Health ignored in smoking policy: part 2

Two somewhat unconnected stories but on the same theme.

1. Requiring cigarettes to be fire safe compliant.

There is no doubt that cigarettes do start fires and there is nothing wrong with looking for solutions to this problem.  However, in the numbers game, the effects of smoking on the health of smokers still far outweighs the effects of the fires set by unattended cigarettes. Though, just like the source article here focuses on whether these are pleasant or not, what is missing from the debate is whether these are better or worse in terms of health to smokers.

I do not know the answer to that question but I think anyone promoting fire safe compliant cigarettes should.  (I would be interested if anyone out there knows of any research on this.)

2. Traditional, ethnic or financial exemptions from no smoking regulations.

Some of these exemptions may have merit but there is dissonance at play. If you argue that smoke free spaces exist to protect not only nonsmokers but also workers (smoking and nonsmoking) but then allow certain defined groups exemptions on the basis of tradition, then you are actually saying that members of those groups are not as valuable as “normal citizens”.

Recently certain casinos have been granted exemptions since not to do so would leave them disadvantaged in competing with tribal (or smoking allowed) casinos (link here). Again, a reasonable argument but one that conflicts with other manifestations of this regulation, and one that is saying that financial health outweighs physical health; one could even ironically suggest that this maintained the time honoured principle of the exploitation of the lower classes, money is being made through the sacrifices of the lungs of the workers and consumers.

(It is odd enough that we willingly accept tobacco use as traditional among certain groups and not among others. I remember years ago reading an article on smoking stigma having a negative impact on an American immigrant group of Vietnamese for whom exchanging tobacco was a ritual and denoted honouring the other, and also thinking that really was it so different that any group of smokers offering each other cigarettes? )

I do not argue for the ultimate priority of health over all other concerns. I am just pointing out that though there is an appearance of health being the driving concern, it does not always play out that way.

-PLB

Filed under: 2nd hand smoke, economics, policy , fire safe cigarettes, casinos

Reasonable tobacco control actions would show some concern for health

It never ceases to amaze me how so many tobacco control measures and arguments seem to ignore the fact that smoking is unhealthy.

For instance, it is no secret that when you are trying to get someone to substitute behaviors or products, it is not enough simply to say it is healthier. (Not that we can see many instances of this happening either other than in their indefatigable promotion of abstinence).

Though some people who are acutely aware of health effects might switch to an alternative, most people require some more immediately attractive incentive such as making the alternative cheaper. In this regard, there seems to be an army working very hard to eliminate taxation loopholes that allow any safer tobacco products (such as smokeless tobacco) to be any cheaper than cigarettes.

Another pernicious move is the assault on flavoured products, all the more reprehensible since it is argued as a childhood issue. Again, if you want someone to make a switch, make the switch attractive. Currently there are moves on to ban flavours in ecigarettes (see here) just as there has been in the smokeless products. In fact, the general disapproval of flavoured products has NJOY cowed and following suit (link here). And of course, in what sounds like a call to responsibility but is more likely a fear of falling behind in the marketplace, they are asking other ecig companies to join them in this foolish and self serving ploy.

Think of this. If you are a smoker and like most smokers, enjoy the experience, why in the world would you switch to a product that is not marketed as being any healthier, that tastes no better than your current product and is no cheaper.

In summary, to make a dent in smoking related disease and death, policies regarding alternative healthier products need to be presented in the following way:

1. Safer alternatives should be labelled as such.
2. Safer alternatives should be cheaper.
3. Safer alternatives should as or more pleasant to use than smoking.
4. Safer alternatives should be allowed in some places where smoking is not.

Is that so hard?

-PLB

Filed under: anti-smoking movement, e-cigarettes, policy, smokeless tobacco , flavoured products, njoy

New catalog of financial conflict of interest re anti-e-cig activism

For anyone who is not aware of pharmaceutical industry funding of the leading anti-THR activists, E Cigarette Direct recently produced this list. Anyone who understand the concept and implications of conflict of interest (i.e., does not just use accusations of COI when they lack the expertise to make substantive criticisms of an analysis they want to denigrate) will realize that any issue with worldly implications will unavoidably generate COI on all sides. It cannot be avoided so needs to be appropriately dealt with. In the case at hand, the obvious minimum step is for entities with ties to the pharmaceutical industry to disclose them and (until the public understands this) point out that pharma loses business when smokers adopt THR.

