Anti-tobacco fanatics need to lighten up
The fun-loving World Health Organisation’s five ways of getting to tobacco prohibition
CHRISTOPHER SNOWDON
Every two years, the world’s most authoritarian anti-smoking fanatics gather in a darkened room away from the prying eyes of the media and dream up new ways of making life difficult for the 1.2 billion people who enjoy consuming tobacco. In the age of the internet, social misfits who have strange obsessions are often able to find each other and occasionally organise conventions so they can meet in real life. The biennial gathering of anti-nicotine zealots is different insofar as it is lavishly funded by governments, attended by senior government officials and hosted by the World Health Organisation.
The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control’s Conference of the Parties, to give it its unwieldy full name, will be held in Geneva next month. To whet the delegates’ appetite, the organisers have formed an “expert group” to devise sixteen “forward-looking tobacco control measures” for member states to consider. Most of them are insane. The rest are merely idiotic. The lunatic notion of banning cigarette filters and the frankly fascistic idea of banning people from smoking in their own home are among the more moderate suggestions. Many of the rest are simply variations on prohibition.
For example, if a government wants to open a new front in the war on drugs, the WHO’s experts recommend that it should consider “retail reduction”. People buy cigarettes from shops, so if you simply ban shops from selling cigarettes, people won’t be able to get them. Why has no one thought of this before? Aside from its faultless logic, one benefit of the policy, says the WHO, is that it “reduces the number of local tobacco industry allies” by taking away the livelihoods of people who work in shops that sell cigarettes. It is therefore a win-win that will definitely work in the way the WHO hopes it will and couldn’t possibly have any unintended consequences.
Those of us unlucky enough to have been born before 2008 will just have to not buy cigarettes of our own volition
If that doesn’t appeal to you, how about the “sinking lid” system? This involves the government setting limits on how much tobacco can be sold and then steadily reducing those limits. In the short-term, this would raise the price of cigarettes as demand exceeds supply, and in the long-term the government could cut the limit to zero. The WHO admits that there is “no real-world evidence for the impact of sinking lid quotas” because — inexplicably! — no country has experimented with them, but thanks to Australia we know what happens when the price of cigarettes is artificially inflated to absurd levels: you get a tobacco turf war in which retailers are firebombed on a regular basis and the government loses billions of dollars in tax revenue.
If you want a sneakier way to get all the problems of prohibition while insisting that you are not, strictly speaking, a prohibitionist, the WHO suggests the option of taking the nicotine out of cigarettes. The idea of this policy (“Low/very low nicotine content levels in combustible tobacco products”) is to produce cigarettes that are not addictive. And not just cigarettes. The WHO says the same policy could be extended to “nicotine products” in general, although presumably not to nicotine patches and gum since they are on the WHO’s list of “Essential Medicines”. The WHO is not a fan of harm reduction when it comes to nicotine and it looks fondly on countries that ban vapes, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it advocates a harm maximisation strategy when it comes to tobacco. All the hazards of smoke with none of the benefits of nicotine! What’s not to like?
If you are feeling braver, you can simply “ban/phase out sales of tobacco products”. This is Prohibition with a capital P. The last country to try it, unless you count the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, was the tiny kingdom of Bhutan and that didn’t work out too well (the ban was repealed in 2021). South Africa banned tobacco sales for a while during the pandemic, but this also led to outcomes that students of history could have predicted. The WHO skirts over the consequences of these natural experiments and instead praises prohibition for being “the ultimate denormalization of tobacco products”. It is worth bearing this slippery slope in mind next time you hear a “public health” activist talk about the need to “denormalise” drinking and gambling.
The abolitionist option that will be most familiar to British readers is “birthdate-based sales restrictions” in which people born after a certain year are only able to buy tobacco illegally. Alongside subsidies for chess and cricket, this was one of Rishi Sunak’s great achievements as leader of a nominally Conservative government. He didn’t hang around long enough to enact it, and the only other country to have taken it seriously (New Zealand) soon dropped it, but Keir Starmer has been eagerly pushing it through Parliament with bells and whistles attached and the Maldives recently became the first country to enforce something similar. As might be expected, the WHO is very keen on this policy. Its only regret is that “the policy does not benefit older people”. Those of us unlucky enough to have been born before 2008 will just have to not buy cigarettes of our own volition.
In total, the WHO’s “expert group” proposed five different ways of reaching the same catastrophic destination. It is difficult to know which of them is the most preposterous, but it is notable that the UK is the only major country that is turning any of them into law. Extremism has become institutionalised at the WHO, but we in Britain are in no position to mock. For years, the UK has been one of the biggest funders of the WHO in general and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in particular. In 2016, the Department of Health’s “Tobacco Programme Manager”, Andrew Black, attended the conference and his department gave the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control an extra £15 million. Shortly afterwards, Mr Black got a job at the WHO and he is currently the acting Head of the Secretariat of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. We are exporting our fanatics and are in position to preach tolerance and common sense to anyone. Puritanism is a British disease.
This article (Anti-tobacco fanatics need to lighten up) was created and published by The Critic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Christopher Snowdon
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