TRIGGERnometry - ＂We Should Legalise Most Drugs＂ - Christopher Snowdon

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00:00:30.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:37.880 I'm Constantine Kissinger.

00:00:38.800 And this is a show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.

00:00:45.080 At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:49.180 Our fantastic expert guest this week is the head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

00:00:55.000 Chris Noden, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:56.560 It's great to be here.

00:00:57.200 It's good to have you. Tell us a little bit about, first of all, as always, who you are, what's your background, how are you in the chair that you're sitting now?

00:01:04.700 Well, as you say, I'm at the Institute of Economic Affairs. I know you've had a couple of my colleagues on before, Kate and Steve, talking about very different issues.

00:01:11.560 I do what we call lifestyle economics, which is paternalism and nanny state kind of stuff.

00:01:16.800 There's obviously a lot of regulation, a lot of political activity around gambling and drinking and smoking and vaping and these kind of lifestyle pleasures, I would call them.

00:01:27.200 which may or may not pose risk to some people.

00:01:30.560 And because they pose risk, they're not regulated like your average products necessarily.

00:01:34.920 And one of the things I kind of discuss and write about is what is actually the appropriate level of regulation.

00:01:41.200 It's certainly not, in my view, prohibition, which is where we seem to be moving with some of these things.

00:01:45.640 So I started out writing about this stuff about nearly 15 years ago.

00:01:50.520 And the initial impetus for that was the whole anti-smoking thing,

00:01:54.300 which was really picking up around that time.

00:01:55.680 A few years later, you had the smoking ban in Britain, and at that time, I was quite

00:01:59.180 a keen smoker, and so the idea of smoking being banned in pubs was not particularly

00:02:04.460 appealing to me.

00:02:05.460 But what I was really interested in is where do these people come from, because I never

00:02:07.560 actually met anyone knowingly who wanted to ban smoking in every pub in the country.

00:02:13.740 So I started delving into that, and what is the anti-smoking movement, and what's the

00:02:17.920 history of the anti-smoking movement?

00:02:19.180 So I ended up writing what was basically a history of the anti-smoking movement, which

00:02:22.420 came out nearly 10 years ago now.

00:02:25.320 In that book, I had two basic hypotheses, really.

00:02:30.020 One was that the anti-smoking campaign now was going to get more and more nasty and was

00:02:36.340 going to ultimately lead to prohibition.

00:02:38.840 The other was that the anti-smoking campaign is going to be used as a template for similar

00:02:44.660 neo-prohibitionist campaigns against alcohol, food, gambling.

00:02:51.060 Everything that's happened in the last decade has pretty much confirmed me in that view.

00:02:58.500 So I'm always busy because there's always stuff in the news about it.

00:03:01.980 Barely a day goes by when there isn't either a study saying XYZ is much worse than we thought

00:03:06.520 and we need more laws against it, or some single issue pressure group is saying the

00:03:11.060 government must act to do whatever against whatever.

00:03:14.080 But it generally involves higher taxes, more restrictions, making things less affordable, less available, less advertised, and is generally less appealing.

00:03:24.840 But all of this really goes against what is the mainstream assumption in economics, which is that if there isn't a market failure, which it usually isn't, then you're just better off leaving the market alone.

00:03:38.780 Let people decide what they want to do.

00:03:40.340 you assume people are reasonably rational, reasonably well informed. And so if people

00:03:45.720 want to exceed the chief medical officer's guidelines for drinking, you should let them

00:03:50.520 do it. And the kind of political campaign that I write about is always trying to push

00:03:56.440 people in the opposite direction. It's always trying to make things more inconvenient and

00:04:00.400 more expensive. And those kind of policies do have costs that aren't discussed enough.

00:04:04.900 You are making people's lives worse if you are deliberately pushing them away and making it more difficult for them to pursue their goals, basically.

00:04:16.060 See, I'm someone who's naturally probably very libertarian-leaning on the one hand.

00:04:21.340 On the other hand, as I'm listening to you, I'm finding it very difficult to agree with a lot of what you're saying.

00:04:27.160 I studied economics at a university, and the assumption in economics always seems to be that human beings are reasonable, rational, etc.

00:04:34.420 But isn't the point with all of these things like junk food that we'll talk about, like cigarettes, like drugs, etc., that they make people act in ways that are either irrational in the moment or that are irrational from a long-term perspective, that people underestimate the impact of having a bacon butty or a cigarette or, you know, a joint or whatever on their long-term health and, you know, the repercussions of that.

00:04:59.180 People don't take that fully into account.

00:05:01.540 Well, to some extent, that's bound to be true.

00:05:03.160 And that would be true of almost any purchase you choose to make.

00:05:06.700 But the buyer's regret is quite a common thing.

00:05:08.860 And it's very, very common for people to not get as much pleasure out of buying and consuming a product than they initially expected.

00:05:15.260 That's almost the norm.

00:05:17.660 But I think, actually, you can assume a good degree of both information and rationality.

00:05:23.500 Obviously, not perfectly.

00:05:24.600 And there's a whole field of behavioral economics which tries to delve into that in more depth and look at the psychology of people's behavior.

00:05:32.620 But I think you are on very dodgy ground when you start to implicitly assume that the answer is for a benign and benevolent government to work out what people actually want and push them in that direction.

00:05:47.580 Now, I would say if there are billions of people going to McDonald's, drinking sugary drinks, on a regular basis, I would assume that's because that's actually what they want to do.