There is nothing inherently bad (or inherently good) about pharma giving grants. Some naive commentators argue that pharma grants must be better than other grants because those companies create good things. But, of course, the companies do many things. They (a) invent lifesaving drugs for serious diseases, which make huge net social contributions; (b) convince people that they should start treating some condition with drugs though it has been done not before, creating their own demand rather than meeting pent-up demand – i.e., they are akin to the fashion industry; and (c) create and heavily market drugs that are needlessly expensive or harmful, creating a profit but a net social loss – i.e., they are akin to the modern finance industry.

In other words, they are companies. If we substitute (a) creating hybrid and electric cars, (b) hyping minor design tweaks, and (c) pushing the sale of gas-guzzling trucks for commuters, then we have described the automobile industry. Indeed, if we substitute (a) developing and marketing smokeless products, (b) trying to entice brand switching, and (c) making cigarettes available to each new cohort, then we have described most of the major tobacco companies.

Lacking both saints and unrepentant demons in the world that controls the money that the rest of us need to do our work (I trust everyone understands that governments and foundations are as imperfect as corporations), it is up to researchers and advocates to be transparent about our relationships and to try to minimize their influences when we do science or engage in education/advocacy in the public interest. The lack of transparency is where ASH, ACS, and others clearly cross the line into unethical behavior – there is no excuse for them hiding relevant funding information from the public and journal readers. However, there is a good argument to be made that these organizations already have extremist positions that happen to coincide with the goals of pharma (and thus their politics could not be influenced by the funding). In particular, anyone whose worldly goal is the extreme position, elimination of all self-administered nicotine regardless of its costs and benefits, already have the incentive to discourage THR because they know they will fail in their goal if people learn that there are satisfying low-risk alternatives to smoking.

Thus the strongest COI is this goal, which therefore should be disclosed. Once that is done, knowing the goals of the funder offers no additional information – we know that the authors already supported that goal, so how could they be influenced by funding to support that goal? In keeping with this, my colleagues and I recognize that our concern about people’s freedom and welfare means that we want to encourage THR and resist the “quit or die” orthodoxy, and we try to disclose this information whenever it might not be obvious – i.e., when writing something that might tend to encourage THR, but is not a clear statement about why we support THR. I am not aware of any examples of the abstinence-only advocates meeting this ethical standard of disclosure. An interesting question is whether they know they are hiding something that they should be disclosing or are they simply so immersed in their insular political culture that they have convinced themselves that they have no COI, nor even any ethical duties.

–Carl V Phillips

Filed under: anti-smoking movement, conflict of interest, e-cigarettes , pharmaceutical funding

The usual clueless complaints about spending on anti-smoking

Does anyone recall any articles about proposed or actual government anti-smoking spending that did not follow the same script as the recent ones (NYT, PressConnects) that complained about U.S. state government spending?

Reported spending on anti-smoking programs was $X (it does not matter what X is) and the anti-smoking activists complain that this is far less than the governments collect in sales taxes and MSA money, implying that somehow they are entitled to the full take. Sometime they even claim, contrary to all evidence, that if they were “fully funded” then they could work miracles.

(Part of the propaganda is that the Master Settlement Agreement payments come from the manufacturers, but it is effectively an additional national sales tax, arguably created in violation of constitutional rules about who can impose taxes, but that is a different story.)

Do the anti-tobacco extremists really think that nothing else government spends money on has any benefit, and thus there is no reason to spend money on anything other than their projects?

I recognize that they seldom seem to have sensible policy analysis in their repertoire — witness how often one of them writes, in effect, “this small study looked at one chemicals analysis (or maybe health endpoint) in isolation, without any consideration of the big picture or any mention of economics, benefits, policy, etc., and based on these results we conclude that the entire world should change public policy regarding nicotine products as follows….”

