Prohibition Always Produces the Same Fruits

Behold the Works of the Health Do Gooders

By David Atherton  
16 Aug 2014
Breitbart News

The European anti-fraud agency OLAF has recently announced that between 2009 and 2013 the European Union (EU) lost €700 million in taxes as smugglers cross into Spain to sell cigarettes at half the prices. 

Two hundred Marlboro in Spain are €47, compared to €18.50 in Gibraltar. However, it is trivial compared to the estimated €10.9 billion lost throughout the EU, with 10 percent of all EU cigarettes being illegal. 

The irony is that many British visitors see Spain as a cheap place to buy cigarettes. By comparison the UK price is an eye watering €120. Between 2006 and 2011, the amount of tobacco imported into Gibraltar tripled and organised crime has exported it to the mainland. It is also one of the pretexts for Spain to hold time-consuming searches of Gibraltar cars in their attempt to pressure the British government into relinquishing control of the territory.

The authorities both sides of the border have been hand-wringing under the mantra that something must be done, however much of it may well be in vain.

The World Health Organization and its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a treaty that the UK and the EU are signatories to, oblige governments to raise taxation on tobacco. In November 2012, it wrote: “Increasing tobacco taxes generally further increases government revenues, as the increase in tax normally outweighs the decline in consumption of tobacco products.”  Spain is no doubt encouraged to raise taxation to help prop up its deficit and Euro-addled economy. The unintended consequences of tobacco taxation are mimicked elsewhere worldwide. As taxes are increased, it becomes lucrative to avoid or evade taxes as described by economist Professor Arthur Laffer and his eponymous curve.

The highest rate of tax on cigarettes is in Ireland. Unsurprisingly the country has an epidemic of legal and illegal tobacco importation. It is, for now, entirely legitimate to go to another country in the EU and bring back as much tobacco as you like as long as it is for personal consumption and not for resale.

It is estimated however that 27 percent of all tobacco and cigarettes in Ireland are consumed free of duty.  €556 million is lost to the Irish treasury, with some quite unwholesome terrorists involved, The Irish Retailers Against Smuggling hold the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA and the INLA responsible, stating that “criminal gangs are making €3 million per week from illegal tobacco trade.” 

Worldwide, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Scotland accuse the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)… the Columbian FARC… and the Chinese Triads.” I am sure it will not be long before ISIS is involved.  In New York, as reported previously, it was discovered that high prices meant that only 19.4 percent of cigarette packs were legally purchased with local taxes paid.

Canada in 1995 nearly saw the trade disappear as this paper from the Fraser Institute outlines. Unwisely the anti-smokers in 2000 pushed for higher taxes and like Ireland has a 27 percent saturation of illegal tobacco.

Smuggling is not a victimless crime. Retailers suffer as do legitimate tobacco manufacturers. In fact, in Australia and other places tobacco companies employ their own agents to find stores who are selling illegally.

The implication for plain packaging is more than implied. Illegal contraband sales are up from 13.3 percent to 13.9 percent of the market in Australia in the first year.

The whole racket seems to have an American prohibition feel about it, with large sections of society willing to be criminal as smugglers save them taxes. The anti-smokers are the most guilty in pushing increases in taxation to reduce consumption. 

Smoking is, economically speaking, inelastic. There is little reduction in consumption in response to higher taxes. Governments and anti-smoking advocates have largely created the problem themselves, eager to tax and spend, and they have passed the Laffer Curve and will see only diminishing returns.

The law of unintended consequences are wholly observable.

Letter From the UK (About Smoking in Australia)

Plain Packaging Fails 

Cigarette Sales Rise in Australia

by Andre Walker  

6 Jun 2014

Breitbart London

Cigarette sales in Australia have increased since the introduction of plain packaging, according to the Australian. The increase has come from budget brands that are no longer identifiable as being cheaper due to their packaging.

Total sales in the first full year since the new packaging came in showed an overall increase of 59 million individual cigarettes across the country. This represents one of the few incidences of cigarette consumption increasing in a modern Westernised country. The increase of 0.3 percent reverses the downward trend of 15.6 percent in the previous four years.

Plain packaging was introduced in December 2012 and was hailed at the time by Labor Health Minister Nicola Roxon as the “world’s toughest anti-smoking laws”. But the plan appears to have backfired as half of the increase in sales have come from the cheaper brands, suggesting that smokers merely switched brands and smoked more because they were cheaper.

Research by InfoView, which monitors the industry, showed market share for cheaper cigarettes rose from 32 percent to 37 percent over the year.  Cigarette giant Philip Morris, which owns Marlboro, says it had not seen a drop in demand since the new packaging came in. Whereas British American Tobacco Australia said the number of people quitting had dropped, and sales volumes were increasing.

The Australasian Association of Convenience Stores chief executive Jeff Rogut said sales by his members grew by $120 million or 5.4 per cent last year. He said: “Talking to members, one of the most common refrains they get from people coming into stores is, ‘What are your cheapest smokes?”He also claimed that the move to lower priced cigarettes was leading to people coming back more often.

The projected tax take from tobacco in 2017 – 2018 is $10.98bn compared with just $7.85bn this year, suggesting that the Australian Federal Government is aware that its laws are unlikely to have the stated effect of reducing smoking.

Australia introduced plain packaging despite warnings to the parliamentary inquiry – set-up to look at the subject – from a number of group that plain packaging would either have unintended health consequences or have little or no benefits.  When the inquiry reported in 2011 it stated there were concerns that plain packaging would “force manufacturers to compete on price, rather than brand, with the unintended consequence of reducing the price of tobacco products”.

The figures released relate to legally sold and taxed cigarettes, but the increase in sales may be much higher when counterfeit and black-market cigarettes are included. Plain packaging makes it far easier for criminals to produce fake cigarettes, which are of a far lower quality and much more dangerous that those produced by reputable firms.

In one case reported on by the Herald Sun earlier this year Australian customs seized 80 million counterfeit cigarettes. This has led to campaigners claiming that it might be safer if packaging became harder to copy instead of easier.

The UK has toyed with plain packaging despite concerns about the health risks. Health Minister Jane Ellison stated earlier this year that she did intend to push ahead with the policy but it was not included in the Queen’s speech.

The country is already awash with counterfeit cigarettes as tobacco taxes are much higher in the UK than they are in continental Europe. Unsuspecting customers in bars and nightclubs buy what they believe are ‘bootlegged’ cigarettes from France: i.e. cigarettes from genuine manufacturers that have been brought to the country without paying tax. In fact what they are getting are dangerous, unregulated counterfeits from China.

However, the country may still push forward with plain packing to placate the growing anti-smoking industry who push for ever more draconian laws even if the rules are of dubious benefit to public health. The industry comprises charities, campaign groups and NHS bodies all employing large numbers of activists.

Public Spirit Levels

A Good Start

There is a certain cast of person who believes he or she are called to hector everyone else about what is good for them.  They are lifelong professional nannies.  A previous generation would have called them “busybodies”.  They operate within the realms of certitude so infallible they do not hesitate to advocate what is good for everyone else.  They harangue legislators, bureaucrats, regulators, the media–anyone that will listen.  Their dedication and passion are compelling.

Some examples spring to mind–drawn from just today’s newspapers.  First up is the anti-tobacco crusaders.  Now the “big thing” that would deter everyone from smoking tobacco and which would make New Zealand smoke free by 2025 or whenever was plain packaging of tobacco.  No brand recognition.  No advertising allowed.  Except it appears to makes little impact on actual smoking rates.  And, in any event, smokers–as a class are not that bad.  They actually benefit the public purse.  They are more likely to die from various diseases at earlier ages, thereby reducing their fiscal drain upon government health and welfare spending. So the fiscal gnomes in Treasury are reportedly, oh-so-quietly, advocating increasing smoking rates as a way to reduce government spending increases over the next fifty years. 