00:05:59.560 And I think you have to set a pretty high bar to anybody who's going to tell you, actually, none of these people want to be doing that.

00:06:05.780 They're not taking in the future costs at all.

00:06:08.040 They really don't enjoy these things.

00:06:09.660 They're just lured in by the advertising or they're in some way addicted to sugar or whatever it may be.

00:06:13.740 Now, addiction does pose a question with regards to rationality, no doubt about that.

00:06:20.100 But ultimately, the goal is to make people free.

00:06:24.040 You want to have people who are making the freest and most best informed and rational decisions as possible.

00:06:31.000 And you are obviously not making people more free, in my view at least, if you prevent them from doing something.

00:06:36.700 That's a real and tangible restriction on freedom if you stop people doing something.

00:06:41.500 Even if you just make something less convenient or more expensive, that's a tangible restriction on their freedom.

00:06:46.880 And I think that could only be justified if there is overwhelming evidence that people are acting completely against their own interests, which could be the case, possibly, for somebody who's addicted to crystal meth or something like that.

00:06:59.580 I think in very extreme cases, you could probably...

00:07:02.120 What about smoking?

00:07:03.000 I mean, I really want to talk about the smoking ban a little bit.

00:07:06.640 But smoking, as someone who used to smoke and every now and again, I'll have a few cigarettes.

00:07:11.140 Like, it is unquestionably the case that if you smoke,

00:07:15.820 you massively increase your risk of cancer, heart disease, etc.

00:07:19.400 Decrease your chance of getting Alzheimer's.

00:07:22.120 That's because you die early.

00:07:23.260 No, no, no, no, no.

00:07:24.640 No, there's been a study proved between the link between nicotine

00:07:27.260 and developing Alzheimer's.

00:07:28.200 Yeah, there are.

00:07:29.120 I mean, the Pharmaceutical Industry spent years looking at nicotine

00:07:31.120 and developing kind of drugs for Alzheimer's and things like that.

00:07:35.120 But that doesn't make it worth the risk.

00:07:36.280 No, no, no.

00:07:37.000 You're going to live to 50 and you won't have Alzheimer's.

00:07:39.400 Fantastic.

00:07:40.580 So there is an unquestionable link there for what I would argue someone who, to be honest with you, quite enjoys a cigarette every now and again for a very minor gain in pleasure or whatever.

00:07:52.080 You know what I mean?

00:07:53.040 But set that aside, it is a thing that gives you, you could say, gives you cancer, right?

00:07:58.780 Sure.

00:07:59.260 Right.

00:08:00.280 So what's the benefit of having cigarettes be available to the public and, you know, be displayed, everyone advertised as they would have been 20 or 30 years ago?

00:08:09.220 Because people do enjoy them, you know.

00:08:11.400 And I used to smoke.

00:08:12.400 I smoked for 20 years and thoroughly enjoyed every single cigarette I smoked.

00:08:17.460 I only stopped because I switched to vaping, which gives me approximately the same amount

00:08:21.040 of pleasure with lower risk, so that's great that's come along.

00:08:24.840 But how do you not mean for vaping?

00:08:25.840 I'm convinced I'd still smoke.

00:08:27.840 I knew the risks.

00:08:28.840 Obviously, I looked into this in great depth, and I just decided it was worth the risk.

00:08:32.100 And you can say it's only a small pleasure, and each individual cigarette perhaps only

00:08:35.620 is a small pleasure.

00:08:36.620 But, of course, one individual cigarette is not going to kill you.

00:08:39.460 It's a lot of pleasures over a period of many decades that genuinely does enhance people's lives.

00:08:45.220 And the fact that there are, you know, it's addictive, well, certainly to a lot of people.

00:08:49.520 It certainly was to me addictive.

00:08:50.540 I know a lot of people who seem to be able to take it or leave it.

00:08:54.400 Doesn't change that.

00:08:55.440 You know, people always, you know, people don't get addicted to things that are not pleasurable, right?

00:08:59.880 People don't get addicted to doing the washing up particularly.

00:09:02.880 They get addicted to things that are enjoyable.

00:09:05.720 And addiction is kind of, I know you had Peter Hitchens on recently making a similar case, actually.

00:09:11.040 But addiction is really very nebulous as a concept.

00:09:14.480 It's really very difficult to define it, apart from anything else.

00:09:19.000 Nevertheless, I'm not going to split hairs about that.

00:09:20.800 I fully accept that if you're a smoker, it is much more difficult to abstain from the next cigarette than it is for somebody to abstain from the next cream cake or something.

00:09:30.320 Although probably the anti-sugar people would disagree even with that.

00:09:33.680 So it's not a game changer to me.

00:09:35.800 The fact that people don't take future costs as seriously as they do current benefits,

00:09:43.800 that's not even necessarily hyperbolic discounting.

00:09:48.140 That's just discounting.

00:09:49.020 It makes sense, actually, to discount the future to some extent.

00:09:52.940 And the fact that there's an addictive element to it, which is pretty difficult to define,

00:09:57.680 that doesn't change it either.

00:09:58.940 Because at the end of the day, the choices between having some bureaucrats or a government or some politicians or some pressure groups deciding what's best for you or you deciding what's best for you, it's a pretty binary choice at the end of the day.

00:10:13.300 And I think, and this builds on plenty of economists, people like Hayek and John Stuart Mill himself made this argument very strongly, is it's not that we assume that individuals are perfectly informed and perfectly rational.

