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Update on the GFN whodunnit mystery

Further to previous posts we are a little closer to solving the great GFN whodunnit mystery.

A week ago I pointed out that the Global Forum on Nicotine has introduced a vaping policy that bans the use of e-cigarettes in any "plenary or parallel" session.

Last year, apparently, "non-vaping delegates" complained they felt "trapped" by a "fog bank" of vapour.

On Wednesday I highlighted comments by delegates who were actually there. To a man they denied there was excessive vapour in any session.

So who complained and why? Well, thanks to Aaron Biebert, director of the pro-vaping documentary A Billion Lives, we are a little closer to solving the mystery.

Commenting on my earlier post, Aaron wrote:

I was there and it was a European public health leader who complained. Obviously he was under the impression that you could get cancer from the vapor and was uncomfortable with it.

Since the GFN people are trying to bring people from all sides together, it makes sense to be respectful of uninformed people and ask people to vape outside of confined areas.

A little sniffily, he added:

Not worth multiple blog posts about it.

Thanks for shedding light on that, Aaron, but I disagree about the "multiple posts" (including this one!) because it's an important issue, I think.

In fact it's a classic example of the way tobacco control (and public health) works.

I've lost count of the number of regulations that have been introduced because one person gets a bee in their bonnet about something and decides to act.

They start to lobby other people (most of whom are apathetic or unwilling to get involved in a spat about something they have very little interest in) and before you know it the powers that be have rolled over and meakly met the complainant's demands.

From the comments I have read on this blog and elsewhere there was no "fog bank" of vapour at GFN.

Now Aaron is telling us that only one person complained. According to the organisers however the policy was introduced as a result of complaints from "non-smoking delegates" (plural).

Which is true? Perhaps the organisers could enlighten us.

Incredibly the policy prohibits the use of even low-powered devices during plenary sessions. What message does this send to owners of pubs, clubs and other enclosed public spaces when even the organisers of a "vaper-friendly" event like GFN choose to prohibit or severely restrict the use of e-cigarettes indoors?

It's all very well saying it makes sense because the organisers "are trying to bring people from all sides together" but why does everything always have to be on terms set by public health, in this case a single "European public health leader"?

Why concede so much ground on the basis of one complaint? Ask delegates not to use high-powered devices in plenary sessions – that would have made sense – and to use their common sense when using low-powered devices, but banning them? To me that makes no sense at all.

The organisers of GFN had an opportunity to take a stand on behalf of courteous vapers. They could and should have told the complainant that he or she was making a mountain out of a molehill and there is no evidence that vaping in enclosed public places is harmful to anyone.

In any case, that was last year. If only one person complained why have the organisers felt the need to introduce such a policy for 2016? Has the same person has been invited back and this is an attempt to appease him (or her)?

What the organisers have to understand is that appeasement doesn't work. Public health campaigners are never satisfied. They always want more.

No-smoking areas were an attempt to appease those who didn't like drinking or eating next to people who were smoking. They were often empty as smokers and non-smokers co-existed quite happily in the much larger areas where smoking was allowed.

Inevitably this didn't satisfy everyone. Some complained that no-smoking areas didn't work because smoke drifted from one area to another.

Forest patron Antony Worrall Thompson had a solution to this problem. He designated one floor of his restaurant in Notting Hill as the 'smoking' area. The other floor became the 'non-smoking' area. It worked brilliantly and everyone was happy.

Other establishments introduced smoking rooms but public health campaigners complained that when the door to a smoking room was opened a wisp of smoke could drift out. (The horror!)

Whatever compromise or solution was proposed it was never good enough. Eventually, even though 70 per cent of the public in Britain were opposed to a comprehensive smoking ban (figure courtesy of the Office for National Statistics), a small minority of intolerant anti-smoking activists got their way.

And they're still not happy. Having kicked smokers outside, tobacco control campaigners now want to stop people smoking around doorways or directly outside public buildings.

