Is There Something In The Water In Wales?

A few years ago, I hinted that perhaps small populations don't tend to be conducive to producing a large talent pool.

When England play football against San Marino, what generally happens? Well, they get thrashed of course. In fact, they get thrashed by just about everyone because they're pants. Even Scotland can put a couple past them! 

It's not their fault. It's just that their population is so small that there is very little talent to choose from. Pitting 31,000 San Marinoans - or whatever they're called - against 53 million Englanders is only going to end in one result.

I'm starting to think that this population handicap could be the reason why Welsh officialdom seems to be populated by utter dickheads. How else does one explain this week's asinine and Luddite advice about e-cigs from Public Health Wales?

• ENDS should feature alongside other health-harming substances e.g. tobacco and alcohol, in all health education for children and young people, and be presented as harmful to health.
• A systematic enforcement programme should be developed to minimise the sales of ENDS to those less than 18 years of age, including development of a register of retailers and systematic test-purchasing, prosecution and media activity.
• ‘Confectionary-like’ (sic) flavours of e-liquid should not be permitted, in order to reduce the appeal of ENDS to children and young people.
• There should be restrictions on the use of ENDS in settings predominantly used by children e.g. in schools and school grounds and around the entrances to schools.
• There should be restrictions on the advertising of ENDS in all media that would be regularly viewed by children and young people.

So, fresh from being frustrated in their attempt to ban vaping in all public places - for no reason except bigotry and spite - PHW have instead decided that they should do the next most stupid thing and issue advice which can surely only have been designed to handicap vaping as much as possible.

As others have already mentioned, the sweeping statement that e-cigs are "harmful to health" for youths is not true in all cases, so can be described as appalling advice. A fair amount of young smokers in Wales will now henceforth be told that e-cigs are a no-no. 

Likewise, advocating bans around entrances to schools smacks of butthurt 'public health' morons trying to exact revenge after their pathetic and ignorance-based full vaping ban proposal was kicked out by the Welsh Assembly, despite Dangle-belly Drakeford's two year marathon of lying.

As for restrictions on advertising, considering there is no evidence that non-smokers are taking up vaping but that there is compelling evidence in favour of e-cigs being hugely less harmful than smoking, you have to wonder why PHW want to reduce the potential positives by hiding the good news away like some mad Uncle in the attic. Does the affront to their egos hurt that much that they'd prefer vaping to wither and die? Well yes, it would appear so. Yet again, e-cigs ruthlessly expose that 'public health' in the field of smoking has absolutely nothing to do with health, and all to do with repulsive prejudice and vile class-led snobbery.

However, the recommendation which illustrates that PHW collectively are less brainy than Kurt Cobain's ceiling is the one about flavours! Firstly, it's spelt "confectionery" for God's sake; does no-one at PHW have the intellectual wherewithal to spot that mistake before releasing a position statement or are they unaware of the existence of spellchecker? And as for this ...

Ashley Gould from Public Health Wales (PHW) said: "You can buy bubblegum, candyfloss, jam doughnut flavour e-cigarettes and they are only aimed at one audience - and that's about recruiting children."

Yes that's right Ashley, you cretin. We've just had advice from dentists that 'cake culture' must be eradicated from offices because adults love cake too much, but according to you only children like doughnuts? As for the other flavours mentioned, I've vaped both and my two regular vapes are Pear Drops and Aniseed Balls ... I'm in my late 40s.

I'm not an outlier either, as the Ashtray Blog has repeatedly pointed out.

“Think of the children,” has been a rallying cry of the anti e-cig movement. 

According to this movement, the e-cigarette industry is deliberately targeting children to get them hooked on nicotine young. So far, evidence has included the fact that some e-cigs are pink and that e-liquids are provided in a range of flavours. 

But vapers like flavours too! In fact, a survey of 10,000 vapers by ECigaretteForum showed that only 22% of them chose to vape tobacco flavours:

Indeed. PHW would like to throw the baby out with the bath water and ban flavours despite this being probably the prime driver of smoking cessation via vaping.

So what the blithering fuck are the provincial pricks at PHW doing with our taxes if they are employed full-time on high salaries and yet haven't managed to find this information for themselves? Because if we put Ashley's 'expert' wisdom on the subject into a Venn Diagram it would look something like this.

Look, I'm a decent guy, quite forgiving in fact. I can see that PHW have obviously got something disastrously wrong with this advice considering it is off dancing with pixies compared to the sanity over vaping in the rest of the UK's 'public health' community (fat Irish blowhards and Scouse communists aside). So I'm prepared to think that maybe it's not be driven by spite, and that maybe population constraints are not to blame as to why Wales has to suffer officials who - like we don't let alcoholics pilot aeroplanes - should not be in charge of anything except a box of crayons.

