Chris Whitty wants to “destroy” the cigarette industry - my TalkTV response

Following Chris Whitty’s attack on the ‘cigarette industry’, which he wants to see “destroyed”, I was invited to discuss the issue with Vanessa Feltz on TalkTV.

Here’s a transcript of that exchange:

Venessa Feltz
“The cigarette industry should be destroyed in order to prevent needless deaths.” That’s according to Professor Chris Whitty. Speaking at a conference England’s Chief Medical Officer described the habit as an appalling way to die and urged ministers to get smoking down to zero. Joining me live from Cambridge is Simon Clark from the smoking lobby group Forest and from South London Deborah Arnott, the chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health. Good afternoon to you both.

Obviously I am going to start with you Simon. You heard what we see Chris Whitty has said. He said, “smokers face an appalling death”. He says, “Ministers are currently considering whether to bring in new policies to limit smoking.” He says “smoking is the biggest driver that we could easily deal with in the sense of the inequalities that we see across the UK. It’s an appalling way to die. It kills people in multiple ways. Everyone in this room, he says, and whatever room he is in, I suspect, would agree that getting smoking down to zero and destroying the cigarette industry should be an aim of public health.” What do you make about that?

Simon Clark:
Well I think it’s quite sad that someone in Chris Witty’s position is talking in such extreme terms. I mean arguing that the cigarette industry must be destroyed, well that ignores the fact that millions of adults know the health risk but they choose to smoke because they enjoy it and many get comfort from smoking. Now it’s their life, it’s not Chris Whitty’s, and if an adult chooses to smoke that decision must be respected. What he is doing is infantilizing millions of adults by effectively saying that the government and the public health industry know better and they want to take the decision out of the hands of adults and make it for them. So it’s Prohibition all over again. The tobacco industry is a legitimate industry that manufactures a legal product and is currently investing heavily in reduced risk products like e-cigarettes. So talk of destroying that industry is extremely unhelpful when government should be working with the tobacco industry because when we move forward the companies are part of the solution to the issue of smoking related death and disease. So the government has to work with the industry, not destroy it.

Venessa Feltz
But isn’t your argument, and you do usually use the same one, that what the cigarette industry is doing is producing a product that is legal, and legally absolutely fine to sell, to purvey and everything else. Shouldn’t that be changed to it is no longer legal to sell a product which it is known causes harm to unborn foetuses, lungs, people’s longevity? At the moment you are quite right, it is legal. Isn’t what Professor Chris Whitty saying about destroying the tobacco industry in it’s entirety [is ] that what they would do would be to make the product illegal?

Simon Clark
Yes, but we already know what happens when you do that. We saw that with the prohibition of alcohol in the United States back in the 1920s and early 1930s. Prohibition doesn’t work. All you do is you hand the trade over to the criminal gangs. They are the ones who will benefit if you ban the sale of cigarettes or destroy the cigarette industry. You simply hand over a huge industry, an industry that makes this government over ten billion pounds a year on tobacco taxation. You hand that industry over to the criminal gangs. It would be absolutely ludicrous and we have got to remember that smoking goes back centuries, if not thousands of years, before the tobacco industry. Yes, the tobacco companies came up with the idea of mass manufacturing cigarettes but there will still be lots of people who enjoy smoking and they will find ways to get cigarettes and tobacco on the black market. You will certainly not stop it.

Funnily enough this argument was borne out by the first caller, a smoker who, when pushed, insisted that whatever happened (cigarettes being made illegal, for example) he would continue smoking.

Arnott meanwhile had chosen to quote another Whitty comment, this one made at the launch of The Khan review in June when he argued that it’s dishonest to say the smoking debate is about health versus freedom.

He was clearly pointing the finger not just at the industry but at groups such as Forest but I didn’t get a chance to respond because that was when Feltz brought in the first caller. Had she come back to me I would have said something like:

The risks associated with smoking are well known and if adults choose to smoke that’s a matter for them. Take that choice away and you are clearly being denied an important freedom – which is the freedom to choose – so of course it’s an issue of freedom, and personal responsibility.

A longer version of this argument can be found in an article I wrote for the online magazine Spiked in June, shortly after Whitty made his “dishonest” jibe. You can read it here.

Comments

[Paul McNamara]

"it’s dishonest to say the smoking debate is about health versus freedom."

This is essentially claiming that criticizing the Government is dishonest.