Delhi: Smoggy City, Foggy Minds

Our esteemed mascot asked an interesting parliamentary question recently, which was answered on December 1st.

Philip Davies Conservative, Shipley 

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether the officials from his Department who attended the seventh conference of the Parties of World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control met with representatives of the Group Action on Smoking and Health during that conference. 

Nicola Blackwood The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health 

Officials met with a range of public health stakeholders on 12 October 2016 before attending the Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Deborah Arnott the Chief Executive of Action on Smoking and Health, attended that meeting. No further meetings were scheduled or held before or during the conference.

I thought that quite strange at the time because, as regular readers will know, I was there and I heard differently. My understanding was that they did indeed hold regular meetings, just in bars and restaurants instead of a sterile room, but meetings during the conference nonetheless.

It seemed to be confirmed by someone who was staying in the same hotel for the duration.

It's clear they were gabbing away constantly while there, after all Deborah Arnott is part of the Department of Health team (though conveniently exempted from FOI requests despite being state-funded) so why wouldn't they?

Strange then, that via inquisitive fellow jewel robber AT we find that no-one at the Department of Health has any recollection of these meetings!

Now, just to remind you, Andrew Black and Alette Addison work in the Department of Health. Could the FOI team not have just asked them? I take it they have telephones these days, or maybe they could have emailed seeing as they had around three weeks to give a reply. Too lazy perhaps?

There is another explanation of course. Perhaps they were all too pissed on Kingfisher beer and local plonk to remember. I suppose it would make the wording of the DoH response technically correct.

Delhi was in the middle of an unprecedented public health crisis brought on by record levels of smog; maybe there were also a few foggy and delicate minds the day after all these meetings, eh? The expenses claims would be interesting to see I reckon.

However, all we know currently is that the meetings occurred and no-one - from the Under-Secretary of State right down to humble DoH grunts - wants to admit that they did. Fancy that!

Snus, E-Cigs, Now iQos - ASH Hate Them All

So, after months of hearing about the things, Philip Morris have today launched their iQos 'heat not burn' system in the UK (albeit only in London).

The press have avidly taken up the story, most probably due to PMI CEO Andre Calantzopoulos dangling the media-friendly suggestion that the global company "could stop making conventional cigarettes". This is not a new claim, there have been a lot of articles recently where he has been interviewed about this new stance, it's just something the British press has only now picked up on, presumably from the PR.

They are also opening a shop in the West End, which seems to me more like marketing than retail if it sells only one product but - as a Puddlecote Inc office colleague pointed out today - Apple shops do much the same thing.

Inside the London IQOS store. pic.twitter.com/cdsOgKnfHW

— Gerry MGGA (@GerryStimson) November 30, 2016

It is interesting that Philip Morris claim 70% of those who tried iQos in Japan continued to use them, though it has to be recognised that it is an entirely different market; as far as I am aware e-cigs really haven't taken off over there. But having said that, if the claimed 90% safer product is that attractive to smokers then this is surely a good thing in the eyes of tobacco controllers, huh?

I think you know what's coming next even if you hadn't read the articles this morning.

No, of course not. Because tobacco control is not in the health game anymore, they just like bashing the tobacco industry and those who continue to like tobacco or nicotine. Dave Dorn put it very well earlier.

Yes, you read that correctly. PMI could, in the future, subject to the right market conditions, stop making fags. They've even said they're looking to working with Government to make that a reality.  

Now, if I was heading up an anti-smoking charity (which I'm not), I'd be happy as a pig in shit at that news. I'd be grabbing all my minions and despatching them to the Dept. of Health and various other top level bodies and doing my level best to, as Jean-Luc Picard would say, "make it so". 

Cos that's what anti-smoking bodies and charities ought to be about, isn't it? 

But no. No. "We don't trust the tobacco companies." "We're not in the business of promoting tobacco products" (which is, actually, very much missing the point - that the IQOS has tobacco in it is entirely specious to the argument - it can be demonstrated to be of much lower risk than smoking, so they SHOULD be promoting such things. You know, like they do with ecigs. Oh... wait...) 

