ (Knight and Chapman, 2004) and ‘prohibitionists’ (Landman and Glantz, 2009; Daube, 2015). Similarly, those producing research unfavourable to the alcohol industry were labelled ‘nannyists’ (Avery et al., 2016), those doing the same in the UPF sector were called ‘too radical’ (Mialon, 2021), ‘food fascists’ (CCF, 2010), ‘gastronomical gestapo’ (Thomson, 2009) and ‘food police’ (Heisel, 2011), while breastfeeding advocates were described as the ‘breastapo’ (Hager, 2014) and were portrayed as ‘limiting mothers’ freedom of choice’ (Baker et al., 2021). Negative religious connotations were also used across the different industry sectors, with academics referred to as the ‘anti-food jihad’ (CCF, 2004), ‘health jihadists’ (Hager, 2014) and ‘religious fundamentalists’ (Petticrew et al., 2015; RESYST, 2019).

In addition, across all sectors, researchers were criticized as lacking the relevant skills (Drope and Chapman, 2001; Landman and Glantz, 2009; RESYST, 2019), being ‘bogus’ (Landman and Glantz, 2009), ‘untrustworthy’ (Vedwan, 2007), ‘mad’ (Hager, 2014), having conflicts of interest (Ibrahim et al., 2004), being money hungry (White and Bero, 2004; Landman and Glantz, 2009; Hoe et al., 2021), ‘publicly funded troughers’ (Hager, 2014) or simply for being ‘peculiar’ (Bornhäuser et al., 2006) or for not having the right physique to criticize the food industry (Pollan, 2006).

When the UKRI handed out the £8 million, the Executive Chair of Medical Research Council said that it would “deliver a deep understanding of the mechanisms linking diverse risk factors to common diseases.” Instead they got some thin-skinned activists moaning about hurty words.

Next up…

This is just a generic opinion piece by Nason Maani (one of Mark Petticrew’s protégés). He claims that the booze industry uses “many of the same strategies previously used by the tobacco industry”. Yawn.

More political advocacy, this time from Anna Gilmore who celebrates the “achievements” of the UN treaty on tobacco control and calls for it to go further. As a global treaty, it is about as far from local as you can get. She fails to mention that there is “no evidence to indicate that global progress in reducing cigarette consumption has been accelerated by the FCTC treaty mechanism.” (British Medical Journal, 2019)

Note that this is about global food systems, not local food systems. The authors chat to some of their friends and conclude that ‘multistakeholderism’ is a bad thing and that policy-makers should only listen to people like them.

This study looked at the impact of brainwashing sessions (“workshops”) on academics and public sector workers who were subjected to a day’s discussion of the “commercial determinants of health”. It essentially analyses the feedback forms that the participants filled out after the event. There was a local element to this insofar as some of the attendees worked in local government but the study seems to have been created to justify the proselytising of the workshops.

There are a few more studies, including one about pesticides and one about ‘learning from tobacco control to tackle gambling industry harms’. Local perspectives are conspicuous by their absence, whereas there are a lot of mentions of global companies and the World Health Organisation. The authors just keep repeating the same anti-capitalist dogma and demand tougher regulation. It doesn’t seem great value for money for £8 million, especially since the UKRI was created to “push the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding”.

Elsewhere, you can keep track of the group’s “policy influence” and political engagement, of which there is plenty. They responded to consultations on plain packaging, the sugar tax and the NHS 10 Year Health Plan for England. They gave oral evidence on the Tobacco and Vapes Bill and “influenced training of practitioners or researchers” at various events, mostly recently at their ‘Local Health and Global Profits’ meeting (which did at least managed to crowbar in the word ‘local’). And, of course, there were lots of lovely conferences.

Nice work if you can get it.

Sales of illegal cigarettes soar as cost of living crisis bites

The proportion of smokers purchasing cheap cigarettes from illicit sources has almost doubled since 2023, according to new analysis. This significant increase is believed to reflect the rising cost of living that has impacted households in recent years, researchers suggest.

Tsk! I wonder which tobacco industry front group is behind this baseless scaremongering?

The study, spearheaded by UCL and funded by Cancer Research UK (CRUK), examined survey responses from 9,996 individuals aged 16 and over who identified as current smokers.

Oh.

The study is here and it does indeed find that the number of smokers buying tobacco from the black market doubled from 12.2% to 23.1% between mid-2023 and 2025. Since people are reluctant to admit to engaging in criminal activity, we can safely assume that both of these figures are underestimates. Among those aged 16-17, the figure was 32%, which doesn’t bode well for the success of the generational tobacco ban.

Moreover, 32.8% of smokers are buying tobacco abroad, up from 8% in October 2020 (when there wasn’t as much foreign travel, to be fair).

The massive rise in the the black market for tobacco since 2021 has been obvious to some of us for quite a while. As I said on TV yesterday, we don’t need this study to know that the black market has got out of control, but now that some ‘public health’ researchers are saying so in a study published by Cancer Research UK, the mainstream media have to take it seriously.

With the generational tobacco ban starting in January 2027, the last thing the anti-smoking lobby wants is for the government to worry about the illicit trade. Both CRUK and ASH have responded to the study by saying that a doubling in the number of black market customers doesn’t necessarily mean that the black market has grown. Maybe they’re just buying half as much!

Hazel Cheeseman, ASH’s Comical Ali, said:

“While the findings do not necessarily indicate a major expansion of the illicit market, they suggest there is a need to continue monitoring trends closely and maintain efforts to prevent illegal tobacco sales.”

Dr Ian Walker, executive director of policy and information at CRUK, said:

“While this research doesn’t signal that the illicit tobacco market has grown, it’s concerning that amongst the declining proportion of people who smoke, an increasing number of people are purchasing tobacco from illegal sources.

This was echoed by one of the authors of the study, Jamie Brown, who said:

“While our findings suggest a growing proportion of smokers are purchasing some or all of their tobacco from illicit sources, this does not necessarily mean the illicit market itself has become much larger.”

This is a blatant cope. Of course the black market has got larger! Legal sales have more than halved since 2021 and you can buy a pack of cigarettes for £5 anywhere.

As for this being a response to the ‘cost of living’, let’s be clear about why this particular cost of living is so high. Since 2020, the minimum excise on a pack of cigarettes has gone from £5.88 to £9.44 and will to rise to £10.38 in October. With VAT added on, that’s a rise from £7.06 to £12.45 before the retailer and manufacturer make a penny.

The tax on a 50g pack of rolling tobacco has gone from £14.08 to £30.23 in the same period and will soon be £34.46.

The government has been asking for trouble and now it has got it. And this is before they start banning 800,000 people from buying tobacco each year every year.

Lead author Sarah Jackson said:

“With the Smokefree Generation policy being introduced, it is hoped that access to tobacco will become more difficult for teenagers as the age of sale gradually rises.”

You can hope all you like, but it’s not going to happen. As I’ve said before, tax rises will make the generational tobacco ban irrelevant within a few years because it will be so normal to buy cigarettes illegally that age restrictions might as well not exist.

It wasn’t difficult to spot the surge in ‘victims’. The UK’s alcohol-specific death rate rose from 11.8 per 100,000 people to 16.6 per 100,000 people between 2019 and 2022 - an increase of 40%. Since the rate had been pretty flat for years before the pandemic, it is safe to say that the ‘surge’ was due to the boredom and despair of lockdowns combined with the inability of alcoholics to access face-to-face treatment.

This was soon noticed at the time, so who is taking the credit for ‘spotting’ it? Step forward Colin Angus, purveyor of low quality ‘public health’ modelling, and his pals who published a study year last about alcohol-specific deaths in England between 2001 and 2022 in which….

We used annual mortality data for England published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Repackaging publicly available data for the Lancet apparently qualifies these people to explain why alcohol-specific deaths, from liver cirrhosis in particular, went up in 2020-22. In their study, they stick to the usual neo-temperance template of demanding action on the three As’: ‘advertising, availability and affordability’.

….effective preventive policies are required to reduce rates of alcohol consumption at a population level, including the introduction of policies that affect the affordability of alcohol consumption, such as minimum unit pricing, those that affect the accessibility of alcohol, and those that restrict advertising.

If tackling advertising, availability and affordability is the solution to the lockdown surge in alcohol abuse, it implies that advertising, availability and affordability were in some way responsible for it in the first place. But, as I explained in Lockdown Lessons in Public Health Economics, alcohol became less available during lockdown (all the pubs and clubs were shut) and there was less alcohol advertising (it’s not worth advertising many alcoholic drinks if the pubs and clubs are shut). Affordability didn’t really change, except in Wales where minimum pricing made alcohol less affordable from April 2020 (Scotland already had minimum pricing).

I’m not sure why the Daily Mail is speaking to some academics who published a paper last year about what happened four years ago. The post-pandemic peak in alcohol-specific deaths is coming down and I expect it to continue to do so. Needless to say, they are still singing from the same hymn sheet…

Colin Angus, Professor of Alcohol Policy at the University of Sheffield who was also involved in the Lancet study, says that Britain’s access to alcohol often comes under the spotlight through the eyes of foreign visitors.

‘I’ve met alcohol researchers from overseas who had never visited the UK before, and they were astonished by just how easy it is to buy alcohol here,’ he tells the Daily Mail.

If you spend your time hobnobbing with Scandinavian temperance campaigners from the Kettil Bruun Society, I suppose that’s the kind of thing you’re going hear.

‘Our team used market-research data to map every licensed premises in Great Britain. Covent Garden had the highest concentration anywhere in the country.