So - and this is a long shot to be fair - the only other possible reason must be that there is something nasty in the water in Wales. And if so, perhaps PHW should be looking into that instead of unleashing mentally-incontinent bullshit about vaping to the poor Welsh saps who have to suffer it.

Good grief. 

No Evidence 'Public Health' Aids Public Health

Following swiftly on from the tobacco controllers who believe lying about the benefits of reduced risk products is a fine and ethical idea, comes this remarkable article in the Guardian.

Brace yourselves, because this one is through the looking glass with Alice and the fucking Mad Hatter!

No evidence sugar-free soft drinks aid weight loss – study 

Soft drinks made with artificial sweeteners, such as diet colas, do not help people lose weight and may be as big a part of the obesity problem as the full-sugar versions, academics have said.

That's right, drinks which contain no sugar and no calories are just as bad as ones which do, apparently. So, I presume we can now forget all that ridiculous panicking about sugar, can't we? I mean, they've been telling us the stuff is death personified for the past year or two, but if a drink with no sugar in it at all is on a par then surely there's absolutely bugger all to worry about, no?

You could pitch the conclusion in a slightly different way and say "full sugar drinks are about as harmless as those with no sugar and no calories". Great, why didn't they just say so before. Hey Public Health England, you can shut the fuck up about fizzy drinks now and instead go and do something useful with the monumental amount of our cash you waste.

Of course that's not going to happen, is it? There's still a lot to be milked out of this particular fake health lobbying cash cow.

A paper by researchers at Imperial College London and two universities in Brazil contends that artificially sweetened beverages, often called diet drinks, are just as big a problem as those containing sugar. There is no evidence they help people lose weight, they say, possibly because people assume they can eat more because their drinks are low in sugar.

Oh right, so you mean that it is nothing to do with the drink, it's that people eat more and, erm, eating a lot makes you fat ... as we have kind of known since Neanderthal man overindulged on Sabre-toothed Tiger steaks.

Of course, if there is no difference between sugary and non-sugary drinks in respect to obesity, we can all ignore these chumps about sugar and they can toddle off and talk about over-eating, huh?

Many manufacturers are looking to boost sales of drinks containing artificial sweeteners in order to escape the levy. Such products already account for 25% of the global soft drinks market. 

Prof Christopher Millett, senior investigator at Imperial’s School of Public Health, said: “A common perception, which may be influenced by industry marketing, is that because ‘diet’ drinks have no sugar they must be healthier and aid weight loss when used as a substitute for full-sugar versions. However, we found no solid evidence to support this.”

In which case, there is absolutely no point in the government trying to get manufacturers to reduce the sugar content in their drinks because - as we have been saying on these pages for quite a while - it will have no effect on the nation's weight whatsoever. The best argument yet for scrapping the utterly laughable and pointless sugar tax, eh? Thanks for your help guys, much appreciated.

The paper, published in the journal PLoS Medicine, is a commentary on the research done so far into artificially sweetened beverages promoted as healthier alternatives and the impact on weight.

Erm, "commentary", did you say? So this is opinion and not a "study" or, in fact, any kind of science at all? Well no, because they skip pretty early into the ad homs.

Maria Carolina Borges, the first author of the study, from the Federal University of Pelotas, in Brazil, said: “The lack of solid evidence on the health effects of ASBs [artificially sweetened beverages] and the potential influence of bias from industry-funded studies should be taken seriously when discussing whether ASBs are adequate alternatives to SSBs [sugar-sweetened beverages].”

"Potential bias"? They don't actually bother to try to do science themselves - God forbid! - to disprove the conclusions of these studies, but merely drag their knuckles along the ground, point an accusatory finger and grunt "Ugg! Industry-funded!", which is an instant fail in my opinion.

It gets worse ...

Prof Carlos Monteiro, a co-author, from the University of São Paulo, said: “Taxes and regulation on SSBs and not ASBs will ultimately promote the consumption of diet drinks rather than plain water, the desirable source of hydration for everyone.”

Desirable to whom, sunshine? Who made you the arbiter of what I, and everyone else on the planet, wishes to fucking drink? Why don't you just Samba off into the River Amazon you odious dictatorial motherfucker you.

As one commenter under the line pointed out, this is 'public health' not just aping satire, no it's even more hilarious than that.

"Possibly because people assume they can eat more because their drinks are low in sugar" is potentially one of the stupidest things I have ever heard and reminds me of Little Britain's half the calories diet, where you cut your food in half and it's half the calories. And because it's half the calories, you can have twice as much. 

We're not talking side-achingly funny farce here, this is an actual policy position from people who claim to work in the 'scientific' 'public health' arena. It truly beggars belief!

