Hattix

Ten years ago, smoking-related illnesses cost the NHS (England) £1.7 billion per year on treatment. Today that figure is £2.7 billion. Anti-smoking lobby group Ash sees this as a success of their lobby, claiming at least a £300,000 saving per year as the number of smokers has dropped from 12 million to 9 million.

I’m not so sure. Smoking was in decline anyway, before the measures of the last five or so years (which have not altered the decline rate), public smoking ban or not, the numbers would have been about the same. Let’s take a look at those figures again, though. Adjusting for inflation we see that ten years ago, we spent £2.38 billion (2008 pounds) on smoking-related illnesses and in real terms, the outlay has only increased by £320,000 - Or about the price of ten years of care for two breast cancer (which isn’t smoking related) patients.

Now let’s take a look at demographics, the thing the anti-smoking lobby doesn’t want you to see. That’s right, we have the 1950s and 1960s baby boomers reaching their 50s and 60s, ages where smoking-related illnesses typically take hold. Why’s the figure increasing then? Because the population is getting older - There are more older people! Unless Ash would prefer us leading our senior citizens to the gas chambers, they’re just going to have to live with it.

The anti-smoking lobby and particularly Ash, have been traditionally a very deceptive bunch. They go on about how much the NHS loses a year and how it’d better be spent on other illnesses (appeal to emotion fallacy) but what they don’t say is that in the tax year 2007-2008, HM Treasury recieved £8 billion in tobacco tax of cigarettes alone, discounting things like hand-rolling tobacco, pipe tobacco and the smaller specialist tobaccos such as chewing and snuff which add up to around another billion. Smokers pay for their own treatment through tobacco taxes and, indeed, are perhaps the only group in the UK who cover their NHS expenses near-directly. They also turn the Treasury quite a tidy profit of £5 billion too.

If anti-smoking programmes are successful, that £5 billion hole in Treasury funds will have to come from somewhere else…like perhaps the NHS.

No part of this post should be seen as supportive of tobacco use. Repeated and valid scientific study has shown that there is no harmless lower bound for tobacco use, any regular use at all at any level is significantly harmful to health and in particular directly linked to chronic and fatal cardiac and pulmonary diseases. Indirect use (passive smoking) is another matter entirely, however.