Pat Nurse v. Amanda Sandford

Indirectly prompted by Pat Nurse, I was just going to find out ( and transcribe) a bit of what Amanda Sandford had said on Radio 5 a few days back – but ended up transcribing more or less the whole thing (or from 12 minutes through to 26 minutes), because quite a lot of the rest of it was interesting too – mostly for the rather bizarre things Sandford said. I think what follows is a pretty accurate transcript.

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Radio5: From tomorrow, cigarettes will be hidden from sight in large supermarkets across England. Cigarette packets will have to be kept behind doors or screens.  Smaller shops like newsagents will have to comply by 2015. I wondered why we have to wait so long for smaller shops because if you imagine they’ve got all the front of the displays, … need a lot of time to replace that. A similar ban will take effect in Wales and Northern Ireland over the coming year. The ban in Scotland is currently subject to a legal challenge. We want to hear from you: Will a ban on cigarette displays stub out smoking? Is it the packaging that encourages young people to take up the habit? Or is this another case of smokers being unfairly targeted, consumers who pay hefty tax being denied a choice of brands? Patricia Nurse is a lifelong smoker. She’s been smoking for 44 years. And Amanda Sandford is from the antismoking lobby group ASH who have campaigned for an end to displays. … Patricia, no more supermarket cigarette displays from tomorrow, is that a good thing at the end of the day?

Pat Nurse: No obviously not a good thing for the adult consumer. It won’t do a thing about preventing new smoking, no

Radio5: If they don’t see the branding when they walk in?

Pat Nurse: Oh come on, that’s insulting children’s intelligence. To be honest, I carried out my own personal survey before this came out. I went round a few shops and supermarkets asked the assistants behind the counter how often do children stand there goggle-eyed just looking at the displays. How many children come in and are attracted by the displays. And they say: Absolutely none. It’s just ridiculous. It’s just punishment for adult consumers because they won’t quit. They want people to quit. They want to eradicate tobacco. Simon Chapman the Australian tobacco control guru has actually admitted that this is about killing off the tobacco companies. All this will do will confuse elderly smokers, particularly the ones who have been smoking for a lifetime, like myself, and really don’t understand why on earth they are being targeted in this way. We are consumers at the end of the day. Why are we denied the rights of other consumers to be able to choose the brand of our product and the price of product too?

Radio5: Amanda, why are you campaigning about this?

Amanda Sandford: The reason for the campaign is to protect children. Unlike Patricia, actually the research does show that tobacco displays do attract children. I think her survey is rather unscientific, if I may put it that way. There is good evidence that children are affected by marketing. The point of putting the cigarettes out of sight is to put it out of mind and make it less appealing to children. What we know is that since the advertising ban, the companies have invested a lot in making the cigarette packs particularly attractive. They’re much more colourful They come in different shapes and sizes. They have displays to make particular brands stand out. It’s not particularly for adults, because adults tend to be quite brand loyal. It’s to attract new smokers, and new smokers are young smokers.

Radio5: What is the evidence?

Amanda Sandford: There’s been studies done in the countries where.. in Canada and Iceland they already have point-of-sale bans. We’ve already seen a fall in new smoking since they introduced the ban.

Radio5: And that’s directly attributed to branding of cigarettes in shops?

Amanda Sandford: We can’t say it’s absolutely directly correlated. But since the bans have been in place there has been a fall in smoking. So it’s likely to be a factor. There may be other things as well. The price is key. We are not saying this is the only reason why children take up smoking, obviously. We know that advertising and marketing works as a concept. It works in all sorts of things. It encourages people buying particular cars, because they’ve seen the advertising. And cigarette smoking works the same way.

Radio5: Patricia, we are all suckers for brands. If it’s working in Canada, it’s a good example?

Pat Nurse: It’s not working in Canada. It’s hardly making any difference on youth rates at all.

Amanda Sandford: Yes, it has. It has.

Pat Nurse: I know that Amanda will dispute that. There’s two schools of thought. And there’s two sorts of studies. Who do you believe? It’s the quality of the kind of studies that Tobacco Control puts forward that concerns me. One of them on outdoor bans for example which was printed in the Tobacco Control journal was saying that young people want these outdoor bans because they’re not then attracted to social smoking, and actually the research was based on 13 people on Facebook. This is the kind of thing that really concerns me as an adult consumer. And as one who started smoking in childhood at 8 years old, I would tell Amanda, because she obviously doesn’t know, that children do not get attracted by packaging. And it certainly wasn’t packaging or displays that attracted me as a child.

Radio5: What attracted you to smoking?