‘If you stood outside Covent Garden Underground station, there were more than 1,000 places selling alcohol within a one-kilometre radius.’

Alcohol is widely available in the heart of London’s West End? What will science teach us next?

Experts - including Professor Angus - believe that the foundations of the crisis have been forming since the 1960s when licensing laws first began to change after wartime restrictions imposed at the turn of the century.

We’ve been through all this before. The Licensing Act which came into effect in 2005 had no effect on alcohol consumption or on alcohol-related problems. Alcohol consumption has fallen significantly since then. The hoo-ha about ‘24 hour drinking’ was a moral panic and yet another example of ‘public health’ academics making terrible predictions.

Per capita alcohol consumption (litres per year) since 2000 is shown below…

In any case, pub opening hours obviously had nothing to do with alcohol-specific deaths rising during lockdown.

NHS figures released in 2024 revealed that alcohol is 91 per cent more affordable than it was in 1987.

Nearly everything is more affordable than it was in 1987, with the notable exception of housing. That’s the whole point of economic growth. But alcohol is still less affordable than a normal basket of goods, thanks to all the taxes.

This, says Professor Angus, is mostly driven by supermarkets offering cheaper prices than pubs and bars.

‘When you compare the prices in pubs to the prices in shops, they’re on completely separate trajectories,’ he explains.

‘As alcohol became much more available in shops, it also became much cheaper, and people have shifted their drinking from pubs to home.

‘It was maybe only 30 years ago that about three quarters of the alcohol sold in the UK was drunk in pubs. Now it’s drunk at home.’

And yet we are not drinking more than we were 30 years ago.

Until well into the 20th century, many British pubs treated the public bar as a male preserve, with women often expected to sit in a separate lounge or snug and receive table service.

Although this was not a universal legal ban, pubs could still operate discriminatory policies. In 1982, the Court of Appeal ruled that London drinkery El Vino’s policy of preventing women from standing at the bar and requiring them to sit in a back room was unlawful under the Sex Discrimination Act.

Today, millions of women think nothing of describing their personality as being a ‘wine mom’ and proudly fetishise drinking prosecco at every opportunity.

Get thee to a nunnery!

‘Looking at trends in liver disease, which are very highly correlated with alcohol, they have tripled in women,’ says Professor Angus, who adds that much of this can be traced back to the 1960s.

‘Back then, drinking for women was much rarer and a bit more taboo before slowly becoming more socially acceptable.’

Not for long if these people get their way. They want to take the policy of ‘denormalisation’ that they have used with such success against smokers and apply it to drinkers. By the looks of it, they’re going to start with the ladies.

‘Drinking alcohol also started to move from being very much a thing that happens in pubs, which were very male-dominated, beery environments, to drinking at home, and wine became much more available.’

Speaking of wine, Professor Angus adds that he finds it astounding that wine is marketed so aggressively at women.

Is it?! I hardly ever see a wine advert.

None of this has got anything to do with the pandemic rise in alcohol deaths. Death rates rose among both men and women in 2020-22 but more among men than among women. Advertising had nothing to do with it either and is an irrelevance anyway. As for pricing, the ‘excess’ alcohol-specific deaths in 2020-22 were at least as bad in Scotland and Wales, which have minimum pricing, than in England, which doesn’t.

The only slight mystery is Northern Ireland where deaths have gone up and up despite there has been a big drop in the number of people drinking above the government’s ridiculous guidelines, according to this graph in the Daily Mail.

This only serves to show how fatuous the neo-temperance approach is. You’re not going to die from cirrhosis if you drink a bit more than the Chief Medical Officer tells you to. The number of people drinking within the guidelines is a poor proxy for alcohol-related harm. So too is per capita consumption, which barely changed during the pandemic despite a 40% increase in alcohol-specific deaths.

It all highlights what a farce the ‘whole population’ approach is. The lockdown surge in alcohol deaths showed that it is not the whole population that we should be concerned about. It was a relatively small minority of people who were pushed over the edge in 2020-21, not by advertising or availability but by the unintended consequences of ‘public health’ measures.

As Angus and chums say in their study…

Between 2001 and 2019, alcohol-specific deaths remained largely stable, followed by a sharp increase in 2020 and further increases in 2021 and 2022.

None of the things they are complaining to the Daily Mail about - Pub opening hours! Supermarket booze! Women’s liberation! Alcopops! - started in 2020. They go back decades. They are endemic. They cannot explain an unusual spike that occurred suddenly. That spike is worth studying because it shows how some people are susceptible to alcohol abuse when their personal circumstances are grim. It shows how effective treatment can be. But these explanations don’t suit the ‘public health’ approach and so they must be ignored in favour of the same tedious neo-prohibitionist dogma.

Action on Smoking and Health’s CEO Hazel Cheeseman was in front of the Treasury Select Committee last week to discuss Britain’s rapidly escalating illicit tobacco problem. She stuck to the usual script of denying that anything was happening and even insisted that the illicit trade had shrunk.

“The way that we tax tobacco, and have done for a number of years, is to have a tax escalator. We predictably increase the rate of taxation above the level of inflation for cigarettes, hand-rolled tobacco and other tobacco products each year.

That approach has broadly been correct and we have managed to decrease the affordability and increase the tax on tobacco at a time when we have brought down the size of the illegal market for tobacco products. The illegal market for tobacco is 90% smaller now than it was in 2000.”

She’s playing a familiar trick here and no one ever calls her out on it. She’s focusing on the volume of tobacco sold at a time when the smoking rate was nearly three times higher and uses a start date that was near the peak of the Booze Cruise mania that began in 1999 when the EU removed limits on personal allowances for cross-border sales of tobacco and alcohol (legal cigarette sales halved in 1999!). She is then comparing those figures to the demonstrably worthless estimates from HMRC for 2024/25 which simply cannot be reconciled with what we know about the number of people who smoke and how much legal tobacco is sold.

ASH are fond of using The Big Lie, but the idea that the illicit tobacco market has shrunk by 90% is so implausible that it made some of the MPs on the committee suspicious of Cheeseman and so they kept pressing. After all, the reason she had been asked to attend was because the illicit trade has manifestly exploded in scale.

But she continued to brazen it out…

“Several billion cigarettes each year that are smoked are not legal. There is a sizable proportion of the market that is illegal. The point that I want to make is that we have come a long way from where we were. It is something that we have a relatively effective strategy in place to control. It is not suddenly exploding.”

This Pinocchio approach did not cut the mustard with MPs like John Glen who responded by saying:

“We surely have to come to terms with the fact that, while the public health outcomes are desirable, we now have a much bigger problem with this illicit tobacco. Would you agree with that, even if you dispute the numbers? What do you think should be done? Let us face it: we all know that trading standards is pretty hollowed out. There are a very small number of people in different local authorities. I think that there are two in Wiltshire and maybe there are some agencies, in my constituency. Are we being honest about the nature of the problem and what we are going to do to tackle it?”

But Cheeseman continue to stonewall…

“I would dispute whether this is a growing problem, because I do not think that the evidence that we currently have supports that it is a rapidly growing concern.”

Who are you going to believe, ASH or your lying eyes?

Julie Minns looked at some figures…

Julie Minns: “Thank you very much, Ms Cheeseman. I understand that, in 2024, Cancer Research UK estimated that 28 billion cigarettes were smoked in the UK. HMRC in the same year only cleared 14 billion for tax purposes. That suggests that half of the cigarettes being smoked are illicit. Do you recognise that 28 billion figure?”

Hazel Cheeseman: “I would have to go and look at the particular study. I wonder whether there is a difference there between Cancer Research UK also including the hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes that were being smoked in that calculation. I would have to go and have a look at it because I am not immediately familiar with it.”

I am immediately familiar with it. The study is here. It uses estimates of how many smokers there were in 2022-24 - based on the Smoking Toolkit Study - and how many cigarettes they smoked on average. The authors found that 78 million cigarettes were smoked every day, amounting to 28.6 billion per year. As big a number as this is, it is an underestimate since their figure for daily cigarette consumption (10.4) is lower than the ONS’s estimate (11.2) and they don’t adjust either the smoking prevalence or cigarette consumption figures for under-reporting, although it is certain that both are under-reported. Moreover, they didn’t include Northern Ireland which is responsible for another 600 million cigarettes or so. The UK total is therefore 29.2 billion using their methodology.

Cheeseman was right to ask about hand-rolling tobacco. The figures Minns cites do not include this. Assuming that two cigarettes are made from each gram of tobacco, total legal sales in 2024 amounted to just under 23 billion sticks. This implies that the illicit share was 21%, more than HMRC claims but less than empty pack surveys and simple maths suggest.

I’m focusing on 2024, but the study uses the period 2022-24, for some reason. This doesn’t matter enormously from the authors’ perspective as the smoking rate only fell slightly in this period according to the Smoking Toolkit Study, but if we look at 2022 there were 36.6 billion cigarettes sold legally (including hand-rolled). This implies that the illicit share was not only zero but that 7.4 billion cigarettes went unsmoked!

Obviously that can’t be right, so let’s go back to the drawing board. Smoking prevalence figures from the Smoking Toolkit Study are a lot higher than the Office for National Statistics’ figures. It’s possible that they are wrong so let’s make our own calculation for the whole UK in 2024 based on ONS figures:

Since there were just under 23 billion cigarettes sold legally in 2024, this implies that 1.5 billion cigarettes went unsmoked. That doesn’t seem likely and if we do the same calculation for 2022, things become even less plausible…

But we know that 36.6 billion cigarettes were sold legally in 2022, leaving us with a massive shortfall of 12.1 billion cigarettes!