So, say the professional nannies, we need to do more to stub our smoking.  What now?  How about a legally enforced change in the colour of ciggies.  Well knock me over with a puff of smoke.  Why didn’t we think of that earlier?  If plain packaging won’t work, coloured smokes will.  Why?  Well, they can be coloured in unattractive hues.  This, from the NZ Herald:

Public health researchers say the Government’s next step after introducing plain packaging for tobacco should be to make cigarettes ugly by changing them to a dark green or brown colour which made young people think of “slime, vomit or pooh”.  A tobacco control lobby group told a parliamentary committee that cigarettes themselves were the “new canvas” for anti-smoking initiatives.

Clearly all those dirty, brown cigars that generally resemble (how to put this delicately?) human stools have deterred smokers for decades, so ciggie brown will be the new down.

Then, in the same edition of the Herald, veteran nanny, Sue Kedgley launched yet another broadside, this time against against cell-phones.  They are killing us with electro-magnetic radiation.  We desperately need rules, restrictions, and regulations for our own good.

We thought we might offer a bit of advice to our public spirited citizens.  Firstly, alcohol.  It’s a killer and needs to be expunged.  But extensive scientific research demonstrates that almost all alcoholics began their tippling careers by imbibing milk.  The small number who did not were Irish babies: they apparently went straight on to whiskey.  Therefore, ban milk for infants, and alcoholic rates will necessarily plummet.  Milk is the slippery slope to perdition.  It’s only big businesses, like nefarious Fonterra, which use their dirty money to create smokescreens against the dangers of milk and its propensity to cause habitual drunkenness.  If citizens can rise up against the milk-alcohol industrial complex, and insist upon plain packaging of both, we will all be better than what we would otherwise be.  And if we can win on this issue, we can win on every issue.  There’ll be no stopping us.   

Secondly, Sue needs to sharpen up her act.  Instead of appealing to this scientific study or that piece of research evidence “demonstrating” the harm to humans from cell phone use, she needs to get smarter.  Instead of writing weasley stuff like the following:

Around three billion people on the planet own cellphones, and cellphone use is growing exponentially. So you would hope governments would take these studies seriously and seek to reduce our exposure to cellphone radiation, rather than sit on their hands waiting for conclusive proof before taking any action.

. . . she need to be more definitive and declarative.  Try this, Sue: “the science is settled.  Cell phones cause cancer.  Cell phone sceptics are not just anti-science, they are murderers.”  That’s the spirit.  That will get you some traction.  No-one likes to have the ultimate execration of  “anti-science” hurled at them. 

Then, there is the biggest nanny of them all, Michelle O who has been working for the good of all by promulgating rules and decrees about what children must eat.  This, from her nemesis, Michelle M:

. . . the L.A. Unified School District pronounced the first lady’s federally subsidized initiative a “flop” and a “disaster.” Principals reported “massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away.” The problem has only worsened. The Los Angeles Times reported last month that the city’s students throw out “at least $100,000 worth of food a day — and probably far more,” which “amounts to $18 million a year.”

Draconian federal rules dictate calorie counts, whole-grain requirements, the number of items that children must put on their trays, and even the color of the fruits and vegetables they must choose. Asked for a solution, LAUSD food-service director David Binkle told the Times bluntly: “We can stop forcing children to take food they don’t like and throw in the garbage.”

Or you can do what Arlington Heights District 214 in Michelle Obama’s home state of Illinois just did: Vote yourselves out of the unsavory one-size-fits-all mandate. Last week, the state’s second largest school district decided to quit the national school-lunch program altogether. Officials pointed out that absurd federal guidelines prevented them from offering hard-boiled eggs, hummus, pretzels, some brands of yogurt, and nonfat milk in containers larger than 12 ounces.  The district will deliberately forgo $900,000 in federal aid and instead rely on its own nutritionist to devise healthy choices that students actually want. One local parent summed it up well: “The government can’t control everything.”

That parent, who dared voice a treasonous notion about there being some limits to government controls, needs to be hunted out and cut down.   It’s just unpatriotic to believe, let alone voice, such things.

As Winston Churchill was once reported to have said, if you took all these loving Nannies like the anti-tobacco people, the Sue Kedgleys, and the Michelle O’s and their like and laid them face down in a long line head-to-toe, head to toe . . . why, that would be a good thing to do.

Or, as another old saw has it, “What do you call one hundred Nannies at the bottom of Auckland Harbour?”–answer: “a good start”.   

Foolish Politicians, Nannies and Wowsers

Prohibition Redux

The old adage from George Santayana runs, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.  A corollary is the proverb, a hundred blows on the back of a fool make no impression (Proverbs 17:10), but a word to the wise is sufficient. 

History has illustrated and taught repeatedly that when the state overreaches to ban or criminalise something as contraband (all for our own good, of course), criminals get richer and stronger.  It happens every time.  When governments overreach to ban tobacco and cigarettes, or tax them out of existence, it becomes, in the words of Yogi Berra, deja vu all over again. 

This, from Breitbart London:

Bootleg Tobacco

By David Atherton  
3 Apr 2014, 4:55 AM

New York City is set to challenge an epidemic of bootleg tobacco as a result of high taxes on cigarettes. The situation is similar to other areas of the world, where criminal gangs are finding themselves by selling cheaper tobacco to people who cannot afford the higher prices of legitimate cigarettes.

New York State has a $4.35 tax on a pack of cigarettes and Michael Bloomberg, when city Mayor, added another $1.50. Missouri by comparison is a paltry 17c. A pack in Kentucky costs $4.96, while nearly another $10.00 at $14.50 is what awaits the smoker in New York.  Bloomberg reports: “. . . someone on a pack-a-day habit over a year will be over $3,500 worse off [in New York state].”  . . . . Consequently New York state has seen an epidemic of bootleg tobacco. It is estimated $7 to $10 billion is lost in state revenue annually.

The situation in New York City is even worse. In a paper published in 2012 by Dr Klaus von Lampe of the Department of Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, found that in the South Bronx only 19.4 percent of packs were legally purchased with NYC tax paid.  The New York Post reports that: “In an effort to crack down on the sale of illegal smokes in New York, Cuomo is set to announce Monday a 13-agency task force dedicated to keeping illegal cigarettes out of the state.  “This new law-enforcement strategy will help to crack down on these illegal cigarette sales and capture those smugglers who seek to evade the law and rob the state of the revenue it is rightly owed,” Cuomo said. . . .

The people behind the smuggling operations are diverse and sinister. Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Scotland says the culprits are “Chinese Triads…The Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Kurdistan Workers Party.” In Europe, the miscreants are allegedly the Russian Mafia, Real IRA and Provisional IRA Certainly, the high profile convictions in New York City of Basel Ramadan and Youssef Odeh in October last year, are alleged to have extremist Islamist ties. They funded themselves by importing cigarettes from Virginia and are also accused of soliciting the murder of witnesses.

In Europe, matters follow a similar pattern. Cigarettes are even more expensive than America where in the UK a pack costs £9.00 ($15.00), Norway £10 ($16.60) and Ireland £7.80 ($9.50).  The Irish Tobacco Manufacturers Association has released new data claiming that 28.3 percent of all tobacco is paid without duty. In Norway the figure is 49.2 percent.  Britain’s relatively low smuggling rate of 15.6 percent can be put partly down to smokers crossing the Channel to legally buy Belgium tobacco in Adinkerke. As long as they are for personal consumption you can bring back as much as you like.

