by frog
The Association of Community Retailers (ACR), friends of Big Tobacco and pro-whaling movements, sent out a release today hailing a new study that shows that by banning tobacco displays you damage the economy and destroy public health.
There are a couple of things I would like to point out.
Canada’s Ruinous Tobacco Display Ban- Economic & Health [PDF here] isn’t a medical paper, per se. It was independently published by the Democracy Institute, a right-wing think tank.
I’m pretty sure that Dr Patrick Basham is not a doctor in the medical sense, or whether his PhD is in public health. Although he has extensive health policy background, you kind of expect public health studies to come from people who are in public health and have medical experience.
Basham works for the Democracy Institute and the CATO Institute. The motto of the CATO Institute, for those who don’t know, is “Individual liberty, Free Markets, and Peace”. Both are fairly well known for their views which run in the face of reality.
Canada’s Ruinous Tobacco Display Ban is basically a whole lot of cherry picked statistics. There is no mention of anything that does not support Basham’s assertions. There is no real research done. It is like me putting forward the assertion that all frogs are green, and only presenting you with pictures of green frogs, excluding the many shades of brown, blue and red that frogs come in.
The paper concludes:
“Regardless of one’s view of smoking, of specific tobacco control measures, or of the tobacco industry, itself, a powerful and growing body of research evidence clearly points to the probability that each country that implements a new tobacco display ban will suffer severe economic damage and severely damage its public health.”
Let’s just make it clear here what Basham is claiming. He says that by removing tobacco displays the country’s economy goes bust and the health of the people gets worse. Wow. I am astounded.
Like any public health person will tell you, with addiction the problem needs to be addressed in more than one way. Banning the display of ciggies isn’t going to help as a solitary method. So on the one hand Basham is quite right that banning tobacco displays was ineffective. What is needed is a comprehensive approach, something similar to the 5+ Solution being floated by Alcohol Action here in New Zealand.
My favourite line from the release was “Retailers in New Zealand find the research illuminating”. I guess that is illuminating like a lit cigarette while you’re standing in the pitch dark.
The ACR has only come into being very recently with pretty much the sole purpose of defending tobacco sales. There is no proven track record for speaking out about much else. Although, with the removal of alcohol sales from dairies potentially on the horizon, we will probably see them branching out into M.O.D. Squad territory. If you haven’t seen Thank you for Smoking you should. The below quote from the movie reminds me of what Basham and the ACR are doing here.
Nick: Nick Naylor, the lead spokesman for big tobacco, would have you believe he thinks cigarettes are harmless, but really he’s doing it for the mortgage.
Polly: The “M.O.D. Squad”—meaning, of course, “Merchants of Death”—is comprised of Polly Bailey, of the Moderation Council, and Bobby Jay Bliss, of the gun business’s own advisory group, S.A.F.E.T.Y.
Bobby: As explained by Naylor, the sole purpose of their meetings is to compete for the highest death toll as they compare strategies on how to dupe the American people.
Published in Health & Wellbeing | THE ISSUES by frog on Tue, June 29th, 2010
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
good stuff guys!
Looks like the finger-pointa-man is on cheese.. the other two makeover!
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Hmmm…
The cheese argument is interesting. If it could be shown that half of the people who ate cheese regularly died from straightforwardly related causes, then I think there would be a good argument for phasing it out. I hope a NZ government would not solicit people to hide such evidence, in order to protect the dairy industry.
By way of taking my position seriously, I’ve had a look at a2 corporation’s web-site and, with casual reading, I have no idea of the disease prevalence that they’re attributing to milk.
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Make smoking compulsory! Think of the health savings with everyone dying younger!
It’s the new green policy!
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I couldn’t have put it better myself. I would just like to add a comment about the graphs in the report. Any difference is going to look bigger when you look at it with a microscope (metaphorically speaking) and fail to add a scale/confidence intervals. ACR’s use of this research is a classy comedy act. I was highly amused.
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What utter rubbish. Your analysis of the Basham document is weak. I just read the paper and it doesn’t claim to be a health document nor does Basham claim to be a medical doctor. Since when has it been necessary for someone to be a medical doctor to make comments on tobacco issues? It just shows your particular bias. The paper is an economic analysis and discusses the possible economic risks based on the experience in Canada, Iceland, Ireland and Thailand. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not pro-smoking. Ban it, I say. But deal with the arguments. Why do so many people (and NGOs especially) just attack the person. Attack the argument if you don’t agree with it rather than peddling rubbish about who’s supporting who. You fail to mention in your tirade that both Sweden and Denmark have decided against banning tobacco displays. I don’t hear you accusing those governments of being funded by BIG TOBACCO! You provide a very weak argument.
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yea quite right ‘HB’! Banning tobacco displays is PC nonsense. Janine Payneter the only comedy act here is you.
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Ok lets put aside the rather large problem that tobacco money put this report into existence and deal with the report on its merits or lack thereof.
1. As Janine correctly points out the graphs and percentages have no confidence intervals or margins of error -so this means a decision can’t be made at all about whether or not there is actually a significant difference between any of the figures used. Dr Basham incorrectly concludes that there has been an increase. This is such a grievous misinterpretation that I wonder as to the nature and circumstances under which Dr Basham gained his PhD and whether or not it was a science or economics based thesis.
2. Dr Basham uses the data from Iceland and Canada spuriously. For example with the Canadian data; he splits data which is intended to be part of a NATIONAL sample into measures of prevalence within provinces. This means that individual samples from each province are too small to accurately measure any changes in smoking within those individual provinces. When used properly i.e. as a national sample the data shows decreases in smoking following the introduction of display bans.
3. The data that Dr Basham uses for Iceland is also inappropriate data for measuring what he purports to measure. The sample is too small to judge whether or not the change in Iceland was significant. Another larger appropriate sized sample from Iceland collected by the European Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs (ESPAD, http://www.espad.org) shows a statistically significant decline in smoking in Iceland following the implementation of display bans.
4. Claims in the report that illicit trade have increased as a result of the removal of displays are downright claptrap. There are other clear well documented reasons for increases in illicit trade in Canada.
5. Sweden and Denmark have right wing governments at the moment. I wonder how much BIG TOBACCO money has changed hands with respect to the selected politicians involved in considering a display ban.
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