The nicotine takeover

I've written an article for Spiked about the medicalisation of e-cigarettes. The recent MHRA decision was bad news for vapers, but there is a bigger picture. It is not just e-cigarettes that will be controlled by the medical establishment. All 'nicotine-containing products'—except tobacco—will henceforth be regulated as medicines, including products which have not been invented yet.

This is the continuation of a process that began with the 1868 Pharmacy Act (UK) and the 1915 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act (US) which restricted the sale of opium to chemists and doctors, after lobbying from the Pharmaceutical Society and the American Medical Association respectively. By 1920, the medical establishment had brought all narcotics under its authority on both sides of the Atlantic and paved the way for the war on drugs. In America this extended to alcohol, with doctors able to prescribe medicinal liquor during Prohibition (a privilege they greatly abused). British medics have never seized control of the drinks industry, but the MHRA ruling will give them authority over the other remaining outpost of chemically induced pleasure – nicotine.

This is an audacious move with profound implications for the years ahead. The conventional mass-produced cigarette is arguably a relic of the nineteenth century which will be gradually rendered obsolete by twenty-first century technology. Recreational nicotine use in a few years time will look radically different to that of the cigarette era. It is reasonable to expect e-cigarette technology to improve significantly if a competitive market is allowed to flourish. It is also likely that other safe, or vastly safer, nicotine products will emerge to compete with them.

All this could be jeopardised if the authoritarian and moralistic public health lobby becomes the judge, jury and executioner of the recreational nicotine industry. Their instinctive asceticism takes little account of the desire for pleasure that motivates nicotine users and their obsession with legislation and top-down behavioural control is irreconcilable with the spirit of free enterprise that created these revolutionary products in the first place.

Please read the rest.

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Graphic warnings for alcohol

More news from the slippery slope. The EU-funded public health lobby group Eurocare has been presenting their 'next logical steps' in Ireland. Following the anti-smoking blueprint to the letter, they've mocked up some graphic warnings for wine bottles. Fetching design, don't you think?

We did tell you this would happen, you know. Plain packaging will be next.

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Bent cucumbers, olive oil and the exact diameter of cigarettes

Today sees the 25th anniversary of EEC Regulation No 1677/88, a piece of European legislation that has gone down in infamy for banning bent cucumbers and which was the precursor to the equally infamous ban on bent bananas. Such regulations have been used as a stick with which to beat Eurocrats ever since.

Regulation No 1677/88 specified that cucumbers must be "reasonably well shaped and practically straight" with a maximum height of the arc being "10 mm per 10 cm of the length of cucumber". If you can bear to read the entire list of rules, you will see that the EU's reputation for bureaucratic micromanagement is well deserved. As Dan Hannan and others have pointed out, it is not a myth.

Legislation of this sort has become an embarrassment to Brussels and, in recent years, the EU has sought to overturn some of the more absurd examples in an attempt to regain its credibility. The desire to meddle runs deep, however, as the recent farce (and U-turn) on olive oil bottles demonstrated. The EU is a Leviathan with too many staff and too much time on its hands. Endless bureaucracy is the result. It simply cannot help itself.

Much of the discussion about the forthcoming Tobacco Products Directive has focused on the EU's intention to kill off the emerging e-cigarette industry, as well as its failure to re-legalise snus. These failings are so glaring that the petty rule-making that dominates its text has been overlooked, but they are worth mentioning.

For example, the Commission wants to ban cigarette packs which are 54 mm wide, but will allow packs that are 55 mm wide (and only 55 mm wide). It will allow cigarettes to be sold if they have a diameter of 7.5 mm, but no more and no less than 7.5 mm. Only cigarettes which have a flip top lid will be allowed. Menthol cigarettes will be arbitrarily banned. Cylindrical rolling tobacco tins will be banned, but rectangular pouches will be tolerated. Packs of 20 will be OK, but packs of 19 will be illegal.

Much of this is relatively trivial—laughable, even—but some of it will have a negative impact on consumer choice. The bans on menthol and slims, in particular, will likely create a black market in those products (even Guardian writers have found a ban they don't like in the menthol proposal). But it is the very triviality of the proposals that is the issue. This directive will take several years, countless meetings and huge sums of money to put into place, and for what? Does anyone seriously think that nonsmokers are drawn to cigarettes that have a 7.3 mm diameter? Does even the most deluded anti-smoking crank believe that nonsmokers are strangely repelled by flip-top boxes?  

What is the point of any of it? At its worst—and its worst is diabolical—the Tobacco Products Directive will actively encourage smokers to keep smoking by deterring the use of e-cigarettes and snus. At its best, it is merely useless; a feeble assortment of barrel-scraping policies that confirm the worst stereotypes of the European Commission as an obsessive-compulsive institution whose first instinct is to vomit up mindless, petty and ill-considered regulation for no other reason than that it can. 

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Joyless puritans

I was on Radio Merseyside on Wednesday talking about Alcohol Concern's predictable desire to ban alcohol sponsorship. You can listen to it for the next few days here — my segment begins at around 1 hour 6 minutes.