What’s going on? Well, we’re not adjusting the figures to account for secret smokers who claim not to smoke and for smokers under-reporting how much they smoke. The authors of the Cancer Research study didn’t make these adjustments either. It is an inherently difficult thing to do, but we know that under-reporting is a big problem and my figures for 2022 prove it. A study from the USA found that smokers underestimate how many cigarettes they smoke by around 40%. A study from Italy found that smokers under-reported their consumption by 35% in 2008 and that this number had grown over time.

I’m not claiming to have the answer to this. I’m just showing how sensitive these estimates are to assumptions and adjustments. HMRC say that they adjust for under-reporting, but can we be confident in their methodology? Something has clearly gone wrong with the HMRC estimates. At the end of the day, all we really know is how much tobacco is being sold legally, and those figures speak for themselves.

It is glaringly obvious that cigarette consumption has not fallen by more than half in five years. But legal cigarette sales have. It is true that sales of hand-rolling tobacco were unusually high in 2021 (and 2020), but this only serves to prove the point. They were unusually high because lockdowns and travel restrictions made it more difficult to buy illicit tobacco! The figure for 2021 is closer to a ‘real’ figure than any we have seen this century. Since then, legal sales have collapsed. The smoking rate has not. The black market has taken up the slack. It is undeniable, and the only people still denying it work for ASH.

This led to a frenzy of activity from a network of NGOs linked to Michael Bloomberg who spat their dummies out and called on the European Commission to disregard to the consultation. Aided and abetted by the useful idiots at Politico, they complained that it had been “swamped with pro-industry feedback”. The executive director of Action on Smoking and Health (USA) claimed that: “This isn’t democratic input,” he says, “it’s manufactured opposition.”

Their evidence for this was that a third of responses had used the phrase “harm reduction” and half of them had “raised concerns about illicit tobacco trade”. This is suspicious, apparently, because the phrase “harm reduction” was invented by the tobacco industry and linking excessive taxation to black market activity is “an argument often raised by industry”.

This is risible. Harm reduction is a concept developed in public health decades ago, long before e-cigarettes and pouches existed, and it is patently obvious that price differentials are a key driver of the shadow economy.

They had another go at it in January when the unpleasant leftwing polemicist Rutger Bregman - who, ironically, has made a career out of attacking billionaires - went on a rant on LinkedIn, alleging that “tobacco interests tried to distort the democratic process with completely fake ‘citizen’ input”.

“This is what democratic hijacking looks like. Big Tobacco lobbyists cite these ‘consultation results’ to European politicians as proof that EU citizens oppose tobacco taxes — even though those ‘citizens’ are corporate sock puppets.”

Bregman said that his School for Moral Ambition had “incubated” Impact Unfiltered. As I reported at the time, Impact Unfiltered only had two employees (it now has three) and they are both graduates of the School for Moral Ambition’s “Tobacco Free Future” internship courtesy of money from Michael Bloomberg via two of his many front groups. Eline Goethals from the School of Moral Ambition has since written a report calling for the total prohibition of all nicotine products. She is currently at the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health which, as the name suggests, is primarily funded by the billionaire prohibitionist Mike Bloomberg.

Bregman’s claims were scurillous nonsense but Politico gave Impact Unfiltered another bite of the cherry with a story headlined ‘EU Commission suspects “coordinated” interference in tobacco tax feedback’ which implied that many of the responses were from bots. Within hours of the Politico newsletter going out, this had been debunked by Clearing The Air who put some research using large language models online which found no sign of bots being used. There was very little of the text repetition that you would expect from bots, nor were there suspicious deluges of submissions at certain times. The supposedly fishy terms “harm reduction” and “illicit trade” were each used in fewer than 1,500 submissions, not in more than 6,000, as Impact Unfiltered claimed. Those who responded were more likely to use the colloquial terms “less harmful” and “black market”.

Unfazed, the nicotine prohibitionists were back yet again this week. An article e-mailed out to Politico subscribers claimed:

A quarter of public responses to the EU tobacco tax looked nearly identical, analysis shows

More than a quarter of public feedback responses to higher EU tobacco and nicotine taxes were linked to organized lobbying, according to a European Commission analysis obtained by POLITICO via a transparency disclosure.

The consultation saw thousands of highly similar submissions land within a few hours close to the October 2025 deadline, raising fears of orchestrated tobacco industry interference designed to look like a grassroots-led pushback against higher taxes.

This time the allegation isn’t that the consultation responses were “fake” or “bots” or “corporate sockpuppets” but that some of them came from people who had heard about the EU’s proposals because of campaigns against them. Isn’t that how democracy is supposed to work? There was nothing stopping the anti-nicotine NGOs from running campaigns in favour of vape taxes. Some of them did. It’s just that they don’t have any grassroots support so they were greatly outnumbered by users of low-risk nicotine products who have had enough of being bullied by professional puritans.

According to Politico…

The Commission analysis, obtained through a freedom-of-information request, found that 5,001 submissions, or more than 27 percent of all responses, were linked to “identifiable campaign patterns,” meaning “very similar or closely clustered submissions.”

Although I wouldn’t trust anything Politico says about this without seeing evidence, I would be wholly unsurprised if it were true. Consumers should be made aware of what politicians are planning to do to them and they should be encouraged to respond to public consultations. They are the public, after all. I would expect a flurry of responses in the hours running up to a consultation ending as each side tries to rally its supporters for one last push. I would also expect to see the same arguments being made in most of the responses. There are only so many arguments to make and most of them are fairly obvious.

Incidentally, notice the difference between the Politico headline (“a quarter of public responses to the EU tobacco tax looked nearly identical”) and what is actually being reported (a quarter of responses were linked to “identifiable campaign patterns”).

The biggest cluster of similar responses, made up of 1,918 submissions, was identified in Sweden, a country with a vocal nicotine pouch lobby.

And they should make their voice heard. I’m glad a few of them made the effort. I’m only disappointed there weren’t more.

And then comes the kicker that makes all this mud-slinging irrelevant….

In the tax consultation, nearly all (93 percent) of campaign-linked responses were opposed to the Commission’s proposal, although so were 87 percent of all submissions.

Oof! So even if you exclude the campaign-linked responses, the overwhelming majority of those who responded don’t want an EU-wide tax on vapes and pouches.

You can see a detailed analysis of the consultation responses here. The only group in society who gave majority support to the proposals were NGOs, and even then only by a majority of 58% to 42%.

It must be dispiriting for a vast network of full time prohibitionists to have so much money and so little public support. Their repeated attempts to disparage the process shows how rattled they are, but they have no reason to worry. Since when did the European Commission ever listen to the public?

Today sees the release of my new book Inside the Sausage Factory: The Illusion of Evidence-Based Policy Making. The title is a reference to something Bismarck supposedly said about the ways laws are made. It can be a messy process, but it is supposed to be ‘evidence-based’ these days, especially in areas like public health.

The book looks at four campaigns for “public health” policies in Britain in the 2010s: plain packaging for tobacco, minimum pricing for alcohol, the sugary drinks tax and the de facto ban on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). I look at the evidence that was cited the most by politicians and the media, but the thing that stands out is that the decisions to introduce (or reject) each of the policies do not seem to have had much to do with evidence.

Instead, I argue that everybody involved in the policy-making process, from voters up to the Prime Minister, was acting in their own rational self-interest. Paradoxically, this led to irrational policies being introduced (none of them worked).

I outline some of my findings at the Spectator today…

The evidence from Inside the Sausage Factory suggests that politicians will succumb to pressure on low-salience issues unless they believe that the policy will be widely unpopular or conspicuously backfire. Once the ‘public health’ interest groups had put their policies on the agenda, the government could not put off a decision forever. They became barnacles on the boat that needed to be scraped off. With the exception of minimum pricing in England, which had significant public and political opposition, the government in Westminster concluded that the reputational risks of inaction were greater than the political, economic and legal risks of acting. The squeaky wheel got the grease.

For those of us who are of a liberal disposition, this is not a happy conclusion to reach. It implies that politicians are hostages to small pressure groups manipulating public opinion and that the cycle will repeat itself again and again. Where will it end?

And I look at what happened next at The Critic…

In the campaigns I write about in Inside the Sausage Factory, several studies were referenced again and again by politicians, journalists and activists. The policies didn’t work and the evidence wasn’t very good, but at least evidence was cited from time to time. The evidence for banning “junk food” adverts and social media for the under-16s is negligible and the evidence from the generational tobacco ban is non-existent. Scientific evidence was not a decisive factor in any of the campaigns I studied from the 2010s. Today, it seems to be entirely optional.

Because the book is published by the IEA, you can download and read it for free. What a boon.

Inside the Sausage Factory is the last in a series of publications about policy-making in “public health”.

The Corporate Playbook examines the fatuous view of policy-making that is trendy in “public health” academia.

Bootlegging Baptists looks at the economic incentives of paternalistic pressure groups and reasons why consumers do not mobilise to defend themselves.

The People vs Paternalism proposes a way of overcoming the paradox of participation and building a grassroots consumer rights organisation.

Anti-Capitalism and Public Health does what it says on the tin and examines the economic agenda of the “public health” lobby.

Not Invented Here asks why certain pressure groups oppose practical solutions to the problems they supposedly care about.