As night follows day the same thing will happen to vaping unless the "pro-vaping" lobby starts defending the practise.

I think that's worth a few blog posts, don't you?

A Billion Lives: first reviews (the director is "super cute")

The self-styled pro-vaping, anti-corruption documentary A Billion Lives had its world premiere in New Zealand on Wednesday.

If I appear a little obsessed by this film it's because I am. I have a professional interest in the subject but I'm also drawn to independent projects like this.

The promotion of a small budget anti-establishment movie intrigues me and it was strangely exciting to follow director Aaron Biebert and his family and crew to Wellington and experience, even from a distance of 11,500 miles, the opening night on Periscope.

I'm such a stalker that I even watched, via Twitter, a clip of their plane landing in New Zealand.

Of course I have serious reservations about the film and while it would be unfair to leap to conclusions before I see it the first reviews confirm my fears.

Lavishing the film with praise, one reviewer described A Billion Lives as "like the Fahrenheit 9/11 of tobacco". That alone should set alarm bells ringing but consider this.

We were promised a film that would explore alleged corruption in government, public health and even the pharmaceutical industry. A Billion Lives may do all those things but here's what the first reviewers chose to highlight:

Becky: I’m a smoker and if nothing else, I’ve learned I cannot trust the tobacco industry or any big business involved in my healthcare.

Ryan: Since the tobacco industry used to lie about the dangers of smoking – denying their knowledge of that fact for decades before being held accountable for it – they have proven themselves untrustworthy and corrupt. How can anyone believe anything they say or those they influence?

Becky: Watching this movie makes it obvious that the tobacco industry and our government just think we’re all a bunch of shmucks who will believe anything. It makes you feel like they have zero respect for our ability to make sound decisions about our health, based on facts.

A second review headlined A Billion Lives has world premiere in New Zealand, revealing powerful forces aiding the tobacco industry appears to confirm that message:

Filmmaker Aaron Biebert ... journeyed to 13 countries on four continents to find similar patterns worldwide: here is a life-saving technology of e-cigarettes, but governments were banning them or fining citizens over their use, ignoring the science and deciding to be complicit with the tobacco industry in keeping people addicted to a harmful product.

Look, I don't want to come across as an apologist for the tobacco industry. Goodness knows the tobacco companies have done some dumb things in the past but in 2016 Big Tobacco is not the problem, it's part of the solution, or should be.

One of the locations where Biebert filmed was the "vaper-friendly" Global Forum on Nicotine in Warsaw. I understand he conducted a number of interviews when he was there last year but did he make any attempt to interview some of the tobacco company representatives who were there too?

Surely this would have been a great opportunity to get some comments straight from the horse's mouth? Instead, according to this second review, "the pro-smoking side was represented through historical clips".

Likewise, as he went from country to country, did Biebert interview any smokers who don't want to quit? Again, according to this review, "Vaping essentially allows one to get the pleasure of nicotine without the harm of the tar and toxins."

It's very easy to be critical of the tobacco industry if you accept the myth that every consumer is addicted to nicotine and vaping allows people to transfer that addiction to a less harmful product, but it ignores something else – the pleasure of smoking.

Nicotine is a factor in people's addiction to or enjoyment of smoking but there are other factors, as readers of this blog have confirmed many times.

Anyway, read the first reviews of A Billion Lives for yourself. I'm trying hard to keep an open mind, I really am, but it's not easy.

The director sounds nice, though:

Becky: Aaron is ... refreshingly Milwaukeean; sincere and doe-eyed. He seems naturally unrehearsed in his delivery, which I appreciated as a thinking and analytical person who is not receptive to preaching. I don’t want to be told what to think, and although he had a clear opinion, I did not feel any urgency from him to blindly agree with him. Instead, I saw him as a human being with an earnest interest in learning more.

Ryan: He’s real. Midwesterners are known to be welcoming and kind and he effuses those qualities.