(For readers interested in an illustration of this phenomenon, the best recent example is the study of PAHs in smokeless tobacco by the anti-THR group at the University of Minnesota. This was a single non-replicated study of limited scope that did not even address human health outcomes, let alone offer any cost-benefit analysis of manufacturing changes. Yet the authors breathlessly concluded that, “Urgent measures are required from the U.S. tobacco industry to modify manufacturing processes”. This policy declaration would still be absurd – completely unsupported by the study results and delving into realms beyond the authors’ apparent expertise — even absent the fact, as Brad Rodu reported in detail,, that the study found levels of chemicals that were so low that any potential health risks lie between trivial and none.)

But even given the behavior of the extremists, you would think that a news reporter would occasionally stumble upon someone to interview about this whose education included one course on law and economics or applied micro, and thus could explain that there is absolutely no reason to expect that the optimal amount to spend on smoking cessation bears any relation to what is collected in cigarette taxes. The most obvious reason for this conclusion is that U.S. states and other governments are taxing the heck out of smokers for the purpose of making ends meet because it is the one tax increase that they can usually get away with without complaint. So of course not all of the revenue is going to anti-smoking – that was never what the taxes were designed for.

But even if the taxes were entirely based on the goal of discouraging smoking, rather than just seeing smokers as a convenient ATM, there would still be no reason to expect that spending it all on anti-smoking would be useful. A simple analogy is that some governments put deposits on soda bottles, batteries, and other objects to increase the chance that they are recycled rather than littered. But whatever the government might net from this (because not all the bottles are returned and the government can choose to claim the balance for itself rather than letting merchants keep it) is not necessarily the right amount to spend on anti-littering campaigns. This is obviously the case since some jurisdictions collect a lot of money this way while some collect none at all — which is, of course, similar for cigarette taxes. An even simpler illustration: If a government collected no money because it did not impose bottle fees or cigarette taxes, would that mean that the optimal level of spending on anti-littering or anti-smoking would be zero? Obviously not.

So what determines the right amount to spend?

Anti-smoking efforts, like all government projects, should be funded until the value the next dollar produces is as high as the value that would come from the next dollar of spending on education, roads, police, social services, and whatever else competes for scarce resources. Spending more than that lowers overall social welfare by taking away from a better use of the money.

So what about the marginal product of a dollar spent on anti-smoking?

It is quite difficult to assess, which is probably why those who want that money can get away with saying “gimme more, more, more!”, but my guess is that a careful analysis would reveal is that an extra dollar on top of the billions already spent produces approximately nothing. It might be that the first few hundred million spent on the most useful targets is helping hundreds of thousands of people a year become nonsmokers. (It might also be that even this slice of the budget accomplishes almost nothing because social forces and common knowledge so dominate smoking behavior – we cannot really know because the assessments of the effectiveness of interventions are generally pretty useless.) But beyond some expenditure, there are clearly severely diminishing returns.

Evidence for this is patent: There is so much spent on silly advertising, pointless research, and barely-useful cessation aids that we clearly have run out of ways to spend the money on high-payoff anti-smoking efforts. If activists who call for bigger budgets have such good ideas about how to spend more money on new projects, why are they not redirecting the portion of the first couple of billion per year that is clearly wasted?

Meanwhile, the U.S. states are in a nasty financial situation, with difficulty paying for schools and other basic services. It is a reminder of the egocentrism (i.e., inability to recognize that other people have different viewpoints or preferences) of the anti-tobacco extremists that they do not seem to care that meeting their demands might well mean that someone goes hungry. Just to keep things in perspective, I should note that the net social damage done by overspending on smoking cessation in the U.S. is trivial compared to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control demanding that countries with health budgets of a few dollars per person-year devote substantial resources to anti-smoking efforts. If poor countries keep the promises they were arm-twisted into making, the social costs will be enormous. This should clearly illustrate that calling for more spending on anti-smoking eventually becomes grossly unethical. The Framework Convention demands are so extreme in trying to direct public money away from where it is desperately needed and giving it to one special interest group as to nearly fit the definition of embezzling or at least major corruption.

The issue of diminishing marginal benefit reminds me of the same principle manifesting in a different way: When I first started doing research in public health, in the mid-1990s, I was quite interested in trying to help reduce the health burden from smoking. But after observing how many people were working in that area and what they were doing, it became apparent to me that the marginal contribution was basically useless, and that the area was (already back then!) grossly overpopulated. Thus, though the issue was the biggest public health issue in rich nations all totaled, the marginal contribution another researcher (like another million dollars) could make was quite small. So I decided to focus my attention elsewhere.

