Quote of the day - how bad science and unquestioning journalism might just kill people

From an excellent review of the awful, ignorant moral panic over vaping in the USA:

Journalists' failure to do so during debates over secondhand smoke got smokers banished to the fringes of social spaces. By repeating this failure in the debate over lower-risk competitors to the cigarette, journalists may get those smokers killed.

Absolutely. The UK is unusual, if not unique, in having adopted a largely evidence-based approach to vaping (it's much less harmful than smoking so smokers switching is a big health plus). In the USA we have a profoundly ignorant panic that is destroying what a month or so ago were legitimate businesses employing thousands and, as the quote above reminds us, probably killing tens of thousands of smokers who might otherwise have switched.

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When misusing the precautionary principle kills - the case of vaping bans

Vaping will be banned in smoke-free areas, although 'this is a precautionary measure' as there is no robust evidence of harm from second-hand vapour.

Welcome to the carefully considered decision of New Zealand's public health gauleiters. Yes folks, they're going to ban something they know isn't harmful because, y'know, precaution. Just let's be clear about this - every single drug introduced onto the market would need banning under this principle. No clinical trial, no epidemiological analysis, no Cochrane Review, no metanalysis and no research appraisal can eliminate the possibility that, in some way, there might be harm.

So what is it with these public health people? Why do they continue to ignore the self-evident reductions of harm from a liberal attitude to vaping and focus instead on something without evidence of harm - sidestream vapour?

For all its problems, the precautionary principle makes some sense. But its purpose is not to ban everything that has even the slightest prospect of causing harm. The problem is that the way risk managers might make use of precaution is very different from the idea of "better safe than sorry" because the latter is a recipe for preventing innovation and invention on the basis of risk.

The purpose of the Precautionary Principle is to create an impetus to take a decision notwithstanding scientific uncertainty about the nature and extent of the risk, i.e. to avoid 'paralysis by analysis' by removing excuses for inaction on the grounds of scientific uncertainty.

That seems clear enough - we act with caution (I'm a conservative why wouldn't I support that idea) but we still act. And we don't let the lack of scientific certainty - proof as us laymen might put it - prevent that action. This is, to the annoyance of some, the driving principle behind many environmental interventions - we're confident that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to changes in climate but we know precious little about the when, why or where of this impact or even how great or small it might be. But because the worst case downside risk - human extinction - is big enough we choose to act on that climate risk.

The problem here is that, while we want action, we don't know what policy choices are effective and what aren't effective resulting in a mish-mash of essentially virtue-driven policies rather than a clear, simple intervention. So, if the reason for climate change is greenhouse gas emission (at least in part), the simple response is a carbon tax but instead we get a bewildering collection of subsidy, sub-optimal investment and bans that don't get to the heart of the problem.

All this is probably fine until we start to apply the idea to areas where the worst case downside risk is not so bad. Obesity is a problem but it's downside risk is a shorter and less comfortable life for the obese and a marginal increase in healthcare costs for society - neither of these are existential. The same goes for most of what passes for public health these days and it results in stupid, "gotta be seen to do something" policies like banning adverts for burgers on bus stops. Worse there's a whole industry of pseudo-science developed to provide succour to these policies - a steady trickle of poorly-framed, badly conducted research studies designed with the ideological purpose of justifying bans, controls and limits in the interests of health.

So focus on the simple - for smoking the two things that worked well to reduce consumption of tobacco, public information and price, have run their course because everyone knows smoking is unhealthy and the price has reached the point where the biggest criminal growth industry is smuggling tobacco. So what's left - especially given further evidence that 'stop smoking service' interventions are expensive and pretty ineffective? We're either got drugs like varencline or vaping. And varencline, for all is effectiveness, carries an actual and demonstrated risk. In contrast vaping really isn't harmful - at least if Public Health England's most recent evidence review is a guide (it would be asking to much, I guess, for PHE to show the same degree of robust review when it comes to alcohol harm or obesity).

So to apply the precautionary principle to policies on vaping in public spaces - "we don't have any evidence it's harmful but, you never know, so we'll ban it" - is to completely misuse that principle. And, in doing this, the idea that vaping is harmful gets set in people's minds - and if a smoker thinks vaping is just as bad and the government bans it in public space then those smokers will carry on with much more harmful smoking. The consequence of precaution isn't safety, it's more harm.


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Judgmental, immoral fussbuckets - an everyday tale of NHS management

This is, quite simply, wrong. Not wrong as in 'incorrect' but wrong as in 'immoral and indefensible':

Patients who smoke will be breathalysed to check they have given up before being referred, while those who are obese must lose 10 per cent of their weight.

Doctors claimed it was the latest example of rationing which is becoming 'more commonplace' across the NHS. The two trusts, East and North Hertfordshire and Herts Valleys Clinical Commissioning Groups, are trying to save £68 million this year.

Any patient who is obese – with a body mass index above 30 – will have to shed at least 10 per cent of their body weight before being referred for non-urgent surgery.