Of course, we jewel robbers know exactly what is going on here because we've seen it all before. 'Public health' science is never interested in truth, instead it merely endeavours to support whatever policy position the lying bastards are pursuing at any particular time. In the case of sugar taxes, those opposed have pointed out - quite rightly - that the 'problem' is solving itself as the public move onto lower sugar products or ones with no sugar at all, and industry reacts by providing products to satisfy the demand. As a result, low and no sugar alternatives have to be demonised no matter how ridiculous it makes 'public health' fucktards look.

This is not a serious study, piece of research, or even a wise opinion based on sound science. It is merely an attempt to counter a very compelling reason why we should not be subjected to daft taxation policies that the 'public health' bandwagon requires to survive just as much as a great white shark needs to keep moving to breathe.

These people are so incredibly cretinous that I don't think they even considered that the message they could be sending is the opposite of what they hoped for; their one-eyed insanity is so deeply-entrenched that they delivered a message saying full sugar drinks are as 'safe' as Coke Zero almost on auto-pilot.

The real target - as is always the case - is industry and free choice. These snobby fucks don't like that people are enjoying drinks that they personally don't - "plain water, the desirable source of hydration" is a pretty blatant clue - made by companies that they ideologically despise.

It's all drawn from the same dishonest and corrupt playbook that tobacco control created when they declared snus, chewing tobacco and now e-cigs to be as dangerous as chain-smoking, and is designed only to demonise industry and deny our free choice of these products as a concept.

However, there's always an upside. We need a tipping point to make politicians ignore the massed ranks of lying 'public health' parasites, and the more they rip into hugely popular products like Coke and tell us that eating cakes in an office is a 'public health' disaster, the quicker the public will wake up and realise they're a bunch of pompous, fraudulent, right-on, money-grubbing, industry-envious arseholes who will happily destroy civil society if it earns them a buck.

Oh yes, and stratospherically-incompetent with it. 

Dateline 2018: A Storm Is Coming

I've been home for just a couple of hours after a particularly revealing week in India for the COP7 conference, and I have to say I'm feeling quite smug.

Long-term readers here will remember that I've been writing for nearly six years now about how e-cigs have the capacity to show up the tobacco control industry for the corrupt, self-perpetuating, anti-social, health-be-damned gravy train that it has been since the early 1970s. This week has proved that hypothesis 100% correct. 

Trading only on prejudice and the pursuit of power and tax-funding, this gargantuan enterprise has been perverted to such an extent that it is now incapable - due to a tangled web of prior deceit and funding arrangements - to cope adequately with a nimble breakthrough technology such as vaping. The FCTC has spent so much time setting itself up to be untouchable on tobacco, parroting junk science at every opportunity and routinely exploiting children, that it is now so heavily bureaucratic and conflicted that it finds itself totally stuffed and flailing now they have decided (wrongly) that they should deal with e-cigs. 

So what we have seen this week is their usual disingenuous tactics fail miserably, so much so that when the light of publicity is shone in their direction, they scuttle like cockroaches muttering the same old canards they have managed to get away with before, but which simply won't wash anymore. 

Let's list the main ones, eh?

1) Everyone who objects is a shill. 

Perfectly exhibited by this clown, although he is only one of many to have tried this utterly pathetic defence in the past few days.

Delegates attending #COP7FCTC : #Vape "advocates" are the same as #BigTobacco mercenaries. Do not get distracted! Protect your people!

— Jaime Arcila Sierra (@arcilasierra) November 10, 2016

I don't know why such idiots seem to think that accusing perfectly normal, everyday people of being shills is going to help them? It won't make vapers go away, instead it just reinforces the injustice that he and his colleagues are inflicting on them and makes it more likely that they will be active in the future. He is in a political arena but seems incapable of understanding this.

This dismissal of opposing opinions has been a central tactic of anti-tobacco frauds for decades, but it used to be just one of their tools for misleading the public; with e-cigs is has become almost the only one, simply because they don't know how to handle the public they claim to understand because they've never had to before. Therefore it doesn't work, because the storm of social media outrage was overwhelmingly from members of the public who are appalled at the disgusting behaviour of the FCTC in New Delhi.

The FCTC has installed article 5.3 to purposely silence debate; it is its only purpose. But this goes out the window when private citizens get involved. Clinging to such a stupid policy when real people are trying to send messages their way just shows what charlatans tobacco control execs are.

2) Junk science

Debate at the venue in Noida this week has been based entirely on a fabricated fantasy in the form of the laughable COP7 report on e-cigs. It includes every pile of shit that its pharma-conflicted buddies have concocted to try to quell this inconvenient fly in their ointment, and refuses to consider any science - however rigorous and weighty - that might derail their pre-conceived judgement.