00:10:26.840 It's just that we know the government isn't. And even if it had much more information than you or I as individuals, there's no way it could have as much information as the entire population.

00:10:37.980 And even if it did, it wouldn't it couldn't possibly set a policy which works for all these different people because people have radically different preferences to have radically different desires.

00:10:50.280 People do make different tradeoffs in their lives. And some people are more risk averse. Some people are more pleasure centered.

00:10:56.400 So even if we accept that individuals make mistakes, of course they do, even if we accept they're not perfectly informed, of course they're not, you still need to make the case that the government is going to do this job better.

00:11:07.320 And I say not only doesn't it, it couldn't, it can't.

00:11:10.060 There is no way in which you can possibly know all the preferences and desires of millions of people and set a one-size-fits-all policy that would work for them.

00:11:18.020 And where do you stand on advertising? Because let's take tobacco advertising, you know, that was banned on Formula One famously.

00:11:26.000 And now we've getting rid of the packets. There's only plain packets. Where do you stand on it? Do you agree with it?

00:11:31.020 Do you think people identify a particular brand or?

00:11:34.360 Well, people do identify a particular brand pretty, but people are fairly brand loyal with everything, including with cigarettes.

00:11:42.460 And that's why there is advertising. That's why you need to have lots of advertising in all these markets,

00:11:46.140 because actually it's really quite difficult to get people to switch

00:11:48.200 from Heineken to Carlsberg or whatever it is.

00:11:50.740 But that is actually what advertising is about.

00:11:52.620 And anybody in business and people in advertising really know this.

00:11:56.160 And the single-issue campaign has never accepted.

00:11:58.400 If the booze companies are saying, look, we are advertising our beer,

00:12:03.420 not because we're encouraging people to drink more,

00:12:06.540 but because we want people who drink beer to switch from this brand to the other one.

00:12:11.220 And actually, even if only a relatively small number of people do that,

00:12:13.860 it's worth millions of pounds to it.

00:12:15.260 So it makes total sense for us to spend a lot of money on advertising.

00:12:18.280 The temperance movement have never accepted that.

00:12:21.080 They've always said, no, it's about inducing aggregate demand.

00:12:25.320 Why else would they do it?

00:12:26.400 That's the line they always use.

00:12:27.720 If it wasn't getting kids to start drinking, if it wasn't increasing the overall sale of alcohol, why would they do it?

00:12:34.200 Well, if you apply the argument to lots of other products, take toothpaste or something like that, take cat food.

00:12:40.380 Why do they advertise cat food?

00:12:41.600 It's not to get cats to eat more food.

00:12:43.280 quite clear, right? We don't advertise toilet paper or toothpaste to get people to use these

00:12:49.260 products more frequently. They're advertised because they are universally bought. They're

00:12:54.200 very, very popular. And if you can shift to 1% or 2% of the market in your favor, it's worth a lot

00:13:01.540 of money for you. So I think we can accept that with everyday goods like toilet paper. For some

00:13:05.860 reason, we don't always accept it with things like alcohol. So I'm a big defender of advertising,

00:13:12.060 actually. I know not many people are. There's two good reasons to defend it. One is more than two

00:13:17.060 actually, but one is quite straightforward. It provides a lot of free stuff for us and people

00:13:20.880 seem to forget about that. You know, the free copy of the Metro with a standard, that's there

00:13:25.360 because of advertising. Using Facebook and Twitter for free, that's there because of advertising.

00:13:29.520 Using most things on the internet are there. Your commercial television stations are there because

00:13:34.020 of advertising. So they are annoying adverts and I'm not a fan of watching adverts particularly and

00:13:38.600 And, you know, actually, TV advertising is going down the drain because everyone can skip through them now.

00:13:43.400 And it's a big problem.

00:13:44.580 But I do appreciate the benefits that it brings me just as a consumer of newspapers and TV programs.

00:13:52.940 And those programs will get worse and the number of stations will decline if the government starts clamping down on other forms of advertising,

00:13:59.880 having already dealt with tobacco, like so-called junk food, which is the next step.

00:14:04.340 And gambling advertising is probably going to go as well, I think.

00:14:07.320 All of that takes money.

00:14:08.300 and I've got an interest in this

00:14:09.320 I'm a big fan of snooker

00:14:10.540 and that tobacco advertising ban

00:14:12.920 had a massive effect

00:14:14.080 on the game of snooker

00:14:15.080 it nearly destroyed it

00:14:16.460 you know

00:14:16.680 there was

00:14:16.960 one time after that ban came in

00:14:18.860 there were about four tournaments

00:14:20.060 in the entire world

00:14:20.960 there was no money in the game

00:14:22.380 no one was coming through

00:14:23.700 the smoking ban then

00:14:25.840 hit the grassroots actually

00:14:27.300 snooker clubs

00:14:28.620 are just

00:14:29.000 in terrible trouble

00:14:30.500 probably never really recover

00:14:31.640 you could almost say

00:14:32.560 they were snookered

00:14:33.140 sorry

00:14:34.960 I apologise

00:14:35.800 I apologise

00:14:36.600 that sound you can hear

00:14:37.620 is me taking off my mic and walking out.

00:14:41.500 It has to be done, though.

00:14:42.640 Someone has to do it.

00:14:42.960 No, no, no, it didn't happen.

00:14:44.220 I thought it did.

00:14:44.960 Right.

00:14:45.300 So we really clobbered snooker.

