Christopher Snowdon's Blog, page 14
May 30, 2024
Australia's tobacco fiasco

As two more tobacconists go up in flames in Melbourne, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) can no longer deny the illicit tobacco crisis Down Under. This article is worth reading.
Even Simon Chapman's half-witted protégé has accepted reality.
Rohan Pike is a former Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Border Force (ABF) officer who helped establish the original tobacco strike team, when the black market was, as he describes it, a “modest problem”.
“The number one driver of the problem is the enormous price of tobacco,” Pike says bluntly.
When the taskforce was established in 2018, more than 400 million cigarette sticks were detected and seized at the border.
Last year, it was 1.7 billion.
Naturally, being an imbecile, her answer is to ban vapes harder. All of this was completely avoidable. All they had to do was allow affordable cigarettes and vapes to be sold to consenting adults. Instead, they allowed clowns and fanatics to call the shots and Australia became an object lesson in what not to do. The UK is not far behind. Are you watching, Mr Streeting?Becky Freeman, an associate professor of public health at the University of Sydney, acknowledges the only reason people buy black market cigarettes is because “cigarettes are expensive”.
PS. Speaking of clowns, this guy is in charge of the Australian Medical Association and apparently believes that every smoker in the country costs the economy $70,000 a year.

But he suddenly becomes sceptical when modelling suggests that taxing something that is currently illegal will raise tax revenue.

There is a lot of ruin in a nation but no society endure quite so many charlatans and fantasists without paying a price.
May 29, 2024
Vape tax consultation - my response
The vape tax consultation closes today, so hurry if you want to respond to this awful idea (which Labour is also keen on). Clive Bates has put his excellent submission online here, but here's what I sent them...
5. Do you agree that the rates and structure outlined in Chapter 3 will achieve the stated objectives of the duty?
Yes and no.
The stated objectives are ‘to reduce the number of non-smokers and young people that vape’ and to shift vapers towards lower nicotine products. Further objectives include raising tax revenue and not making smoking more attractive. It is notable that the government’s stated objectives do not include reducing smoking rates among middle-aged and elderly adults who are at most risk from smoking-related harm, nor improving the health of the nation.
Substitution effects
It is well established that vaping is much less harmful to health than smoking and that e-cigarettes and cigarettes are direct substitutes (McNeill et al. 2022). It is also well established that switching to e-cigarettes is a highly effective way of quitting smoking (Hartmann-Boyce et al. 2022) and it is highly likely (though difficult to prove categorically) than the use of e-cigarettes by nonsmokers who would otherwise have started smoking has a prophylactic effect, i.e. it prevents smoking uptake. Ample evidence for this exists in the public health and economics literature and can be inferred in the UK from both routine statistics and general observation.
Any policy that deters consumption of e-cigarettes is therefore likely to result in more people smoking. This effect has been shown in several studies looking specifically at e-cigarette taxation (eg. Pesko et al. 2020; Saffer et al. 2019; Cotti et al. 2022). The extent to which this will occur if the UK introduces a vape tax is difficult to predict since illicit e-cigarettes make up a large share of the market and existing laws are poorly enforced.
The government acknowledges that e-cigarettes are direct substitutes for cigarettes and that there is a cross-price elasticity issue that means that a vape tax will make smoking relatively more appealing. This is correct and the government proposes yet another tobacco duty rise to offset this. The proposed rise is relatively small compared to the proposed vape tax. For example, the e-cigarette fluid I use will rise from £3 per bottle to £6.60 per bottle while a pack of cigarettes will rise from around £16 to £16.50. This still represents a substantial price difference, but the gap is relatively much smaller. Moreover, it is easy to buy a pack of cigarettes in the shadow economy for £5. Official retail prices are increasingly irrelevant as a comparator.
