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Show me the smoking gun

New figures suggest the smoking ban has produced a pretty small reduction in the number of people who smoke.

But we are told that making people quit is not the point of the legislation. According to a spokesman for the Department of Health:

The primary aim of the legislation is to reduce the risk from exposure to second-hand smoke."

The BBC adds:

Doctors estimate second-hand smoke kills more than 600 people a year.

But no evidence is provided about the impact of the ban on passive smoking. Lucky for the Department that. The best study on the impact of bans on passive smoking suggests that all they do is shift the burden of second-hand smoke from adults to children.

This evidence is compelling and yet smoking ban advocates simply ignore it.

Every time one of them blithely talks about the ban reducing passive smoking they should be presented with the evidence and asked to address it.

Those good ol' smokin' days

Brink Lindsey has written an interesting book, The Age of Abundance, about how mass affluence (thanks be to capitalism) has transformed the way we live. He regularly disinters ads of the past on his blog to show how American social attitudes have dramatically changed. Ciggie adverts like the one below are fun: unlike this early example of health-obsession.

Robbie Millen

Pedant's corner

I have been sent an email by an anti smoking organisation informing me that "the smoking ban is fast approaching". I think they will find that the smoking ban is standing still and it is us that is fast approaching.

Dutch Organs show: Sick? Or the lesser of two evils?

Oh how terrible, was the first reaction. Julia Raeside in The Guardian spoke for our nation:

Endemol is at it again. The streaker on the pitch of the television industry is back in the news thanks to its latest production for Dutch TV. On Friday, De Grote Donorshow (The Big Donor Show) will give three dialysis patients the chance to win a dying woman's kidney. Who lives? You decide. Actually, the terminally ill woman will decide with the aid of SMS input from the viewers. Which taboo subject can Dutch TV exploit next without being taken off air?

Yeah, how sick. How grotesque. How very Endemol of Endemol. And in a rare show of media bipartisanship, The Guardian’s comment pages mirrored Daily Mail stories with headlines like this:

A new kidney would change my life, but I'd rather wait ten years than win one like this

But then our friend Chris Dillow disagreed, and after reading his blog for the past year, it’s possible that Mr Dillow has never been wrong about anything. So it’s worthwhile hearing out his opinion:

Tom Watson says Endemol is "sick." No, Tom. What's sick is that people are dying because of the shortage of kidneys - a shortage exacerbated by the refusal of our managerialist rulers to consider using markets. Endemol is merely publicizing this fact. Whilst there is such a shortage, kidneys have to be rationed somehow. In practice, this means doing so by luck and by medical protocols that discriminate against the mentally ill. It's not obvious that rationing according to popular vote is much worse than this…

None of this, of course, is to defend Endemol. They're doing it just for the money. But we've known ever since Adam Smith that, sometimes people who are motivated by money can inadvertently do good.

And Mike Wallace pipes up with this thought:

Doctors have been up in arms about the idea that the donor should be involved in the decision at all. To quote Prof. John Feehally, formerly President of the UK Renal Association,

"If organs become available after someone dies, health professionals with access to detailed information about those waiting for a transplant make objective decisions about who should receive those particular kidneys."

Except it isn’t, is it? It’s a woman deciding what should happen with her own vital organs—if anyone is going to “play God” about dishing out your internal bits and bobs, shouldn’t you yourself get first go? Professor Feehally’s objection is hardly any different. The idea that doctors can play God seems to be fine with him, even if the same right is perversely not extended to the donor herself.

You see, once you've framed your arguments as pro-free markets, pro-personal freedoms, and anti-Tom Watson, I find it hard to disagree. My righteous indignation has been quelled. Maybe yours will be too if you read both the Wallace piece and Dillow’s post in full.

Murad Ahmed

Beer for children. Hurrah!

There is so much the Japanese can teach us. For instance, they manage to have a heroic drinking culture that is remarkably good mannered and non-aggressive. How wonderful to learn that in Japan you can buy fake beer for your toddler. It's unimaginable in uptight Britain.

And here's the advert, which you can watch below.

Robbie Millen

(via Reason)

Pay attention at the back: a lesson on free speech

Can members of the University and College Union do joined-up thinking?

This morning they voted against Government plans to instruct lecturers to report students with extremist views to the police. Their reasoning was this:

Universities must remain safe spaces for lecturers and students to discuss and debate all sort of ideas, including those that some people may consider challenging, offensive and even extreme

Quite right, freedom of speech must prevail.

But then they unanimously agreed to this motion this afternoon:

All negative characterisations by teachers of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender people, identity and lifestyle should be outlawed and classified as an act of discrimination and an incitement to hatred based on sexual orientation

So challenging, offensive and even extreme views deserve to be aired, so long as they don't happen to be the sort of challenging, offensive and even extreme views that the union disapproves of. I'm not quite sure that these lecturers have quite got the hang of this free speech thing.

Robbie Millen

Why the smoking ban is wrong

Christopher Hitchens and Simon Hoggart engaged in debate yesterday about the smoking ban. Hitchens spoke for me, beginning with this:

If I had wanted an encapsulating anecdote for my argument, it would have been provided by our glorious Secretary of State for Health, Patricia Hewitt, who commented on recent events in Iran: "It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people." Yes, I think that just about expresses the anti-tobacco mentality. It is all-enveloping and all-inclusive, utterly patronising and completely, laughably literal-minded.