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All you need to know about Simon Chapman

Reptilian sociologist Simon Fenton Chapman is holding forth in this week's issue of the British Medical Journal in a two-headed debate about e-cigarettes. Naturally, the prohibitionist is touting the benefits of prohibition under the following heading:

Should electronic cigarettes be as freely available as tobacco cigarettes? No

Consider that for a moment. Simple Simon thinks it's better to make real cigarettes more available than a non-tobacco, non-combustible product that is around 99 per cent safer. He says...

Many smokers want to access e-cigarettes to quit or reduce risk, and they should not be denied this opportunity.

This from a man who fought (successfully) to have e-cigarettes banned in Australia! Is Chapman having another senior moment or is he being disingenuous? As he goes onto show, it's the latter.

But the needs of often desperate smokers must not become the tail that wags the dog of tobacco control policy

Er, why not? Are smokers not the people that the anti-smoking lobby set out to help? What is the public health movement for if not to improve the health of smokers? As the war on e-cigarettes shows, whatever altruism existed in the anti-smoking lobby has long since past. Today, it is sheer puritanism, anti-capitalism and the narcissism of the likes of Simple Simon that wag the dog of tobacco control policy. Truly, as Dick Puddlecote likes to say, it has never been about health.

Meanwhile, public health seat-filler Martin McKee brings two bonkers ideas together to create the perfect neo-prohibitionist tweet...

If reading that has made you feel like you need a shower, scrub down with Jean-François Etter's sane and humane response to Chapman's bile: Should electronic cigarettes be as freely available as tobacco cigarettes? Yes

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Close encounters of the third variable

From yesterday's Metro...

Chemical in plastics 'causes obesity in many young girls'

Young girls exposed to a chemical found in a variety of plastics could be up to five times greater risk of obesity, a study suggests.

Sceptical minds will have noticed that this epidemiological finding relates only to girls, not boys—always an indicator of a data dredge. Notwithstanding the unlikelihood of a single chemical 'causing' obesity, what kind of bizarre substance would cause obesity in females but not males?

Those aged nine to 12 with 'extremely high' levels of bisphenol-A in their urine were most likely to be grossly overweight, the Plos One journal reports.

What could possibly explain this phenomenon?

The substance can be found in drinks bottles, food cans and till receipts.

So people who drink lots of drinks and eat lots of food are more likely to be obese? Who'd a thunk it?*



(* "Surely the researchers adjusted their findings to take into account diet?!", I hear you cry. Not really, your honour. They adjusted for the amount of 'junk food' and vegetables eaten because these are seen as good/bad by public health boneheads, but there was no accounting for the number of calories consumed. You can read the study here.)

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E-cigarettes: The control lobby shows its true colours

You've probably heard today's disgraceful news. In short, the medical establishment was given an opportunity to grab some more power and it took it. I'll write more about it when I have time, but here's the statement I put out with the IEA:

"There is no more reason to treat e-cigarettes as medical products than there is to treat alcohol-free beer or chewing gum as pharmaceuticals. They are emphatically not medicines and they make no claim to treat any disease. They are alternatives to smoking which many smokers have found to be effective substitutes for cigarettes.

E-cigarettes have the potential to make conventional cigarettes obsolete, but only if they are allowed to flourish in a free market. The medical establishment has played no part in the rise of this remarkable product and, shamefully, many anti-smoking campaigners want them banned.

The MHRA's decision will stifle innovation, raise prices and lead to a black market in potentially lethal nicotine fluids amongst existing e-cigarette users. In the short term, e-cigarettes will have to be taken off the market, potentially for years and possibly forever. In the meantime, most of the UK's one million e-cigarette users will return to smoking cigarettes. The only winners will be the tobacco industry and the pharmaceutical industry.”

I'll write more about this as soon as I get the time, but I recommend you read Dick Puddlecote...

Today is the apex of tobacco control industry stupidity. Ultimate and resounding proof of what I have been saying for years. It has never, ever, been about health. And now they have illustrated it beyond reasonable doubt.

And Clive Bates...

Medicines regulation involves disproportionate costs, compliance burdens and restrictions – none of which apply to cigarettes. So this is a good day for the cigarette makers, and their competition will be weakened. We need regulation to encourage these products to compete with cigarettes, not smother them with red tape.

What the e-cigarette sector doesn’t need is ‘boring’. That has been tried and failed with NRT. It needs marketing verve, style and buzz, not the dull deadening hand of bureaucratic approvals. That applies to product design, packing, marketing, sponsorship – the works… the public health challenge is to get as many smokers to switch as possible, not to make perfectly safe products that no-one wants.

And, most cathartically, Longrider...

Scum, the lot of them. They should be taken out and strung up from the nearest lamp post. Then their heads put on spikes outside Traitor’s Gate, while the ravens peck out their eyeballs. These evil people are trying to effectively ban a product that is less harmful than tobacco and is helpful to people trying to give it up. It isn’t about health. It was never about health. It is and always has been, about control.

Let the battle lines be drawn. These people are not only the enemies of liberty, they are also the enemies of the one thing they claim to be advocating for—health.

Tobacco control. It's not about tobacco, it's all about control.

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