Along with the Mirror, the Mail loves a scare story about vaping and there are researchers all over the world willing to help it fill column inches. The latest one appeared yesterday and led to headlines like this…

This is pretty irresponsible stuff. It transmits the dangerous message that you might as well smoke. But it is roughly what the study claimed.

Published in Nature Medicine, the study used a huge database of 4.5 million South Koreans who were, or who had once been, smokers. Of them, 2.2 million had quit by the time the last data was collected in 2023. Of the 2.2 million quitters, 25,545 were e-cigarette users. That’s only 1.1%, but still a decent number. The researchers then looked at the smokers/ex-smokers who got lung cancer. There were 35,887 of these, of whom roughly half had quit smoking. Of the ex-smokers, only 71 were e-cigarette users. That is not such a decent number.

The researchers then looked at the lung cancer risk of the smokers, the ex-smokers who didn’t vape and the ex-smokers who did vape. They also divided the ex-smokers into those who quit before 2012 (long-term quitters) and those who quit after 2012 (short-term quitters). When compared to those who kept on smoking, the quitters did better (as you might expect), but the difference was not statistically significant for those who vaped.

In this table, the “minimal” adjustments are for age, sex and how much the person had smoked in their life. The “full” adjustments are for “age, sex, smoking pack-years, body mass index, household income, alcohol consumption, physical activity, CCI, underlying COPD, and underlying IPF.” The authors don’t show the raw data, but it is interesting that there were 18,522 cases of lung cancer among ex-smokers and only 71 of them involved people who had switched to vaping. This could be because vaping isn’t very popular in South Korea, but it is actually fairly common and the table above shows 578 smokers who also vape.

It is perhaps not surprising that these dual users of cigarettes and vapes did significantly better than smokers, since dual users tend to smoke less. It is far more surprising that they also did better than people who stopped smoking and only vaped. It difficult to see how this can be explained.

The researchers deal with the anomaly of dual users by ignoring them in the main text and lumping all the current smokers together (the table above comes from the appendix and is only there because two reviewers asked to see the data for dual users). This had the effect of making vaping look a bit worse because it diluted the beneficial effects of dual use, but the general picture was the same: ex-smokers who vape do not see a statistically significant reduction in lung cancer risk. But remember that we’re dealing with a very small number of people and the confidence intervals are wide for the vapers. We are comparing 18,451 ex-smokers to 71 ex-smoking vapers.

I could say much more about the flaws in this research, but I don’t have to because the journal has thoughtfully published the peer review comments. While one reviewer thought the study was just swell, another reviewer had a series of criticisms:

The authors interpret these findings as suggesting that vaping causes lung cancer, an interpretation that seems somewhat tendentious. The cancers that were observed were likely the result of decades of smoking and the finding, if genuine, would more likely suggest that vaping was reducing the benefits of stopping smoking. There is a high probability though that the results are an artefact of several methodological issues.

Here is the main one. The by far the most [sic] important determinant of the reduction in cancer risk after stopping smoking is the duration of abstinence. As vaping is a relatively new development, duration of abstinence can be expected to differ substantially between vapers and non-vapers. The control for this was inadequate. Ex-smokers were divided into groups abstinent for <5 years and >5 years. It is a certainty that among >5 years quitters, vapers had quit much more recently; but this would be the case among <5-year-quitters too, as the popularity of vaping was increasing during that time. The results may be just showing that risk reduction is proportional to duration of abstinence and have nothing to do with vaping.

Apart from this key problem, there are several other issues.

The current findings could be in part due to reverse causality. Smokers with prodromal symptoms of lung cancer could have been more motivated to switch to vaping. A previous publication by some of the current authors using the same data set (https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.54958) found that recent quitters had not just no reduction, but in fact an increase in risk of lung cancer compared to continuing smokers. They interpreted the finding as due to smokers with incipient cancer being more likely to stop smoking. This is not mentioned in the current manuscript where it would be highly relevant given that vapers were bound to be more recent quitters than non-vapers.

… Apart from this, vapers and non-vapers probably differed in dozens of variables. Controlling for different covariates can lead to different and even opposite results. Some suspicions are raised by the fact that the manuscript copies closely a paper by a different team using the same data set to look at effects of vaping on CVD (https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.054967) but it includes different covariates (and does not use propensity matching).

A second draft was written but it did not satisfy this reviewer who felt that his\her criticisms had not been addressed.

As per my initial review, the finding is likely an artefact of EC [e-cigarette] users quitting more recently than non-users. Some non-users quit smoking 40+ years before the 2018 baseline, EC users could have quit only since about 2007 but more likely several years later when EC use in Korea became more widespread.

He or she also who found further flaws…

There are also some additional issues that have emerged. The previous concerns about the study rigor were reinforced when it turned out that in the initial NM submission, over half of quitters for <5 years were misclassified. The finding that abstainers >5 years who vaped had a higher incidence of lung cancer death is based on 5 deaths in this group. The authors now also report changing lung cancer outcome definition from what they used in their previous report, i.e. a post-hoc modification of the primary outcome.

Alarmingly, I now also noted that the Korean NHIS questionnaire does not differentiate between heated tobacco products (HTP) and EC [e-cigarettes]!

A third draft was delivered, but it did not - and could not, given the inherent weakness of the underlying survey - address the fundamental problems raised by the reviewer: that there was misclassification bias in the data, that there was likely to be reverse causation at work, and that the smokers who switched to vapes had quit smoking, on average, more recently than the other ex-smokers. As the reviewer had pointed out in their first comments, previous researchers had used the same dataset and made the same mistake. He or she replied…

I appreciate the authors’ efforts to address the points raised, but the key issues remain.

There is no doubt that EC users quit smoking more recently than non-users (see the previous reviews for the explanation) and because time since quitting is a major predictor of lung cancer risk, this must have contributed to the findings. The issue also remains that Korean smokers who vape have been shown to initiate smoking earlier than non-vapers and earlier initiation of smoking dramatically increases lung cancer risk - after controlling for pack years (https://doi.org/10.1097/00001648-199309000-00010). Given several other issues, including the possibility of reverse causation, doubts remain whether the conclusions reliably reflect the data.

The authors made various changes to the text, watering down certain claims and adding caveats here and there, but the study remained essentially the same. When it was published, the abstract focused on a comparison between quitters who vaped and quitters who didn’t (rather on a comparison between quitters who vaped and smokers who kept on smoking). This gave them a statistically significant relative risk of 1.56 (a 56% increase in lung cancer risk). Although they admitted in the text of the study that “the risk of all-cause mortality remained significantly lower among ex-smokers who used e-cigarettes after smoking cessation compared with current smokers at baseline” (my italics), this finding did not make it into the abstract and was not mentioned elsewhere.

And when speaking to the press, the lead author, Yeon Wook Kim, no longer had to worry about caveats…

“E-cigarettes are commonly considered a safer option than conventional cigarettes or a smoking cessation aid. However, increasing evidence reveals that e-cigarettes are associated with adverse outcomes in lung-health, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, and lung cancer.”

And the Daily Mail reported the story like this…

Swapping cigarettes for vapes does NOT significantly reduce the risk of lung cancer, study finds

Job done.

As I wrote for The Critic yesterday…

There is no coming back from this for Australia. It is finished as a legal tobacco market. All it can be now is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world. The tipping point has come and gone. Smokers feel no obligation to pay taxes to a government that vilifies them, and vapers feel no compulsion to obey a law that undermines their health. At some point, the international tobacco companies will pull out of the country and anti-smoking campaigners can celebrate the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. As tobacco duty revenues fall to zero and the turf war escalates, they can pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves on a job well done. They finally defeated “Big Tobacco”.

Not only has tobacco duty revenue collapsed and violence escalated but nicotine consumption has risen by 40% in the past decade and it is widely anticipated that when official statistics are published later this year they will show a rise in the smoking rate.

The blame lies squarely on the charlatans masquerading as public health experts who opposed the legalisation of vapes and pushed for ever higher tobacco taxes while scoffing at the idea that any of the obvious unintended consequences would come to pass.

In a sensible country, these people would have gone into hiding to live the rest of their lives in disgrace. But since Australia is a clown country, the government invited the arsonists to advise them on how to put out the fire.

Two weeks ago, the Australian Senate held an inquiry into what it calls the ‘Illegal tobacco crisis in Australia’. The risible sociologist Simon Chapman and his brainwashed protégé Becky Freeman, who are more responsible for the black market fiasco than anyone, were invited to give evidence. Anyone hoping for a reckoning was destined to be disappointed. Instead of being publicly shamed, they were asked softball questions and given the opportunity to double down on their failure.

Freeman’s answers, in particular, were jaw-dropping in their brazen denial of reality.

Australia should be really proud of its tobacco control history. We have not lost the policy battle. This is not a policy disaster.

We have less than 10 per cent of people in this country smoking.

Australia’s smoking rate is 11.1% which is higher than the rate in the USA which has much cheaper cigarettes, no plain packaging and no graphic warnings. It is higher than the rate in New Zealand and the UK where vapes are legal, and it is much higher than Sweden and Norway where safer nicotine products, specifically snus, have driven cigarettes to the brink of extinction. And, unlike in Australia, there is no expectation that the smoking rate will go up in these countries, nor do they routinely see convenience stores burnt down by gangsters.

Of course, we're all very concerned that smoking rates are going to rise at the end of this year when the latest data comes out, particularly among young adults, because they've been hit with a double whammy—illicit tobacco, and they were the first group of young people to vape. And, if you vape, you are five times more likely to go on to smoke.

