Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Say something stupid, get endorsed on Catallaxy

Bernard Keane from Crikey made this statement about plain packaging cigarettes:
One of the highest profile public health industry lobbyists, Professor Mike Daube, yesterday claimed “the primary focus for plain packaging was always to reduce smoking among children, but it is a real bonus that it has clearly had an impact on smokers”. That’s rather different to what Daube said when plain packaging was first announced, when he claimed “we know from research that it will have a significant impact on children and adults”. Is Daube readying for when we see that plain packaging hasn’t affected tobacco sales?
Actually, Bernard, it is not "rather different" at all.   You can say that something will have a significant impact on both A & B, while believing that the primary effect will be on A.  To say that the impact on B is "a bonus" is hardly controversial rhetoric.

Anyone who had read anything about the plain packaging argument knows that the effect of getting less children to start smoking was always believed by many to be the main way it would work.  Here's Harry Clarke in 2012:
Well, I think the main target is youth.  Young people, it's claimed, are seduced by the attractive packaging and the brand names that are associated with cigarettes.  I guess for confirmed smokers it won't make so much difference, but certainly for youth, it's well recognised that branding does have an impact on purchasing choices.  We've currently done pretty well in Australia in reducing smoking rates among young people, but this is really trying to clinch the deal and to reduce the initiation of smoking among young people as much as possible.
Anyone with any common sense would also then assume that this effect would take time to show.

But all of that is not good enough for Sinclair Davidson, who thinks evidence should be in by now and that the lack of evidence on the number of smokers means he can already declare the "policy is a dog."  The policy has been fully in effect for about 7 months. 

Talk about taking glib and pathetically poorly informed criticism to new heights.

3 comments:

nottrampis said...

Rather sad an economics professor doesn't understand what evidence based policy means or rather revealing!

TimT said...

Could it be that the plain packaging era will merely encourage a DIY spirit amongst the young - grow your own, roll your own, make your own? Or, alternatively, go to an 'unofficial' provider....

Steve said...

I doubt it, Tim.

Amusingly, while looking around some blogs about this, I noticed that some freedom loving types were proud to show off the year's supply of branded tobacco they had stockpiled at the end of the last year so as to foil government intentions.

I thought, well, you would have to wait for sales figures to get past that minor hump before you could tell if sales were really down or not.

Anyway, the point is, the "new teenage smoker" in any one year is a surely a relatively small part of the total number of smokers for that year. If you expect a policy to work by reducing that number, you are going to have to wait a while before having reliable figures, and even then they might remain ambiguous given that the rate of youth smoking was gradually declining anyway. (Although I suspect the rate will show something of an increase, eventually.)