They're screaming for independent research into the risk profile. Here's an idea. They leech public money - yes, WE fund them - so let THEM, in the public interest (which it undeniably is) fund the research. Let THEM actually use the money they trough from the public coffers for a good purpose - get it given to an independent and unbiased lab to replicate the studies and confirm or deny the claims.

Carl Phillips described this pathetic stance by tobacco control in a blog last summer entitled "Public health (heart) lung cancer", where he offered up a handy test whereby we can assess the motives of tobacco controllers everywhere.

The test for anti-tobacco extremism is the answer to the following question: If you could magically change the world so that either (a) there was no use of tobacco products or (b) people could continue to enjoy using tobacco but there was a cheap magic pill that they could take to eliminate any excess disease risk it caused, which would you choose? Anyone who would choose (a) over (b) takes anti-tobacco to its logical extreme, making clear that they object to the behavior, not its effects.

Quite.

So what has been the reaction of ASH today to this massively safer alternative to smoking? Well, I think it woefully fails Carl's test, don't you?

But anti-smoking campaigners said products such as Iqos, like tobacco, need tough regulation. Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), told Today: "We still need to be very cautious about what the industry's up to." 

"Philip Morris is a tobacco company. They are still making most of their profits from selling cigarettes," she said: "On current trends, smoking will kill one billion people in the 21st century, most in poor countries. 

"If Philip Morris really want to see the end of smoking they have to stop promoting smoking to new young smokers around the world."

Absolutely nothing in there about the promise of heat not burn technology, just a load of irrelevant bleating cockwaffle and veiled smears of how industry is deceitful.

In fact, ASH's press release went even further than that.

ASH therefore believes that unless and until independent evidence shows that IQOS and similar products are substantially less harmful than smoking then these products should be regulated in the same way as other tobacco products.

This is the same ASH, remember, who went ga-ga about the non-existent proof of efficacy of plain packaging and still pumps out regular misinformation about passive smoking being dangerous outdoors which has never been proved and never will be. Yet they comically speak about deceit ...

Particularly because of the tobacco industry’s long record of deceit over the health risks of smoking, there is an urgent need for independent research into the level of harm these products may cause. 

... before declaring that even if it is provided they will ignore it.

We understand that the UK Government has asked the independent Committee on Toxicity to look at the data; this is welcome but not sufficient.

In other words, ASH will not accept any level of verification that iQos is 90% or more safer than tobacco, because ... well, tobacco industry.

Something which I had a good chuckle about this morning.

@Jester2109 Always makes me laugh seeing tobacco controllers accusing others of deceit @Twigolet @DavidDorn_VTTV @BBCr4today

— Dick Puddlecote (@Dick_Puddlecote) November 30, 2016

ASH are part of an industry which is now widely known to be the biggest liars the planet has ever seen, yet they are now set to place insurmountable burdens in front a technology which has definite potential to massively reduce harm from tobacco (their supposed policy goal) and citing deceit.

We've always known that ASH are morally-incontinent and only exist to satisfy themselves with tormenting smokers and looting their cash, but today showed that they are even lower than we previously thought.

I'll make some (not so) bold predictions here and now. ASH and their regional warped fucksticks will campaign vigorously for iQos and other HnB variants to be banned in public places. They won't have any evidence that it is harmful to others, they'll just do it anyway (because it was never about protecting bar staff). They will say, disingenuously, that no tobacco product is safe and follow the same shit path they did by getting snus banned in the 1980s, arguably killing people. And they will do all this because they are not remotely interested in health or harm reduction, and never have been.

They are just a dysfunctional, self-interested organisation - allied to blatant liars worldwide - who hate industry and get paid handsomely for doing so.

And how do I know this? Well, because ASH tried exactly the same with e-cigs. They attempted to strangle vaping in its infancy just like they did with snus; persistently tried to hamper its development at every turn, and still do; and only failed because of the huge enthusiasm and strength of vaper opposition.

ASH are not a friend, they are a vile prohibitionist organisation which has no care for health and which - as today proves - is in favour of tobacco harm reduction like Vichy France was in favour of freedom for the French people. It's shameful that the government funds them; for the good of public health they should be financially starved into extinction.