No one on the committee pulled her up on this weapons grade bullshit. She’s obviously accepted that the smoking rate has risen and is getting her excuses in early, but the idea that a rise in vaping must be followed by a rise in smoking is not supported by any evidence in any country ever. Teen vaping “epidemics” in the USA and the UK were accompanied by smoking rates among both adults and minors falling to record lows. The gateway theory has been demolished. It was never more than a prohibitionist lie based on a failure to interpret statistics properly. If Australia manages to engineer a rise in smoking and vaping simultaneously it will be thanks to the unique combination of idiotic policies espoused by Ms Freeman.

It seems that Australia’s political class is still gullible enough to believe the high priests of tobacco control, but the patience of the general population is wearing thin and it is not too late for the rest of the world to use Australia’s ship wreck as a lighthouse.

One example is obesity, which we are told can only be tackled by fundamentally changing the food environment, banning advertising, taxing more products and demonising ‘Big Food’. None of this has ever actually worked anywhere. We do, however, now have GLP-1 drugs that work wonders for many people.

Plenty of ‘public health’ academics are notably resistant to ‘fat jabs’ because what they really want is to fundamentally change the food environment, ban advertising, tax more products and demonise ‘Big Food’.

Take this article from three self-described “public health scholars” in JAMA Health Forum, for example. They object to obesity being framed as a “a disease requiring individual treatment” because, they say, it undermines public support for government action. They even complain that “medical societies consistently argue that we do need to both prevent and treat obesity” because treatment - i.e. losing weight - is something that individuals can do for themselves. Moreover, studies have shown that when the public hear about people losing weight on their own initiative, they are less likely to support population-wide policies such as food taxation.

Broadcasting a “we need to do both” message, it turns out, is a counterproductive communications strategy for addressing the obesity epidemic. Studies message-testing obesity narratives find that public support for government action is highest when obesity is framed as the result of food industry manipulation and addresses toxic food environments.

The authors don’t seem particularly interested in whether this narrative is true. The main thing is that it can “build support for addressing upstream drivers of the obesity epidemic”. They conclude that medical professionals should stop talking about GLP-1 drugs in public and bang on about ‘BiG fOoD’ instead.

While we acknowledge that public and media discourse often expect clinicians to comment on treatment efficacy and emergent therapies, in an ideal world, the medical community would move discussions about GLP-1 drugs targeting causes of individual cases in-house, while using its credibility and authority publicly to amplify much needed political discussions about the root causes of increasing obesity incidence.

This messaging should include concrete policy proposals targeting unhealthy food environments shifting the debate toward the structural causes of the obesity epidemic, such as World Health Organization–recommended sugar taxes and other policies that would effectively reverse the rise in ultraprocessed food production, marketing, and consumption and, importantly, the corporate power that has so far prevented governments from enacting these policies.

You can see why they are worried about fat jabs. The drugs work by giving people artificial willpower and prove that if obese people simply eat less food they will stop being obese. It has nothing to do with advertising, price, availability or ‘corporate power’.

From the perspective of the authors, these drugs are a threat, but what exactly is their perspective? The first author, Luc Hagenaars, has written a lot about sugar taxes which he compiled for his PhD thesis. He also worked at the Dutch Ministry of Health in the early 2020s when the Netherlands was undergoing its anti-liberal counter-revolution. Last year, he wrote an article titled ‘The Ozempic Era Could Shift Blame for Obesity From Individuals to Commercial Food Systems’ which made exactly the opposite argument to the one he is making here.

The second author, Grant Ennis, is an Australian with a Masters in Public Administration. He has written a book titled Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment which has been praised by no less a luminary than our old friend Greg Fell.

He also “lectures at Monash University (Australia) on activism, organizing, corporate disinformation, and the role of subsidies in creating global problems (the content of Dark PR).”

This seems to be only his fourth journal article. The others are titled ‘From Corporate Activism to “Dark PR:” Corporate Discourses and Their Influence on Public Opinion in the Digital Society’, ‘We Do Have Enemies and We Should Know Who They Are: The Commercial Determinants of Physical Activity’ and ‘Calling for a more coherent policy response to driving harm’ (the latter article was co-authored with Mr Fell and tries to apply the Total Consumption Model to motoring).

The third author, the splendidly named Yogi Hale Hendlin, is based in San Francisco and has a PhD in Environmental Philosophy. He is currently writing a book titled Interspecies Solidarity: Valuing difference in the biotic community. He has a keen interest in ‘Critical Plant Studies’ and has written “the first ecohumanities book dedicated to algae”. He’s written a lot of papers but none of them seem to be about obesity. He does, however, have a book in the pipeline titled Industrial Pandemics: The Spread of the Corporate Virus and How to Stop It and he is affiliated with The Center to End Corporate Harm. He is not only interested in ‘interspecies politics’ but also in ‘understanding industries themselves as disease vectors’.

What does this tell us? Firstly, it tells us that anybody can call themselves a “public health scholar” these days. Secondly, it tells us that some people in the “public health” conversation about obesity might possibly have more of a political interest in fighting corporations than a medical interest in making people healthier.

One of the conclusions in the Not Invented Here paper is that when you cut through the rhetoric of a lot of single-issue campaigners, you find that they are motivated by anti-capitalism. Anti-capitalism is at the very centre of the omnicause. I wrote a whole paper about anti-capitalism and public health. The latter has become a branch of the former.

The study uses data from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs in which 15-16 year olds self-report their alcohol intake. The authors look at trends in Lithuania and several other countries since 2007 and claim that since 2018, when the alcohol ad ban took effect, Lithuania has seen a bigger decline in the frequency of intoxication among this age group than its peers.

The first thing to say about this is that intoxication among 15-16 year olds in any of the countries is not very common. As this graph from the study’s appendix shows, most of these kids never get drunk and most of those who do only get drunk once a year. (Symptoms of drunkenness in the survey include “staggered when walking, not being able to speak properly, throwing up or not remembering what happened”.)

Therefore, the (mean) average frequency of intoxication per annum - which is what the authors focus on - is quite a small number. By 2019, it was below 1.5 in all six countries.

As we shall see, it is not at all clear from this study what actually happened in any of these countries, but what appears to be the data from the four surveys (2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019) is shown in Figure 1 of the study. The trend is down everywhere except in Italy where it was low to begin with.

The authors say that: “Overall, levels remained relatively stable between 2007 and 2011”. That might be true overall, but it does not apply to Lithuania where the rate clearly fell. It fell again between 2011 and 2015 and then again between 2015 and 2019. The rate of decline was pretty consistent over the whole period. Would the decline have come to a halt if Lithuania hadn’t banned alcohol advertising in 2018? That is essentially the authors’ claim, but it is hard to prove it with this survey.

Later in the study, we are shown Figure 2. This also purports to show the mean number of intoxication occasions in the last 12 months, but the graph looks rather different.

In this graph, Lithuania still sees a decline in teen drunkenness but the rate of decline is less steep between 2015 and 2019 - when the ad ban took effect - than it was between 2007 and 2015. The dotted line shows the authors’ counterfactual in which the advertising ban never happened. Without the ban, they surmise, there would have been almost no change in teen drunkenness between 2015 and 2019. But since there was a decline between 2015 and 2019, the advertising ban must have worked. QED!

At this point, the reader is starting to wonder what is real and what is not. Are the results of the survey shown in Figure 1 or Figure 2? Or neither?

The plot thickens in the appendix where the authors talk us through their adjustments, although they do not really explain them. They begin by showing how the data looked when it was only adjusted for the “secular trend”. God knows what that involved in practice, but the word “predicted” in the title indicates that we are already in the world of modelling.

This graph looks completely different to the graphs above. Here, the trend is remarkably similar in all six countries. There was a decline in teen intoxication everywhere, but it nearly all happened between 2011 and 2015. All the countries ended in the same position as they began, relative to each other, and Lithuania is in the middle of the pack.

They then make adjustments for “individual-level differences (gender and social behaviours)”…

And then they make adjustments to account for “differences in self-perceived availability of alcoholic beverages”…

And then “alcohol control policies other than marketing (taxation and personal control)”…

And finally they adjust for “alcohol marketing”, leaving them with the final model that appears in the study as Figure 2. This is the graph to which they add their counterfactual and declare victory.

As you can see, the various adjustments completely transform the data and we are still none the wiser about what the survey actually found. Has there really been a big drop in teen intoxication in Lithuania or is it all relative to a counterfactual based on the authors’ assumptions about how 15-16 year olds respond to the availability, price and advertising of alcohol?

There are plenty of valid reasons to make adjustments to data. A pollster might weight the findings of a survey according to past voting intentions, gender, age and other relevant factors if certain people are under-represented in the poll, but that is not what the authors are doing in this study. An epidemiologist looking for a causal association with a lifestyle risk factor might adjust the statistical association to account for known risk factors such as smoking. That is perfectly justifiable but, again, it doesn’t seem to be what the authors are doing here.

Moreover, the authors are adjusting for things that are murky, largely unknowable and arguably unnecessary. Why would you adjust for the secular trend, i.e. what has happened in the past? What does adjusting for “social behaviours” even mean? And how can you adjust for the effect of marketing when you don’t know what the effect of marketing is? (The authors admit in the introduction that “real-world evaluations of full marketing bans remain limited” and that “a 2014 Cochrane Review and a more recent literature review identified insufficient evidence for the effectiveness of alcohol marketing bans”. It is precisely because we don’t know what effect marketing bans have that the authors conducted the study!)

