Last week I wrote for The Critic about the Sheffield University alcohol research group continuing to get government grants rolling in despite having been wrong about everything for the best part of 20 years. I also wrote for the Spectator about the deranged war on non-alcoholic drinks by people who supposedly want us to drink less alcohol.

These two themes converged when I saw this article in the BMJ by Sheffield’s John Holmes - who is now a “professor of alcohol policy” - and three like-minded souls. It is titled ‘How should public health respond to rise of alcohol-free and low alcohol drinks?’, to which the answer should be either ‘nothing’ or ‘throw a little party’. Instead, the four amigos - who think they represent ‘public health’ - drone on at great length about the trivial concerns of pointless academics.

Labour is weighing up a crackdown on people under 18 buying ‘no and low-alcohol’ drinks. On current form, this means Keir Starmer’s government will launch a public consultation, commit itself to a ban, endure weeks of mockery and abuse from the public and then perform a humiliating U-turn. But when the inevitable climbdown comes, what will be the main reason? Let us consider the options.

Firstly, it is impractical. Where do zero-alcohol drinks end and soft drinks begin? The very definition of a soft drink is that it has no alcohol. Assuming that the government doesn’t want to ban teenagers from buying Fanta and Pepsi Max, it is going to have to make a legal distinction between a non-alcoholic drink and a soft drink. It could do this on the basis of branding, but if a non-alcoholic beer removes the word ‘beer’ and calls itself a soda, what is the government going to do about it? Conversely, what if a company decides to call its brand of apple juice a non-alcoholic cider?

Kids can buy drinks that have up to 0.5 per cent ABV. One option is for the government to drop this limit to zero. But there is a reason the current limit is 0.5 per cent. Sugars in soft drinks can ferment slightly, meaning that they might contain minute traces of alcohol; less than 0.1 per cent, perhaps, but not nothing. Some fruit juices can contain up to 0.5 per cent alcohol. Even ripe bananas are slightly alcoholic because natural fermentation converts sugars to ethanol.

There's a website called Tobacco in Australia: Facts and Issues which is written by a few anti-smoking activist-academics. It provides lots of tobacco-related statistics and a bit of editorialising. 

As has occurred in New Zealand¹ and the UK²,the major tobacco companies operating in Australia have commissioned the production of many reports over the past 15 years claiming alarmingly high estimates of the extent of illicit trade in tobacco in Australia.^3-6

Industry estimates suggest that illicit tobacco consumption as a percentage of total consumption increased from 11.8% in 2012 to 23.5% of the total tobacco market in 2022. This contrasts to the 2022 estimate from the Australian Taxation Office of 14.3%.

People most likely to buy packs originating from overseas—being travellers, recent migrants and international students or special visa workers—are much less likely to be motorists and much more likely to be walking and using public transport. The packs they use are therefore much more likely to enter the litter stream in public places than are packs used by cigarette consumers who do not travel frequently overseas.

A number of academic papers, reports produced by US government research agencies, statements by political parties and research services and newspaper articles, allege that powerful and dangerous criminal gangs and terrorist groups are involved in counterfeiting activities on a massive scale. 

 

.... Such reports have been embraced enthusiastically by think-tanks with a political agenda of keeping taxes very low. The tone of these reports is often highly emotive and alarmist, and are consistent with in the interests of tobacco companies to ‘talk up’ the problem of illicit trade in general and counterfeit cigarettes in particular.

In Australia, Hamad’s crew were busy waging a relentless turf war for control of Australia’s multibillion-dollar illicit tobacco trade, a battle involving dozens of firebombings and the gunning down of business and personal rivals. 

I did the Tom Nelson podcast last week. We discussed a range of issues including vaping, nicotine, obesity, prohibition and more. Check it out.

You are a critic of Michael Bloomberg’s role in tobacco policy, why?

The New York financial services billionaire and philanthropist, Michael Bloomberg, spends hundreds of millions of dollars in this field and serves as a WHO ambassador for non-communicable diseases. Yet his policy instincts are those of an out-of-touch elitist, beset by a range of obvious, harmful, unintended consequences. He remains totally unaccountable for the consequences of his actions and interactions with governments through his giant complex of well-funded activists, academics, PR professionals, and officials. He is surrounded by people who refuse to engage with evidence suggesting he is doing more harm than good. Nowhere is this more evident than in low- and middle-income countries, where his staff and money can make a significant impact with little resistance. Though they like to pretend to be independent academics, journalists or civil society organisations, Bloomberg’s complex of organisations serves the ambitions and policy preferences of one overconfident, unaccountable billionaire and his prohibition agenda. It is the most counterproductive use of philanthropic money in the whole of public health, and it needs to stop before even more people are killed by philanthropic negligence.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform does not pull its punches. Its report - A Study Fraight with Bias - concludes that ICCPUD’s Alcohol Intake and Health (AIH) study was a politically motivated waste of money that violated federal law.

Lacking anything else to do, the Labour government is planning to lower the drink-drive limit. England and Wales have a higher limit than most European countries and fewer drink-related road accidents per capita than nearly all of them. We also know from Scotland that lowering the limit won't have any effect on road safety but will damage the pub trade. 

The worst people in the country are all in favour of this, namely the anti-motorists ("Just walk lol"), the pub gentrifiers ("I support my pub by going in every now and again for a lime soda") and the people who support every pointless restriction on liberty by saying "What's the fuss? All you have to do is obey the law."

But it is a pointless restriction on liberty. As I say in Spiked, it is the opposite of evidence-based policy. If you support unnecessary restrictions on liberty which damage businesses just so you can feel morally righteous, you are the problem.

Read my Spiked piece.