00:14:46.240 That was a bad thing for snooker fans,

00:14:47.460 a bad thing for snooker players.

00:14:48.680 And to be fair to Barry Hearn,

00:14:49.820 he's got the game back on its feet now.

00:14:51.440 There's loads of tournaments.

00:14:52.400 But that's happened largely because,

00:14:54.060 if you watch any snooker,

00:14:55.100 they're all sponsored by online gambling companies.

00:14:56.880 And it might not be long before online gambling companies

00:14:59.440 are prevented from sponsorship and advertising of anything.

00:15:03.940 So there's not a bottomless pit of advertisers

00:15:06.160 who can replace these guys, you see.

00:15:07.480 That's the thing.

00:15:08.700 So, yeah, from a consumer's point of view, just of the media and of various free things,

00:15:14.760 advertising is good.

00:15:15.940 It's also a good thing in terms of just letting people know what's out there.

00:15:20.340 And, of course, we all know that Coke exists.

00:15:23.640 So from that point of view, it doesn't need to remind us that Coke exists.

00:15:26.560 But it is in a battle with Pepsi and other drinks.

00:15:29.740 And if they stopped advertising, it's kind of game theory.

00:15:31.860 If they stopped advertising, Pepsi would win.

00:15:33.560 It's in both their interests, really, to stop advertising.

00:15:35.860 and then the market wouldn't really change very much

00:15:39.020 and so long as all the other soft drinks

00:15:40.860 stopped advertising too

00:15:41.820 they'd actually make more money

00:15:43.300 and that actually is what happened

00:15:44.780 with the tobacco companies after the advertising ban

00:15:46.540 they were spending a fortune

00:15:47.680 but it was all defensive advertising

00:15:49.640 a lot of people who attack our advertising

00:15:51.320 don't understand how much of it is actually defensive

00:15:53.400 people who talk about corporate power

00:15:56.180 and the manipulative power of advertising

00:15:57.960 it's a paper tiger

00:15:59.560 these guys are terrified

00:16:01.260 that somebody else is going to eat their lunch

00:16:04.220 And so, you know, in a funny kind of way,

00:16:06.060 it actually helped those back of companies make more money

00:16:07.660 because they saved a vast amount.

00:16:09.540 It didn't really have any effect on the smoking rate

00:16:11.260 and it didn't make much difference to market share.

00:16:15.020 So they just battled it out on price.

00:16:16.780 I suppose a counter-argument with that bit

00:16:18.740 would be product placement, which we see a lot in films.

00:16:23.200 James Bond.

00:16:24.100 Yeah, and you see it with Bond,

00:16:26.140 you see it with James Dean, Marlon Brando.

00:16:28.740 They take the cigarette, they tap it,

00:16:30.580 they put it in, they light it. 0.97

00:16:32.320 it looks fucking cool, doesn't it? 0.93

00:16:34.360 Yeah, I think it does. 0.88

00:16:35.560 Yeah.

00:16:35.880 I don't think a lot of that was product placement, by the way.

00:16:37.800 I mean, there has been product placement of tobacco and alcohol.

00:16:41.140 Obviously, the Bond things, you've got Heineken and laptop computers,

00:16:45.220 and they pay a fortune, don't they, for that?

00:16:46.700 But that probably works much better than advertising, actually.

00:16:48.780 Having it associated with James Bond literally there in the film

00:16:51.860 must be well worth the money.

00:16:55.040 But, no, I mean, in the old days, most people smoked,

00:16:57.800 and therefore most characters in films smoked.

00:17:00.060 And the fact that it works well from a filmmaking point of view, doesn't it?

00:17:03.340 The fact that you've got this pause where you can zoom in

00:17:05.260 and you've got that moment where they light the cigarette,

00:17:07.200 and as you say, it looks quite cool.

00:17:08.840 So I don't think a lot of that was kind of paid for promotion,

00:17:11.360 as it were, by tobacco companies, to my knowledge.

00:17:13.680 It's a kind of chicken and egg thing as well,

00:17:15.160 because if smoking is cool and you have a cool character,

00:17:17.760 then you want to portray him as cool, you give him a cigarette as well.

00:17:20.940 I mean, have you noticed a lot of the kind of Netflix documentaries

00:17:23.880 and a lot of the films now,

00:17:25.300 they seem deliberately set in the past just so people can smoke it.

00:17:28.720 Stranger Things.

00:17:29.360 Have you seen Stranger Things?

00:17:30.160 So it's set in the 80s.

00:17:31.020 It doesn't need to be set in the 80s, really.

00:17:32.800 I mean, they get a bit of mileage out of the fact

00:17:34.640 that it's like some of those old 80s films.

00:17:36.660 But it just means that everyone can be smoking all the time indoors.

00:17:39.960 It looks quite cool.

00:17:41.200 Mad Men's a perfect example of that.

00:17:42.760 Right.

00:17:43.160 The one instance where I would disagree with you is I'm a big football fan.

00:17:46.020 I love football.

00:17:47.180 And when I watch a football match now,

00:17:49.320 it just seems to be bombarded with gambling adverts.

00:17:53.100 And that isn't really a problem for me.

00:17:54.780 I'm a 36-year-old man.

00:17:56.260 Fair enough that you want to do what you do.

00:17:58.800 But I worry about, and again, I hate the way I'm going to say this, I worry about the effect on young people, especially children who watch football, who then suddenly become bombarded with adverts being made aware of gambling at an age when they don't necessarily need to be.