I know there are pressures on the NHS but singling out lifestyle choices for exclusion is not how we should respond to a lack of cash. Imagine for a moment that it's your Dad who's been told he has to quit smoking in order to have a hip operation or you Mum they're telling to lose a stone before they do her cateract operation. The people proposing these things - just to save a bit of cash - are ghastly, self-centred and uncaring, yet we're told every day how wonderful the NHS is and how it's employees are living saints. This proposal proves - once again - that the service is filled with judgemental fussbuckets.

It is time the Government put an end to NHS Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups implementing these policies.

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East Riding CCG: Nasty judgemental fussbucketing nannies.

You're in pain. You've already waited an age for the operation. And then you get a letter from some nameless, faceless official of the NHS telling you that because you're a smoker or a bit chubby you have to wait an extra six months. Just because the bosses of that nameless, faceless NHS bureaucrat disapprove of your lifestyle.

The measures have been introduced by East Riding CCG, which has denied that it is about saving money, saying it is to "encourage and empower patients to take greater responsibility for their lifestyle choices."

This won't save the NHS a farthing. It's just being used as a painful and unpleasant stick to beat up people whose choices the scummy fussbuckets in the East Riding NHS don't like. I've no issue if a surgeon or doctor says "look mate, there's no point in me doing this knee operation until you lose some weight" or "you should quit smoking if you want this treatment to work" where the evidence is based on the actual case, the real information about a real patient. But to impose an arbitrary delay - a nasty, uncaring delay that might kill people - just to make a point about their lifestyle is worse than unforgivable, the people saying it should be escorted out of their well-paid NHS jobs because they clearly aren't suited for a caring service.

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The measures have been introduced by East Riding CCG, which has denied that it is about saving money, saying it is to "encourage and empower patients to take greater responsibility for their lifestyle choices."

Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/health/overweight-people-and-smokers-to-be-denied-surgery-for-six-months-in-four-yorkshire-hospitals-1-8763080

The measures have been introduced by East Riding CCG, which has denied that it is about saving money, saying it is to "encourage and empower patients to take greater responsibility for their lifestyle choices."

Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/health/overweight-people-and-smokers-to-be-denied-surgery-for-six-months-in-four-yorkshire-hospitals-1-8763080

(Depressing) Quote of the day....

Leg Iron on the smoking ban - and what's to come:

I still laugh like a hyena with a nitrous oxide overdose at every business out there who claims to have a ‘no smoking policy’. No, you have no such policy. You do not have the choice in this matter, you are not allowed to decide. The Righteous have take that decision from you.

You do not decide your own policy. That is not your choice. The option resides with a higher power – your business is now their business. Just do as you are told and act as unpaid smoke police. Suck it up and get used to it, you don’t have the balls to fight it.

Next you will be unpaid booze, salt and sugar police. You don’t have the balls to fight that either. Just get used to it, your business has to pay to enforce it and it’ll ruin you eventually but who cares?

I'd like to hope that this won't come to pass. But it will. Jobs will be lost. Businesses will close. All because of the public health fanatics and the supine media and government that indulges their lies.

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It's time to close down public health and get our lives back

It has to stop. There is no basis in protecting health. It is quite simply driven by the mission of public health to treat smokers as pariahs, people to be pushed to the margins of society:

The smoking ban should be extended to include all outdoor public areas, according to health experts.

Exclusion zones should stop smokers lighting up in parks, pub and restaurant gardens, at public events and shopping areas.

All university campuses and schools, beaches and sports and leisure facilities should also fall under the crackdown.

Imagine Glastonbury, Reading or Leeds Festival without smoking (of any kind). Consider what will happen to your local when smokers have to move half a street away to enjoy a fag. Those smokers - getting on for a fifth of the population - won't be there. And what happens when a fifth or more of your business goes away? No more local pub. Half the nations festivals and concerts unviable. Empty bars. Closed restaurants. Hundreds of thousands more jobs destroyed by public health.

I'll say it again - there is no health ground for this at all. None. Banning smoking indoors at least had the merit of a very marginal health benefit to non-smokers working in a smoky environment. These proposals from the Royal Society of Public Health are quite straightforwardly an attack on smokers and their right to make the personal choice to inhale tobacco smoke.

I haven't smoked for over ten years but I don't see why those who choose to smoke should be ostracised, excluded and treated like pariahs. In fact I find such an idea to be offensive and the people making it to be the worst sort of hideous fussbucket. The fanatics of public health aren't going to stop until all of the pleasures on their list of sins are marginalised - booze, fags, burgers, fizzy drinks, red meat, bacon, cheese, chocolate, boiled sweets, jam, cheese, cake, cream: all labelled, resitricted, controlled, hidden away, taxed and if they can get away with it banned altogether.

Children will be force fed a grey, dull vegetable diet washed down with tepid water. The legion of tutting health worrywarts will peer over their specs at mums who let their kids have a Happy Meal. We'll be weighed, measured, lined up, checked and made to fill in forms describing, in ever more detail, our bad habits. All so some public health "nurse" can lecture us about eating or drinking the grey uninteresting pap that the Church of Public Health recommends.