Becky: He’s also super cute.

I wonder if they'll put that on the poster ... Better than "People are going to die".

PS. I've just noticed that director Aaron Biebert has commented on a previous post (No UK premiere for A Billion Lives (yet). Why not?)

Given this post it's only fair I include his comments here too:

Simon, I'm starting to like you. Thanks for all the advice and support.

I also wanted to clarify that the official announcement was this one, not your screenshot.

You'll be happy to know that our sold out world premiere at the Oscar-qualifying DocEdge film festival was a great success.

Seems like everyone had a fun night out. We were thrilled to see Sir Richard Taylor, politicians, athletes, doctors, and others join us.

Check out our Facebook page to learn more about what the critics are saying now.

Thanks, Aaron. I'm beginning to like you too. Jury is out on your film, though.

Four on film

Spent yesterday afternoon filming in London.

I wasn't doing the actual filming - Dan Donovan and his sound engineer Ben were doing that - but I tried to make myself useful in other ways, buying lunch, hailing taxis, rounding up interviewees, asking the questions, that sort of thing.

Dan is making a short film to be shown at our Battle of the Brands event at the Churchill War Rooms next week.

The event is to mark the introduction of plain packaging in the UK from next Friday but not everyone we invited could make it so we decided instead to capture their thoughts on film.

Yesterday therefore we spent the afternoon running around London filming Mark Littlewood, director-general of the IEA; Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas; Sam Bowman, director of the Adam Smith Institute; and Ella Whelan, deputy editor of Spiked.

Ella will be a new name to most of you but she's a rising star, increasingly on TV and radio talking about a variety of issues. (On Wednesday night she was in Belfast appearing on BBC Northern Ireland's Stephen Nolan Show.)

She impressed me enormously when I saw her on Nicky Campbell's Big Questions a few months ago. She's only 23 but she handles difficult issues really well.

A week or so ago she was interviewed about plain packaging on the Victoria Derbyshire Show on the BBC News Channel and impressed me again.

I found out she was a smoker when she posted a picture of herself on Twitter on No Smoking Day. Naturally she was smoking. Yesterday however she admitted she's almost given up but she doesn't strike me as the sort who will abandon her liberal principles so easily.

Ben, our sound man, has no plans to quit smoking. He's 22 and made the interesting point that people of his age have never known smoking in pubs and clubs yet lots of his friends smoke.

Neither the smoking ban nor the display ban has discouraged a new generation from smoking and plain packaging won't make any difference either.

Ben started smoking for the classic reasons. Without prompting he told me he began because of peer pressure and because both his parents smoked.

His father (who is 53 and therefore younger than me which made me feel extremely old) switched to e-cigarettes for a while but prefers smoking and has now switched back.

As readers know I'm all in favour of tobacco harm reduction as a goal and I support giving people the option of switching to e-cigarettes and other 'safer' products, but what I hate is the evangelical belief that all smokers would be better off switching and, wow, isn't vaping fun.

The reality, as I keep saying, is that a great many people enjoy smoking. Inform smokers about the alternatives but thereafter leave them alone and respect their choice.

Instead there's an assumption among some vaping advocates that if smokers can be persuaded (or forced) to switch to e-cigarettes their lives will never be the same again. Nirvana awaits.

The truth is that many smokers have tried e-cigarettes, found they don't like them, and keep smoking.

Claire Fox is another. Yesterday Claire told me she's keeping an open mind about vaping but when she previously tried to switch she didn't really like it.

There are a lot of smokers like that but their voices are never heard. The only people we hear from are ex-smoking advocates of vaping whose habit has become a hobby and, in some cases, an obsession.

Btw, Battle of the Brands is now fully subscribed. If you're coming on Tuesday I look forward to seeing you. It should be ... interesting.

Early bird tickets now available for The Freedom Dinner

Delighted to report details of The Freedom Dinner 2016.

