At the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum in Washington yesterday I was one of five speakers on a panel that addressed the question, ‘Is prohibition back?’.
Other speakers were trade law consultant Abrie du Plessis; Kgosi Letlape, former president for the Health Professions Council of South Africa; Riccardo Polosa, full professor of internal medicine at the University of Catania and founder of the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction; and the IEA’s Chris Snowdon.
After the late afternoon session we moved upstairs to the rooftop terrace on the ninth floor of the Hay-Adams Hotel for the ‘Welcome Reception’. As you can see (above) the terrace overlooked the White House and Washington Monument. Not a bad view.
Anyway here’s my initial four-minute contribution to the earlier discussion:
In answer to the question ‘Is prohibition back?’, prohibition - or the threat of prohibition - has never gone away.
What was once called the temperance lobby at the start of the 20th century merely reappeared under the guise of public health and devised a new strategy - creeping prohibition. The goal is still the same but it’s long-term rather than short-term.
In relation to tobacco, prohibition is nothing new because there has been clear evidence of creeping prohibition for decades.
For example, public smoking bans are a form of creeping prohibition because they severely restrict where people can smoke and in many countries even designated smoking rooms and booths are prohibited. Since banning smoking in all indoor public places, we’ve seen many examples of smoking bans being extended to outdoor public places, and even social housing, prohibiting people from smoking in their own homes.
Bans on menthol flavoured cigarettes are an example of an entire category of cigarette being prohibited. In the UK menthol cigarettes represented over 20% of the cigarette market, and they’re now gone - prohibited.
Meanwhile there are plans in America to not only ban menthol cigarettes but to limit nicotine levels in cigarettes, effectively prohibiting cigarettes as consumers currently know them.
Another example of creeping prohibition can be seen in New Zealand where the government plans to ban the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2008, while in the UK a recent report commissioned by the government recommended that the government raise the age of sale of tobacco by one year every year until no-one is allowed to smoke.
Meanwhile governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland have all set targets by which they want their countries to be ‘smoke free’, by which they mean fewer than 5% of the adult population smoking.
From a consumer perspective the problem with these smoke free targets is that they are difficult if not impossible to achieve without further (and excessive) regulation, and that often means prohibition and punitive taxation which is a more subtle form of prohibition, effectively pricing consumers out of the market.
As for prohibition, that should never be the answer to the problems caused by tobacco. The outcome would almost certainly be the opposite of that intended. The product will be driven underground, illicit cigarettes manufactured to far less exacting standards will become the norm, and that will put consumers including children at even greater risk.
Moreover, if we accept prohibition - or even ‘smoke free’ - as a legitimate goal we effectively hand autonomy of our bodies over to government and a puritanical health lobby that will never stop dictating how we live our lives.
Talking of prohibition I also want to raise an interesting or disturbing development. A couple of years ago Philip Morris called on the UK government to ban the sale of cigarettes in England by 2030. This year in Scotland the UK’s leading vape retailer launched a campaign urging the Scottish Government to ‘Ban smoking for good’.
The point I want to make is that by actively promoting the prohibition of cigarettes and smoking, these companies are effectively legitimising and normalising the idea. It’s also, I would argue, self-defeating because the day will surely come when alternative nicotine products including e-cigarettes will also be targeted for prohibition, as indeed they already are in some parts of the world.
Alternative approaches to tobacco harm reduction should clearly focus on extending consumer choice and allowing companies to promote and sell reduced risk products as harm reduction devices.
But the onus is not only on governments to adopt a light touch regulation policy on vaping and smokeless products, the industry can also help by developing better reduced risk products that appeal to more smokers because there is no question that many current smokers don’t want to switch because they don’t like the reduced risk products that are currently on the market as much as they like cigarettes.
So instead of calling for a ban on cigarettes, as Philip Morris has done in the UK, the industry should fight prohibition and focus on improving e-cigarettes and other reduced risk products like heated tobacco so they appeal to more smokers - and of course government must allow them to market and promote those products so they appeal to current smokers.