I look forward to the predictions above coming true, we should hold ASH and their provincial colleagues to account when they do. 

Mascot Watch #32: Definition Of 'Independent' Edition

I haven't written much about our esteemed mascot here recently, but he posed an interesting parliamentary question on Tuesday. 

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will undertake an independent review of the cumulative effect of tobacco control measures introduced by his Department in the last decade before moving forward with a fresh smoking strategy.

Well, it would be a good idea wouldn't it? To assess how successful - if at all - graphic health warnings, the vending machines ban, tobacco display ban and plain packaging have been before embarking on more splashes of taxpayer cash on funding even more self-enriching makework for the likes of ASH and their fellow hideous tobacco control industry tycoons.

Nicola Blackwood replied for the government (emphasis mine):

The Department assesses the impact of all proposed measures before laying legislation using standard government methodology. These assessments are set out in Impact Assessments which are scrutinised by the Regulatory Policy Committee before publication alongside the Statutory Instrument. A number of the tobacco measures contain commitments to further review the impact of the legislation within five years of them coming into force.

So, Davies asked if there was a plan to study if those policies had been successful after implementation, and Blackwood's reply is that they don't need to because an impact assessment was done before the law was passed.

It's also interesting that Blackwood proudly states that Impact Assessments are scrutinised by the Regulatory Policy Committee, because last I heard the RPC were not at all happy with the IA for plain packaging.

And as for the five year reviews, well we know how 'independent' they are don't we. Because, y'see, Davies did specifically ask about "an independent review" and not fantasy garbage thrown together by the same tobacco control industry grant-gobblers who lobbied for the policy in the first place.

Blackwood continues ...

The 2013 report An Audit of the impact of the Department of Health’s Regulations upon business concluded that there is a robust cost-benefit case for the tobacco control regulations considered and experience shows that initiatives to reduce smoking prevalence work best in combination, with cumulative effects over time.

In other words, they haven't actually got a clue if any of those policies were responsible for the decline in smoking. They just did stuff and other stuff happened or, as the report itself put it.

[B]ecause tobacco control measures are mutually reinforcing, it is difficult, retrospectively, to disentangle the impact of single initiatives, particularly when they have been implemented as part of comprehensive strategies, the effects of which have built up over the years.

So, government don't really have a Scooby. They have observed a correlation between smoker bullying and declines in prevalence and just assume it must be solely down to their inspired policy-making.

It could be equally argued - in  fact, I think there is a far bigger case to make - that the explosion in e-cig use has driven the decline in smoking. But why would government and those who profit from lobbying the government with government cash (taken from us, natch) want to admit that?

That way lies the gravy train graveyard.

The Exception That Proves A Fool

Surely today has seen the funniest load of disingenuous bollocks ASH has ever released.

ASH research shows corner shops don’t need tobacco to be profitable

Well actually, their report, Counter-arguments (geddit?), would be funny except for the fact that - in the absence of anything useful to do with the taxes government regularly shovel this wasteful bunch of parasites - you paid for it.

Snowdon has already sliced and diced it (a simple task since their economic acumen alone wouldn't even merit a GCSE E grade) but I did find this part particularly hilarious.

Newcastle-based small retailer John McClurey agrees, but says corner shops have little choice but to sell tobacco: 

“I have little choice to sell tobacco as many of my customers still smoke. But tobacco makes me very little money while tying up plenty of cash in stock. Tobacco is a burden to me.

Now, this is the best supporter ASH could find in the trade and he admits that he cannot stop selling tobacco because it is a necessity to his business.

It's very simple, John. If you believe what ASH says - that "corner shops don’t need tobacco to be profitable", simply stop selling it.

He believes it’s time for change and welcomes the ASH report because it challenges retailers to consider whether tobacco companies and their local reps really have retailers’ interests in mind. 

McClurey added: 

“The decline in the market, the disappearance of cigarettes behind gantry doors and the shift to plain packaging have made the traditional approach to selling tobacco out-dated. A better alternative for retailers is to reduce stock, shift the gantry and free-up space for products that actually turn a decent profit.”