There are two ways this situation can be dealt with, either enforcement or lower taxation. As you imagine, Sheila Duffy of ASH Scotland prefers enforcement. She said to me today “The key way to tackle the illicit trade it through enforcement.  Improved enforcement, and restrictions on the smuggling links of tobacco companies themselves, has seen illicit tobacco in the UK consistently decline over the last decade, while tobacco regulation has increased.”

While Simon Clark from the smokers group Forest said to me, “Instead of launching a cigarette smuggling task force, paid for with public money, they should reduce tobacco taxation. It’s not rocket science!”

Whether either option gets adopted or in part, tobacco smuggling threatens to not only undermine legitimate businesses but, worryingly, the rule of law too.

American Prohibition saw nearly a whole society turned into deliberate or unwitting criminals.

Government Wowsering

Up in Smoke

In New Zealand we have a messianic crusade to make the country “smoke free” by 2025.  The definition of this paradisaical state is as follows:

 What does Smokefree New Zealand 2025 mean?

• Our children and grandchildren will be free from exposure to tobacco and tobacco use

• The smoking prevalence across all populations will be <5%. The goal is not a ban on smoking.

• Tobacco will be difficult to sell and supply.  [http://smokefree.org.nz/smokefree-2025]

Of course this is being promulgated by government and its agencies, and driven by particular wowser-politicians.  We do not question the motives of said protagonists.  Smoking can cause much harm.  But we do question the wisdom of the wowsers. 

Moreover, we are also deeply sceptical of government promoted programmes and causes where the underlying object is to restrain government spending on health (as is the case of the anti-tobacco movement).  The reason is straightforward: when an entire population (that is, more than 5 percent) is dependant upon government provided healthcare, the government has been given a license to control human behaviour to an extraordinary extent for its own ends.  In this case, the broader campaign against smoking shows every sign of not being driven primarily by concern over smokers welfare, but by a desire to restrain public health expenditure.

The fiscal logic is simple: less smoking mean less smoking related diseases which, in turn means, less government spending on health.  Such logic is pernicious in that it “proves” far too much.  It can (and has) rapidly extended to arguments for nanny controls over food, diet, exercise, and drinking. 

In addition, the fiscal argument is just sloppy.  It is relentlessly self-defeating.  The cold fact is that from a fiscal perspective once medicine and health is socialised and paid for out of the public purse, the sooner people die off, the less expenditure impact upon government revenues.  Thus, from a fiscal perspective alone, the more people that smoke and become obese the better.  The shorter the life span, the less the cost to the government (and the taxpayer), because the biggest costs always occur towards the end of life, particularly when, as is the case in New Zealand, we have a universal, non-means tested, taxpayer funded, retirement income scheme. 

In the end, then, the wowser campaign against tobacco falls back on humanitarian concerns–trying to prevent people from harming themselves.  This is a highly tendentious position, particularly because the actual results are likely to be desultory.  And the unintended consequences are adverse to say the least. 

One of our daily newspapers carried a “canary in the mine” story about how people are likely to respond to ever increasing taxation costs upon tobacco (the key strategy being employed to make people stop smoking):

A Southland woman is beating tobacco tax price hikes by turning over a new leaf and growing her own. Liz, who does not want her surname published for fears someone might steal her crop, has been growing, curing, and smoking her own tobacco for about two years.  She and her partner each smoked about 50 grams of loose, roll your own tobacco per week, she said.  “Who wants to pay $60 a week for something you can grow yourself for less than $5?”

Each plant provides about 100 grams of tobacco, and takes four to six months to grow, she said.  Liz said that after picking the leaves, she hangs them and leaves them to “colour cure”. . . .  The plants grow to up to 2 metres tall, and Liz grows them throughout her garden at home.  “I’ve got about 30 in at the moment, they grow really well down here but they can’t go anywhere near frost so you have to get your seasons right,” she said.

It is legal to buy seeds, grow and smoke tobacco for personal use in New Zealand, but against the law to sell or give away home grown tobacco away.

We have seen the home-brew market grow substantially in New Zealand–and that without any substantial restrictions upon the sale of alcohol.  We have also seen an explosion in home poultry.  The opportunity of saving around $60 per week will  no doubt generate a huge expansion in home-grown tobacco. 

How are the wowsers and the nannies likely to respond?  By campaigning to make home-grown tobacco illegal.  And that is when the trade will become extremely profitable to criminal gangs and smugglers. 

One wonders how many times we have to repeat this kind of folly before we learn. 

Unintended Consequences

Prohibition Works Out Well for Criminal Gangs

It is universally acknowledged that Prohibition was a failure in the United States in the 1920’s.  Not only did it fail in preventing access to alcohol, it proved a boon for criminal gangs which were able to prosper significantly manufacturing and selling contraband alcohol.  But, as we are well aware, those who do not learn history’s lessons are condemned to repeat them.  Consequently, we find many voices clamouring for prohibitions of various kinds in our day.  Dumb and dumber.

As with the Prohibition movement early last century, there are always plenty of social evils to garnish the argument for prohibiting whatever the evil substance du jour  might be.  Tobacco is the biggie at the moment.  New Zealand has a diverse bunch of wowsers who have publicly committed to making New Zealand “smoke free” by 2025.
  There are lots of incremental steps which are being proposed along the way to get us closer to prohibition heaven: steeply rising excise taxes upon tobacco; banning all smoking in all public places, in cars, on beaches, in places of work; ghastly photographs on cigarette packages accompanying the health warnings; growing restrictions upon advertising; and plain packaging.

In these matters we are following along after Australia. As we lemming along in its wake it is starting to become clear that the unintended perverse effects of Prohibition in the United States are very much alive in Australia more than a century later.  Funny that.  Criminal gangs are flourishing off the (now) illicit cigarette trade, which means that they are able to fund and facilitate expansion into other “business lines” (exactly as occurred in the United States).  Smoking is starting to rise, since contraband has a coolness and an allure which is more attractive than legal products.  And the punitive excise rates upon tobacco which are designed to price it off the market have simply opened up enormous profitable arbitrage opportunities for smugglers.

KPMG has produced an analysis of the unintended (but inevitable) effects of Australia’s “war” on tobacco.  No doubt the wowsers feel more self-righteous, but their folly and ignorance is going to end up doing great harm.  Some people will never learn.  This from the Herald Sun:

ILLEGAL tobacco is booming across Australia, funding international criminal gangs, and costing taxpayers more than $1 billion each year.  And the introduction of plain packaging for legal cigarettes has failed, according to a report released this morning.  That report states that ­tobacco consumption in Australia will rise this year for the first time since 2003.  Demand for cheap counterfeit and contraband cigarettes is accelerating, driven by excise increases on legitimate tobacco.  And shops dispensing ­illegal tobacco do so with ­apparent impunity, despite a fine of up to $340,000 for selling a single packet.

The Tobacco Plain Packaging Act, passed in 2011, made Australia the first country to remove all logos, colour and design from cigarette packets.  But a report compiled by the international auditing firm, KPMG, and released exclusively to the Herald Sun, shows that while sales of legal cigarettes and tobacco have slipped slightly in the past 12 months, surging demand for counterfeit and contraband cigarettes and chop chop tobacco has more than made up that shortfall.

The KPMG report was commissioned by big players in the legal tobacco industry. . . .