Nicotine levels
The government appears to believe that lower nicotine vapes are somehow more addictive or more harmful than higher nicotine vapes and that e-cigarettes will be consumed less if high-nicotine fluids are discouraged. This is the same mistake that was made when nicotine yields in cigarettes were lowered by law, although this did at least have the effect of simultaneously reducing tar yields. There is no such compensating benefit from lower-nicotine vape juice since lowering the nicotine will not reduce exposure to the other substances in e-cigarettes. In practice, vapers (and smokers) titrate nicotine to achieve the optimal level of nicotine consumption (which varies from person to person). Those who have a higher tolerance/demand for nicotine will vape more if they can only access low-nicotine fluid.
A vape tax may well switch consumers towards lower-nicotine vapes, but this is not an objective worth pursuing and could be counter-productive. Insofar as vaping causes harm to health (which remains unproven), it is not from the nicotine but from the other ingredients, flavourings, etc. in the fluid, which users will be more exposed to if they are priced out of buying higher-nicotine fluid. They will certainly end up spending more money.
It should be mentioned that high-nicotine fluid cannot legally be sold in the UK as a result of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive which caps fluids at the relatively low level of 20mg/ml.
Tax revenue
A vape tax will obviously raise tax revenue. It will be a significantly regressive tax because vapers, like smokers, tend to be disproportionately on lower incomes. It will also be, in effect, a tax on quitting smoking and will be seen as a cynical and hypocritical cash grab by the general public.
6. Do you agree that the rates and structure will encourage manufacturers to reduce the nicotine content of their products?
No. As mentioned above, this is not a worthwhile objective. Manufacturers will follow demand. They already sell vapes and vape juice with a range of nicotine strengths. They do not need to do any reformulation. They will simply sell more of one type and less of another.
7. What do you think the likely impact the rate structure will have on consumers’ vaping behaviours?
Those who have a higher demand for nicotine will vape more, buy vapes from informal, untaxed sources or buy vapes from abroad by mail order.
8. Should production of vaping products by individuals for their own use be within scope of the duty?
No.
How exactly are you going to do that? It is completely impractical. The vape tax and the government’s other anti-vaping policies will very likely lead to more home production and more illicit sales, but the failure to enforce existing laws suggests that the state will be powerless to stop it. Billions of pounds of tobacco and e-cigarette sales take place in the shadow economy every year and this trend will doubtless continue. The government explicitly intends for all tobacco sales to be conducted on the black market eventually. It may hope to keep some sort of a grip on the e-cigarette market, but the vape tax and other anti-vaping policies currently proposed make it very likely that it will loose control of a growing share of vape sales too. Australia’s neo-prohibitionist approach to vaping has been an absolute fiasco. There are lessons to learn from that benighted country if politicians had the eyes to see.
9. Are there any other factors concerning home production/blending that should be considered?
Yes. It will encourage the sale of pure nicotine which will be mixed ineptly by enthusiastic amateurs and any harm that results from this will be your fault.
58. Do you believe the introduction of the new duty would lead to consumers switching to alternative nicotine containing products?
Yes. Cigarettes.
59. Unless already covered in your responses to other questions within this document, is there anything else you would like us to note about the impact of the duty?
There are legitimate concerns about underage vaping in the UK, rates of which have increased sharply in the last three years. Those concerns should not lead to a knee-jerk reaction that throws the baby out with the bathwater. There are no Pigouvian grounds for a tax on e-cigarettes and no non-trivial negative externalities to be addressed. A vape tax would amount to a tax on smoking cessation and would take hundreds of pounds from those who can least afford it. These are people who have already done what the government demanded and given up smoking. They are now to be punished for it in an attempt to prevent those who are already forbidden from buying vapes from doing so.
The public at large would like something to be done about underage vaping. So do I. But the laws already exist to make an sizeable impact on the problem. Illegal vapes are being sold illegally to children up and down the country. The laws are simply not being enforced. Further legislation and taxation will not address this problem.
References
Cotti, C., Courtemanche, C., MacLean, J. C., Nesson, E., Pesko, M. and Tefft, N. (2022) The effects of e-cigarette taxes on e-cigarette prices and tobacco product sales: Evidence from retail panel data. Journal of Health Economics 86: 102676.