Pat Nurse: I think it was a case of wanting to grow up. I was the youngest in a single parent family of five. Nobody took a lot of notice of me, because I was the youngest. And I’m the first to put my hand up and say I absolutely admire and thank Tobacco Control for the work that it has done over the years to make it much safer now. I was the sort of child who at 8 years old could go into a local shop and ask for a packet of cigarettes, and the only thing I would get was the shopkeeper would say Are these for your mum? and I would say Yes. And we had television advertising as well.

Radio5: Jonathan in Swansea. What do you make of this? From tomorrow shops and supermarkets will have to be hiding their cigarette packets behind doors and screens..

Caller Jonathan: It’s rather futile and childish. It’s not going to make any difference to the amount of people who smoke in this country.

Radio5: It’s aimed at children. It’s not really designed to stop people – that’s what we’re hearing – to stop people from smoking. It’s designed to deter young children. The research –  and we can argue about the research – suggests that young children are attracted by the colours and the brands of the cigarettes in what sometimes are just sweetshops.

Caller Jonathan: How many newsagents sell cigarettes to children in the first place?

Radio5: Well.. Amanda, haven’t we already laws that stop children buying cigarettes?

Amanda Sandford: Yes, there is a law. It is illegal to sell tobacco to people under 18. And to be fair, a lot of shopkeepers are much more compliant with the law. But the fact is that children do get hold of cigarettes from other sources, either from family or friends. The appeal of smoking comes from the marketing. and that’s what the tobacco companies have been doing over the years.

Caller Jonathan: I would disagree with that, actually. I think that the appeal in smoking comes from the fact that it’s seen as a forbidden habit.

Pat Nurse: I’d agree with that. I had someone report to me today that, where as I said my own personal survey showed that children don’t stand there goggle-eyed, I’m told that somebody went to one of these hidden displays and there were children looking and waiting there to see what came from behind it. You make something taboo, and children are automatically interested. This is absolutely infantile.

Radio5: Isn’t that true, when you think of drugs like marijuana and cannabis, drugs that are illegal, just because they’re not available over the counter doesn’t mean that people aren’t smoking them?

Amanda Sandford: That’s true. But we’re not talking about making tobacco illegal. And of course it’s not surprsing..

Caller Jonathan: That’s the aim, to make tobacco illegal!

Amanda Sandford: Of course children are going to be curious about that at the moment. It’s a new thing. They will wonder what’s there. But in time they’ll accept that that’s tobacco and it won’t appeal to them.

Pat Nurse: You’ve already said that children get their tobacco or cigarettes from other sources and not shops. This is just ridiculous. It’s futile. And it is meant to punish adult smokers.

Radio5: Jonathan, make your final quick point.

Caller Jonathan: I think this ban is going to backfire. It’ll only encourage children to take up smoking as an act of defiance against the nanny state.

Radio5: Darren.

Caller Darren: That last point was really quite good, I think. Children do things quite often if you tell them not to. Going back to my days as a teenager, I used to drink when I was 14 to 17 because I wasn’t allowed to. When I turned 18 I couldn’t be bothered. No different with smoking. My daughter is aged 17. 70 plus percent of her fellow students smoke, and most of those are girls, and the reason why when she asked why they smoked: The reason is they want to lose weight. These stupid magazines out there, which all these girls follow, unfortunately they’re saying, probably supported by the tobacco groups, that you can lose weight by smoking.

Amanda Sandford: Absolutely. The reason that girls are getting these messages that smoking helps keep them slim is particularly through the marketing. You now actually get super-slim cigarettes. And they’re sold in packs looking like perfume packs or lipstick packs with pastel shades They’re clearly marketed at young girls. It’s that sort of thing we’ve got to put a stop to, first by putting the cigarettes out of sight in the shops, and ultimately by getting them into plain packaging, so that people can see them for what they are, just things that cause cancer and heart disease, and not things that make you look sexy and attractive to other people.

Pat Nurse: And again if Amanda knew anything about smoking culture then she would know that for a very long time, probably since before she was born, there were always cigarettes that were described as slim, and it was nothing to do with weight. It was to do with the size of the cigarette.

Amanda Sandford: Yes, but it has the effect of making the cigarettes look appealing.

Pat Nurse: The government’s bullying obesity campaign makes children and young people terrified to put on any weight in case they get subjected to the same kind of bullying as smokers are being subjected to at the moment. It’s very odd, the whole nannying policy on all sorts of things. Let adults be adults, and leave children alone to grow up and develop properly without your interference, and everyone would be much better off.

Amanda Sandford: But you said Patricia yourself that you started smoking because it made you feel grown up. Again that’s something the industry capitalised on. They claim they only market to adults because they want children to be…

Pat Nurse: But I also started smoking in a different time and a generation when nearly everybody smoked. I do admire the work that you’ve done in helping to protect children from my generation and my children’s generation. But frankly you’re just going over the top with over-regulation and undoing all the good work that you did before.