00:18:14.840 I don't know. I think the evidence on that is not very strong, actually, that the gambling advertising has any effect on people's uptake of gambling or of gamblers becoming problem gamblers.

00:18:26.760 Well, hold on.

00:18:27.420 It has no impact on the number of people doing gambling.

00:18:30.180 Why are they doing it then?

00:18:31.340 Now you're asking that question.

00:18:32.380 Because, I mean, take your online gambling company, Ray Winstons and stuff like that, right?

00:18:36.960 There is a huge amount of that at the moment because you get a lot of advertising in a market

00:18:40.940 when a market has recently opened up and people are fighting for a market share.

00:18:44.380 And you get a lot of advertising in a market where the companies think the door is about to close on advertising.

00:18:49.000 And at the moment, you've got both those things happening in the online world.

00:18:51.700 It's a relatively fresh market.

00:18:53.180 So there's still a lot of companies who are battling to be the market leader, but also the fear that any minute the government is probably going to ban this TV advertising.

00:19:02.220 It's only been legal.

00:19:03.400 So they're fighting for market share. They're not trying to get more people to gamble.

00:19:06.460 Absolutely. Yeah, they're fighting for market share. Yeah, I don't think there's any real doubt about that.

00:19:09.880 I mean, obviously, they would be quite happy if it meant people to start gambling.

00:19:13.940 And I dare say it does get people to put a bet on the football that they wouldn't have done otherwise.

00:19:20.000 I mean, I put a bet on the football just a few days ago for that very reason.

00:19:24.840 Not because of the advertising, actually, but because I had a phone in my hand and it was convenient

00:19:28.580 and it was a game I wasn't that interested in, but putting a tenner on one of the sides

00:19:31.860 was going to make it more interesting for me, which is actually what a lot of recreational gambling is about.

00:19:35.640 It's just about giving you a bit more pleasure from watching an otherwise meaningless game.

00:19:39.440 And I lost it. I backed Man United and they lost for the first time in months.

00:19:44.940 But I wouldn't have done that had I had to leave the house and go to a bookie's.

00:19:48.080 Now, that wasn't advertising. That was just having an online convenient way of doing it.

00:19:54.900 So, yeah, the fact that people can gamble on their phones and on their computers has no doubt made more people put more bets on.

00:20:02.420 But there's no evidence at all that the liberalization of gambling that we've seen in the last 15 years has led to any increase in problem gambling whatsoever,

00:20:09.360 despite the fact that every now and again the newspapers will claim otherwise.

00:20:12.240 It just hasn't. We've been measuring it for 20 years.

00:20:14.140 And for A, it's low.

00:20:16.360 It's a lot lower than it is in places like Hong Kong or Sweden

00:20:18.840 where they have a more restrictive set of laws on gambling.

00:20:22.640 And it hasn't gone up.

00:20:23.900 It hasn't gone down, but it hasn't gone up.

00:20:25.100 It's about 0.6% of gamblers.

00:20:27.520 You know, pretty small number.

00:20:29.300 Hong Kong is like 2%.

00:20:30.440 China is like 4%. 0.89

00:20:31.740 Las Vegas, you won't be surprised to hear, it's about 5%.

00:20:34.020 Well, that's where they all go, right?

00:20:36.520 Well, exactly.

00:20:37.240 They're going out.

00:20:38.080 But the question, I've always been very, very interested in this.

00:20:41.500 What responsibility do gambling companies have for addiction and should they contribute and help people who have become addicted as a result of the vices that they promote and have in society?

00:20:55.460 It's a good question. I don't know how much responsibility they have.

00:20:58.660 I mean, does a car company have responsibility for motor accidents?

00:21:02.120 Does an alcohol company have responsibility for people getting drunk and falling over?

00:21:06.220 I don't think so, really.

00:21:08.760 I think it makes sense for them.

00:21:10.780 I think possibly morally, if you're making a lot of money, morally there's a case for taking a slice of that and setting up a problem gambling charity and stuff.

00:21:18.240 And they do do that.

00:21:19.260 And you can always say, well, they should be giving more.

00:21:21.080 Well, okay, how much, right?

00:21:22.940 They do give millions of pounds, these companies, and I dare say some of them could afford to give more.

00:21:26.940 And it would look good for them.

00:21:27.940 It would be good corporate responsibility.

00:21:29.740 But I'm not sure whether morally they have a responsibility necessarily to do that unless they feel they're acting unethically in the first place, which presumably they don't.

00:21:39.160 Well, let's move our way through the drugs pyramid to move a step up. 0.98

00:21:43.020 Because as you said, we had Peter Hitchens on the show quite recently.

00:21:46.500 And that's kind of how this interview has happened.

00:21:48.100 You and I were talking about it and you were like, I've argued with Peter about this many times.

00:21:53.240 So let me just try and recall some of the kind of things that he said.

00:21:57.100 He said that, first of all, his central argument, I think, is that people who consume drugs should be treated as criminals because it's a voluntary action.

00:22:05.060 and that once a drug is legalized, you can't go back.

00:22:11.520 You can't prohibit it again.

00:22:13.280 And also, particularly on cannabis, his point was that there seems to be,

00:22:16.800 he didn't necessarily say it was causation,

00:22:18.580 but there's certainly a correlation between the use of marijuana

00:22:21.480 and violent acts, mass shootings, terrorism, et cetera.

00:22:26.300 He reeled off a very impressive list of mass shootings

00:22:29.540 and terrorist attacks that have been committed by people

00:22:31.920 who were habitual users of cannabis.