Well off you go then, Johnny-boy, what's stopping you?

Here's the guy, next to those products he's been selling for over 30 years and which, it would appear, he doesn't intend to stop selling anytime soon.

Why? because, on the same day as ASH released their report, buried at the bottom of their bastard cousin ASH Scotland's daily news round-up was this article in Wholesale News (emphases mine).

“Independents account for 50% of all tobacco sales in the UK and this has been driven by PMPs which have around 80% of the market and have proven popular with both retailers and shoppers. By premium pricing tobacco products, many retailers are only forcing smokers to go to the multiple retailers who are still charging at the RRP or below. Offering a compelling price on tobacco will keep customers coming through the door as it is the primary driver of footfall into c-stores. We do not need to give the multiples a hand-up when it comes to attracting customers. Instead retailers have to protect and develop their own businesses. I firmly believe that it’s ‘RRP or RIP’ for many independent stores as their businesses are at risk if reduced traffic comes through their doors. 

“We have seen from Australia that retailers who price at RRP or below have had no adverse effect on their tobacco sales. This is critically important as the tobacco shopper visits c-stores more regularly than non-smokers and spends almost £1,500 per year more in store. As a customer group, these shoppers are vital to your business and for your continued success, you need to retain these shoppers rather than drive them to rivals.”

ASH, it would seem, would prefer corner shops to commit business suicide just to satisfy their extremist feud with tobacco companies. Needless to say, if that were to happen, salaries of the hideous tax-scrounging trolls at ASH would not suffer one little bit.

But it's not going to happen anyway. If even the anti-smoking lobby's only supporter in the retail trade (they stick him on the end of a broom handle quite often to spout their shit as a result) admits that his business needs to sell tobacco and would suffer if it didn't, what the hell is the point in ASH's report today?

Meanwhile, in the real world, newsagents and tobacconists will be lobbying MPs tomorrow with a manifesto entitled "Fair Deal for Small Shops", which will doubtless include criticism of the many abuses their trade has suffered at the hands of the selfish, ivory tower, empathy-free extremists at ASH. And will be backed by every small retailer up and down the country with the exception of John McClury ... who still sells tobacco.

Now, who would you believe about the economics of the convenience store business? Those who work in it day to day, 99.9% of whom believe ASH to be a force for evil? Or ASH, who would find it difficult to push beads around an abacus without a detailed manual and have never had to turn an honest profit in their lives, and their lone retail supporter who says convenience stores should stop selling tobacco even though he can't himself without going bust?

Please! Someone cut off ASH's fucking funding, for crying out loud, they're beginning to embarrass themselves.

More Limp Vaping Support From ASH & PHE

The ASH Twitter page believes in quality over quantity, which is why they proudly linked to this article in one of only two tweets today.

Public Health England: Vaping in the home: advice for parents - by Jo Locker https://t.co/oaxtcEvCnC

— ASH (@ASH_LDN) October 5, 2016

Here are a couple of interesting snippets.

In contrast to the known harm (yeah, right - DP) from secondhand smoke, there’s no evidence so far of harm to bystanders from exposure to e-cigarette vapour and experts have assessed the risks to be extremely low.

So therefore, an article entitled "Vaping in the home: advice for parents - by Jo Locker" should consist of a few lines after that saying it's none of their business, doncha think?

Course not, because this article was written by the £500m per year tax-draining Public Health England, and they have to be seen to be doing something with the money. So what does this guidance entail?

A parent who quits smoking in favour of vaping is one fewer smoking role model. However while they will no longer be modelling smoking, they will be modelling vaping.

Erm. And?

For those who find that allowing vaping indoors helps maintain a smokefree home, they might find it helpful to permit it. But those who don’t have a problem in keeping their home smokefree might want to consider what can be gained from permitting vaping indoors.

How about the fact that it is polite to allow people to do things they enjoy, and if - as the previous assertions imply - there is no harm, where's the problem?

