Displays of ignorance
Wednesday, April 29, 2009 This is a longer post than usual but bear with me. Commenting on the previous post, Belinda has linked to a piece which was published today on the online magazine Spiked. Written by by Patrick Basham and John Luik of the Democracy Institute, the article asks "Why does New Labour want to ban cigarette displays in shops when there's no evidence it will impact on smoking habits?".
There's some excellent stuff here, but here's a taster:
In a further effort to bolster the quickly unravelling case for display bans, the government has circulated a study by Gerard Hastings and colleagues from the Centre for Tobacco Control Research at the University of Stirling. Hastings claims, most recently in a letter to The Times this week, that an increased awareness of tobacco brands, supposedly from tobacco displays, increases young people’s susceptibility to becoming a smoker.
Yet Hastings claims are refuted, first by the fact that, according to a US Department of Health and Human Services study, interest in smoking and intention to smoke drives brand awareness rather than the other way around. Young people interested in smoking are interested in tobacco brands. Interest in tobacco brands does not lead to an interest in smoking. Clearly, Professor Hastings has confused the sequence.
Second, Hastings’ claims are further refuted by the British experience in which there has been a significant decline in awareness of tobacco brands. Yet, according to the most recent statistics for England, there has been no decline in youth smoking. Indeed, there has been an increase in smoking among adolescent girls. If Hastings’ claim about awareness of tobacco brands driving youth smoking were true, then one should expect a sharp decline in awareness to bring about a corresponding decline in smoking.
Funnily enough, we have just sent some briefing notes to peers on a similar theme. One section, entitled "Misrepresentation of evidence", reads:
The anti-smoking lobby repeatedly implies that display bans in Canada resulted in a drop in smoking rates among 15-19 year olds from 22% in 2002 to 15% in 2007. The vast majority of Canada in population terms was not covered by a display ban until 2008 so the decline in smoking rates happened at a time when tobacco was openly displayed to the majority of the population. In fact, the state in Canada which first banned tobacco displays – Saskatchewan in 2002 – has had the worst record in the country for reducing youth smoking.
The anti-smoking lobby also quote data to the effect that smoking rates among 15-16 year olds declined following the introduction of a display ban in Iceland in 2001. Looking at the full data set for young people, 15 to 19 year olds, smoking rates were almost exactly the same in 2007 as they were in 2001, according to Statistics Iceland.
Significantly, ASH backtracked recently when challenged by Mike Penning MP (Conservative Shadow Health Minister). ASH told politicians that Iceland and Canada offered evidence that display bans work, leading Health Secretary Alan Johnson to say in parliament that “The number of young smokers in Canada ... was reduced by 32 per cent among 15 and 19-year-olds as a result of the implementation of the measure.”
Penning noted a subtle change in their rhetoric when he pointed out in his blog that “The choice of language used by representatives from the campaign group Action on Smoking and Health in a recent article is revealing – point of sale bans in Iceland and Canada are now being cited as ‘coinciding’ with a fall in youth smoking, rather than effecting this ...”.
In response ASH said that “ASH makes claims of causation with great care and for a number of technical reasons, including the fact that display bans were part of a range of interventions, it is not possible to definitely claim causation at this stage.”
The Smoke Free Coalition recently claimed in a briefing to peers that seven out of eight studies show a link between exposure to point of sale displays and youth smoking. Nothing could be more misleading. Virtually all studies into the reasons for youth smoking cite peer pressure and parental influence as the major factors. We are not aware of any study that set out with the clear aim of finding out what causes young people to smoke and came back with the answer: tobacco displays. The studies cited by the anti-smoking lobby always emanate from within the global tobacco control community and follow a similar pattern.
Research presented by tobacco control advocates is consistently lacking normal standards of academic rigour. According to the Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman, writing in 2006:
“The findings in the public health literature linking tobacco company (nonprice) marketing campaigns [with smoking outcomes] emerge from empirical implementations that fall far short of those required to establish well-founded causal relationships. These studies do not accurately model human behavior, as these studies ignore how human choice affects the measurement for both ‘treatment’ and outcome.” (Heckman, et al. 2006, p.43).
Basham and Luik's article coincides with the publication tomorrow of a Democracy Institute book called Hidden in Plain Sight: Why Tobacco Display Bans Fail. Details to follow. If you don't want to buy the book I recommend that you at least read the full article HERE.
PS. To answer Belinda's question, yes, Basham and Luik's piece will be sent to peers.
Reader Comments (4)
I hope that we contributors have added to the debate when this came up on the highly influential ConservativeHome, based on a piece by Mike Penning. To be fair Mike Penning appears to of done his research before the Icelandic studies were published. I also read recently that Kenneth Clarke is also aware of the misleading spin from ASH. It was also good to see that ASH dispatched a Campaigns Officer to add to the debate, with negligible influence. I hope the tide has turned.
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2009/02/mike-penning-wh.html?cid=148763611
Ken Clarke on ASH.
“I do recall how Ash [Action on Smoking and Health] were extremely vehement that the smoking ban would have no effect on the licensed trade at all and produced the completely untrue assertion it had had no damaging effect on bars in Dublin... That seemed to be swallowed by most of the public and unfortunately – what mattered – the vast majority of Members of Parliament.”
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2009/03/21/pub-trade-went-up-in-smoke-with-the-ban-says-ken-clarke-91466-23199701/
Are we ruled by imbeciles?
Bans don’t work; it just makes the product look more interesting to the young. FACT
On the Question of Ireland. I looked in to going to Ireland for New Year post smoking ban. It was too expensive. After the smoking ban. I could have got New Year for £200 for 2 including flight from UK.