None of this is about making our lives better. It's not about our health. It's about an ideology of control. A belief that because the state provides healthcare this somehow gives them the right to tell us how to live our lives, to ostacise us for smoking, to denormalise drinking, to tax sugar, and to force manufacturers to take anything approximating to taste out of the food we buy.

It's time we stopped indulging these nannying fussbuckets. Time we told them to butt out of our lives. Time to point out that whether we smoke, drink, eat cake or go to a burger bar is absolutely none of their bloody business. Time to close down public health.

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Voluntary bans - smoking and the power of tutting!

Oxford City Council has just rolled out its 'voluntary ban' on smoking in children's play areas across all of its 87 such places. This follows a three month trial in three parks. The coverage reports that stickers have been placed at the sites advising parents not to smoke - for the sake of the children, of course, because ASH have said that second-hand smoke is bad. Even on a windy September morning. And even when the playground is a few yards from a busy road filled will fume-spewing diesel motor vehicles.

This is a voluntary ban as the resident fussbucket (or, if you prefer, Council Board Member for Leisure, Parks and Sport) puts it:

"It's something we need to keep an eye on.

"I don't think a PSPO is necessary at the moment; it's just asking people to respect other users and respect the children playing."

A bit of a warning there, I suspect, as the councillor invokes the "do as you're told citizens or we'll have to take sterner action" approach that we love so much. Right now the signs have all the enforcement power of tutting and a bit of side-eye and, I guess, the Council wants to enlist the self-appointed school gate enforcement team.

Most parents will probably abide by the advice, mostly for the sake of a quiet life, but I think the response from one hints at a growing appreciation of the smoking issue:

Alex Thomas, a father-of-three from Botley, said: "I suspect it's a good idea in terms of encouraging children not to see smokers as a norm."

But the 34-year-old said he 'wouldn't mind' if he saw people smoking in play areas, adding: "I think it's entirely their right.

"There are enough places smokers aren't allowed to smoke and if a parent needs a cigarette to get through an hour in the playground on a cold November day, fair enough."

Well said Alex. Shame that public health bosses seem unable to summon anything like this degree of respect for other humans.

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Vaping in Bradford. Why the Council voted down a more liberal approach.

Last week Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors voted down a motion I submitted to Bradford Council calling for a 'vaping friendly city'. This motion set out how Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians had described vaping as "at least 95%" safer than smoking and argued that we should be more positive about e-cigarettes as an effective aid to quitting smoking. The proposed resolution was to conduct a review of current policies with a view to being more open to vaping in public places.

Now the dust has settled I thought I'd share with you the main reasons given by those voting down the motion (other than the real reason for Labour's opposition - this was a Tory motion and we don't vote for Tory motions). This is from memory but I think captures the essence of the debate - supporters of vaping will be very familiar with the arguments.

1. "But 5% of something very harmful is still harmful"

2. "People don't like the smell of vaping - and what about asthmatics?"

3. "There isn't enough evidence that vaping isn't harmful."

4. "We've got used to people not smoking in offices, this is a step backwards."

5. "The flavours smell horrible and are targeted a children."

6. "Here's an opinion piece from the British Medical Journal that says vaping doesn't help people quit

7. "There's no evidence that liberalising rules on vaping encourages people to switch"

We then got three very specific arguments.

8. "It would confuse people because our neighbouring authorities have different policies."

9. "We don't have to lead, to fly the flag, all the time, we don't have to do this."

10. "Officers in public health* are too busy to conduct a review."

*Bradford spends best part of a million quid on smoking cessation.

And finally

11. "We should be talking about more important things for the District than vaping."

It was a pretty depressing episode. I've learnt that, even with a pretty modest motion asking that officers look at our approach to vaping, the controlling Labour group will vote stuff down - "Not-Invented-Here Syndrome" I call it and this combines with a knee-jerk tribalism ("must be a bad idea if the Tories are proposing it") to make it hard to make progress.

Where we go from here I'm not sure. Putting another motion to Council won't work and I'd already tried approaching public health and the council's HR department directly (they chose not to reply). We've made - and will continue to make - the case through the press. Maybe Bradford's vapers are happy to muddle through with a mish-mash of different attitudes towards what they do. And perhaps public health (and Labour councillors) are happy to conflate smoking and vaping because it suits their disdain for what seems like a decidedly working-class habit.

In the end any change will only come through the 20,000 or so Bradford vapers putting pressure on the Council to change. Right now I've gone as far as I can take it.

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Scribblings: museums, why Trump, slavery and fussbucketry (plus an odd airport)

First a cheat in that it's not a scribbling but I had to share it somewhere - the story of Denver International Airport's embracing of conspiracy loons as a marketing tool:

After being tortured for years by the ceaseless, incredulous questioning, airport officials have assumed a new stance on the subject. What started as denial and moved onto anger, then despair, has finally landed on acceptance.

"For many years the airport tried to fight against the conspiracies, and we constantly had to explain and disprove them,” says Stacy Stegman, senior vice-president of communications for DIA. “Over time we've kind of learned to love that there's a certain amount of strangeness associated with the airport, and it's kind of fun."