This annual event, now in its fifth year, takes place on Tuesday 12th July at Boisdale of Canary Wharf.

Guests are invited to arrive from 6.15pm for a whisky cocktail reception on the smoking terrace. From 7.30 there will be a three-course dinner with wine in the main restaurant, followed by after dinner speeches.

Previous speakers have included General Sir Mike Jackson, former head of the British army; Lord Bell, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; Mark Littlewood, director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs; Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas; Brendan O'Neil, editor of the online magazine Spiked; and Alex Deane, former chief of staff to David Cameron.

This year our speaker is Rod Liddle, associate editor of The Spectator. Former editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Rod writes a weekly column for The Spectator as well as contributing to The Sun and Sunday Times.

Please note, early bird tickets are available for £75 (single) until 31st May 2016. After that date they will cost £110 (single). To book call 0207 715 5815 or email events@boisdale-cw.co.uk.

To download the flyer with full detail click here.

That GFN vaping policy – the mystery deepens

Quick update to an earlier post about the vaping policy at next month's Global Forum on Nicotine.

To recap, the organisers have banned vaping in all plenary and parallel sessions (ie most of the conference) because last year "non-vaping delegates" at this self-styled "vaper-friendly" event complained that they felt "trapped" by the "fog bank" of vapour.

You couldn't make it up.

Vapingpoint Liz mentioned it on her blog and received the following comments from people who were actually there.

Liam Bryan (Vapers In Power) wrote:

I was there last year, Liz, I obviously wasn't in all the sessions (some run concurrently) but in all the rooms I was in there was no "fog bank". The vapers, myself included, were only occasionally vaping and most of us had chosen older devices which don't produce much vapour anyway. I had my mini nautilus for the conference events for instance. I think whoever complained would have felt "trapped" by any amount of visible exhale!

Peter Stigaard wrote:

I was in Warsaw last year too and I also didn't witness banks of fog or clouds of vapours. People were taking quiet puffs during the sessions/plenaries and during breaks people had a vape in the conference lobby. Making a blanket ban on vaping will only result in the consumers not turning up for the GFN this year, I'm sad to say.

Intriguingly David Dorn (Vaper Trails TV) added:

It wasn't "friends" who complained ...

So if it wasn't 'pro-vaping' advocates who complained, who was it and why have the organisers rolled over to meet their demands when eye witness reports claim there was no "fog bank" of vapour.

Who exactly is running this conference and why have they imposed a policy on vaping that can only undermine the argument that vaping should be allowed in pubs and other enclosed public places.

Meanwhile Liz (a vaper) has posted a further piece about GFN, The Global Nicotine Forum – an inconvenient truth.

Liz notes that the "whole conference" is really about stopping people smoking:

The only talk that would interest ME is on the last day. 'Are vaping advocates throwing smokers under the bus by making alliances with public health?'.

In my cynical way, I would assume that after a whole conference of all sorts of academics and public health employees offering their nuggets to a crowd of like-minded people, the answer will be "no".

Oh Liz, that is cynical.

You're absolutely right, though. The answer will undoubtedly be a loud and indignant 'NO!' and afterwards everyone will skip off to the bar, swathed in a warm glow, happy to have convinced themselves (if no-one else) that they are not throwing smokers under a bus.

Update: On the subject of a "fog bank" at GFN15 my colleague Rob Lyons, who was there representing Action on Consumer Choice, tells me:

"I wasn't aware of one, no. I was sat in the middle most of the time so there might have been a few sub-ohmers sat at the back puffing away more voluminously. But it certainly didn't affect the plenary room as a whole nor the workshop room I was in."

That new vaping policy is beginning to look, at best, ridiculous. At worst ... I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Compassion in public health is rare - ain't that the truth

I shouldn't be surprised but I am, which is shocking in itself.