I read the documents that were put to the COP7 meeting this week on the subject, and nowhere was it mentioned that the COP7 report had been ripped to shreds by more honest colleagues in their profession. The science on e-cigs only points one way, but the delegates at COP7 think that - just as they did with tobacco - if they just keep lying for long enough, it will all go away and they don't have to change course. They will have to in the end or continue to be mortally embarrassed as they have been this week. But here we are, over a decade since e-cigs arrived on the scene, with their still being incapable of recognising how their reputation is being trashed by their own incompetence.

And talking of incompetence ...

3) Manipulation of the media

The tobacco control industry has relied for many years on the "science by press release" approach whereby a pliant media just parrots what they're told without asking any questions. This just doesn't work when the world can see what tobacco controllers refuse to; that e-cigs are quite obviously a remarkable invention.

The huge uptake of vaping around the world is something the press are now very interested in, and they are asking questions themselves. Apart from a few very lazy hacks, the ears of journalists have been pricked by the visibly accelerating prevalence of vaping and they are curious, especially since vapers tend to be engaged and hunger for news stories about the subject. The upsurge in vaping is a rich seam of visitor clicks for the new online media

In the past the FCTC hasn't needed to be bothered about such things so just trundle out bland - and almost invariably inaccurate - messages to the media before retiring to their state-funded hotels to get pissed and plan their next jamboree.

It doesn't work with vaping and leads to crashingly embarrassing occasions such as this where their spokesperson not only has no clue about the subject matter, but also seems not to understand how their own processes work.

Do watch this, because it highlights how extremely incompetent the organisers of COP7 really are.

5) David fighting Goliath

This deliberately constructed fallacy is one which has served the tobacco control industry well for many years. They tap into the public's mistrust of big businesses - the ones who make cigarettes in particular - and portray themselves as poor, marginalised, under-funded philanthropists fighting against an incomparably-funded enemy.

But the vast majority of e-cig manufacturers are small independent businesses, which the Goliath of tobacco control is putting to the sword at every opportunity worldwide. There were around a thousand activists at COP7, almost exclusively funded by global governments and with the added bonus of patronage from multi-national pharmaceutical companies.

When you have government representatives on all your delegations; are funded generously by one of the most lucrative transnational sectors of big business; spend a week calling unpaid citizen vapers shills and encouraging governments to put small independent start-ups out of business with impossible regulations and state-sanctioned bans; and have the power to ban the press from reporting on what you are doing, you are no longer the fucking David you like to pretend to be!

The tobacco control industry has never been the poor underfunded underdog, and the FCTC's approach to e-cigs proves this fact categorically.

So what now?

Now, I might be wrong but I believe I was the only vaping consumer to be afforded one of the restricted 30 public places to attend COP7 in India (see report of the day here). I was, of course, then banned from observing further detailed proceedings about vaping along with the press and any other interested parties.

However, I'm already hearing that vapers are so consumed with anger at the way COP7 has treated the subject that the next conference in Geneva in 2018 will be attended by many hundreds more. The FCTC now has a two year period of warning to stop being so lazy and to develop some understanding of the products and the people who make and consume them. Personally I hope they don't, because just following the same idle and mendacious lines as they've done for decades with tobacco is working very well for someone like me who just wants to see their total destruction.

I don't believe I'll be disappointed, either, simply for the fact that the FCTC is not fit for purpose. I will write up the quite ridiculous procedure tomorrow on how COP7 debated vaping for 5 days but ended up with exactly the same ill-researched crap that they had produced in Moscow in 2014. The only teaser I'll give is that it's hardly surprising when you allow third world nations the ability to display their ignorant opinons with the full backing of a UN-backed and unelected global quango Goliath.

Those organising COP8 now have two years to start learning about vaping while the science has another two years to further show up their stupidity. If the FCTC thought this year was a trifle uncomfortable, that will be nothing compared with when hundreds of the vapers  they have insulted this past week - and hopefully unnecessarily-impoverished manfacturers and vendors too - turn up on their doorstep in 2018.

New Delhi will look like a maiden aunt's garden party by comparison. 

Times Of Embarrassment

Today's edition of The Times carries an apology to the scientists and researchers it defamed in a couple of articles last month about the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum. This came about after those involved threatened to take legal action.

The articles concerned have now been pulled and the original URLs take you to the apology instead, but you can read some of what was said in screen grabs that I published here.

The articles disappearing will also come as a relief to Cancer Research UK because the journalist claimed that it was they who "condemned scientists who accepted tens of thousands of pounds from tobacco companies".  I'm sure that The Times would also publish a retraction of that claim, but for some reason CRUK don't seem to be demanding one. How odd?

I wonder, also, if The Times will be asking their reporter to pay back her travel expenses considering her lazy hackneyed approach to the subject led to embarrassment for the paper and resulted in nothing but empty URLs for their cash. What a mess, eh? Perhaps there is a lesson in the whole palaver for a few people, don't you think?