Hartmann-Boyce, J., Lindon, N., Butler, A. et al. (2022) Electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews Issue 11.
McNeill, A., Simonavičius, E., Brose, L., Taylor, E., East, K., Zuikova, E., Calder, R. and Robson, D. (2022) Nicotine vaping in England: an evidence update including health risks and perceptions. Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. 29 September.
Pesko, M. F., Courtemanche, C. J. and MacLean, J. C. (2020) The effects of traditional cigarette and e-cigarette tax rates on adult tobacco product use. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 60: 229-58.
Saffer, H., Dench, D., Grossman, M. and Dave, D. (2020) E-cigarettes and adult smoking: Evidence from Minnesota. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 60: 207-28.
May 22, 2024
Does alcohol misuse cost England £27 billion a year?
Read the rest.It’s a mark of how much the currency has been debased that £20 billion in 2001 would, if it kept pace with inflation, be worth £36 billion today.
That £20bn was the “societal cost” of alcohol to England in 2001, according to an economic analysis from the Cabinet Office. That estimate has never been officially revisited.
However, the neo-temperance Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS) put out an unofficial update on Monday to coincide with a Health and Social Care Select Committee on the subject. IAS’s estimate is £27.4bn – and this is being touted as a 40 per cent increase; the Guardian ran with “alcohol abuse costs soar to £27bn a year” on its front page.
But this ignores inflation. In real terms, the costs have fallen by around 25 per cent, and both the Cabinet Office estimate and the new estimate are gross overestimates.
When I calculated the cost of alcohol misuse to the government in 2015, I arrived at a figure of £3.9bn. Updating my estimates with fresh data last week, it became clear that the total is still below £5 billion and is less than half of the amount the government rakes in from alcohol duty every year.
Why are my figures so different to those of the IAS?
May 21, 2024
Ultra-Processed People revisited

I picked up a copy of Ultra-Processed People in paperback to see what Chris van Tulleken has been up to and he seems to be gettng worse.
Van Tulleken does not only judge people by the motivations they are presumed to have. He also judges food by the supposed motives of the people who make it. In the Frequently Asked Questions section of the new chapter we find the following enquiry:If you cook at home with xanthan gum, are you making UPF?
I am surprised that this question is frequently asked but I suppose Chris and I move in different circles. I am even more surprised by the answer:No. UPF is industrially produced for profit. This is part of the definition. If you make food because you love someone and you want to nourish them, then you’re not ultra-processing.
Earlier in the book, van Tulleken describes xanthan gum as “revoltingly, a bacterial exudate: slime that bacteria produce to allow them to cling to surfaces” and suggests that consuming it may have “profound effects on immune system development”. How fortunate, then, that there is an ingredient that acts as an antidote to this “disgusting” emulsifier. The name of that ingredient? Love.This raises more questions than it answers. What if you ultra-process food for someone you love but make a profit? What if you ultra-process food for someone you hate but give it to them for free?
Read the rest at The Critic.
May 17, 2024
A swift half with Lord Frost
The final episode of the second series of The Swift Half came out yesterday. It features Lord (David) Frost who, amongst other things, negotiated Brexit under Boris Johnson.
May 16, 2024
Gambling suicides - another junk statistic
This is an important story about OHID's statistical incompetence/corruption. Do read the rest.
There is one gambling-related suicide in the UK every day. There are up to 496 gambling-related suicides a year. Ten per cent of all the suicides in England are caused by gambling.
These statistics, and other iterations of them, have become mantras for the anti-gambling lobby since January 2023 when the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) published a report claiming that there are “between 117 and 496 suicides associated with problem gambling” in England. Activists naturally focused on the larger of these two numbers and started putting it on billboards. The monetised value of years of life supposedly lost to suicide make up most of the “up to” £1.77 billion that gambling is said to cost “wider society” each year.