Commenting on the news that a council in New Zealand is looking to extend an outdoor smoking ban from playgrounds to other outdoor areas, Dr Marewa Glover, associate professor at Massey University's School of Public Health, said:

Extending smokefree areas is becoming a new form of segregation, and may do more harm than good to smokers.

Marewa Glover says our heaviest smokers are among sections of the community who already feel "marginalised and discriminated against" - Maori, Pacific Islanders, solo mums, those with mental illnesses.

"These groups are already feeling hard done by and punished by society. Then you bring in a campaign that hopes by further shaming them for smoking, it's going to get them to quit.

"But it's just heaping more punishment on them. The cumulative effect of all that excluding and marginalising is to increase their stress, their depression, their anger - and all that drives smoking."

I can't remember hearing another health professional talk about smokers in this way, treating them like human beings and expressing concern about "segregation", "shaming", marginalisation and so forth.

So last night I tweeted Dr Glover, thanking her for her comments. Compassion for smokers who don't want to quit is unusual. Among public health professionals it's almost non-existent.

Dr Glover 'liked' my tweet and in response I also got a tweet from a leading member of the New Nicotine Alliance who pointed out that Dr Glover is a "keynote" speaker at the Global Forum on Nicotine in Warsaw next month. For good measure she added the hashtag, #justsayin.

Thank you. I know who Dr Glover is (she was in the UK recently speaking at Durham University). I know she's speaking at GFN16. I also know that she spoke at last year's event.

In fact, as I write, I'm watching her on Periscope. (She's attending the world premiere of A Billion Lives in Wellington, New Zealand, because she features in the film.)

Unfortunately one swallow doesn't make a summer and I would be amazed if her fellow health professionals at GFN followed her example and spoke in similar terms.

In fact, I don't think I have EVER heard another health professional or smoking cessation expert criticise ANY smoking ban.

Compassion for smokers who don't want to quit isn't part of their DNA. Every smoking cessation policy is designed to coerce or cajole them to quit.

Policies ranging from smoking bans to punitive taxation to "shaming" smokers for their habit – not to mention the segregation and discrimination Dr Glover refers to – all receive unconditional support.

The same is true of almost all "pro-vaping" public health advocates.

There's never any mention or acknowledgement of the negative impact these policies may have on ordinary people.

And it's not just health professionals and anti-smoking campaigners. The New Nicotine Alliance itself is noticeably silent whenever there's talk of extending smoking bans to outdoor areas.

"Nothing to do with us, guv," is their habitual response.

So forgive me if I don't fall for the fallacy that just because Dr Glover is speaking at GFN that somehow makes the entire conference smoker-friendly and compassionate to those who don't want to quit.

GFN isn't even vaper-friendly!!!

PS. If her compassion for smokers wasn't unusual enough, Dr Glover added:

"We're moving beyond the reason for banning smoking indoors, which was ... protecting the health of by-standers from secondhand smoke.

"Now what we're doing [banning smoking in outdoor open areas] has no scientific evidence of health reasons."

Perhaps Dr Glover and fellow health professionals at GFN could issue a joint statement to that effect. Sadly I don't think many (if any) of them would sign it, do you?

See Public health professor warns Wellington smokefree moves will cause harm (Dominion Post).

Significantly Dr Glover later tweeted: "How shameful it's come to this: compassion in Public Health rare." Ain't that the truth.

Never heard such compassion for smokers from a public health professional. Thank you, @MarewaGlover. https://t.co/dEdCfAXODG

— Simon Clark (@simonclark_) May 10, 2016

The healthiest option

I sense that few if any readers of this blog are interested in the Food and Drug Administration's decision to seize control of the regulation of e-cigarettes in the United States.

I don't blame you. According to Carl Phillips however it's "the most chatter-inducing event in the history of THR".

Carl, a US-based expert on tobacco harm reduction, has chosen not to add to the hullabaloo. "Been there, wrote that," he says, adding:

Anyone who is shocked by what was released last week was not paying attention. I have seen literally nothing in the deluge of writings since the regulation was released that I and CASAA (and others, of course) did not already point out.