Despite the bust last month of one illegal tobacco importation ring and the discovery of a huge haul of illegal tobacco in 16 shipping containers at Melbourne’s docks, that is the tip of the iceberg, according to KPMG.   In that raid, Victorian police arrested 10 people and seized 71 tonnes of tobacco along with 81 million cigarettes.The haul would have avoided $67 million in excises. Tellingly, guns and other weapons were also found.

But KPMG estimates that 1433 tonnes of illegal tobacco has entered Australia in the last 12 months, an increase of 154 per cent.  It calculates that illicit tobacco is 13.3 per cent of total Australian sales and getting towards a market share enjoyed here by the world’s biggest manufacturer, Imperial Tobacco.  Contributing to the problem is that Australians are paying not much short of $20 for a packet of cigarettes, while the same or equivalent brands in our region might be as low as $1.08 in countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia or South Korea, a common source of our illicit tobacco.

The upshot is that NZ wowsers are as stupid as Australian wowsers.  No surprises there.  Australians are dumb.  Yet we New Zealanders are dumber still.  We get to pursue our wowsering even whilst the bad consequences of Australia’s folly are emerging as we speak.  Now what does that tell us about ourselves?  

Enslaved to Power

Tobacco in Plain Packages

New Zealand is the second country in the world to opt for restricting cigarettes to be sold only in plain packaging.  The objective is to make the weed less attractive to smokers, thereby cutting the power of advertising to pull people into smoking.  There are inevitable legal challenges–which in our case will be dependant upon legal challenges in Australia (the first country to implement such a ban.)

This move has long been an objective of the Maori Party because Maori have a disproportionately high number of Maori smokers when compared to the rest of the population.  Maori co-leader, Tariana Turia probably believes that tobacco is just one more conspiracy by white capitalists against Maori. 

We suspect that the move will be welcomed in many quarters.  Few people will be prepared to endorse the damage that smoking can do to lungs and its connection with lung cancer.

But, as always, there are broader issues which thoughtful folk will have considered resisted and will see this as a wowsering move by a nanny state.

In the first place there are the rampant political inconsistencies of the Greens
who have long campaigned for the legalisation of marijuana, one the one hand, and government restrictions upon tobacco use, on the other.  Go figure.  One cannot help suspecting that their opposition to tobacco stems from the fact that it is manufactured and marketed by global corporates, rather than being surreptitiously grown in the back yard, as marijuana is.  Populism and Marxism make for an idiosyncratic mix in the Green mind.  One presumes that the Greens would have no objection to tobacco if it were a backyard product. 

Secondly, self-government and self-control cannot be engineered nor commanded by any state.  Tobacco consumption is a matter of self-control.  When, in the name of some vast perceived social good, the government decrees it will help people struggling with self-control in the area of tobacco consumption, its efforts will end up with nugatory effect.  In fact, it may even make the product more attractive.  Whereas now it is argued that smokers stay brand loyal due for subjective reasons engendered by marketing, plain packaging may entice people to experiment with a wider variety of  brands because the only way of choosing will be to experiment–to taste and see. 

Such legislation is an easy, but ineffective measure that will have little effect, except to make the politicians feel good, beneficent, and wise.  They will be congratulating themselves that they are “doing something positive”, they are “making a difference”, that are “taking a stand” but all along they are fooling themselves about the pseudo-competence of government, and blinding themselves to the obvious: the incompetence of government to change hearts and minds and build the strength of will to break addiction.

Thirdly, the nanny-state philosophy has a thousand applications which the government will likely move more and more toward to solve social problems.  Take just one example: addictive gambling.  It is abundantly clear that addictive gambling is a serious problem in New Zealand, tearing families apart, impoverishing dependant children and spouses, and provoking theft to feed the habit.  Ban gambling?  Make pokie machines have only black and white colours?  Regulate to make them smaller?  But the real problem is human weakness, wilfulness and the lack of self-control.  And there governments are ineffective.  An enslaved people will discover addictions in every place: governments would therefore end up controlling virtually every aspect of human behaviour whilst they have the view that rules, regulations, controls and bans will solve the fundamental problem.

Obesity, alcohol, sex, driving for thrills and adrenaline rushes–all are matters of self-control and personal responsibility.  There can be no end to rules, restrictions, regulations, and penalties once governments get involved in trying to combat or correct such human deficiencies and foolishness.  

If the government has a legitimate part to play in such social destructions it may be in advertising campaigns that focus upon personal responsibility and accountability, such as the anti-drink-driving campaign, with the slogan “If you drink and drive you are an idiot!”  It may also offer encouragement to voluntary welfare groups that actually get down into the nitty gritty of people’s lives to help them. 

The Christian gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is clear: the Kingdom of God is a realm of universal totalitarian government–but the most important form of government is self-government.  (Romans 6:6).  We are all called to be enslaved to Christ alone.  We are His bondservants.  Civil government and the state cannot substitute for the rule and reign of Christ.  It is a huge step forward when the state (and the people) recognise its limitations in such things. 

But, without a prior acknowledgement of Christ as Lord of all, such a step is unlikely to be taken.  For there is an enslavement and an addiction which underlies all such measures by government: an addiction to power.  That is the biggest, the most debilitating, and the most destructive addiction of all. 

The Fiscal Benefits of Tobacco

Asinine Zealotry

The zealots amongst us are trying to make New Zealand smoke free by 2025.  Why?  Well, it’s good for us.  The state knows best.  The gummint is on a moral crusade–being spearheaded by our current nanny-in-chief, Tariana Turia.  She and her Maori parliamentary cohort are all wound up because they believe smoking is a Maori health issue: tobacco addiction rates are much higher amongst Maori than non-Maori.

Rather than do the hard yards of actually reforming Maori society they have opted to take the “easy” road.  Ban tobacco for everyone in the country.  Hell hath no greater fury than a zealous politician trying to engineer redemption by legislating to make us good. 

We confidently predict that as a consequence tobacco growing will rapidly expand in the benign New Zealand climate.
  Whilst it is legal at the moment to grow one’s own tobacco for one’s own consumption, it is illegal to grow it for sale.  (The government does not like competition: it presently makes far too much money off tobacco excise. Therefore, tobacco and cigarettes are a state controlled monopoly.)  We predict that soon even growing it for one’s own consumption will be banned.  Then the home grown tobacco trade will explode in the hands of the criminal gangs. 

After all, marijuana is illegal in New Zealand.  It is, however, freely available everywhere at a black-market price–which, these days, given its ubiquity, is quite reasonable.  Marijuana, like tobacco, grows readily in our benign climate. 

To summarise: the intent of the banning-tobacco lobby is to enforce health upon everyone.  The unintended consequence will be the criminal gangs growing in wealth and power and a burgeoning criminal class.  It will also result in greater disrespect for the law itself–for the law will have become more asinine. 

One argument often put forward by the banning brigade is that tobacco consumption is a great fiscal burden upon the government exchequer because of the public health costs arising from tobacco induced ill-health.  Sadly for them, the argument is totally bogus–and that on two grounds.

Firstly, Treasury has now come out to confirm that tobacco related health costs are well covered by the current tobacco excise taxes.  Secondly, on a whole-life basis, smokers save the government money.  They tend toward less longevity and therefore less overall expense to the exchequer.  Smokers, therefore, ought to be awarded a fiscal merit badge of public honour.  This from the NZ Herald:

A Treasury report has admitted that smoking saves the Government money because smokers die earlier and pay more in tobacco tax than their health problems cost.  The regulatory impact statement on tobacco taxes prepared ahead of the Budget said smokers’ shorter life expectancies reduced the need for superannuation and aged care.

