On the 24th June this year, the BMA voted to ban the sale of cigarettes (forever) to anyone born after the millennium. So in 2018 it would be illegal for an eighteen year old but legal for a nineteen year old. And with each successive year thereafter, the discrimination would notch up accordingly.

The effect of course would be to progressively drive young and eventually older people into the hands of modern day Al Capones.

Freedom2choose chairman Dave Atherton appeared on BBC radio Wales and Freedom2choose Scotland’s Belinda Cunnison was also allowed a brief slot on BBC radio Scotland.

BBC iPlayer Radio: Jason Mohammad 25/06/2014 (Episode no Longer Available)

BBC iPlayer Radio: Morning Call 25/06/2014 (Episode no Longer Available)

Update:

Unfortunately the links have now died but can be listened to below:

Wales – The case in favour is here:

(Link no Longer Available)

Dave Atherton and other’s responses are here:

(Link no Longer Available)

Scotland – Introduction:

(Link no Longer Available)

Belinda responds:

(Link no Longer Available)

Additional Comments:

It is much easier to make a false claim than it is to debunk it. This means that in a few minutes on air very few claims can be disputed. So a few comments about some other assertions that various doctors made on these programmes is in order:

  1. One doctor asserted that this proposal would stop young people smoking. He then contradicted himself by noting that most people tried cigarettes at around 13 or 14 years of age. Clearly these would have been bought for them so this crazy notion would make no difference at all.

  2. Others claimed that most smokers started smoking by their early twenties and became addicted young. More on addiction below but the real reason for people starting young is obvious. If you like something then you are likely to continue to do it. If you don’t then you’re unlikely to change your mind as you age.

  3. A doctor claimed that health problems wouldn’t occur until they reached their 30s or 40s. But even Richard Doll’s famous ‘British Doctors Study’ claimed that health issues only began to occur from age 50 onward. Incidentally, the average age at death for lifetime cigarette smokers in this study was 73 years. What’s more, most of those deaths occurred during the 1950s and 60s when life expectancy was less than 65 years.

  4. Addiction:

    If nicotine really was addictive then how come NRT products have a 98.4% failure rate? Freedom2Choose Article: Freedom To Choose Gets It Wrong (Link Temporally Unavailable)

    As to the claim that it is similarly or more addictive than heroin, there is no evidence to support that whatsoever. The nearest thing is the US Surgeon General’s report of 1988 which was the first report claiming that nicotine was addictive. So where did he get his evidence?

    The answer is that it was from a 1984 paper by Jack Henningfield, an advisor to the Surgeon General and also a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry. Here are a couple of quotes from the McTear vs ITL court case. The full text is 600 pages long but there is a 60 page summary here: Bolton Smokers Club Forum: The McTear Case: The Analysis .

    Please note that this case (from 2005) is the ONLY time that a British court has been asked to consider anti-smoking ‘evidence’. The two top anti-smoking ‘experts’ in the UK were amongst those testifying. James Friend (appointed by the Government to chair the ‘Scientific Committee on Smoking and Health) and Richard Doll both gave evidence under oath.

ITL’s expert witness:

[5.398]… Figure 5 showed nine histograms each showing two bars, one for placebo (P) and the other for the “drug” under investigation (D) or simulated gambling (SG). In all nine histograms the D or SG bar was higher than the P bar. Professor Gray said that the significance was said to be that nicotine increased scores on this scale to the same degree as that seen for morphine and amphetamine, for example, and from the way the figure was drawn that appeared to be the case. It has subsequently been pointed out by Warburton, however, that the scales on the vertical axes of each of the histograms were quite different from each other. This was standardly regarded as very poor scientific methodology and should have been pointed out by the referees of the paper at the outset; it was something that graduate students were taught at an early stage not to do. For morphine for example, the P value was below 4 and the D value nearly 10; the same for amphetamine. For nicotine, the P value was 5 and the D value just below 7. But the scales had been set so that the difference between P and D for nicotine appeared to be as large as that for amphetamine and morphine, though this was simply not the case.

And then the judge’s view:

[6.206] Professor Gray’s evidence accordingly is consistent with the averment for the pursuer that once individuals such as Mr McTear have started smoking it is difficult for them to wean themselves off the habit. It provides no support for the proposition that tobacco is more addictive than cocaine, or more addictive than heroin for that matter. There is no evidence before me which provides support for the conclusion in USSG 1988 that the pharmacological and behavioural processes that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Indeed, insofar as this relied on Henningfield 1984, it lacked a sound scientific basis.

The Henningfield paper is here: (Link no Longer Available)

See also: (Link no Longer Available)

Postscript:

The final consultation on plain packaging has begun so if you haven’t acted yet please be sure to read this.