Of course, if I had been more open minded at the time and looked past the orthodox discourse, I might have found the THR work of Rodu and a few others and realized there was an under-populated and potentially valuable area to work on. I only discovered that half a decade later and by accident. (I try to remind myself of that now and again when I get frustrated with people who are genuinely interested in promoting public health but are tricked by the anti-tobacco extremists’ rhetoric into believing that harm reduction is not a good option.) This story does suggest that there may be a few approaches to reducing the health risks from smoking that are indeed underfunded — like, say, harm reduction. Total government and NGO spending on researching and promoting THR is a small fraction of 1% of the total anti-smoking budget (and most of that depends on industry grants). Of course it does not seem terribly likely that the activists clamoring for more state spending want any of it directed to THR since both they and the states have a history of wanting to just do more of what they have been doing even though the marginal value has diminished to zero.

-Carl V. Phillips

Filed under: anti-smoking movement, economics, policy , brad rodu, economics, FCTC, Master Settlement Agreement. sales tax, PAHs, university of minnesota

New Jersey blocks the fire exits…

TRENTON — The New Jersey Senate has approved a bill that restricts the sale and use of electronic cigarettes.

The bill expands the definition of “smoking” to include e-cigarettes and extends the ban on smoking by minors to include them.

Electronic cigarettes look like the real thing but don’t contain tobacco. Instead, they employ a metal tube with a battery that heats up a liquid nicotine solution. Users inhale and exhale the resulting water vapor.

The Senate bill, approved Thursday by a 38-0 vote, prohibits their use in public places and workplaces. It was approved Monday by the state Assembly and now goes to Gov. Jon Corzine.

U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg has called on the federal Food and Drug Administration to remove e-cigarettes from the market.

(via cigarettesreview)

Michael Siegel has already addressed the foolishness of the supposed health detriments to e-smoking so I will not repeat that.

But here’s what struck me about this:

1. If we think smoking is bad (and that appears to be generally accepted) then you should be encouraging alternatives. The popular perception of smokers so often put forth by anti-smoking groups is of slaves to an addiction which will kill them and who would do anything to quit. So to use a simple metaphor, they are in a room on fire and are actively looking for an exit.

E-cigarettes are just such an exit.

They might not be the official “fire drill” exit, but they are an exit. But the building fire marshalls don’t like the idea of anybody just using whichever exit they like. They spent a lot of time designating the proper door and by god, people are going to use it! Better a few lost than the chaos of people getting out of the room any which way.

2. Backing up the behavioral control is changing the definition of smoking; Orwellian NewSpeak if ever there was. But it is telling in that it makes quite clear that the concern is over the behavior and not the health consequences.

3. Finally, even the most obvious issues tend to have at least one dissenter but here we had 38 voting for and none against? When is the last time that happened? Must have been quite the exciting day on the floor hearing the arguments on that!

-PLB

Filed under: anti-smoking movement, e-cigarettes, policy , ecigarettes, new jersey, smoking bans

Eroding the safer options

Ok, its pretty well accepted even by those who do not want to promote the option of smokers using smokeless tobacco that using smokeless tobacco is much safer than smoking. (They like to make the point of saying “less harmful” rather than safer to make sure to keep harm in the equation).

However a lot of energy is spent focussing on the residual potential for harm in using this product. And it seems to be quite popular with the media to republish these reports with ever increasingly inflamatory headlines.

Witness the new wave of media around the Stepanov study. (First wave, Second wave, and more).

This report has found higher levels of certain carcinogens than had previously been reported. There is no reason to debate the findings, and the recommendation that manufacturers attempt to reduce these levels is good however what remains unaffected is that these potentially carcinogenic products are still fractionally so when compared with smoking. In other words, whatever this report shows, and it says nothing about actual disease, switching from smoking is as good a move as it ever was. (Of course, many cannot see the difference and this report ends up with misleading headlines such as the Chewing Tobacco No Safer Than Smoking).

To belabor the point, they measured amounts of constituents that have been known to be carcinogenic at the cellular level. They did not prove that these substances had any substantial effect on human beings.

Its no different if we were bombarded every few weeks or so by studies about how under some circumstances seat belts increased the possibility of injury. These would be true studies yet not only would they not affect the fact that using seat belts are better than not using them and that these very reports would be used by some people to argue against the use of seat belts altogether.