Absolutely wonderful stuff and top marks to the airport management. In the meantime we discover from Julia that some museums are more equal than others:

So all presumptuous would-be museum builders should think they won't get a warm welcome?

Well...

You'll have to read to find out why one museum gets the nod and other doesn't - politics is a good hint. And while we're in America Tim Newman's spotted a great article about how the liberal elite "gleefully bludgeons people with opposing views into silence" and concludes with hitting right on why Trump - despite being a hideous, self-serving, sexist sleazeball - has got down to, effectively, the last two for America's top job:

You don’t need to be a Trump supporter, a Republican, or a Right Winger to see that a self-selected wealthy elite browbeating swathes of the population into ever-more strict silence won’t end well.

That's about the sum of it. Trump's too flawed to win - looking more like he'll be flattened unless something drastic happens (and the Republican Party will suffer for selecting such a disaster) - but the problem remains (or in the UK, Remains).

On this theme A K Haart takes Strindberg as the text in suggesting that 'progressives' are something of a cult - a new religion:

It may be going a little too far to paint socialism as a secular religion but there are interesting parallels once we focus on behavioural control and blur the distinction between politics and religion. Socialism has its priesthood, evangelists, taboos and possibly sacred texts. The Communist Manifesto for example. It may not be a church but it has a collection plate where even the unrighteous have to cough up their compulsory donations, compulsion being essential to progressive ideas.

And with all religions it needs a devil and demons - you can join us here.

So much to the politics of now - what about work? There's lots of talk about the future of work and in parallel with the past of work and especially slavery. Which makes Demetrius's discussion of the subject quite fascinating:

In England into long in the 19th Century the Acts of Settlement applied by which people could be forcibly sent to what the law specified was their home Parish. Once there it could be the Workhouse and in those places and under the Poor Law of 1834 for those at the benches, in the fields or breaking rocks it was a form of servitude hard to escape.

Read the article, it opens up the question of what we actually mean by slavery. And why we need to own the robots rather than be sacked by them.

And finally a couple of updates from the febrile world of fussbucketry courtesy of Longrider and Dick Puddlecote:

I am becoming increasingly angry at this attitude that somehow we owe the NHS anything. We do not. We pay – handsomely – for this service and it owes us, not the other way around. Unfortunately, socialised healthcare leads us to this moronic thinking that other people’s health is any of our concern because the NHS may be needed to care for them in the event of a lifestyle choice. Well, the gentleman Allsopp observed is also likely a taxpayer and has paid for any healthcare he may need, but does he?

And:

Arnott once proudly boasted of the "confidence trick" she employed to con politicians into depriving private businesses of their right to determine their own policies on smoking in their premises. I hear that at the recent Royal Society of Medicine event, which Simon Chapman's fans all avoided, she was equally gushing about how she had conned parliamentarians into going for plain packaging.

Keep up the good work!

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Scribblings III: Star Wars, flags, skateboarding, free speech and not blaming smoking

Worse than smoking!

We begin with the weird as Grandad encounters reports of the Star Wars obsessive - this my friends is in a space beyond geekdom or nerdism:

daoku began watching star wars at different playback rates in order to do this but again it only lasted a while.
He then purchased the exact cinema seats that were there in 1977 and placed them in his living room.He purchased 40 shop floor dummies, dressed them in 1970's clothes, placed them on the seats and watched star wars until the small hours.

That is just the tiniest of flavours...

It is good to know that, when you need one, you can find someone who has fine details of flag history and etiquette at his fingertip. James Higham is one such:

The ship is right, the three masts are right and the artist may well have been right in 1776 on the flags, though it seems not.

And, as anyone who has been to Parkhead will tell you, getting the flags (and songs right) is important!

Meanwhile Raedwald, from his eyrie in the Alps, comments on risk (and skateboarding):

Some years ago, skateboarders old enough to buy cheap airfares would gather informally in small groups, take postbuses to the high places and board down the mostly empty mountain roads. Much fun. In the UK, the official reaction would be one of horror; the bansturbationists would emerge in force, the Chief Constable would appear on TV, MPs would demand new laws to ban boarders and local councils would deploy wardens to patrol all the steep roads with powers to seize boards. After all, the UK is a nation where it is now forbidden to roll a round cheese down a grass hill because of 'elf-n-safety.

Here's a couple of those skateboarders.

Among all this frivolity there is seriousness. And nothing is more serious that protecting free speech. The Churchmouse reminds us that there appears to be something of an inconsistency in attacks on speech:

Despite recently supporting a European Commission code promising to take down online hate speech within 24-hours of posting, Facebook has failed remove a group titled “I Want to F**king Kill Donald Trump” to the ire of his supporters.

The group was created on May 14 with a post reading “Donald Trumps Hair Looks Like A Bleached Mop – Gordon Ramsey 2016.” The most recent post is, “What Is Your Weapon Of Choice?” Asking what weapon people would use to kill Trump if given the chance.