It turns out that these figures are based on nothing. They are a will o’ the wisp. A mirage. They exist only on a laptop in Whitehall. They are worthless.
May 14, 2024
Could the Tobacco and Vapes Bill be any worse? MPs hope so.
The Labour MP Rachael Maskell has put forward an amendment to the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to extend Sunak's prohibition to all nicotine products, including vapes and pouches. The only difference is that the ban on tobacco sales will be for those born after 2008 whereas the ban on nicotine will be for those born after 2014.
To move the following Clause—
“Sale of vaping products and nicotine products
(1) The Secretary of State may by regulations prevent the sale of to anyone born
after 1 January 2015—(a) vaping products; or
(b) nicotine products.(2) Regulations made under subsection (1) must specify an exemption for products prescribed by a clinician
(3) Regulations under this section:
(4) Prior to making any regulations under subsection (1), and within 12 months of this Act coming into force, the Secretary of State must commission an independent evaluation of the health impacts of the matters under subsection (1) and must lay the report of the evaluation before Parliament.”
(a) shall be made by statutory instrument; and
(b) may not be made unless a draft has been laid and approved by resolution of both Houses of Parliament.Member's explanatory statement:
This new clause would allow the Secretary of State, by regulations, to prevent the sale of vaping and nicotine products to anyone born after 1 January 2015 after having laid before Parliament an independent evaluation report on the health impact of doing so.
The final destination is the total prohibition of nicotine. In the long run, the aim is to make it a controlled substance and fully drag nicotine into the war on drugs. There is no ethical or health justification for this, but Sunak has given them more than an inch so they are taking more than a mile.
I don't know what chance this amendment has of passing, but it raises the question of what Labour will do when in power to prove that they are even more prohibitionist than the Conservative Party. The answer will certainly not be nothing.
Even Jacinda Ardern's legislation (now repealed) only included cigarettes. Cigars, hookah, snuff, heated tobacco, rolling papers, etc. were all exempt. Sunak has already gone much further than the New Zealand Labour Party.
The full list of amendments is here (Maskell has put her name to 25 of them). They are mostly uber-prohibitionist, gathering up the loose ends of various ASH demands over the years, such as banning what's left of e-cig advertising, putting health warnings on cigarette papers, introducing a tobacco levy, etc. There is also an amendment (N14) signed by 11 MPs to ban vaping everywhere smoking is banned. Why? Because they can.
It's sickening.
May 13, 2024
Obesity and worklessness
There has certainly been a rise in worklessness since the pandemic. The number of people of working age who are economically inactive has risen from 8.5 million to 9.4 million. This includes 2.8 million people who say they are too sick to work. Almost all of the increase in economic inactivity is explained by this rise in long-term sickness.
Is obesity the ‘root cause’ of the problem? It seems unlikely. Despite obesity rates rising for several decades, there had been no increase in the number of people off work with long-term illness since the 1990s. Between 2000 and 2019, the number actually fell – from 2.3 million to 2 million, but since 2020 another 800,000 people have suddenly joined their ranks.
May 10, 2024
Rampant misinformation at the Tobacco and Vapes Bill committee

The UK Vaping Industry Association has written to MPs to raise concerns about the ‘misleading, incomplete, unsubstantiated, or incorrect’ information presented to the Tobacco and Vapes Bill Committee last week. The UKVIA should have been invited to give evidence to the committee (it has no links to the tobacco industry and therefore could not be disqualified on the usual McCarthyite grounds) but it wasn't. Instead, the floor was given to rabid anti-vapers, mendacious fanatics and hopeless ignoramuses.
The UKVIA has compiled a little document with a handful of the worst lies told by committee members and their guests during the two day hearing. They include...Steve Turner, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, was a repeat offender, claiming that vaping causes popcorn lung and that "nicotine addiction is smoking". Dr Rob Branston, one of Anna Gilmore's cronies at her Bloomberg-funded pressure group, left a massive hostage to fortune when he said “we can be reasonably confident that there will not be a big wave of illicit products in the future.” Cut that one out and keep it.