One final observation: bad news is so much more of a draw than good. Any one of these bad reports about tobacco generates myriad appearances here and there but one about the benefits of switching is fortunate to get any press at all.

-PLB

Filed under: smokeless tobacco , misinformation, stepanov, toxicology

Is the Climate Change Orthodoxy as Dishonest as the Anti-Tobacco Orthodoxy? An Epistemic Challenge Problem

The last couple of weeks have offered a fascinating and educational experience for those of us who attempt to interject legitimate science and thoughtful ethical analysis into the politicized world of tobacco research. It was enough to inspire me to write my first blog entry.

In case you missed it, a scandal erupted when a huge amount of email from climate researchers was leaked. The email revealed the behavior of the faction that promotes the dominant theory, that anthropogenic global warming poses a major threat that we need to address immediately. These researchers-qua-political-actors endeavored to ignore and denigrate research that does not support their theories — done without even addressing the accuracy or validity of that science — and attempted to mislead the public about their own findings.

What is fascinating, in case it is not obvious, is that a simple word-substitution algorithm would make the whole thing read like an expose of the anti-tobacco extremists’ behavior in attacking tobacco harm reduction, denying the benefits of nicotine, condemning low-risk products, overstating the effects of second-hand smoke, and trying to bully anyone who challenges them.

John Tierney provided a good concise overview of the “smug groupthink” that has already been revealed from this enormous collection of information. Adding a bit of narrative element to the story (foretelling a book-length version?), Tierney describes how, on the email list for the researchers who support the dominant theory and politics, one researcher was expressing concern about the quality of some data while the others focused their discussion of how to protect data from legitimate legal requirements to share it (read: how to make sure that no one who does not already agree with their conclusions gets a chance to re-analyze the data).

There is also this revelation: “When a journal publishes a skeptic’s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting”. The usual strategy appears to be to attack anyone whose research threatens the orthodoxy as being on the payroll of industry, whether or not that is true, without even considering whether the science might be right. As Tierney put it, “Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians.”

Probably the most interesting reported scandal, which you may have heard about, related to the hockey-stick-shaped graph that was widely touted to the public and policy makers. It purported to show a sharp increase in global temperatures over recent decades after centuries of relative constancy with a downward trend. It turns out that the real inconvenient truth about this graph was that the recent uptick was based (without any acknowledgment or explanation) on a different data source than the rest of the graph; had the graph just used the one data source it would have showed no increase.

It all sounds strangely familiar, huh?

But here is the most interesting part to me: An educated layperson — say someone with a degree and who reads the news, but with no special expertise in the topic — could be forgiven for not knowing there was any honest scientific disagreement about the particulars of global warming. Similarly, an educated layperson could be forgiven for not knowing about the great potential of tobacco harm reduction, the fact that nicotine is a beneficial drug with very minor health risks (so long as one is not inhaling smoke), and that environmental tobacco smoke does not pose the dire threat that is currently fashionable to claim and is actually quite difficult to link to substantial disease risk. (This forgiveness does not extend to experts who know better but are intentionally misleading people, nor to the many clinicians or “public health” spokespeople who pretended to be experts while merely reciting the conventional wisdom they read in an anti-tobacco pamphlet. Such people are liars of one sort or another and are a threat to the already shaky validity of public health science, and should not be forgiven for either.)

So, as an educated layperson on the question of global warming, I read about this revelation and realize there is more to this science than meets the eye. I see the smoking gun that we have been lied to, and that people who present themselves as legitimate scientists are acting more like marketers. I am also aware of the research that shows people want to believe. E.g., most people, when reading a newspaper account of topics they know something about, rate it as fairly inaccurate and misleading, but then assume the story on the next page they have no expertise on must be completely accurate. But even for me, my gut reaction is to assume that most everything I thought I knew a month ago is still right. I seek consolation in the embarrassed researchers’ defensive claims (see, e.g., the explanation for the aforementioned data change in Tierney’s column and the comments following Tierney’s blog, which also contain additional damning observations).