 Ironically, one of the reasons smoking has developed such bad public press is the propaganda noised about to the effect that smokers are costing us all money in funding their public health care.  The opposite is the case.  Smokers are saving the exchequer money.   Such realities, however, will be ignored by the zealots, the do-gooders, the wowsers, and the we-know-what’s-best-for-you campaigners. 

Some astute folk will be asking, How can be profit from the fanaticism of the zealots?  Here’s an idea.  In New Zealand, criminal gangs such as the Mongrel Mob and Black Power are not illegal organizations.  Since they are about to enjoy a sizeable economic and trading windfall through the ban on tobacco, some bright spark should incorporate the gangs and list them on the stock exchange.  Then everyone would have a fair chance at reaping the windfall benefits from tobacco prohibition. 

The senior management and directors of Mongrel Mob Inc and Black Power Limited might turn over fairly frequently as they rotate through the prison system, but that’s a small matter.  There would doubtless be plenty of experienced candidates to fill their involuntary leaves of absence. 

>Nanny State is Back . . .

>Puffing Big Clouds of Smoke

Nanny state is back, if it ever went away. The former government was turfed out in part because the public had had enough of the government trying to tell us what lightbulbs we could buy and what length of showers we could take. But bureaucrats, whose sole existence is to plan the lives of others, never went away. They just regrouped, and gradually they are, once again, possessing the souls of their new political masters.

The big cause ju jour is (once again) smoking. We know that there is a cabal of hard-core prohibitionists and abolitionists whose long term goal is to outlaw all tobacco use in this country. They have joined forces with the Maori Party which sees tobacco as a tool of Maori suppression and victimisation. All the protagonists are smugly self-righteous. They are acting with the purest of motives (they tell themselves)–for the good of others.

The anti-tobacco bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health have turned to economic and fiscal cost arguments to bolster their case. Once again it is a matter of “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”. They have decided that the public health system could be saved $1.9bn per annum if tobacco never existed. One problem: their figures are nothing other than out and out propaganda–lies, damned lies, and statistics! Or, more to the point, they have resorted to smokescreens.

Dr Eric Crampton, a (nonsmoking) senior lecturer in economics at the University of Canterbury has crunched the numbers and concluded that the bureaucrats’ figures are pure spin and flub. The numbers are merely “politically convenient”, he claims, in a recent opinion piece in Stuff.

The ministry’s latest estimate of the cost of smoking has nothing to do with the costs that smokers impose on taxpayers or the costs that could be avoided if smoking were to disappear. Rather, it’s a politically convenient number whose promotion has much to do with gaining voter support for anti-tobacco initiatives and nothing to do with real economic costs.

The Ministry of Health has engaged in the most egregious kind of simplistic analysis to produce the figures they want.

Here’s how they derived the figure – number reckoning revealed courtesy of an Official Information Act request and extensive correspondence with the ministry.

After sorting the population by age, gender, income, ethnicity and smoking status, they then compared the costs of providing health services to smokers as compared to nonsmokers for each group. The excess costs of the smoking group were tallied up to produce the $1.9b figure.

But there are two very big problems with this way of estimating costs. It’s easiest to think of smoking as bringing forward a whole lot of end-of-life costs. Smokers die earlier than nonsmokers. We know that.

And the costs to the health budget of somebody who is dying are rather higher than the costs of somebody who is healthy. But everybody dies sometime and most of us will incur end-of-life costs that will be paid for by the public health system.

Therefore, you have to compare the full life-cycle costs to the public health budget of smokers and non-smokers.

Suppose that a smoker will die at age 65 and a nonsmoker will die at 75. Comparing 65-year-old smokers to 65-year-old nonsmokers and calling the difference the cost of smoking then rather biases upwards the measured costs of smoking. We ought to be comparing the health costs of a smoker dying at age 65 with the health costs of a nonsmoker dying at age 75.

And, perversely, the deadlier cigarettes are, the greater will be this bias. The younger smokers are when they die of smoking-related illnesses, the greater will be the measured cost difference between smokers and non- smokers because a smaller proportion of comparable nonsmokers would be incurring end-of-life costs.

In other words, smokers save the public health system money! And, oh, by the way. We have not begun to factor in the huge costs to the country of longer living non-smoking people who commence receiving New Zealand (taxpayer funded) Superannuation at 65, and continue long into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Far, far cheaper to see people killed off by smoking at 45.  So, if the anti-smoking bureaucrats want to argue fiscal costs to cloak their nannying, beware the double-edge of the sword you hold.

The fiscal higher costs of smoking are rubbish–pure and simple. Crampton concludes:

. . . be as sceptical of numbers coming from the Ministry of Health as you would be of numbers produced by the tobacco industry. Neither is a disinterested party.

So, if the fiscal arguments are bogus, what are we left with? Nannying. Smoking is bad for you. Since you choose to continue, we are going to protect you from yourself by making it more and more expensive to smoke, then eventually, we will ban it all together. For your good. So there!

When smoking was banned in work places and public places, the argument of preventing damage to others was satisfied. Mission accomplished. Third party victimisation, however overstated, was now regulated against. Now to achieve the goal, the game needs to be lifted.  To achieve total abolition of tobacco the  individual will have to be prevented from doing damage to himself. Nannying, pure and simple. But it’s a hard fight politically. So, roll out bogus numbers and spurious economic arguments as cloaking devices. The “we-have-a-plan-for-you” bureaucrats are hard at work.

But, no doubt they go home each night feeling so, well, virtuous.

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog

>Prisons and Tobacco

>Going Up in Smoke

We have argued previously that in New Zealand, prisons and prison policy are an unholy mess. This is unlikely to change–at least in our lifetime–and probably not in several lifetimes. The fundamental reason for this intractable mess is that non-Christian societies have no sustainable foundation for justice. The bottom line is that non-Christian societies in general, and secular humanist societies (of which New Zealand is one) cannot settle upon any principle or dogma that defines justice per se.

It is all a big slough of shifting quicksand. Prisons are supposed to “deal to” criminals. But our society cannot–is unable–to decide whether this “dealing to” involves administering retribution, enforcing restitution, enabling rehabilitation, reducing crime, or protecting society from rapacious criminals. It end up running all these “lines” at the same time–and failing in all–since they are contradictory and work at cross purposes.

Moreover, our society has no basis to distinguish between sins and crimes: it ends up criminalising what ought not to be subject to the interdiction of the state, and decriminalising what ought to be. Abortion–a murderous act–has been decriminalised. Indeed it is propagated, supported, promoted, and funded by the state which is supposed to administer justice. On one hospital floor medical professionals will be exerting all their powers to save the life of a prematurely born baby. One floor above, they will be ripping a baby asunder and killing him or her. Confused? Inhumanly so.

On the other hand, the law of the land has criminalised acts of parental discipline of children but our Prime Minister has instructed the police not to apply the law. Confused? Ridiculously so.

Unbelief has no rational consistent criminal policy because it cannot define or settle the key issues attached to justice. It has no ultimate or absolute frame of reference–and as Sartre once said, a finite point, without an infinite reference point cannot have any definitive meaning.

So, in our society issues of justice, crime, and punishment comes down to whimsy around which a political consensus can swarm, albeit it fleetingly. So, one government administration will be committed to reducing the “crime rate.” Its solution will be to shorten prison sentences, expand parole, and increase non-custodial sentences so that fewer recidivist, hardened criminals will be forged like orcs in the caverns of our prison system. Then the public will become outraged; the pendulum will swing. A new administration will be elected which is committed to (you guessed it) reducing crime rates. But the solution this time will be longer sentences, harsher prison conditions, less parole. The real world becomes more like a parody of Monty Python every day.