Me, I liked Facebook and Twitter better when they defended free speech rather than allowing government and the progressive mob to beat them into submission.

Finally - for this week - Leg iron asked where it all went wrong:

As a smoker, I’m feeling neglected. All the things we used to cause have moved on. We were the Grim Reapers who brought death and decay everywhere we went. Every disease, every illness was our doing. I was having fun with that.

As our intrepid freethinker observes - the fussbuckets are now obsessed with food.

There's still hope - as this outcry reminds us.

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Scribblings II: On pubs, smoking bans, perdigree dogs, political donations and Brexit

We're back with another dose of great writing from Martin Scriblerus bloggers. I did get called out for calling it 'scribblings' - but what else could I choose! Well here we go:

There are a lot of beer bloggers who talk about beer. Old Mudgie talks about pubs and his blog is a paean to their wonders, a wistful look at the memories of pubs gone and a poke at those who get too precious about beer. Here's he looks at why old pubs just sit empty:

Assuming the building has no future as a pub, it is going to cost money to convert it to anything else, and that will need both someone willing to take it on, and planning permission. In many cases, the owners are probably hanging on to get planning permission to demolish the building and redevelop the site for something else, typically housing.

Up and down the country, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of derelict pubs that have been in that state for years, many of which are featured on my Closed Pubs blog. Fortunately there aren’t too many in Stockport, but two exceptions are the Royal Mortar on Higher Hillgate and the Bow Garrett on Brinksway, both of which must have been closed for over ten years.

Dick Puddlecote, when not running some sort of transport business, writes passionately about the fussbuckets - charmless, judgemental folk who hate us having pleasure. Here he cites a fellow 'jewel robber' (and he calls those challenging the anti-smoking, temperance and diet fanatics) and comments that:

This is what happens when you have a colossal state-funded machine which views life solely through the lens of health. Other pleasures and benefits in consuming the products in question are completely ignored, therefore the prohibitionists simply cannot comprehend the huge social and financial damage their rancid policies are causing ...

Julia has been a loud, uncompromising and essentially conservative voice in the blogging world for a long while. Here's a typical sample of her blogging as she comments of a story about a lefty who bought a pedigree dog - first the quote from the story:

"...Colleagues and friends have accused me of abandoning my longstanding centre-left principles in favour of eugenics, arrivisme and trying to suck up to the ruling classes..."

Then...bang:

Might I suggest you find new colleagues and friends? It should be quite easy, now you have a puppy!

Brilliant!

Mark Wadsworth is best known for writing about land value tax but he's not a one-trick pony and here's a cracking post about donations to political parties (that may or may not be a good idea):

...it has been suggested that parties should either be funded out of taxation or there should be a cap on the amount each donor can give.

I don’t think either of those two are satisfactory, and would like to suggest another alternative. Legislated anonymous donations.

Anyone wishing to donate above say £500, would have to send their cheque to the Electoral Commission nominating to whom it should go. Once a year, those donations would be passed on to the relevant party aggregated and without the names of the donors.

Raedwald's another blogger who takes few prisoners and doesn't bow to political correctness. Here he compares a map of 7th century East Anglia to the devastating effect of ice caps melting on the region:

The Indie prints a map of how East Anglia could look if the giant ice sheet did melt; it's exactly the same as the historic Anglian coastline in the 7th century.

Finally -for this week - Frank Davis compares the experience of Remain voters after Independence Day with the shock smokers like Frank got on 1 July 2007 when they were banned from pubs:

But for those who voted to remain, their experience that day was probably one of shock and dismay and disbelief. They are probably feeling something very like what we smokers experienced on 1 July 2007. For they also had just been expelled from a club in which they had come to believe that they were full members – just like smokers and their pubs. They had become exiles. Their world had been turned upside down. They are probably filled with the same disbelief and rage as many smokers were on 1 July 2007.

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Smoking cessation: it stopped being about health years ago

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In 2003 Hon Lik registered the patent for the first modern electronic cigarette since when millions of people across the world have stopped or significantly reduced their consumption of regular old-fashioned cancer-sticks. There is no doubt - really, there is no doubt - that this is one of the biggest public health boons ever. Instead of people having their lives cut short by using combustible cigarettes to get a hit of nicotine, they'll mostly be using a delivery system that's pretty near harmless - as harmless as getting a caffeine hit by pouring hot water over coffee beans.

The smoking cessation business (or most of it - there are a few notable exceptions) has spent almost every waking hour and bucket loads of research cash since Hon Lik registered that patent trying to discredit the electronic cigarette and the practice of vaping. Urged on by the pharmaceuticals industry and tacitly back by Big Tobacco these so-call smoking cessation folk have acted to protect their business interests - funding, jobs, research grants - rather than accept that vaping disrupted smoking by making it possible to enjoy the lift from nicotine without the health costs of smoking.

And these people refuse to accept the reality and are still throwing money at research into new smoking cessation devices:

Chemists at the University of Bristol have been awarded £930,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop potential new aids to help smokers stop smoking.