The confusion is made worse by the fact that Lithuania raised the drinking age from 18 to 20 at the same time as it banned alcohol advertising. It also restricted the hours that off licences can open. How can you isolate the effect of any of these policies when all you have is two surveys, taken four years apart, in which teenagers are asked to fess up to doing something that most of them never do and that most of those who do only do once a year? The only way to even attempt such a task is by piling one untested assumption upon another until the data is unrecognisable.

I have no problem believing that teen drunkenness has declined in Lithuania since 2007, as it has in most other European countries. Lithuania has become a more sober country in general, albeit starting from a very high base. The number of 15-16 year olds in Lithuania who have got drunk in the past year has certainly declined, making it highly likely that the “mean frequency of adolescent intoxication” has also fallen. But the claim that the ban on alcohol advertising had anything to do with that - let alone that it single-handedly cut teenage intoxication by 35%! - is entirely fanciful and cannot possibly be proven by the source data for this study.

The authors nevertheless conclude…

This study provides real-world evidence that a full national ban on alcohol marketing can reduce risky drinking behaviours among adolescents. To our knowledge, this is one of the few studies that have empirically demonstrated such an impact.

But it is not real world evidence, is it? It is a scenario at best. Nothing has been “empirically demonstrated”. I have read the study several times and I am still unclear about what actually happened in any of the six countries.

Following Lithuania’s 2018 ban, we observed a large decline in the prevalence and frequency of alcohol intoxication among adolescents protected by this ban…

This is not true. They have not so much “observed” anything as hypothesised it. The relevant survey data comes from 2015 and 2019. It doesn’t tell us what happened “following Lithuania’s 2018 ban”. The decline - if there was a decline - could have happened between 2015 and 2017 for all we know.

If we want some empirical evidence that hasn’t been distorted beyond recognition, we can look at per capita alcohol consumption in Lithuania. This data, from the WHO, shows a steep decline in alcohol consumption between 2012 and 2018 followed by a rise in the years since. On the face if it, this does not suggest that any of the policies that took effect in 2018 had much of an impact on drunkenness.

But, as I have been saying all along, the generational ban is little more than a silly, virtue-signalling gimmick. There is an even greater problem lurking in all the new powers that Wes Streeting has granted himself…

It is the vapes part of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill that is the real problem. It gives the health secretary, currently Wes Streeting, Henry VIII powers to do whatever he likes with vaping. The government is already consulting on banning vaping everywhere that smoking is banned, despite there being no plausible heath risks from second-hand vapour. It has made it clear that it intends to ban all advertising for vapes and nicotine pouches. It has even suggested that it will ban some or all e-cigarette flavours, a backdoor route to prohibition, which Michael Bloomberg’s army of lobby groups has been campaigning for worldwide. A vape tax that will double or treble the cost of vaping is already due to be introduced in October.

Taken together, this represents the most comprehensive package of pro-smoking policies ever introduced in this country. In the name of preventing minors – who cannot legally buy e-cigarettes – from taking up vaping, the government is putting every obstacle in the way of adults who might otherwise be tempted to use the most effective stop-smoking devices ever invented. It is doing all this while cigarettes with no health warnings on the pack are being sold for a few quid on the high street and has tied a bow on it by passing a law that will give smoking the allure of forbidden fruit for young adults.

The looming crackdown on vaping is a threat to both liberty and public health. The new vape tax - another Rishi Sunak policy - will create a major disincentive for smokers to switch when it comes into effect in October, but there is more trouble on its way.

The government didn’t even wait for the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to become law before launching a public consultation on banning vaping everywhere that smoking is currently banned.

As I wrote at the time, there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to confuse the public about what is being planned. I was on a BBC radio station yesterday and the presenter wrongly believed that the ban would only be in cars carrying kids. In my experience, even most vapers don’t know what is about to hit them. Yes, yes, I know that many pubs already ban vaping, but that should be a choice for them. As the Hippodrome’s proprietor Simon Thomas says, there is a big difference between enforcing your own policy at your own discretion and being compelled, on pain of a £2,500 fine, to stop anyone ever stealth vaping on your premises.

And it’s not just pubs, but every workplace in the land, even if no one else is in the room.

There is no scientific justification for this because “secondhand vapour” is not dangerous. There is no economic justification for it because there is no market failure. And there is no ethical justification for it because, as Clive Bates, the former director of Action on Smoking and Health, says, the basis of liberalism is that people should be left alone unless they are causing harm to others.

The fine people at the New Nicotine Alliance have been running a campaign against the ban called Save Vaping. Unfortunately, they are as impecunious as the proverbial church mouse and the issue is flying under the radar in the media. Nevertheless, they have found a growing number of people willing to speak out against the ban, including politicians from both sides of the House.

The government wants to slip this through on the quiet via secondary legislation. Don’t let it. You can submit a response to the consultation here or via the Save Vaping website. It won’t take long as it’s mostly a bunch of yes/no questions. The government doesn’t have to abide by the views of the majority of respondents, but if there is a lot of opposition to the proposals at the consultation stage, it makes it harder for them to proceed and easier to backtrack. I don’t sense a lot of enthusiasm for a ban, even from ‘public health’ groups that are usually trigger happy with prohibition. Please get involved (unless you support the ban, in which case forget I mentioned it).

HMRC data shows that illicit tobacco consumption is stable as of 2023/24 and has declined substantially over the long term, with illicit cigarette consumption falling by almost 90% since 2000.

ASH’s CEO Hazel Cheeseman has recently been on some sort of fact-finding trip to Brussels where she was given reassurances by her fellow ideologues. There is, apparently, nothing to see here.

The claim that “illicit tobacco represents a relatively small share of the market” rests on a flawed estimate from HMRC which even they admit has “high uncertainty”. The collapse in legal sales since 2021 is conclusive evidence that the illicit trade is much larger than they claim.

If HMRC were serious about getting the measure of the black market, it would conduct empty pack surveys. All that needs to be done is to collect random but representative samples from public and household bins and see how many cigarette packs and tobacco pouches originated in the UK.

The tobacco company PMI commissions KPMG to conduct empty pack surveys all over Europe. They found that 25.6% of manufactured cigarettes in the UK were contraband or counterfeit in 2024 - much higher than HMRC’s figure of 10.5% - but groups like ASH ignore this because the research is industry-funded.

I didn’t learn until last week that the Irish government commissions its own pack surveys. Conducted by Ipsos MRBI, they don’t involve going through recycling bins and the packs aren’t usually empty. Instead, a thousand smokers are interviewed for five minutes and are asked to bring their tobacco with them. Respondents are offered a scratchcard for participating and the response rate is “consistently high (over 80%)”.

The most recent (2024) survey found that 26% of cigarette packs in Ireland were illegal and a further 11% were legal but bought abroad via duty-free/EU. The number of illegal packs has doubled since 2019 when the figure was 13%.

For rolling tobacco, 36% of pouches were illegal and a further 13% were legal but bought abroad via duty-free/EU. The number of illegal pouches was three times higher than in 2019.

Ireland and the UK have similarly extortionate rates of tobacco duty. Are we really to believe that the UK has a much smaller black market? Are we to believe that the black market has doubled in size in Ireland in the last few years but not in the UK?

Interestingly, in Ireland only 2% of the packs were illicit whites (“cigarettes manufactured for the sole purpose of being smuggled into and sold illegally in another market”). From seeing empty packs on the pavement, my impression is that the figure is higher in the UK where brands such as Manchester and Top Gun have never been sold legally but are widely consumed.

ASH’s response to the collapse of the legal trade has been to claim that it is all due to people quitting smoking and that the recent decline is in line with the long term trend. They created the graph below as evidence for this.

They say that the pandemic “disrupted smoking behaviour” and that if you ignore that blip, legal sales have been falling steadily since 2015.

There are two problems with this. Firstly, the pandemic didn’t disrupt smoking behaviour; smoking rates continued to decline. What was disrupted was the ability of people to buy tobacco from abroad and on the black market. The increase in sales relative to the number of smokers in 2020 and 2021 was the result of lockdowns and travel bans forcing smokers to buy tobacco legally in British shops. It gave a hint of how big the non-duty paid market had always been.

Secondly, ASH ignore rolling tobacco in that graph. If you include cigarettes made from rolling tobacco, the graph looks very different. The increase in legal sales during the pandemic is more obvious and the subsequent decline is more dramatic. From 2023, the drop in legal sales has clearly been well below trend - and well below the decline in the number of smokers.

Incidentally, the reason ASH use the year 2000 as their baseline is because that was the year of the “booze cruise” when Britain’s drinkers and smokers took full effect of the EU’s Single Market. It led to over 10,000 cars being seized and a government crackdown on smuggling. During this mini-crisis, legal tobacco sales halved in a single year and by 2000/01, HMRC estimated that the tobacco tax gap was 25%. It is likely that the true figure is higher than that today. The claim that illicit sales have fallen by “almost 90%” since 2000 is based on absolute volumes and ignores the fact that there are far fewer smokers around today. It also ignores rolling tobacco. Using HMRC’s figures and including cigarettes made from rolling tobacco, there were 12.2 billion illicit cigarettes smoked in the UK in 2000/01. By 2023/24, this had fallen to 4.5 billion cigarettes. This is not a decline of “almost 90%”. It is a decline of 63%, mostly of which is due to the smoking rate more than halving since then.

Above all, the claim is based on HMRC estimates which are simply not credible. It is hard to say whether their estimates were better in 2000/01 but they are demonstrably wrong today.