Hoggart never once addressed the question of freedom, contenting himself with a long description of why he doesn't smoke any more (what's that got to do with it?) and simply asserting that it wasn't a freedom issue. Perhaps he is planning a second article in which he explains why.

But neither of them address what seems to me a fatal flaw of the ban - it won't work.

The only possible justification of banning people from smoking in designated public spaces - smoking rooms in pubs, say - is that it reduces passive smoking.

Only it doesn't. The best available study (summarised in an article I wrote in February) suggests bans simply shift the burden of passive smoking from adults to children. This means that it shifts it from those who can choose to avoid it onto those who can't.

I have never heard a proponent of the ban counter this. Yet surely it is fundamental.

Leave my smoking breaks alone!

What an excellent idea. Thank you NICE. Of course, smokers should be given paid time off by their employers to attend smoking cessation clinics. But such a good suggestion shouldn't stop there? The overweight should be given time off to see dieticians, that'll make the tubby more energetic; those who like a tipple and arrive at work with the odd unproductive hangover, well they could be sent to alcohol concern workshops; and the naturally unenergetic could be sent to the gym or doped with uppers to give them a bit more fizz; and. . .

Jeepers! What an astonishingly crass idea. Let's ignore the practical objections. Let's ignore the unfairness of loading onto business the costs of fulfilling an individual employee's choice. And let's ignore NICE's unfitness to judge what makes a company more productive. Let's instead focus on the obnoxious assumption behind the proposal: that it's the State's duty to ensure that we are compliant, productive little worker bees, who maintain our health so that we can boost the GDP (and afford to pay for an army of bureaucrats, "smoking cessation workers" and smoking ban compliance officers). I am not a drone, I am a free man!

It's worth checking out Simon Clark's Taking Liberties blog. He fights the good fight for harassed smokers in Britain. He has a sharp post on the latest British Medical Association prodnosing, and is promoting a pro-smoking CD of songs. Good man.

Robbie Millen

In response to the Virginia Tech massacre

So what to make of the grim killings at Virginia Tech?

The Washington Post's leader, in typical stately fashion, asks all the right questions:

Would the university have suffered the same tragedy if Virginia law did not prohibit the carrying of guns on campus? Should metal detectors be ubiquitous in American classrooms and dormitories? And why are gunmen so apt to carry out their lethal rampages at American schools?

The New York Times is tougher:

Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice, uses a column in the LA Times to give a brief history of mass murder by gun-wielding lunatics. He examines the social changes that have increased the incidence of such massacres.

So what has changed? For one thing, the United States has become much more dog-eat-dog, more competitive in recent years. We admire those who achieve at any cost, and it seems that we have less compassion for those who fail. (Just look at how eager we are to vote people off the island or to reject them in singing competitions.) This certainly increases frustration on the part of losers.

Then there's the eclipse of traditional community: higher rates of divorce, the decline of church-going and the fact that more people live in urban areas, where they may not even know their neighbours. If mass murderers are isolated people who lack support, these trends only exacerbate the situation. Many mass murderers, for example, are people who have picked up roots and moved.

He concludes by saying this:

It should give us some degree of consolation to know that these events are exceedingly rare. But they still occur, and they are among the sad and tragic prices we pay for the kind of open, modern, democratic society we live in.

A graduate student from Virginia Tech wrote this article last year, complaining about the ban that stops students from carrying concealed weapons (hat tip Samizdata):

Now consider the situation of this past Monday. A violent criminal who clearly has no respect for other people’s lives is running loose on campus, his precise whereabouts unknown. And while the police did an excellent job of patrolling campus, they simply cannot be everywhere at once. Is it not obvious that all students, faculty and staff would have been safer if CHP holders were not banned from carrying their weapons on campus?

What the Board of Visitors has effectively done by banning CHP-holding students, faculty and staff from carrying their weapons is creating a “Safe Zone” for criminals who do not care about the rules anyway. Disarming law-abiding citizens has never made the general populace more secure.

To British ears, the idea that ordinary people carrying guns makes the population safer sounds mad. But we forget our own lost history of gun ownership. Richard Munday wrote this article a couple of years ago. It's a fascinating read:

A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns: there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials". Conan Doyle's Dr Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter's journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.

Robbie Millen

Dealing with psychic conmen

Until about half an hour ago, when Hugo Rifkind sent me an email, I had no idea that it even existed. But since I found out about the Fraudulent Medium Act 1951 I have had time to form a very definite view of it. Twice.

Version 1.0: It's good news that we have such an act and the BadPsychics website is right to wish to revise it in order to make it more easily useable. Psychics are conmen. If you amended the get-out clause in the Act - which allows psychics to present themselves as mere entertainers - there would be more prosecutions. I'd better sign the Downing Street petition calling for a revised act.

Version 2.0: I'd better not sign it. Yes, psychics are conmen. Yes, there are real victims of their cons. But do we really want more laws restricting people from doing things. We ought to be moving in the opposite direction, with less laws and more cons.

Or perhaps I'm wrong. What do you think?