They may as well be saying "be utterly selfish, do what you think is best for you and you only in your house, fuck visitors and anyone else who vapes". But then, as I've said many times before, tobacco control is built on selfish prejudice and greed and preys on the opinions of anti-social bigots, so it's hardly surprising.

More to the point though, is why PHE even thought this was a good way to spend our money. Why the blithering fuck is it any concern of theirs to tell others what they should be doing in their own homes? If householders are worried about vaping it's up to them to research it themselves. It might result in perverse outcomes from those sad enough to seek out the scaremongering stories just to suit their own prejudices, but how on Earth do PHE (and ASH) think that advice is going to counteract such attitudes?

They have just supplied two fantastic excuses for bigoted individuals to cite in banning vaping in private homes, and they can now say it is sanctioned by an authority such as Public Health England. This is how ASH's 'support' of vaping generally goes. It is half-hearted at best, mostly insipid, and always offers a nice option or two for those of a prohibitionist mentality to seize upon. PHE's is generally a load of over-cautious and unhelpful horse-cock too.

In other news today, ASH Scotland were asked to object publicly to a hideous policy from Aberdeen Council which bans smoking and vaping outdoors and has no other goal except to bully smokers and vapers.

@ASHScotland @NHSGGC Will you please speak out against the inclusion of vaping in this? Goes agnst good work done.. https://t.co/6p6E6R1lFe

— Andy Morrison (@GMFCfantasy) October 5, 2016

Here is the 'vape-friendly' organisation's robust and outspoken response.

So, having subtlely changed their mission statements in 2010 to include nicotine in their definition of smoking and stay clinging to the gravy train, the Action on Smoking and Health collective have morphed into Inaction on Vaping Bans (and if you want to install one we won't get in your way, in fact we'll quietly hand you the tools and even "fully welcome" them).

I despise these so-called 'friends' of vaping, but even I didn't expect they'd eagerly tweet advice which advocated occasions where vaping bans are appropriate in private homes so soon. The plan must be coming along nicely if they're all that comfortable.

Remember, we're the angels; they're bound for hell.

Tobacco Control Is Like The Wild West, Urgently Requires Regulation

In my entry at the Tobacco Tactics website, there is a section entitled "Denigrating Health Professionals". As you can imagine, I am extremely proud of this, so much so that it features prominently in my Twitter banner.

You see, this is because they fully deserve the abuse for the extensive catalogue of lies they have told over the years. It's a shame that my page hasn't been updated since 2012, but I sometimes think that could be because others are starting to see that I'm right. Simon Chapman, for example, is now viewed by even some of his own 'public health' colleagues as a dangerous crank and spreader of blatantly false bullshit.

He's not alone, of course, as The Sun's front page splash proved the other day.

Now, I've been writing about this stuff for a long time, but I am struggling to remember anything worse than that from any tobacco control or 'public health' source. It seems that - despite the internet exposing their practices to more scrutiny than ever - they have not cleaned up their act, but instead strive to be increasingly worse. Many sections of the tobacco control industry, it seems, believe that the answer to their lies being exposed is just to lie even more than before!

The 'research' that led to that study has already been skewered comprehensively by others (see here, here, and here), quite an easy task (apart from if you're a journalist) since it is truly desperate stuff.

However, I'm more interested in what this says about 'public health' in general and tobacco control in particular. By that I mean what punishments are there for disseminating execrably false information such as this? The 'public health' movement is forever telling us that we need regulations to stop the damaging excesses of industry, but they have arguably far more potential to harm the public if they come out with garbage which directs the public wrongly, yet are totally unaccountable!

In my business, if someone I employed was lying to primary or secondary customers, I would be calling them into my office and disciplining them harshly if not dismissing them for gross misconduct. Reason being that such actions could undermine the company's integrity and put our revenues and future contracts in jeopardy.

In tobacco control, though, it is the other way around; lies are applauded by fellow tobacco controllers and they derive more revenue from the lies (by way of increased publicity and grant status), rather than less. If controls were the same as they naturally are in the private sector, they should be losing their integrity too, but don't because they self-describe as 'experts' and everyone believes them ... even though many of them knowingly lie through their teeth every day.