We are currently in a “harden up, get tough on crims” phase. The Minister of Corrections, Judith Collins has announced that within a year smoking will be banned in prisons. True to our madding Monty Python world of “we know better than God,” four contradictory reasons have been advanced for this startling innovation: preventing prisoner access to dangerous materials (lighters, matches); making prison less palatable for prisoners (two thirds of whom smoke, we are told in a NZ Herald article); enabling prisoners to kick tobacco addiction–thereby achieving a nannying public health goal; and protecting prison officers from second hand smoke (in compliance with the law of tobacco free work places). This last reason is particularly a hoot, since the same Herald article tells us that half of corrections staff are smokers and the under the ban they, at least, will still be allowed areas where they can continue to smoke freely while at work.

So, which is it? What is the real reason for the change? All of the above? Which means none of the above. Our prediction? A very, very messy outcome. The unintended consequences will be huge. Bureaucratic boondoggles will abound. Last time we checked classified drugs were illegal in prison but drug use continues unabated. Now, tobacco is going to become a classified drug in prison, and two thirds of the prison population are addicted. Good luck with that one.

Let us ask a few simple questions: what has banning tobacco got to do with a person and his criminal act(s)? Nothing. Will it restitute the victim of the crime? Not at all. Is it an act of retributive punishment? Maybe, but the result is more likely higher smouldering anger and resentment. Will it help reduce recidivism? Nah.

Then, why is the government doing this again? The only understandable and defensible answer is to ensure compliance with the Smoke Free law. But if that is all it is (as we suspect is the case) the rest of the “reasons” advanced are smoke screens to appeal to other whimsies which float around our nation’s prison policy. But why the smokescreen? Because to focus solely on the Smoke Free law as the overriding rationale would be to expose that particular piece of nannying legislation to ridicule, and risk reasonable people beginning to call for that egregious extension of state power and interference to be modified or changed. And that would never do.

So, to “sell” the idiotic, let’s position it more in terms of public health, and more about what would be really good for prisoners in the long run. Prisons will be “framed” as the health and welfare reformatory to create the New Model Man. In anti-Christian societies, bad ideas get endlessly retreaded.

>Alcohol, Tobacco, and Legalism

>Beware the Spiritual Evils of Prohibition

It is clear that the nanny-staters amongst us are busily involved in a reasonably long term campaign to outlaw tobacco use in New Zealand completely. We expect they will be successful. Then we will go through a couple of decades of the consequences of nannying prohibition, and we will find, much to the disappointment and chagrin of the nannyers, that the law of unintended consequences has not been prorogued and that the social evils that burst forth in the era of Prohibition in the United States will have equally burst forth upon New Zealanders a century later. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Christian folk are likely to get caught up in this sort of thing. Below is timely reminder from Justin Taylor, Don Carson, and John Piper explaining why Christians should have nothing to do with any attempts to prohibit the use of alcohol or tobacco by means of legislative fiat or ecclesiastical edicts. For there is another law which has not been prorogued: a generation that is stricter than the Bible, will be followed by a generation which rejects the authority of the Bible outright.

Alcohol, Liberty, and Legalism

An interesting discussion took place in the comments to yesterday’s post on the Guinness Brewing Company. It seems that some think brewing beer is either an illegitimate vocation, and immoral activity, or unwise as a witness for Christ.

It’s not possible in one post to address all concerns. I’d just say, for my own part, that I do not advocate alcohol consumption and I don’t particularly like the taste of alcohol. Further, I find it slightly annoying when those who enjoy adult beverages talk about it a lot. (Sort of like the younger pastors who tend to work into conversation how much they enjoy a good cigar, or the occasional pipe. Good for you, bro!)

But the fact of the matter is that though alcohol can be abused, and is often abused, it is still part of God’s good creation—and Jesus partook of it enough that some falsely accused him of being a drunkard (Matt. 11:19 and parallels), and in fact he created “good wine” at a wedding celebration (John 2:1-6).

One of the reasons I think it’s worth returning to the issue is not because I care about alcohol per se, but rather because this issue is a good test case for hemeneutics, application, and ethics.

Again, with no attempt to be comprehensive, here are a few things that have been helpful to me throughout the years:

A Latin phrase to keep in mind:

abusus usum non tollit (“Abuse does not take away proper use”)

Ryan Kelly explains why Romans 14 has less application to this issue than most people think. Here’s the conclusion:

What we should conclude from all of this is that it is the abuse of a thing that is sin, not its use. Sin is that which violates God’s biblical commandments, not the additions and inventions we make. No man can bind the conscience of another. As Sola Scriptura Christians, our minds, wills, and hearts are directed by God’s revealed will in the Scriptures alone. On issues not forbidden or condemned by Scripture, we cannot invent a morality, or, worse, impose those inventions on others. We cannot be holier than Jesus, can we?

And this from D.A. Carson:

Paul refuses to circumcise Titus, even when it was demanded by many in the Jerusalem crowd, not because it didn’t matter to them, but because it mattered so much that if he acquiesced, he would have been giving the impression that faith in Jesus is not enough for salvation: one has to become a Jew first, before one can become a Christian. That would jeopardize the exclusive sufficiency of Jesus.

To create a contemporary analogy: If I’m called to preach the gospel among a lot of people who are cultural teetotallers, I’ll give up alcohol for the sake of the gospel. But if they start saying, “You cannot be a Christian and drink alcohol,” I’ll reply, “Pass the port” or “I’ll think I’ll have a glass of Beaujolais with my meal.” http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=158134922X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrPaul is flexible and therefore prepared to circumcise Timothy when the exclusive sufficiency of Christ is not at stake and when a little cultural accommodation will advance the gospel; he is rigidly inflexible and therefore refuses to circumcise Titus when people are saying that Gentiles must be circumcised and become Jews to accept the Jewish Messiah. The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, p. 145.

And here is John Piper, a teetotaller and an advocate of teetotalling, putting his young pastoral ministry on the line at Bethlehem Baptist Church in 1982 in order to argue against a provision requiring teetotalling for church membership

I want to hate what God hates and love what God loves.

And this I know beyond the shadow of a doubt: God hates legalism as much as he hates alcoholism.

If any of you still wonders why I go on supporting this amendment after hearing all the tragic stories about lives ruined through alcohol, the reason is that when I go home at night and close my eyes and let eternity rise in my mind, I see ten million more people in hell because of legalism than because of alcoholism. And I think that is a literal understatement. Satan is so sly. “He disguises himself as an angel of light,” the apostle says in 2 Corinthians 11:14. He keeps his deadliest diseases most sanitary. He clothes his captains in religious garments and houses his weapons in temples. O don’t you want to see his plots uncovered? . . .

Legalism is a more dangerous disease than alcoholism because it doesn’t look like one.

Alcoholism makes men fail; legalism helps them succeed in the world.

Alcoholism makes men depend on the bottle; legalism makes them self-sufficient, depending on no one.

Alcoholism destroys moral resolve; legalism gives it strength.

Alcoholics don’t feel welcome in church; legalists love to hear their morality extolled in church.

Therefore, what we need in this church is not front-end regulations to try to keep ourselves pure. We need to preach and pray and believe that “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither teetotalism nor social drinking, neither legalism nor alcoholism is of any avail with God, but only a new creation (a new heart)” (Galatians 6:15; 5:6).