Professor Tim Gallagher, in collaboration with Professor Adrian Mulholland (School of Chemistry) and Dr Richard Sessions (School of Biochemistry), will use a combination of synthetic chemistry, computational modelling, structural biology and pharmacology to develop potential new smoking cessation agents.

I'm sure the science here is fascinating but do we really need to spend nearly £1 million of taxpayers money (especially in these tough times for public funding) on researching "potential new aids to help smokers stop smoking". That's 'potential' aids not actual aids that can be put on the market for smokers to use. What we'll have instead is some quite interesting chemistry (all those ligands and that partial agonism) but little practical health value. And all this at a time when there's a pretty damned effective aid to quitting that the same government funding this research wants to limit, stop from being effectively promoted and placed in the "we rather disapprove of this sort of thing" category of consumer goods.

As I say, smoking cessation stopped being about health years ago. Now it's more about preserving the jobs of smoking cessation advisors and the funding of researchers. The minute there was a breakthrough disruptive technology - one produced without government research funding and promoted successfully through a free market - the smoking cessation funding should have gone and the research investment directed into other areas of public health challenge. But the public health isn't about health at all really, is it?

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Quote of the day - "Just get off our backs"

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From Clive Bates (via Dick Puddlecote):

"You told us to quit smoking. You taxed the pants off us; you've bullied us with your public information campaigns; you've racked up the stigma that we felt. You've tried to stop us using these products wherever we can. You've hit us with massive societal disapproval. Tobacco companies haven't done that, government and public health have done that.

So we've done the right thing. We've got off smoking; we've protected our health; we produce a vapour which doesn't harm anyone; most people aren't troubled by it.

Just leave us alone! Just get off our backs!"

Absolutely right.

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So ads for vaping don't 'normalise' smoking - no surprise (except to nannying fussbuckets)

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We know that the public health fraternity don't know the first thing about advertising, let alone understand how it works. Despite having assortments of higher degrees, the typical public health 'expert' still holds to the 'if advertising doesn't work, why do business advertise' line that's popular amongst thirteen-year-olds and sociology professors (except the latter will add the word 'neoliberalism' into their ignorant statement). Of course the rest of us know that advertising works by promoting the brand rather than the category. We also know that advertising of brands in one category absolutely doesn't promote the use of a different, competing category.

The latest study into ecig and vaping advertising confirms all this and is reported here (although the writer seems also not to understand that ads promote brands not categories):

The major study finding was that neither the flavored nor non-flavored e-cigarette advertisements affected the appeal of smoking to youth. This includes advertisements for e-cigarettes with candy flavors like bubble gum or chocolate. Instead, the study found that flavored e-cigarette advertisements affect youths' interest in trying and buying electronic cigarettes.

Importantly, the study also found no effect of exposure to e-cigarette advertisements on smoking susceptibility or the perceived harm of cigarettes.

The study concluded that: "Exposure to adverts for e-cigarettes does not seem to increase the appeal of tobacco smoking in children."

And, as the author then observes:

Advertising for a product that is being marketed as a more appealing alternative to a different product is going to increase the appeal of that product, not the inferior product. It also makes sense that e-cigarette advertising does not undermine youth's appreciation of the severe hazards of smoking. If anything, one might expect that e-cigarette marketing helps to reinforce the public's understanding of the hazards of smoking, since e-cigarettes are being presented as a favorable alternative to cigarettes.

Even the thirteen-year-olds will get this, I suspect. Will the nannying fussbuckets?

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The whole point about vaping and harm reduction

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So we're sat in a cafe in Bradford having something to eat. Outside the cafe there's a little gathering, about ten or twelve young people - boys and girls - aged 14 or 15. They're behaving exactly like you'd expect young people this age to behave - joshing with each other, lots of braggadocio from the boys, preening and giggling from the girls. All pretty normal and almost certainly a bunch of nice kids.

And three or four of them were vaping.

Now before you get all shocked, imagine the scene a few years ago. A dozen working class fifteen year olds in Bradford away from parents in the City centre - three or four of them would have been smoking good old-fashioned cigarettes. Instead they're vaping - doing something that Public Health England tell us is at least 95% safer than smoking.

It may be that you'd prefer these young people to do nothing - no smoking, no vaping. And maybe you're right in your preference. But if they're going to do something surely it's better they choose the least harmful option? Just like I was back in the 1970s, the young people are doing the naughty thing they're told not to do - in my case it led to being a heavy smoker for thirty years. For these young people their choice means they won't have the coughs, the shortness of breath and the massive risk of lung or throat cancer that I had.

Which is why it's very stupid to try and make vapers and vaping equivalent to smoking.

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In which the medical profession reminds us how monumentally stupid it is

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Seriously these doctors are utterly ignorant, they have not the first conception of human behaviour:

Norway's biggest medical organisation wants to ban the sale of cigarettes to adults.

In a drive towards a smoke-free society by 2035, the Norwegian Medical Association (NMA) is pressing the government to back its proposal for a ban on tobacco sales to citizens born after the year 2000.