Radio5: Darren, have you any other children? Would you not prefer cigarettes to be on display or not?.

Caller Darren: …I don’t see that it would make any difference. What makes the difference is when you’ve got Casualty on TV where in order to calm themselves down the doctors, which are supposed to be people everyone follows, they’ll pop outside for a fag.

Pat Nurse: Truth is that doctors and nurses do actually smoke. That is a fact of life.

Radio5: Amanda, what we seem to be touching on here is whether we really working on what the motivations really are for young people. Is it as simple as they see the brand? Isn’t it more than that? And doesn’t this play to exactly what young people do, which is rebel, and if something is not available, or something they’re not supposed to be doing, there’s almost that kind of feeling that I want to go and do it.

Amanda Sandford: Well, no, there are clearly a number of different factors which encourage young people to take up smoking. And the first one, of course, is their own home environment. If the parents smoke or older siblings smoke they’re more likely to smoke themselves. But there are external factors, and advertising and marketing has been shown repeatedly in research right across the world in different countries to have an effect on young people. We saw that was why the advertising was banned. Since the advertising ban, actually, smoking among 11 to 15 year olds has actually halved in that time, which suggests that the ban has worked up to a point. But still we have around 300,000 children who start smoking every year, so something more needs to be done. I think we’re all in agreement that we don’t want children to take up smoking, so we have to look at what works and what doesn’t work. We know putting up the price helps. We know that the ban on smoking in public places has helped because it helped to denormalise smoking. So the point about putting cigarettes out of sight in shops will also be another factor in helping to reduce the appeal of smoking.

Pat Nurse: We’ve just had an admission from Amanda that the whole smoking ban was not about health, but was actually about stigmatising adults and ???, thank you very much

Amanda Sandford: I didn’t say that at all!

Pat Nurse: You did. You just said that it would help with the denormalisation. That’s how I read it, and that’s how the public will see it, frankly.

Amanda Sandford: <laughs>

Radio5: What do you mean by that point about the denormalisation of smoking?

Amanda Sandford: It’s becoming less socially acceptable. Smoking is now socially unacceptable by and large. The vast majority of people don’t smoke. Most people find it deeply unpleasant. Ultimately it will decline as attitudes … … change.

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I guess it’s strictly true that, near the end of the above transcript, Amanda Sandford didn’t actually say the smoking ban was about ‘stigmatising’ smokers, but that it helped to ‘denormalise’ smoking. But since ‘denormalising’ smoking entails stigmatising and excluding and vilifying and persecuting smokers, it amounts to the same thing.

But what about what she went on to say? Is it true that “smoking is now socially unacceptable by and large”. Clearly in some social circles it is, but in other social circles it is not. A social division is emerging between smokers for whom smoking is as acceptable as it always was, and antismokers for whom it is not. Is it true that “Most people find it deeply unpleasant”? I don’t think that’s at all true. I think that this is only true in antismoking circles. Most people – including non-smokers – aren’t in the least bit bothered. It’s really only the antismokers (and not even all of them) who find it “deeply unpleasant”. And who is to say whether “Ultimately it will decline as attitudes … … change”? Clearly that’s what Amanda Sandford hopes and expects. But will it actually turn out that way?

As for the substantive issue, the moment she opened her mouth, Amanda Sandford asserted that the display ban was for the sake of the chiiiildren. But really, the display ban doesn’t affect them at all, because they don’t buy tobacco anyway. The people it does affect are the smokers, who now can’t see the price of the tobacco they buy, or the range available. But doing anything for the sake of the children helps disguise the real target of vindictive legislation.

And is it true, as she said, that cigarette companies have made their products much more attractive? I haven’t noticed it. I used to buy Old Holborn for year after year, and it’s still in the same livery as ever. Same with other brands. And, as best I can see, all the other cigarette packets remain unchanged. Cigarette displays haven’t become any more alluring than they ever were. It’s probably only antismoking obsessives (and not children) who notice them at all, like puritans spotting a nipple on the top shelf of a magazine rack.

And from the way that she spoke of the power of advertising and marketing here and here, you’d think that the tobacco companies were still able to advertise. But they can’t, and they haven’t been able to (in the UK) for 20 years or more. So where the hell is all this advertising and marketing?

And is the idea of plain packaging really to show tobacco as it really is, the cause of cancer and heart disease? Or is that done with the addition of warnings and pictures? Which is a form of anti-advertising and anti-marketing.

I couldn’t help but think that Sandford’s was a delusional world, filled with lots of beliefs that simply weren’t true.

And I thought that Pat Nurse knocked spots off her throughout.