00:22:34.180 So if he were here, if he was sitting in France's seat, let's say, what would you say to him?

00:22:40.840 Well, firstly, on the point about, you know, once something's been legalized, you can't prohibit it.

00:22:44.740 He talks as if these drugs have always been illegal.

00:22:47.800 If you just take a longer view, the war on drugs is only 100 years old.

00:22:51.620 And there wasn't actually much of a problem with recreational drug use.

00:22:56.160 While they were openly available, openly available to anybody, you could get them.

00:23:00.140 You know, in the 19th century, most people would have taken opium in some form.

00:23:03.560 often just for pain relief or something, but it was pretty widely used.

00:23:07.220 But there wasn't any real moral panic about opium use,

00:23:11.180 huge moral panic about gin and alcohol, beer, but never about opium.

00:23:16.940 And cannabis, to be fair, was never very widely used, but it was in America.

00:23:20.740 So these things were legal, and we did prohibit them, and it hasn't worked.

00:23:25.320 Now, Peter's argument is really quite unique, actually.

00:23:28.500 If you have arguments about drug reform, legalization, the traditional battle is between someone like me who thinks that, A, it's basically morally wrong to be stopping people from consuming these drugs, but also that actually the consequential argument is probably more compelling for most people, which is more people are dying as a result of drugs being illegal.

00:23:54.400 far more deaths from opiates, mainly heroin, than there were a hundred odd years ago when

00:24:00.180 people were using them freely. And there's all sorts of reasons for that, about how the supply

00:24:06.020 chain makes these drugs more concentrated, more lethal, more addictive. And my vision is to go

00:24:15.120 back to the kind of pre-prohibition stage. Now, the argument against that is traditionally,

00:24:19.760 well, it is actually immoral for people to be using these drugs, and we should use every

00:24:23.740 argument against them. And Peter does say that. But he goes one step further. And he just says,

00:24:28.300 there isn't a war on drugs. And it's quite difficult to then blame the war on drugs for

00:24:34.880 anything. So I would be saying, well, heroin, for example, wasn't used until the war on drugs

00:24:40.500 came along. It's only come along to replace the smoking of opium, which is relatively harmless

00:24:45.700 because it suits the drug dealers to have something that's much more compact, much more

00:24:49.200 easily to transport, blah, blah, blah, right?

00:24:52.000 But that doesn't cut any eyes for Peter

00:24:53.620 because he just says, well, drugs are basically legal.

00:24:57.160 I mean, you can get them everywhere.

00:24:57.940 He didn't say that on our show.

00:25:00.040 No, we said it before.

00:25:01.320 I mean, that's the gist of his book,

00:25:02.680 The War We Never Fought,

00:25:03.500 is that essentially the drugs might as well be legal,

00:25:06.140 that the police don't really enforce cannabis laws particularly.

00:25:08.480 Well, that's true, isn't it?

00:25:09.840 Yeah, but there's a big difference between that

00:25:11.560 and them being legal, right?

00:25:13.280 So a lot of the problems I have with the war on drugs

00:25:15.940 is that people cannot walk into a shop and buy something

00:25:19.060 and know what's in it, know what it's likely to do.

00:25:22.620 There's no regulation whatsoever.

00:25:25.140 The supply chain behind that is built on blood.

00:25:29.380 That would be a legal market, right, if somebody could do that.

00:25:32.540 Obviously, you cannot do that.

00:25:34.420 And so you've got ecstasy pills which are adulterated and kill people.

00:25:39.120 That clearly wouldn't happen if you had legal ecstasy.

00:25:42.900 But Peter just overlooks it and says,

00:25:44.300 oh, well, the fact that you'll get a slap on the wrist for possession of cannabis

00:25:48.000 means that the whole thing doesn't really exist.

00:25:50.660 And therefore, any argument you make

00:25:52.440 about the harms of prohibition is invalid

00:25:54.960 because there isn't prohibition.

00:25:57.480 And of course there is.

00:25:59.040 The mere fact that you can be done for possession,

00:26:02.040 actually people do get done for possession,

00:26:03.920 particularly of class A drugs.

00:26:06.640 They can have their careers ruined actually quite often

00:26:09.760 and sometimes, not very often,

00:26:11.400 serve time in prison just for possession.

00:26:14.460 Possession was never illegal in America

00:26:16.600 under alcohol prohibition.

00:26:18.000 So the prohibition of drugs is actually much more far-reaching than the prohibition of alcohol was.

00:26:24.160 And it's suffering from the same inevitable problems.

00:26:29.660 How would you envisage a society where drugs are legal?

00:26:35.020 Would it be the Amsterdam model where you go into a coffee shop and you pick your weed and you sit down and you smoke?

00:26:41.200 Would it be completely legal? How would you go about licensing it and regulating it?

00:26:45.680 Well, broadly speaking, it would be like this, and you would have, I think, probably

00:26:50.960 specialist shops is probably the way to go.

00:26:52.780 So like your old head shops before the government banned legalized, or used your tobacco.

00:26:57.680 So a specialist shop, licensed, but not restricted in number.

00:27:02.480 Some of the places in America that have done this haven't done it very well because they've

00:27:06.220 turned it into a cozy state-mandated cartel, and so you get shortages and not enough competition.

00:27:14.840 they've banned branding in some places and stuff like that.

00:27:17.580 I wouldn't do any of that.