What could go wrong here? Right now it's anyone younger than 16 which I'm guess means they can't buy fags anyway. They do however have friends who are 17 and can buy fags. And since the stupid doctors don't intend to ban possession of cigarettes, this secondary market (doubtless a pretty profitable one) still exists and won't go away until the last of those 17 year olds has died in about eighty years time. All this, of course, is without the capacity of Norwegians to pop to Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Finland, the Baltic States from where they can bring back - perfectly legally - loads of cigarettes.

Fortunately Norway has some politicians with a modicum of common sense:

Yet despite the NMA's hopes, health spokespeople for the Conservative, Labour, Centre and Christian Democrats parties in the country told Aftenposten the idea was not currently feasible.

Indeed the idea will never be feasible. In other news teen smoking in most places - including Norway and the UK - is at its lowest ever level. Something that's down to vaping and nothing to do with public health at all. Not that the health fascists and nannying fussbuckets will ever admit to this.

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The threat to working class culture is demonisation, denormalisation, temperance and prohibition not appropriation

Let's start this with the (I'm sure pretty unsurprising) fact that I'm not in the slightest bit 'working class'. It's important we start there because I like pubs, enjoy some of that fatty food, used to smoke and have been in my fair share of working men's clubs, pubs and bars. This isn't showing off but rather an observation about what we might understand by 'working class culture'. We might add greyhound racing, course fishing and pigeon racing to this list plus such delights as bingo, betting shops and seaside amusement arcades. Others might add things about taste in furniture, music, clothing and even styles of gardening.

Some don't seem to get this and, watching what we might call 'social worker chic', get all confused about what is and isn't working class. Just like those trendy middle-class social workers who dressed scruffy because they thought their working class clients would like it, we have a new generation of chippy (and probably middle class) sorts who think bars under railway arches with bare brick walls, uneven tables and unmatched seating are in some way a pastiche of working-class culture:

Visit any bar in the hip districts of Brixton, Dalston or Peckham and you will invariably end up in a warehouse, on the top floor of a car park or under a railway arch. Signage will be minimal and white bobbing faces will be crammed close, a Stockholm syndrome recreation of the twice-daily commute, enjoying their two hours of planned hedonism before the work/sleep cycle grinds back into gear.

Expect gritty, urban aesthetics. Railway sleepers grouped around fire pits, scuffed tables and chairs reclaimed from the last generation’s secondary schools and hastily erected toilets with clattering wooden doors and graffitied mixed sex washrooms. Notice the lack of anything meaningful. Anything with politics or soul.

Now I may be wrong here but the 'authentic' working class wouldn't ever have gone to these sort of places. The pubs and clubs they went to were smartly turned out places with neat upholstery, tidy copper-topped tables and well-polished bars. They had a juke-box, a one-armed bandit and a snug - the customers saw gritty urban aesthetics every day at work and really didn't want exposed girders or plain brickwork on a night out.

For me one difference between the middle and working classes - a practical one but real nonetheless - was shown when I lived in a bedsit in York. One of my fellow residents was a bin-man - every morning he crawled out from bed slung on work overalls and cleared up other people's trash while I (slightly later) headed off to an office all suited and booted. And when I was going out of an evening, I took off that suit to put on something more casual and comfortable. The bloke who emptied bins, on the other hand, bathed, groomed and dressed in the best clothes he owned to go out.

Anyway, to return to our middle-class whinge-bucket who thinks opening a bar with cheap decoration and expensive drinks is appropriating working class culture. The real problem isn't this at all - that some ever-so-hipster folk start food stalls in a traditional London street market helps sustain those places and reminds us they're places for everyone not just one or other class. And there are still plenty of greengrocers selling bowls of veg for a quid - at least in most London markets I've ever visited. The problem is that we disapprove of working class cultural choices.

Take drinks, for example. We're pretty cool about charging £8 for half-a-pint of over-hopped craft beer but when some lads buy a six pack of cheap lager to drink while having a kickabout in the park then it dreadful 'binge drinking' and the middle-classes cry for laws - minimum pricing - that price them out of drinking altogether. Rather like Titus Salt banning boozers in his 'perfect' village while serving fine wines to guests at his mansion, today's middle class fussbucket believes the working classes can't be trusted with drinking especially when that drink is lager, cider or cheap vodka.

Look again at that list of working class pursuits above - those same middle-class worrywarts think greyhound racing is cruel, fishing is barbaric and betting shops are filled with devices that are impossible for punters to resist (working class punters of course, they're too dumb to understand). All the pubs or at least the sort of pubs those working class blokes used to frequent, have gone - you occasionally see an older bloke in one of these trendy over-priced hipster bars looking like a bewildered alien visiting from another better planet. And, as well as those pubs, the smoking ban has decimated the bingo halls and working men's clubs - every community used to have at least one of each but now they're gone or else counting the sad days before brewery loans can't be covered by the handful of customers.