Sheila Duffy, Chief Executive of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH): “There is a link between regular vaping and moving onto smoking..."
Laura Young, PhD Researcher from the Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science at the University of Dundee: “The first thing to remember is that vaping is not good for you. It is slightly better than smoking...”
The UKVIA letter reads, in part:
It won't make any difference, obviously. The government has made up its mind and is not interested in facts.
“Because the evidence was mainly given by those who have spoken out against vaping in the past, it presented a very skewed message which often conflated the legal compliant vape industry with the black market and frequently made no distinction between the tobacco and vaping industries.
“We recognise there are illegal traders in our industry who will sell to children, and criminal gangs who import black market devices, which can contain illegal and dangerous substances. The legitimate and majority side of the sector want to rid the country of this scourge on society and see them prosecuted, punished and driven out of business. To equate the illegal and legal vaping sectors is as unfair as saying that illegal immigrant smugglers and the Dover to Calais ferry do the same thing. One is illegal and needs to be stopped, the other performs a helpful and beneficial service.
“We are also not trying to water down, delay or circumvent the legislation but we do want to ensure that when MPs scrutinise this Bill they are doing so from an informed perspective which comes from fact not fiction. In scrutinising this Bill, MPs must balance the rights and needs of adult smokers to have access to the very best products to help them quit, with those of young people to be protected from age-restricted products, including vaping.
“This by no means is an easy path to navigate and it will be made even more treacherous whenever evidence presented to the Committee is so misleading that it does more harm than good. Not only does the underhand management of the Bill Committee’s oral evidence session risk the Bill not facing proper scrutiny prior to its third reading, but the selection process across the board was fundamentally undemocratic, with the people this Bill will impact the most not being able to provide evidence on how it can be improved.
“It is another example of the growing list of decisions by the Department of Health and Social Care to exclude the UKVIA and wider industry from any meaningful collaboration with the Department."
May 9, 2024
Everything is displacement
In 2018, Dr Lisa Cameron, an MP from the Scottish National Party, called for the consumption of dog meat to be banned in the United Kingdom. There was no evidence that anyone in Britain was eating dogs and she was surely correct when she said that “I do not believe the general public would approve of the practice at all”. The sale of dog meat has been banned for many years, but Dr Cameron was concerned about a loophole that allows people to eat their own dog if the animal has been humanely killed. Appalled at the prospect of this hypothetical problem, she urged the government to “take action to nip it in the bud”. The Conservative minister Sir Alan Duncan immediately rallied to the cause, saying: “There is no need in the modern world for this disgusting habit.” Like Dr Cameron, he said the government “should nip it in the bud”.
Somewhat surprisingly, the campaign gathered steam. Jim Shannon MP said that “it is obscene, gross and immoral that someone could, technically speaking, cook a dog and eat it”. Following such newspaper headlines as “Horror of DOG EATING in the UK – Theresa May urged to act” (Daily Express), questions were asked in both Houses of Parliament and the House of Commons library prepared a 13 page briefing on the issue in advance of an hour long debate in the House of Commons. The debate was triggered by a Ten-minute Rule Bill from the Conservative MP Bill Wiggin who admitted that “there is no evidence that dogs are eaten in the UK” but that Britain should be “setting an example to the world”. By the summer of 2019, Michael Gove had reportedly drafted legislation to make the possession of dog meat a criminal offence. Alas, the clampdown on theoretical dog-eating fizzled out when civil servants decided that a ban would be “culturally insensitive”.
In its small way, this episode sums up the last 14 years of government. The sheer inanity of it, the entanglement in trivia, the virtue signalling, the use of legislation to “send a message”, the inevitable involvement of Michael Gove and the whole thing falling apart for fear of seeming racist. It is a canned version of the whole era. Unserious politicians in serious times will do anything to avoid grasping the nettle. Everything is displacement.
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