The enemy is sending against us every day the Sherman tank of the flesh with its cannons of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. If we try to defend ourselves or our church with peashooter regulations, we will be defeated, even in our apparent success. The only defense is to “be rooted and built up in Christ and established in faith” (Colossians 2:6); “Strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy” (Colossians 1:11); “holding fast to the head from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together, . . . grows with a growth that is from God” (Colossians 2:19). From God! From God! And not from ourselves.

>Sledgehammers and Nuts

>Drugs of Choice

The dreary and tedious dishonesty of our political leaders is interminable. We were afflicted recently with significant tax hikes on tobacco and cigarettes. The prime mover was Tariana Turia of the race-based Maori Party; National went along for the ride.

Turia has long held the view that tobacco is a racist drug in that somehow it singles out Maori and damages them disproportionately. She has mumbled about it being a curse of pakeha colonisation. She has a deep conviction that something must be done to help Maori kick the habit. All well and good, as far as kicking the habit goes.

Her solution: ramp up taxes on tobacco for all smokers, regardless of race. This is the dishonest piece. Like the injustice and folly of keeping the whole class in at lunchtime because of the bad behaviour of one miscreant, Turia wants to “help” her people in a very round about way, by which all citizens end up paying the price.

Why is this bad policy? Firstly, it avoids the need for personal accountability and responsibility. Tobacco addiction is a personal choice–that is the hard, uncomfortable truth, which needs constant reiteration. Trying to get at the problem by taxing tobacco more is avoiding the hard issue, placing blame on externals, trying to change the “environment”, and not confronting the accountable individual.

Secondly, arguing that tobacco is costing the government millions of wasted health care dollars in treating tobacco related diseases simply does not hold water. The sad fact is that many smokers die younger: therefore, they end up being a much smaller drain on the taxpayer over the course of their lifetime than non-smokers. Those people who live long healthy lives are a much bigger drain on the public purse than tobacco smokers–by the time they have lived for decades on New Zealand Superannuation, flashed their senior citizen discount cards, and had a couple of re-bores, valve jobs, and hip replacements to keep them comfortable in their older years.

Thirdly, the unintended consequences are pernicious. The more tobacco is taxed, the more it becomes a prohibited substance, with all the criminal opportunities presented therein. Turia and her do-gooding colleagues need to be reminded of what the outcomes of the Prohibition era actually were. Ramping up taxes on tobacco just elides into Prohibition-type circumstances where criminal gangs will have one more way to enrich themselves. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Finally, using the tax system to try to mould social behaviour is bad for the polity as a whole. It always distorts and leaves society weaker over the long term. So, in this case, the “poor” will end up using more of their discretionary income on higher-taxed tobacco, leaving less for food, clothing, and rent. This will increase their dependency and poverty, leading to inevitable demands for increasing government largesse to the poor, who are so impecunious they can no longer afford food. The politics of guilt and pity will rush to “take care of the poor” once again with ever greater entitlements.

Now, we do not minimise for a moment that smoking amongst Maori is a serious problem. But cowardly blameshifts, misplaced senses of victimisation, failure to confront the problem courageously, not letting people face the consequences of their folly, and lessening personal responsibility are not going to produce a healthy society. In the end, the Turia approach will make Maori and others more enslaved and dependant upon the biggest and most addictive drug of them all–the government–and will consign more and more to perpetual puerility.

That is far more dangerous and destructive to the fibre of our nation than any tobacco-caused illnesses.

>Advocacy Research

>Snake Oil, Hypochondriac “Science”

Over the past week or so we have seen “experts” advocating a complete ban on tobacco in New Zealand within ten years. As an interim measure, they are calling for the inevitable increase in taxes on tobacco, and much more radical, a ban on smoking in public places such as beaches and pretty much anywhere outdoors where other human beings are present or might be present some time in the future. These “experts” are actually “taxpayer funded health officials” aka bureaucrats. These health bureaucrats are very experienced and skilled at getting the government to swing in behind their causes.

They are politically savvy. They have tapped successfully into the “care for children” cause. They are now tapping into the “Maori problem” rubric, since plenty of Maori smoke. They know that if the smoking issue can be framed as one which disadvantages and hurts Maori, it will leapfrog in public traction.

The call from the Auckland Regional Public Health Service for a range of tough measures comes in its submission to the Maori affairs select committee’s forthcoming inquiry into the tobacco industry and the effects of tobacco use on Maori.

Hopes are high among public health campaigners that the inquiry will re-frame debate on tobacco and make it easier for the Government to adopt radical measures to make New Zealand smokefree within 10 years.

The Auckland service wants the law banning indoor smoking at workplaces extended to playgrounds, outdoor eating areas, beaches, the area outside buildings, cars when a child aged less than 16 is present, public transport stops and pedestrian malls.

Pity the poor worker who has now been banned from work when it comes to smoking. Now he or she will be banned from smoking outside as well, if these erstwhile human controllers have their way.

These measures would greatly reduce smoking opportunities for workers and bar patrons, who have been forced outside or onto the street by the smokefree environments law.

The regional public health service is funded by the Auckland, Waitemata and Counties Manukau district health boards and the Health Ministry. The Waitemata DHB has already endorsed its approach.

Like all bureaucrats they believe in redemption through laws and rules and regulations. The Prime Minister hastily dismissed them as taking one nanny-state-step-too-far. But one of the reasons these folk are so effective is that they think long term. No doubt they are well aware that they are unlikely to make much progress under the current administration (apart from the tax increases, since the government is rapaciously going after every dollar it can expropriate with a modicum of political acceptance). But, they will be figuring that when Labour finally comes back into government, their banning of tobacco will be up front and centre. The inconceivable will become the inevitable.

Local authorities are already on the kick.

The call to ban smoking in many public places comes as an increasing number of local authorities are putting up signs asking people not to smoke in areas used by children, such as playgrounds, sports fields and beaches.

Auckland University banned outdoor smoking at its campuses from last month, adding to the statutory indoor ban.

Behind all this lies junk science. We are learning that there are few things more dangerous than advocacy science–which is where “science” becomes handmaiden to political causes. In fact whenever this has happened it has become downright dangerous. In the past eighty years advocacy “science” in the West has, well, advocated eugenics, compulsory sterilisation, forced population control, substituting food for bio-fuel production, and the compulsory expropriation of private property to combat “global warming”. The damage inflicted by advocacy “science” has been considerable, indirectly causing untold human suffering, degradation, and death. All, we note, with the intent of “saving” humanity.

Rob Lyons details the junk science that lies behind the anti-tobacco crusade.

Advocacy research: what a filthy habit
New research suggesting ‘third-hand smoke’ is a major health hazard was spurred by policy, not hard science.
Rob Lyons

First we were told – quite reasonably – that smoking was bad for us. It increases the risk of a variety of diseases, particularly lung cancer and respiratory illnesses, as well as making heart disease and stroke more likely. No one who smokes regularly can be unaware that there is a fair chance that their habit will shorten their life, even if the immediate prospect of a stimulating drag is more enticing than a few extra years of old age. We’ve all got to die of something, at some point; it’s up to us to make a calculation about whether that nicotine hit is worth it.

Advocacy science could not stop at providing hard evidence of the health damage and dangers of smoking. Because governments now assert control over our bodies through public health systems, it was inevitable that the issue would spill over into laws, rules, and regulations over tobacco use. If the rapacious government was going to pay for treating tobacco related diseases, then would move to control its use.

But these things are relentless. Soon the advocacy moved on to second-hand smoke.