It would be a relatively cheap and simple operation for the government to use empty pack surveys like KPMG’s or personal pack surveys like Ireland’s. Either system would produce a better estimate than HMRC is currently able to provide. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the government refuses to use a better method because it would rather not know the truth.

Looking for a rationale for banning vaping in six million buildings, the Impact Assessment raises the issue of whether ‘secondhand vapour’ may pose a risk to the health of bystanders. It cites several studies and reports looking at this question. Let’s take a look at them.

The WHO

The first is from the World Health Organisation, an agency that is extremely hostile to vaping and that is constantly receiving community notes on X (Twitter) for spreading misinformation about it. The IA says:

“the WHO state that the vapours generated by vapes typically raise the concentration of particulate matter in indoor environments and contain nicotine and other potentially toxic substances. Vape vapours therefore pose potential risks to both users and non-users”.

Note the use of the word “quantifiable” rather than “harmful”. Even the tiniest quantities are quantifiable with modern technology. No environment - inside or outside - is entirely free of particles in the air that could be harmful in large enough amounts.

The WHO citation is just a webpage in the format of Frequently Asked Questions. Under ‘Are secondhand ENDS [electronic nicotine delivery systems - the pointless ‘public health’ term of e-cigarettes] emissions dangerous?’, it says:

The aerosols generated by ENDS typically raise the concentration of particulate matter in indoor environments and contain nicotine and other potentially toxic substances. ENDS emissions therefore pose potential risks to both users and non-users.

The IA repeats most of this verbatim, but the WHO does not cite any supporting evidence. Note that even the WHO does not go beyond talking about “potential” risks.

The EU

The second source is an EU council recommendation on “smoke- and aerosol-free environments” from 2024. It leans heavily on the WHO and, like the WHO, it supports a ban. Most of its citations for secondhand exposure involve heated tobacco, but it does cite five peer-reviewed studies about e-cigarette vapour which, it says, show that e-cigarette emissions “expose bystanders to quantifiable levels of particulate matter and key toxicants and contaminants”. The IA quotes this verbatim, but note, again, the use of the word “quantifiable” rather than “harmful”.

The five studies are:

Fernández et al. (2015) found that “PM2.5 [particles that are 2.5 micrometres or smaller in diameter] median concentration was 9.88 μg/m3 in the e-cigarette user home and 9.53 and 9.36 μg/m3 in the smoke-free homes”. The authors admit that “the PM2.5 medians in the e-cigarette user home and non-smokers smoke-free homes were similar” and “whether secondhand exposure from e-cigarettes poses health risks at short- and long-term is still unknown.” To put those figures in context, the concentrations were 572.52 μg/m3 in a smoker’s home.

Li et al. (2020) is a literature review from some California-based researchers. They show their hand early on when they note the rise of vaping in China and other countries and predict that “secondhand exposures to e-cig aerosols will likely become a potential public health problem in those countries soon”. They say that research into the health effects of secondhand vaping is “inconsistent”, but report unusually large readings of PM2.5 in various exceptional or unrealistic settings, such as at a vape conference, in an exposure chamber with a smoking machine and in a lab where the measuring device was positioned 50cm away from the vaper.

Hess et al. (2016) is another literature review, this time by Australian researchers. They found very little evidence of harm. For example:

“[The study] concluded that there is no significant risk of harm to human health from exposure to the levels of tested chemicals.”

“No difference was found in lung function for the nonsmokers passively exposed to EC [e-cigarette] vapour compared with no exposure, but participants’ serum cotinine levels were raised” [cotinine is a biomarker for nicotine and is often used a proxy for exposure to nicotine]

“This study found that short-term passive EC exposure did not seem to lead to the inflammatory response that is seen in volunteers passively exposed to CC [conventional cigarette] smoke – blood count measures were unchanged”

“the short-term exposures to EC vapour did not elicit a reduction in lung function or an increase in inflammatory markers.”

“As found by Flouris et al., this short-term passive exposure to EC vapour did not significantly affect inflammatory markers in the exposed subjects.”

They nevertheless conclude that “current evidence regarding passive exposure to EC vapours shows the potential for health impacts.”

Lerner et al. (2015) subjected mice to “acute exposure of e-cig aerosols” and found that this led to “measurable oxidative and inflammatory responses in lung cells and tissues that could lead to unrealized health consequences”. Studies involving humans have not found the same effect, probably because humans are not exposed to unrealistically high doses.

Borgini et al. (2021) was a quasi-natural experiment in a room with two habitual vapers. Its main finding was that Juul e-cigs produce less aerosol than a brand called Just Fog. The researchers didn’t even bother looking at PM2.5 because there was so little of it. (Roberto Sussman has written about this study in more detail.)

The EU document also cites a study by Glantz et al. (2024) which has nothing to do with secondhand emissions. I don’t know why they referenced that. Perhaps because Stanton Glantz is a fanatical opponent of vaping?

Studies specifically cited in the Impact Assessment

The IA mentions three other studies. They are:

Amalia et al. (2023) went looking for chemicals and aerosols in the homes of 29 vapers. They didn’t find nicotine in eight of them and in the rest the average level was “quite low”. That’s putting it mildly. The average level was 0.01 μg/m3 . That’s one hundredth of a microgram per cubic metre of air. In studies of secondhand smoke, this would be considered below the limit of quantification. There was no statistically significant difference between levels of particulate matter in vapers’ homes and non-vapers’ homes. Non-vapers living in houses where people vaped had higher levels of cotinine in their salvia and urine, although vastly less than vapers themselves. The authors called for further research. (Roberto Sussman has discussed this study in more detail.)

Tattan-Birch et al. (2024) found that children living with vapers absorb more cotinine than children who don’t. But, as the data in the study show, the quantities were homeopathically small. Cotinine in the blood of secondhand vapers averaged 0.08 μg/L (micrograms per litre) whereas secondhand smokers averaged 0.49 μg/L, and children exposed to neither vape nor smoke averaged 0.02 μg/L. To put that in context, the average vaper has a blood cotinine reading of around 250 μg/L, more than 3,000 times higher than that seen among those who are “exposed” to secondhand vapour. (NB. cotinine is harmless.)

Islam et al. (2022) All research on vaping from California comes with a red flag and this is no exception. This cross-sectional study used data from two waves of the a health survey and suffered from massive problems of confounding because, of the 223 young adults who reported being exposed to secondhand vapour, only 6.9% were not exposed to secondhand vapour, tobacco smoke or cannabis smoke and did not smoke or vape themselves. 11.5% of them were vapers and/or smokers but supposedly had no exposure to second-hand smoke. 48.4% were smokers and/or vapers and were also exposed to secondhand vapour/smoke and 33.2% didn’t vape or smoke and were exposed to secondhand smoke, but not to vaping. Teasing out the effects of secondhand vapour from this muddy dataset seems an impossible job. The researchers attempted to do so and found a 40% increase in bronchitis and 53% increase in shortness of breath among the secondhand vapers. Experts were critical of this study when it was first published, not least because the effect size is implausibly high (it suggested that passive vaping is worse for you than actual vaping).

Studies cited by OHID

Finally, the IA cites the extensive report on vaping from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), published in 2022. This, in turn, cites the following six studies:

Martínez-Sánchez et al. (2019) got six people who didn’t vape or smoke to live with a vaper for a week. After seven days, their urine was tested for tobacco-specific nitrosamines (NNAL). Two of them didn’t have a detectable level of NNAL. The other four averaged 0.47 pg/mg (picograms per millilitre; a picogram is one trillionth of a gram). The authors correctly note that this is “very low” and that the average level among smokers is “around 300 pg/mL”, i.e. 638 times higher.

Johnson et al. (2019) sent 34 people to an e-cigarette convention. If you’ve ever been to one you’ll know that there is nothing vapier than a vape convention. After spending six hours amongst cloud-chasers, the participants had their urine and saliva tested for acrolein, tobacco-specific nitrosamines and cotinine. Acrolein was found at average levels ranging from 163 to 839 μg/g. The authors note that there are “many sources of acrolein exposures both in the environment and endogenously, thus the acrolein concentrations measured in this study are only partially attributable to passive e-cigarette exposure.” Levels ranged between 186 to 324 μg/g before the participants attended the event.

As in other studies, passive vaping was associated with higher levels of cotinine, peaking at 2.31 μg/g of urine after one event, but generally being below 1 μg/g. These levels are not unusual among non-smokers, including those who are not exposed to tobacco smoke. When researchers use cotinine tests to identify smokers, they use a threshold of 100 μg/g or more.

In contrast to Martínez-Sánchez et al. (2019) (see above), the researchers found that all tobacco-specific nitrosamines tested for (including NNAL) were “below the limit of detection in all samples for all sampling times and sampling events”.

Qunitana et al. (2019) is some more research from California. One of the authors of this paper is Georg Matt who invented the concept of ‘thirdhand smoke’ which, like ‘passive vaping’, relies on scaring people about barely measurable levels of chemicals in their environment. These researchers gave some kids wristbands which measure nicotine and then tested their urine after a week. They found a close correlation between wristband readings and urine readings. That’s it. No data on how levels changed relative to exposure. All it did was show that the wristbands work.

It’s not obvious what this study contributes to the literature although the authors do point out that the wristbands are commercially available, and one of the authors declares an interest in the company that makes them.