In short, even I have to work hard to force myself to realize that politics may be trumping science and that I should reevaluate what I thought I knew. This does not mean, of course, that we should assume that the opposite is true. That would be like concluding that smoking is not so bad just because propagandists have overstated how bad it is and repeatedly lied about low-risk alternatives. The key is that the core message is probably still the best supported theory, but it may be that lot of details with great practical importance may have been lies and we need to stop assuming all the orthodox claims are true.

I am interested in epistemology, work hard to think like a good scientist and philosopher, am familiar with the research on practical epistemology, and have personally experienced a case where the orthodox “researchers” have hidden truths and misled the public. But I still want to cling to what I believed before. It seems entirely possible, of course, that the global warming orthodoxy is correct on all points of substance in spite of the fact that the anti-tobacco orthodoxy is lying to the public about harm reduction and other topics. After all, there has been no evidence presented to suggest that climate scientists write papers that systematically ignore the weaknesses of their data and methods, or that journals will publish almost anything that supports the orthodoxy regardless of its scientific weakness, while censoring heterodox studies that are methodologically of much higher quality.

Thumbing through a climate science journal and seeing what seems like careful science offers a breath of fresh air for those of us who usually must read public health journals. But my gut inclination to believe them in spite of the recent scandal has nothing to do with reviewing the accuracy of their core claims — I could be misled by what might be faux-careful-science outside of my field just as easily as a layperson could be taken in by the junk science in public health journals. No, I am just another victim of the well-known psychological tendency to not want to admit doubt about something I thought I knew.

So, what hope do we have of educating victims of the wealthy and aggressive anti-tobacco (anti-nicotine, anti-electronic-cigarette, etc.) propaganda machine about the truth?

I am not going to mull that question over for five minutes and glibly suggest solutions (I will leave such behavior to people writing the worthless “policy implications” paragraphs for their health research study papers). But I would like to try to clarify the question: If you, reader, are a proponent of tobacco harm reduction, then you are probably concerned with freedom, human welfare, and protecting highly-vulnerable people from the abuses of powerful institutions. Thus, there is probably a good chance you were disposed to be sympathetic to the “we need to do something about global warming, soon” position. So please read a bit more about the recent revelations and then introspect about whether your urge is to continue to believe exactly what you always believed. What would it take to sway you from that? Is there any particular revelation that gave you an anchor of skepticism that did not just fade away? Were you left with particular “but what about…?” thoughts whose answers might have swayed you more? (Having thought about these, please drop me an email or post a comment — I am seeking to learn more.)

Of course, this exercise does not work if you already thought there were holes in the orthodox position on global warming. In that case, your reaction is probably to not feel, at a gut level, that anything has been revealed because it is all old news. Those of us with expertise know that the anti-tobacco extremists are willing to lie to the public, damage the validity of health science, and do whatever they can to destroy anyone who reveals truths they find inconvenient.

I get the impression that there are honest scientists who question some of the global warming orthodoxy that would say the same thing about their antagonists. What could those honest scientists say to me, an educated and very interested layman, that would help me see the world as they see it? And is there anything they could say to someone less invested in epistemology?

-Carl V. Phillips

Filed under: anti-smoking movement , climate change, group think, john tierney

Anybody up for a class action suit against Banzhaf?

In a recent press release, John Banzhaf is encouraging any and all to pursue legal actions against electronic cigarette distributors on the basis of them being presented as absolutely clean products when an FDA study found trace quantities in a few units of a small sample. These same contaminants have been found to be present in pharmaceutical nicotine products. (And as is quite widely known, these elements exist in much greater quantities in cigarettes, the product they are typically replacing and the product that Banzhaf, and his organization, ASH, supposedly are fighting against).

As Michael Siegel points out in his blog today, Banzhaf is not calling for suits against any pharmaceutical companies and suggests that at the very least he should have disclosed that much of the funding of his group comes from the distributors of nicotine replace products (which of course could be threatened by any growth in the e-cigarette market).

All I can say is that I am somewhat relieved that Banzhaf did not use the early studies on airbags and seatbelts and the few instances of related injury to keep these products from the market.

Of course at the core this is simple self aggrandizement. I can think of no other example where the signatory of the letter refers to himself in the third person so many times and so magnificently. (In nine out of the thirteen paragraphs of his release, he refers to himself at least once, and even bestows upon himself a title: the Dean of Public Interest Lawyers).