More controversial was the suggestion that breathing other people’s smoke might be dangerous, too. Okay, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if those nights of old spent steeped in a nicotine-tinged fug in the Dog and Duck didn’t exactly do one’s lungs the world of good. The smell certainly lingered on your clothes. Even then, anyone who remembers boozers in the past, or the top-deck of the bus on a winter’s evening, will know that the modern, well-ventilated, pre-smoking ban pub was a much less smoky environment. By rather dubiously extrapolating from some small personal risks, based on smoking studies that probably bear little relevance to twenty-first century Western workplaces, official estimates concluded that about 1,000 people per year die from ‘secondhand’ smoke in the UK. In July 2007, a ban on smoking in public places came into force in England. The tobacco lovers were turfed out on to the street.

Junk science just tore out another artery from the body politic.

But now we are moving from “secondhand” smoke to “thirdhand” smoke. The “thirdhand” iteration by junk science is critical to getting tobacco banned altogether.

Old tobacco smoke does more than simply make a room smell stale – it can leave cancer-causing toxins behind, Reuters reported today.

Researchers in the US found cancer-causing agents called tobacco-specific nitrosamines stick to a variety of surfaces, where they can get into dust or be picked up on the fingers.

Children and infants are the most likely to pick them up, the team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California reported.

“These findings raise concerns about exposures to the tobacco smoke residue that has been recently dubbed `third-hand smoke’,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As Lyons writes, we are now moving from the stupid to the unbelievably stupid–except he puts it more colourfully:

Now, claim researchers, you don’t even need to breathe smoke in, you simply need to be in contact with smokers or touch surfaces that have been in contact with their smoke to be at risk. If the dodgy research that produced the smoking ban was bullshit, the claims made for third-hand smoking are in a whole new category: ‘beyond bullshit’.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California found that carcinogens from cigarettes linger in the environment on clothing, floors and walls long after smoke has dispersed. Worse, their shock-horror discovery was that some of these substances can then go on to react with these surfaces to produce more carcinogens. Mohamad Sleiman, the lead researcher, told Scientific American: ‘Our findings indicate that third-hand smoke represents an unappreciated health hazard.’

This is why smoking is being banned in public places by local councils in New Zealand where children might be remotely present, let alone parks with playgrounds where they are usually present in abundance.

This is not cold, hard-headed investigation; this is ‘advocacy research’. Those involved have decided that tobacco smoke is not just a threat to smokers but to everyone, particularly children. Unsurprisingly, their work then confirms this prejudice. Winickoff is asked in that Scientific American article why the label ‘third-hand smoke’ was chosen. ‘This study points to the need for every smoker to try to quit. That’s the only way to completely protect their children… Really, I think that what this says is that we need to have sympathy for smokers and help them quit smoking… [And also] that the introduction of this concept will lead to more smoke-free spaces in… public.’

So, now children are exposed to deadly agents if they crawl on a carpet or sit on a swing proximate to where a cigarette has been smoked. Really. Yes, really! Yeah, right. Science has become a nonsense–as it always does when it moves from research to advocacy.

The mere presence of carcinogens does not mean that we will suffer from cancer. In fact, we are bombarded with carcinogens every day. Our food is packed with them, particularly naturally occurring substances that plants produce to ward off pests. If the microscopic quantities of carcinogens in our carpets and on our clothes left by tobacco smoke are going to be treated as a potential health threat, that makes every cup of coffee a caffeinated, cancer-causing cocktail, too.

If the chemicals in cigarette smoke were really so deadly as Winickoff and Glantz imply, it would be simply inconceivable that people could live – as many do for 50 years or more – while smoking a packet of cigarettes or more every day. It usually takes decades of effort directly polluting the body with tobacco smoke before someone becomes seriously ill because of it. The idea that a whiff of smoke in the air, or a thin coat of smoky tar on the walls, can put us in mortal danger is just laughable. Or, at least, it would be if the health authorities weren’t so keen to pounce upon each new study as a justification for ever-greater restrictions on lighting up.

All advocacy “science” posits a bogey-man, a monster hiding in the cupboard about to spring out and devour. It dovetails nicely with the prevailing pessimistic world-view which sees demons everywhere, threatening to overpower and destroy us all. But junk science it is–and junk science it will remain. As Lyons puts it, junk science is nothing more nor less than institutional hypochondria. When junk science teams up with nannying bureaucrats we really do have a demon from the ancient world.

Anti-smoking is hypochondria-by-proxy, an obsessive compulsive disorder whose sufferers demand that the normal pastimes of others leave them under attack. Contrary to what Winickoff says, it is anti-smoking campaigners and our health guardians who need help – to quit their disgusting, illiberal, interfering, busybody habit once and for all.

>From the NewsDesk

>Maori Party and Tiro Rangatiratanga Leaders in Talks

Hone Harawira said publicly yesterday that he was disappointed at the lukewarm response of the Minister of Finance to his calls for more strident action against the evils of tobacco.  He was nonplussed that his call to lynch tobacco company executives was regarded by parliamentary colleagues as too much of a stretch.  He was, however, determined to keep playing his part in a Maori Party campaign against the evils of tobacco.

The Health Department yesterday released figures showing that 49.3 percent of Maori women smoked, and 41.5 of Maori men smoked also.  “That’s too high.”  Mr Harawira believed that implicit racism lay behind these statistics.  “Tobacco was introduced by Pakeha bastards,” he said “and its damaging Maori people.”  If the Maori Party could not get sufficient support from “pakeha” parties, it would seek out different political allies.

When asked which parties, he revealed that he has been having “meaningful and positive” discussions with the leaders of Tiro Rangatiratanga, the Maori sovereignty movement.

  Tiro Rangatiratanga, he explained, means that Maori take control over all thing Maori–and both groups agreed on the need for Maori to stand up and control their own destinies.  “This is an area where a separate Maori judicial system will do an awful lot of good,” said Mr Harawira.  “We are going to pass a Tiro Rangatiratanga law that will have application only to Maori.  Pakeha won’t be able to share in this.  This is about Maori doing something positive for Maori.” 

Maori sovereignty representatives are thinking of joining  with the Maori Party in a special Maori Parliament to be called Aotearoahui.  We will pass a “tangata whenua law” making tobacco a Class A drug for  Maori only.  “We don’t care about Pakeha.  If they want to kill themselves off with smoking, that’s their problem.  If anyone is seen smoking, the Maori police will be directed to establish first if they are Maori–and if they are, they will be arrested for possession and use of a Class A drug.  We will throw them into a Maori prison where they will be forced to withdraw. We will stamp out tobacco use amongst our people in ten years,” Harawira said.  

However Maori Party leader, Tariana Turia was more cautious.  “Well you know that Hone is passionate and rather hot headed at times.”  She explained that Maori had learned a long time ago that there was far more mileage to be gained if they were successful in making it clear that Maori problems were really caused by colonialism and the Pakeha and society generally.  That way the whole country felt obligated to support and resource Maori properly. When asked specifically what she thought of the Tiro Rangatiratanga approach she said, “We just don’t think there’s much money in going down that path.”  

Prime Minister, John Key currently in New York shaking President Obama’s hand,  was asked what he thought of this controversy which had emerged while he was out of the country.  “Frankly, I have a good relationship with Tariana.  It is, well, frank.  We can talk through most things and reach a good compromise.  She calls me all the time and tells me what she wants”  He said that he did not want to say anything further until he had a chance to get back to New Zealand and sit down with the Maori Party.  “But nothing is off the table,” he said.  “Most things could be resolved with good will and spending.  But if not, we could always look again at the idea of lynching.”  As long as good New Zealand business executives were not being criminalised before they were lynched there might be an acceptable compromise in there somewhere.