Melstrom et al. (2018) In this study, six people who don’t use nicotine “were exposed to secondhand aerosol from ad libitum e-cigarette use by three e-cigarette users for 2h during two separate sessions” and then had their blood, saliva and urine tested. Suspiciously high baseline readings suggested that at least one of them was a secret smoker. There was an increase in average cotinine levels after the experiment but only very slightly, e.g. blood readings went from 0.299 ng/ml to 0.326 ng/ml and saliva went from 0.350 ng/ml to 0.395 ng/ml. Is that a lot? It’s less than the variation among the participants before the experiment began when it ranged between undetectable and 0.894 ng/ml for blood and undetectable to 1.056 ng/ml for saliva. The authors, who include the future head of the FDA’s tobacco division, nevertheless conclude that their findings “could have important implications for public health policy” because “aerosols produced from the use of e-cigarettes may contain other harmful constituents that were not measured in this study.” This is typical of the way researchers in this field sideline their own findings in an attempt to justify vaping bans.

Qunitana et al. (2021) It’s those Californian wristband advocates again. This time they produce some half-useful data. Nearly all the kids’ wristbands reported some exposure to nicotine, but kids who lived with vapers had eight times more of it than kids who didn’t and kids who lives with smokers had ten times more of it more than the kids who lived with vapers. The silicone wristband had now been adapted to measure tobacco-specific nitrosamines but only five out of the 26 wristbands on kids who lived with vapers showed any detectable level of these. The conclusion is once again pro-wristband: “Silicone WB [wristbands] show promise for sensitive detection of exposure to tobacco-related contaminants from traditional and electronic cigarettes”.

Amalia et al. (2021) put a vaper in a car and a room and measured the air for particulate matter (PM2.5). They also measured nicotine, cotinine, 3’-OH-cotinine, nornicotine, tobacco-specific nitrosamines, propylene glycol, and glycerol in the saliva of “bystanders”. The highest median PM2.5 reading was 21 μg/m3 in the room and 16 μg/m3 in the car, and “most of concentrations of the airborne nicotine and all biomarkers were below the limit of quantification in both settings.” A few bystanders reported “mild irritation symptoms”.

Although PM2.5 levels roughly doubled after the vaping began, levels of PM2.5 recorded outdoors before the experiment began were within the same range (14-25 μg/m3). The authors admit that “the highest median PM2.5 concentration in our study did not exceed the outdoor guidance level of World Health Organization air quality standard (25 μg/m3 as daily average) and the United States Environmental Protection Agency Air quality index (35 μg/m3 as daily average)”, but insist that the levels were “not negligible”. That is a matter of opinion. They were less than you’d getting from lighting a candle and much less than you’d get from cooking food.

Moreover, there is a fundamental difference between PM2.5 from vapour and PM2.5 from burnt matter. As Roberto Sussman points out, “particulates of exhaled e-cigarette are highly volatile liquid droplets almost entirely composed of glycerol, propylene glycol, nicotine and water” whereas “PM2.5 particles from atmospheric air pollution exhibit a very complex chemical compositions, largely consisting of semi-volatile and non-volatile compounds, mostly generated by combustion sources: primary and secondary organic carbon, a wide variety of sulphates and nitrates, hydrocarbons, metals and crustal material”. The misleading conflation of vape and smoke (or, more precisely, of liquid droplets and particulate matter), with the implication that they are both equally harmful, is common in these studies.

Conclusion

That is all the evidence the UK government has put forward, directly or indirectly, on the ‘risks’ of secondhand vapour. Most of the studies are from researchers who are actively looking for risks and who write up their work in a way that emphasises the “potential” harm. They generally fail to provide adequate context by referring to typical readings among active vapers, let alone active smokers, and they rarely refer to the safe thresholds of the substances they are examining (the 2021 study by Amalia et al is one of very few exceptions). That is because the levels recorded are generally considered safe by regulators in workplaces and outdoors (which is where the regulations tend to be applied). Unable to show that the measurements are unsafe or abnormal, the researchers focus instead on an increase in one substance - usually cotinine - and imply that any increase above the baseline must be hazardous.

It should be noted that these are the studies mentioned by organisations such as the WHO who want vaping banned indoors. Weak as it is, they presumably think that it is the best evidence to support their position, but other evidence is available. For example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sampled the air in a vape shop (where e-cigarette use was obviously heavy in a confined space) it found that all chemicals in the air were below the occupational exposure limit. It expressed concerns about detectable levels of two chemicals (diacetyl and 2,3-pentanedione), but both of these are banned for use in e-cigarette fluids in the UK (and EU).

Similar studies have found that even in very high exposure conditions in a small, non-ventilated vape shop, nicotine concentrations in the air were undetectable and those chemicals that were detectable were at very low (and legal) levels.

A systematic review of the evidence found “no evidence of potential for exposures of e-cigarette users to contaminants that are associated with risk to health at a level that would warrant attention if it were an involuntary workplace exposures” and “no evidence that vaping produces inhalable exposures to contaminants of the aerosol that would warrant health concerns by the standards that are used to ensure safety of workplaces.” And that is to the users of e-cigarettes! “Exposures of bystanders are likely to be orders of magnitude less, and thus pose no apparent concern.”

Public Health England said in 2016 that “there is no evidence of harm to bystanders from exposure to e-cigarette vapour and the risks to their health are likely to be extremely low.” They also said that “e-cigarette use is not covered by smokefree legislation and should not routinely be included in the requirements of an organisation’s smokefree policy”. Why? Because there is no risk to bystanders and vaping bans discourage smoking cessation.

As Prof Peter Hajek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) says:

“While health risks of e-cigarettes to vapers themselves have been estimated at up to 5% of health risks of smoking, health risks to bystanders are most likely reduced by a much bigger margin, and most likely altogether. This is because e-cigarettes release no chemicals into the environment themselves, only what users exhale, and such exhalation has so far not been shown to generate any toxicants at levels that could conceivably affect the health of bystanders.”

There has been a concerted effort by anti-vaping academics to find evidence that ‘secondhand vapour’ is harmful to bystanders. Despite using a variety of methods, they have come up empty-handed, with the partial exception of a few studies that have looked at air quality in unrealistic laboratory conditions. The levels of chemicals measured in the atmosphere and in the bodies of people ‘exposed’ to vaping in everyday situations are not only vastly lower when compared to tobacco smoke, but are lower when compared to everyday activities such as cooking and are consistently below the safe level for indoor and outdoor air quality.

Update

If you want an even deeper dive, Dr Sussmann has followed up this post here and here.

Bootleg cigarettes are readily available on every main street in Australia — at convenience stores, candy shops and tobacconists. Competition has driven the price of under-the-counter smokes lower and lower, at a time that the cost for staples is rising. Violence has erupted between organized crime groups jostling for a slice of the lucrative market, with a spate of firebombings, extortion, shootings and homicides.

The scale of the black market and the criminality has raised questions about how far governments can raise so-called sin taxes to curb undesirable behaviors. Australia is now facing the quandary: Are the high cigarette prices doing more harm than good?

The government has said that Australia faces an illegal tobacco “crisis.” But it has refused to back down from the tax hikes or acknowledge the role they may have had in fanning the illicit trade, even as it loses billions in tax revenue. The World Health Organization advises that taxation is “the most cost-effective way to reduce tobacco use.”

The NYT interviewed a 75 year old retired teacher who started buying illicit tobacco a few years ago when the rate of tobacco duty started to get absurd. The rate has risen by 60% since 2020.

“You’re mad buying them in the traditional shops,” a smoker friend told her, she recalled.

She walked into a shop in her neighborhood with signs on the window for tobacco and asked for cheap cigarettes. “It felt a bit like somebody was going to tap me on the shoulder or something,” she recalled. “I did feel a little naughty.”

But the man behind the counter showed her a selection of bootleg smokes, and she got her cigarettes for about $14 a pack. A few months later, the store’s windows were smashed in.

The black market in cigarettes is now so normal in Australia that little old ladies are not just buying them but are happy to have their name and photo published in the New York Times.

“It used to just be a health problem, and it’s now it’s a crime problem,” said James Martin, a criminologist and professor at Deakin University. “We’re opening up this massive new front in the war on drugs.”

Indeed. And it is an entirely self-inflicted wound on the part of the Aussie government. Instead of correcting its mistakes, the government buries its head in the sand and funnels more and more money into ‘enforcement’ while setting up committees like this…

Meanwhile in the Guardian, there is a tiny hint that sanity could be restored.

Becky Freeman, a professor of public health at the University of Sydney and a leading tobacco expert, said she backed freezing the excise at current levels, and that the release of the Itec estimates showing the extraordinary prevalence of illicit smoking has only confirmed her opinion.

“I only support tax increases if they are effective at reducing smoking,” Freeman said.

“And now we know the size of the illicit market and how incredibly cheap those products are, I agree that a freeze at this time makes sense. There wouldn’t be any health gains by raising the price.”

Freezing tobacco taxes won’t be enough, but at least it won’t make things worse. This statement of the obvious is not remarkable in itself but because of who is saying it. Becky Freeman is a completely ideological, wild-eyed, prohibitionist clone of Simon Chapman. ‘Not making things worse’ is about as much as we can hope from Australia’s wowsers. Last year, Freeman’s idiotic solution to Australia’s organised crime nightmare was to restrict the number of legitimate retailers (“shut the shops”). She and her ilk have spent years claiming that the illicit trade is a will o’ the wisp of the tobacco industry, that it is nothing to worry about and that it has nothing to do with tax or regulation. No one should be congratulated for acknowledging the bleeding obvious, but when someone has spent their career denying reality, as Freeman has, it is worth at least a slow hand clap.