Even something like vaping, which should be a public health bonanza, is sneered at by these middle-class do gooders. Just like the cheap lager, these do gooders see the electronic cigarette as something naff used mostly by fat, unattractive working-class people. And we - the middle class public sector managers, councillors, MPs and MEPs who decide these things using crappy research from our middle class friends with sociology doctorates - know better. The working classes mustn't be allowed to make their own choices - mistaken or otherwise. And if we can't actually ban aspects of working class culture then we'll 'denormalise' it, turn it into something so marginalised that those who indulge can be safely treated as pariahs.

Drinking, smoking, vaping, one-armed bandits, betting shops, burgers, fried chicken, over the top Christmas lights, paved front gardens, outdoor drinking, fizzy drinks, chocolate treats in the kids' lunch boxes, sugar pourers on the cafe table, salt, cheap chicken, bacon sarnies, cream, best butter, standing outside for a fag...there seems to be no end to the disapproval - nearly always of working class things - from the nannying fussbuckets, greeny-greeny nutters and know-all 'experts'.

So no dear writers, it's not appropriation or gentrification that's the problem for working class culture it's bans, controls, taxes and an endless nannying chorus of disapproval. It is demonisation, denormalisation, temperance and prohibition that's the threat to working class culture not a load of well-paid Londoners getting ripped off at some craft bar in a railway arch.

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Sorry but smoking doesn't harm Gedling Council's reputation

Gedling Borough Council (it's in Nottinghamshire and Labour-controlled, since you ask) is proposing the further demonisation and stigmatising of its employees - the ones that smoke that is:

"Whilst at work, and so far as is reasonably practicable, employees who smoke in accordance with this policy should do so with their Gedling Borough Council uniform covered as not doing so may create a negative impression of the council when viewed by the public."

Since when did smoking give a negative impression of the Council? Since officious HR managers and self-righteous councillors started treating smokers like pariahs. Ever since the smoking ban in 2007 (and long before that in many councils) smokers have clustered round the doors, on windswept pavements and corners. I'm guessing this looks untidy to those officious managers and is accompanied by moans from other employees about smoking breaks (like those other workers don't use up Council time talking about their holidays, making tea or playing solitaire on the phone).

What this policy is about is the isolation of smokers - it is but a short step away from a man with a bell parading in front of them crying "unclean, unclean". No health purpose is served and it isn't about the Council's image - it's simply nannying fussbucketry, rules for the sake of rules. A much better approach would be to provide a shelter for staff that smoke perhaps with somewhere to sit away from the doorways where smokers currently clump. But that would be thoughtful and considerate - why would the Council want to treat smokers that way, they're smelly scum aren't they?
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Nannying fussbucketry of the day - cutting your nose off to spite your face

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Rory Stewart is a government minister in the environment department. Presented with the opportunity to take some cash off tobacco companies to help clean up litter, he plays the nannying fussbucket card:

In January, Kris Hopkins, then a local government minister, said he wanted tobacco companies to "make a contribution to put right the wrongs as a consequence of their product". The companies offered to fund measures to help clean the country's streets last month, but the offer was rejected by Rory Stewart, a junior environment minister. In a letter to the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, Mr Stewart said that a tie-up risked undermining councils’ work in promoting public health. Mr Stewart said it was "for local authorities to decide whether they wish to work with the tobacco industry", but added that councils should take their own legal advice before accepting the support. He said: "Since April 1 2013, local authorities have had responsibility for improving the health of their local populations and for public health services. The Government's view is that where a local authority enters into a partnership with a tobacco company, this fundamentally undermines the authority's statutory duty to promote public health." 

How stupid is this?

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Banning smoking at mental health units. A rant at Bradford's health fascists.

Bradford NHS Care Trust decided to ban smoking everywhere on its sites in Bradford.

A BLANKET ban on smoking has come into force at Lynfield Mount psychiatric hospital in Bradford.

Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust said the ban also affected all its buildings, grounds and vehicles, including the Airedale Centre for Mental Health at Airedale Hospital at Steeton, Keighley.

Nicola Lees, deputy chief executive and director of nursing at the Trust, said the decision had been taken to help patients' mental health as well as theirs and staff's physical health.

This decision has been presented uncritically in the local paper and is accompanied by almost congratulatory quotations from Public Health England.

Let's be clear about this - it is a ghastly, unnecessary and illiberal attack on the rights of mental health patients. These are vulnerable people - they're not in the Care Trust's units for fun, they're there because they want (or need - some are in a secure unit under the provisions of the Mental Health Acts) help with mental health problems. And let's also be clear that forcing them to quit smoking (and this is exactly what the Trust is doing) makes little or no contribution to resolving their mental health problems - indeed, for some, it might even make them worse.

This decision isn't a substantive contribution to bettering the health of Bradford people. Rather, it's a nasty, spiteful and thoughtless piece of tick-box public health introduced by people who care more about being seen to be righteous than they do about the well-being of mental health patients. There is no health and safety justification (it's a ban outside where passive smoking risks are zero), merely a sad conformity with the English NHS's growing attachment of health fascism.

Don't these patients have some rights left. Rights to make their own choice as adults about whether or not to smoke? It would appear not - the health fascists have won again.

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