00:27:18.300 I would have branding.

00:27:19.340 I would have probably some level of advertising.

00:27:21.900 I think politically, you need to be realistic that you're not going to have a great deal

00:27:24.880 of it.

00:27:25.480 But I think it is important that we have brands because people know where they are then.

00:27:31.320 It's a real incentive.

00:27:32.640 This is one of the things overlooked when it comes to advertising the brands.

00:27:34.880 There's a huge incentive for a company to maintain quality and to maintain their own

00:27:39.940 reputation if they have a brand that is worth a fortune.

00:27:43.500 If you haven't got that, if you've just got cannabis shops where you've got anonymous pots of green leaves and nobody really knows what it is,

00:27:51.220 there is no incentive whatsoever to maintain the quality because no one knows where they're getting it from.

00:27:55.520 So actually, you do need to have brands.

00:27:57.420 I would have specialist shops for things like cannabis.

00:28:01.100 I would essentially legalize all the drugs themselves, but not necessarily every derivative.

00:28:05.380 That's the thing.

00:28:05.920 So I don't think I would legalize crack cocaine and heroin, for example, but I would certainly legalize opium smoking.

00:28:11.380 And I would have opium smoking bars.

00:28:14.500 Obviously, there would be no smoking ban under my regime.

00:28:18.100 So this is just your way to get smoking back into the pubs.

00:28:21.300 Let's legalize opium.

00:28:22.960 It's a crack in the door to bring back smoking.

00:28:25.880 So, yes, opium smoking.

00:28:27.420 Now, I'm not going to stop people from making crack cocaine in their kitchens.

00:28:33.380 I'm certainly not going to stop people from growing their own cannabis and stuff like that.

00:28:36.260 I just hope that if you give people a much safer variety of the drug, essentially the variety of the drug that was consumed circa 1880, all right?

00:28:47.100 So that would be smoking opium rather than intravenous injection of heroin.

00:28:51.960 There would be some form of cocaine.

00:28:54.780 I mean, cocaine is a difficult one.

00:28:56.000 I think most legalizers accept that cocaine is a difficult one because, I mean, it does play to your irrationality point, right, when people are on the stuff.

00:29:03.940 It's clearly very, very Moorish for a lot of people.

00:29:07.400 And they don't necessarily act in the most responsible, rational way.

00:29:13.100 However, as comedians who've performed to audiences,

00:29:19.060 some of whom have been on that, I think, yes.

00:29:23.020 So it's difficult, but it is out there already, right?

00:29:25.420 People are already taking it.

00:29:26.380 In London, it seems that everybody's on it.

00:29:28.840 Yeah, despite the fact that it's really expensive.

00:29:30.480 Yeah. So I don't know. Cocaine was never used all that much, actually, before prohibition.

00:29:34.880 It was kind of associated with a few bohemians and actors. Yeah. But it was used. It was mainly

00:29:41.120 used actually in patent medicines and stuff. And maybe that might be the way forward. We look at

00:29:46.720 the drugs that are being consumed today, i.e. under prohibition, and just assume that a legalized

00:29:51.080 market would be just exactly the same drugs, but sold legally. I don't think it would be like that

00:29:56.040 Because, as I said before, prohibition has incentivized suppliers to produce these drugs

00:30:01.740 in the most powerful and concentrated forms, which is not actually responding to demand.

00:30:07.300 Skunk is a great example of this, right?

00:30:09.060 So skunk is a fundamentally different drug, really, to what marijuana was like up until

00:30:13.320 the late 1990s.

00:30:14.680 And it has caused a lot of the problems that Peter talks about.

00:30:17.500 It's just that Peter doesn't get that the solution isn't to try and have some kind of

00:30:22.080 Iranian-style enforcement of drug laws.

00:30:24.220 the solution is to go back to that kind of stuff because i actually know a lot of people who stopped

00:30:29.380 smoking cannabis around that time because it was suddenly getting much stronger and people didn't

00:30:32.800 know why people didn't know about the thc level or the cbd level they just knew that it wasn't

00:30:37.880 that pleasant they were getting paranoid so a lot of people stopped consuming at that point

00:30:42.000 but a lot of people started really upping their consumption and this is where you see and most

00:30:47.320 people know someone who's kind of turned into a recluse or a loser really as a result of skunk

00:30:53.300 But that wasn't the suppliers following demand for really strong,

00:30:57.540 high THC, low CBD cannabis.

00:30:59.560 That was just them going, well, we can breed these strains

00:31:03.120 and we can charge twice as much for it for the same physical volume.

00:31:06.800 Therefore, great, right?

00:31:08.280 Same reason under prohibition in America, people weren't,

00:31:11.720 Al Capone wasn't selling beer, right?

00:31:13.020 Because it was too bulky.

00:31:13.800 He was selling spirits.

00:31:15.000 The stronger the better.

00:31:16.080 More bang for your buck, more profit.

00:31:18.340 Same thing with skunk.

00:31:19.060 So I think if you legalize skunk, I think what, sorry, 0.98

00:31:21.460 If you legalize cannabis, I think what you would have to do would have, we'd have to have some sort of level, some kind of limit on the THC.

00:31:28.520 And also, more importantly, I think, a minimum limit of CBD.

00:31:32.320 CBD is the anti-psychotic bit that kind of balances out the THC.

00:31:35.580 Nature is wonderful in putting these things into plants, isn't it?

00:31:39.140 And over time, the crossbreeding has led to much less of that, almost non-existent amounts of that.