Carl's post (Ecig deeming regulation - nothing new to see here) reminded me of something I wrote in January 2015, a few months after attending the Global Tobacco Network Forum (GTNF) in West Virginia.

The biggest coup was to get Mitch Zeller, director of the US Food and Drug Administration's Center for Tobacco Products (CTP). Reduced harm products presented the CTP with a challenge, he said. They may be less of a risk to the user but their availability might prevent consumers from choosing the healthiest option, complete cessation [my emphasis].

And that, in a nutshell, is what we're up against. Even the more liberal and open-minded public health officials view complete cessation as the long-term goal. Zeller didn't say it but "No safe level of nicotine" is sure to be the mantra for many years to come. Good news for the likes of ASH but bad news for the rest of us (including the taxpayer).

I suspect this explains why so many "pro-vaping" public health groups have kept silent on the FDA's deeming regulation.

The truth, as everyone but the most myopic advocates of THR must surely now acknowledge, is that the goal of 'public health' is not smoking cessation, it's nicotine cessation.

The moving target will always be the "healthiest option" so it doesn't matter if e-cigarettes are 95 per cent less harmful than combustibles, the "healthiest option" will always be "complete cessation".

Vapers seem to hope that if they ally themselves with "pro-vaping" public health campaigners e-cigarettes will be excluded from the worst regulatory excesses. Good luck with that.

The problem is, as soon as you accept punitive regulations for one consumer product you are conceding that, in the name of health, similar regulation is acceptable for other products.

The argument that regulations should reflect relative risk is good in theory but it doesn't apply here because the most powerful 'public health' bodies only see two categories - risk and no risk.

It doesn't matter that e-cigarettes are 'safer' than combustible tobacco. They are not the "healthiest option" and must be regulated accordingly.

One or two governments (including the UK) may prefer light touch regulation on THR products but ultimately they are powerless against the might of unelected 'public health' officials in Brussels (EC), Washington (FDA) and Geneva (WHO).

Btw, the response to the announcement of the FDA deeming regulation also reminded me of the response to MPs voting in favour of a comprehensive smoking ban.

Forest had been campaigning against a public smoking ban for three years. The day after the vote we were overwhelmed with calls and emails from smokers complaining bitterly about the legislation. Nothing like that had happened before.

To paraphrase Carl Phillips, it was the most chatter-inducing event in the history of smokers' rights (in the UK at least), beaten only by a similar outpouring of noise on July 1, 2007, when the legislation was formally introduced.

What we are seeing now is history repeating itself. Vapers are up in arms but why has the FDA announcement come as a surprise? As Carl Phillips says, he and others have been writing about this for years.

Meanwhile the idea that 'public health' is anything other than an enemy of choice and personal freedom is a joke yet some THR advocates cling to the hope that some form of alliance is the best way forward.

If the FDA announcement hasn't put that thought to bed I don't know what will.

PS. A lot of FDA chatter has focused on the impact the deeming regulation will have on the tobacco companies. A good example is this article in the Washington Post, Why the FDA's new e-cigarette regulations are a gift to Big Tobacco.

Returning to that January 2015 post, I also noted that another speaker at GTNF 2014 was Susan Cameron, CEO of Reynolds American, the second largest tobacco company in the United States:

Some vapers should look away now because in her speech Cameron called for the strict regulation of open-system vapour products. In her view, they present a "unique risk" because they are "open to tampering".

It's comments like these that have upset a lot of vapers. Personally I'm against strict regulation but credit to her for going public with her position in such a no-nonsense fashion and not hiding behind Chatham House rules.

Indeed. You may not like it but no-one can say Cameron wasn't being entirely open and honest about her company's position.

How the pro-vaping chatterati failed to notice all this is a bit of a mystery. It's been staring them in the face for years.