The Tobacco and Vapes Bill hasn’t become law yet, but Action on Smoking and Health have already announced their next set of demands. Via the All-Party Parliamentary Group that ASH set up and run, they are calling for a ban on smoking in the tiny handful of cigar lounges that are still allowed to permit it, a £700 million a year levy on the tobacco industry, health warnings on individual cigarettes, and a ban on cigarette filters.
These are the last desperate squeals of an organisation that has made itself obsolete. The idea of a tobacco industry levy has been repeatedly rejected by HMRC because the tax will ultimately be paid by consumers and we already have tobacco duty for that. Banning smoking in luxury cigar lounges is just petty, and health warnings on cigarettes, as recently introduced in the anti-tobacco basket case that is Australia, are preposterous.
The only interesting proposal is the ban on cigarette filters — and not in a good way. ASH will have half an eye on the House of Lords, where the Tobacco and Vapes Bill will arrive later this month. Since the average peer is even more intolerant and puritanical than the average MP, ASH will be hoping that they add yet more bells and whistles to this appalling piece of prohibitionist legislation. In the reading in the Commons last month, an amendment to ban cigarette filters (proposed by one of those freedom-loving Conservatives, natch) got more than 100 votes. The amendment referred to “plastic cigarette filters” so Caroline Dinenage — for it was she — may have thought that this was a minor piece of environmental regulation. Perhaps she didn’t know that all cigarette filters are made of plastic; cellulose acetate to be precise. A ban on plastic filters would be a ban on all filters and, unless the UK is going to repeal EU laws on tar and nicotine yields, possibly a ban on all cigarettes.
ASH recently put up a webpage in which they assert that filters are a “fraud” and “provide no health benefit at all”. According to anti-smoking folklore, nothing the tobacco industry has ever done to make cigarettes safer has worked; it has all been a con, a PR stunt to keep people smoking. But actions speak louder than words. Governments tell us that low-tar (“light”) cigarettes are no better than high-tar cigarettes while banning high-tar cigarettes for health reasons. In 1992, the EU set a maximum tar yield of 15mg for cigarettes. In 2003, it banned tobacco companies from using descriptors such as “light” or “low tar” because implying that “a certain tobacco product is less harmful than others … might mislead consumers”. A year later, it lowered the legal tar limit to 10mg. There is no point trying to make sense of this.
Are cigarette filters a “fraud”? ASH don’t provide any evidence for this claim because it isn’t true. It is one of the many lies we tell children to discourage them from smoking, but legal restrictions on tar yields are evidence-based. Hardly anyone smokes unfiltered cigarettes anymore so the evidence necessarily comes from the past, but there is a lot of it. One of the most recent studies was published in the British Medical Journal in 2004. It found that smokers of unfiltered cigarettes were 44 per cent more likely to develop lung cancer than smokers of filtered cigarettes. The authors noted that their findings were consistent with 22 previous studies going back to 1968.
These studies include a piece of research by Ernst Wynder, the American who pipped Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill to the post in 1950 when he identified the link between smoking and lung cancer. In a study published in 1979, he found that the “relative risks of developing lung or larynx cancer were consistently lower among long-term smokers of filter cigarettes than among smokers of nonfilter cigarettes, irrespective of quantity smoked.” In 1976, another pioneer of tobacco research, E. Cuyler Hammond, found that rates of lung cancer and heart disease were significantly higher among smokers of high tar (mostly unfiltered) cigarettes and suggested taking them off the market. A study from Britain published two years later, based on evidence from more than 10,000 people, found that smokers of filtered cigarettes had an 18 per cent lower overall mortality rate than those who smoked unfiltered cigarettes.
An interesting study published in the British Medical Journal in 1984 found that smokers who consumed unfiltered cigarettes had a 60 per cent higher risk of developing lung cancer than smokers who switched to filtered brands. Still more interesting is the evidence that smokers of menthol cigarettes have historically had a lower rate of lung cancer than other smokers. The most plausible explanation for this finding, which have been documented in several studies, is that menthol cigarettes are invariably filtered and smokers of menthol cigarettes (which have been around since the 1920s) were the first to switch to filters.
Research in this field has all but dried up, but one more study appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2019. Based on evidence from 14,123 smokers in America, it found that consumers of unfiltered cigarettes were nearly twice as likely to die from lung cancer as those who consumed filtered cigarettes.
I could fill the rest of this article with evidence showing the relative health benefits of filtered cigarettes, but what would be the point? Nearly all the studies come from an era before tobacco research became entirely activist-driven. The only time you are likely to see filters mentioned in the public health literature these days is when quackademics are doing survey-based research into the public’s “misconceptions” and “misperceptions”. Some “public health” academics, albeit in California, have even called for filters to be banned because people think they are safer.
Unfiltered cigarettes are much more satisfying and flavoursome than … EU-regulated rubbish
The idea is not new. In 1990, the American anti-smoking zealot John Slade said he wished the US government had banned cigarette innovation in 1950 because then “the only cigarettes on the market would be unfiltered 70 mm smokes, and far fewer people would be smoking.” From a public health perspective, this seems like a bit of a gamble. It is far from clear whether many people do think that filtered cigarettes are safer than “unfiltered 70mm smokes”. Years of propaganda may have put paid to that. And even if they do think that, they are well aware that cigarettes in any form are very bad for them. Smokers, almost by definition, are not health conscious.
But there is a more important point that people like Slade wouldn’t appreciate and which it may soon be illegal to say out loud: unfiltered cigarettes are much more satisfying and flavoursome than the EU-regulated rubbish we’ve had to put up with for the last few decades, especially since 2004. They look cooler and taste better. I’m sorry but it’s true. No one knows what the latent demand for real cigarettes is and, if I were in “public health”, I wouldn’t want to find out.