As I've mentioned many times before, though, the reaction by tobacco controllers to the behaviour of some of their colleagues - ranging from unprofessional to gross misconduct I'd venture to say - has ranged from mild rebuke (as the maximum) to deafening silence. At times, they have even jumped on the lunacy bandwagon themselves!

Under the line at Clive Bates's article, Linda Bauld despairs at having to constantly defend vaping, rather like the Dutch boy and the dyke. That's all well and good, but it is tobacco control which punched the holes in the dyke in the first place with thoroughly disingenuous and regularly mendacious claptrap, as I've described before.

However, the world's prime promoter of such things - Mad Stan Glantz - has been a star in the tobacco control industry firmament for a very long time. Bauld and the rest of the UK tobacco control community have known he's a weapons grade lie machine for decades, but have been quite happy to let it all go without comment.

Glantz has been falsifying data and producing jaw-dropping junk research (like this, for example) since many of the current crop of career tax-sponging anti-smoking prohibitionists were in nappies, yet not one of these fine upstanding 'experts' and 'scientists' has ever bothered to pull him up on any of it before.

So there is some vague hint there by Bauld that some tobacco controllers like Glantz have been a bit naughty, but that'll be all it is; a vague hint. To make it any more than that would - quite rightly - call their own expertise and impartiality into question.

@CaeruleanSea His previous junk has been very useful to PH people. They can't suddenly admit that he's a clown.

— Christopher Snowdon (@cjsnowdon) May 7, 2016

What is urgently required is some serious oversight of the 'public health' Goliath. Tobacco control, especially, has to whipped into line and told that this isn't some jolly little club where lying is allowed with a wink and a smile, but is supposed to be professional and not run and operated by people with the professional acumen of Del Boy and the morals of Alan B'Stard.

All the while tobacco control was calling for more regulations on e-cigs with the glib and inaccurate sound bite that a perfect and successful free market was "like the Wild West", the only industry which has truly acted (and continues to act) like the Wild West has been the totally unregulated and entirely unaccountable tobacco control industry; where black is white; economic principles are inconvenient and to be ignored; and where truth is a lie and vice versa.

In Bauld's comment, she also hints that this is an international problem so, therefore {shrug}, what can we do?

I do think there is someone somewhere worrying about this. This includes funders as well as researchers and others. The problem is that funders operate largely within a domestic (national) sphere in public health and the international environment (beyond a few countries) is overwhelmingly opposed to tobacco harm reduction. That is not the full story but it is part of it.

Well, it would be some kind of start if the UK could show some leadership (tobacco controllers like that word, don't they?) and actually do something useful.

Let's look at the organisations who are supposed to oversee 'public health' in the UK. The Faculty of Public Health is run by lunatics who are - along with the Chief Medical Officer - complicit in the deceit being forced upon the public regarding e-cigs; the different branches of ASH pay lip service while permanently trying to destroy vaping (after already having destroyed snus); and PHE are so limp that it looks like they just want to take government cash and not ruffle any feathers.

Where is the outrage from the lucrative 'public health' community towards such absolute crap being fed to the public by news outlets they usually despise such as The Sun, Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times? Why are angry letters not being publicised by 'public health' grandees even now, two days after the damaging headlines.

If you were a cynic, you'd think it wasn't about health or something, wouldn't you?

So, there's a reason why I denigrate health professionals. It's because it is not an honourable industry so they deserve no respect, in fact it is arguably fundamentally corrupt.

To borrow one of their oft-employed arguments, self-regulation has signally failed with 'public health' and tobacco control, their profession is like the Wild West; it ignores extremist views and they all urgently require harsh regulation to curb the public health harm their excesses cause.

I'm sure many will agree, just not publicly in case they get attacked by the most corrupt in their echo chamber or it results in a loss of the state funding they all parasitically crave.

So, in the meantime, I shall watch the inevitable tumbleweed emanating from the likes of PHE, RCP, ASH, FPH etc over recent headlines with amusement, while they laughably describe other industries as unregulated, negligent and harmful.