You just have to wonder how this blowhard survived grade school.

-PLB

Filed under: anti-smoking movement, e-cigarettes , john banzhaf, lawsuits

For only three cents, you too can stop STDs..

Astonishing report in Forbes.com titled A Beer Tax Won’t Reduce the Clap.

Not only a grabber of a headline but a whiplash of an aftershock in wondering what the alternative position would be. Seems lettered senior medical directors Lloyd I. Sederer of the New York State Office of Mental Health and Dr. Eric Goplerud of the Center for Integrated Behavioral Health Policy at George Washington University. have come to the conclusion that “a tax increase of 3 cents per beer would cut youth gonorrhea by 9%”.

Lets leave aside the original impulse to track beer tax rates against youth gonorrhea rates over time (full marks for originality are given) but consider this current growth in levying taxes on goods in order to change public behaviors.

1. If you are really serious about this, one would think that adding a few dollars tax to the beer might have more of an effect on the gonorrhea rates….if just three cents buys you nine percent, you might just make a dent in some other STDs as well and maybe even into the adult incidence.

2. But really, these are just the baby steps toward the Holy Grail of eliminating choice. There is a point of taxation where for some the purchase becomes impossible rather than difficult; the choice has been forced. Let’s just be done with it and remove all discretionary income. It only leads to disease it seems. After all it is discretionary income that purchases vehicles which are necessary for accidents, that purchases alcohol which can also lead to falls or poisoning (and don’t forget the STDs), that purchases cigarettes which cause disease. Sure, discretionary income and the freedom to use it can make life more pleasurable but is a little bit of pleasure really worth the possibility of disease, obesity, or even death?

Look, I’m not saying that removing discretionary income would eliminate accidents and disease but as the source study author in all their evidence based wisdom put it, it could.

And you can bet that there are a few folks out there who are even now , with furrowed brow, drawing lines between these STD rates, heart attacks and second hand smoke regulations. I’m sure there is some correlation to be found.

I do have an alternative hypothesis regarding this interaction and that is if you made alcohol very cheap it might in fact reduce STD rates. The same people who would take advantage of cheap booze and then lay about the house all day drinking might just be the same folks who would otherwise be most likely to otherwise go out and spread those interesting venereal conditions. I’m not saying that it would happen but it could.

I’m just saying.

-PLB

Filed under: fun, policy , alcohol leads to gonorrhea

Spinning wheels, rejecting improvements..

It is always interesting to watch dogmatic groups devour their own young, or to put it another way, dissension with the potential of making basic arguments both stronger and more subtle, and thus more persuasive to opponents, is aggressively rooted out to keep it simple. And here the KISS message directive of Keep It Simple Stupid only leads to misinformation and more smoker death. With any luck it will accelerate the demise of these dangerous anti-health organisations.

1. Michael Siegel is ejected from the Americans for NonSmoker Rights list serve (link here).

The true colors of the modern-day anti-smoking movement showed brightly last week, as a prominent smoke-free air advocate (me) was thrown off a smoke-free advocacy list-serve for daring to criticize an inflammatory and unfounded personal attack, bordering on defamation, of an individual (private citizen) who is a smoking ban opponent which was posted on the list-serve.

2. Christopher Snowdon follows up this story with an older one of Siegel running afoul of the same organization when he attempted to correct his own error (link here). He had written an article with what turned out to be an inappropriate characterization of a researcher, in communication with that researcher realized his error, and in good faith tried to remove the article and publish an open retraction. Again, the organization refused to on the grounds that this would contradict a previous position and erode the bulwarks in general.

Following is an excerpt from the letter from the ANR on why it would not allow Siegel to publish a retraction to his own writing.

But at this point ANR must put its political credibility ahead of what you consider to be your scientific credibility. As I stated to you earlier, you are being much too hard on yourself and perhaps after some time passes you will feel more comfortable with the notion that the paper was accurate and that you really had nothing to apologize for. You have done far too much good on this issue to let this one incident deter you from further strong advocacy, and I hope you will continue to be a valuable asset to the movement.

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. ~George Bernard Shaw

-PLB

Filed under: anti-smoking movement , americans for nonsmokers rights, anr, christopher snowdeon, dogmatism, george bernard shaw, michael siegel