00:31:44.920 And that's really caused the psychological.

00:31:47.320 That's really interesting.

00:31:48.200 One thing I was going to ask is, I think most people are aware of the cost of addiction and drug use for individual people and for society.

00:31:57.020 You know, drug addicts, people becoming homeless, people living on the street, you know, violence sometimes, as Peter talks about, all this kind of stuff.

00:32:04.340 But I think we so often forget that the drug war, which I personally think is absolutely being waged, has a huge cost as well.

00:32:12.160 And that cost is tremendous in terms of people dying in places where these drugs are being produced, where they're being trafficked from.

00:32:19.940 I mean, Mexico is essentially a non-state because it's run by cartels.

00:32:25.480 And thousands of people are dying, tens of thousands dying every year in the most brutal and horrific ways.

00:32:32.020 I mean, the stuff that's coming out of Mexico is just shocking. 0.99

00:32:34.780 Yeah. And before that, it was Colombia.

00:32:36.320 You know, wherever the capital of the global drug industry is, is always the murder capital of the world.

00:32:41.440 Yeah. So that's one. But also in Western societies, the number of people who end up in prison simply for using or being involved in drugs, who otherwise would not have been in prison, who otherwise would not have encountered killers and murderers and rapists and whatever, would not have then become violent and would not have been radicalized in that way. That's a huge cost as well, isn't it?

00:33:05.940 Yeah, the greatest cost really is in the countries that are producing it, the utter corruption that just infests every element of countries which are usually fairly corrupt to begin with and just get worse.

00:33:18.560 Yeah, that's the greatest cost because, like you say, tens of thousands of people are dying every year.

00:33:23.200 It totally undermines normal institutions, just kills a country from within, really.

00:33:28.380 But, yeah, there's other costs.

00:33:29.360 I mean, Peter is right when he says there's very few drug users, actually, in prison,

00:33:34.160 or very few people being sent to prison merely for possession.

00:33:37.000 It's mainly drug dealers.

00:33:37.840 But, of course, I consider drug dealers to be a victimless crime anyway, really,

00:33:41.060 or it should be under a legal system.

00:33:44.080 So, yeah, the costs are very extensive.

00:33:46.220 It costs the government, apart from anything else, a huge amount of money

00:33:49.020 in terms of prosecuting it and controlling the borders,

00:33:53.400 whereas we could be making a load of money out of it.

00:33:55.200 You know, I wrote a study last year for the IA.

00:33:57.280 looking at how much revenue the government could realistically expect if it legalized cannabis.

00:34:02.900 And I gave various different options of how it would go about it, what kind of tax rate you

00:34:06.240 would have on it. I think it would be reasonable, by the way, to have an extra kind of sin tax

00:34:10.380 on cannabis just to make it politically plausible, really, apart from anything.

00:34:16.100 And we're looking at just the tax on the product would bring in about a billion pounds a year,

00:34:20.420 I think, or somewhere close to that. You then add on the extra income tax and business rates,

00:34:27.280 and so on, all the businesses around it, the retailers and manufacturers are paying, and

00:34:32.880 then the indirect employment and taxes generated by that.

00:34:37.340 It's not a game-changing amount of money for a government that spends the kind of cash

00:34:41.400 that it does, but it's certainly better than spending money, which is what we're doing

00:34:45.400 at the moment.

00:34:46.640 So I am pretty positive about this.

00:34:49.580 Everything else I write about, apart from vaping, it's just losing battle.

00:34:53.600 Everything's just steadily getting worse from my perspective.

00:34:56.140 but um really oh yeah i mean everything's getting more and more you know regulated and clamped down

00:35:03.020 on um i mean they're more or less run out of things to do to smokers the the food thing has

00:35:08.340 taken off sugar in particular uh over the last few years and that's just not going to end uh we've

00:35:13.940 got public health england you know doing this food reformulation scheme which is just insane

00:35:19.060 hardly anybody really knows about it but it's going on um and as i say vaping in this country

00:35:25.360 at least, has been good because we've actually had the public health agencies on site, but

00:35:28.660 most other countries, it's horrible. America is unbelievable what they're doing with vaping.

00:35:35.560 So cannabis is the one positive aspect really globally because things are moving in the

00:35:41.800 right direction. You've had Canada legalized. You've had about 10 US states legalized and

00:35:46.440 more to come. Uruguay is legalized. So I don't think Britain will be the next off the blocks

00:35:50.900 because we rarely are.

00:35:52.260 But I think once a few European countries start legalizing,

00:35:55.240 Britain will realize that it doesn't actually lead to more problems.

00:35:58.200 It actually alleviates quite a lot of problems.

00:36:00.120 And they're making a load of money, the governments.

00:36:02.820 I mean, that's what's done it in America.

00:36:04.500 America started the war on drugs, don't forget.

00:36:06.060 America started the war on drugs and then got the UN

00:36:07.740 to get the rest of the world to abide by the war on drugs.

00:36:10.520 And yet it's leading the way in ending it, at least with cannabis.

00:36:16.280 And they've done it because the governors of various states

00:36:19.100 see their neighboring state making a fortune from taxes.

00:36:24.380 And nobody really wants to bring back prohibition in these states.

00:36:29.120 You know, overnight, it's a big news story.

00:36:30.500 When it happens, what's going to happen?

00:36:32.240 Nothing happens.

00:36:33.220 Basically, the same number of people carry on smoking cannabis.

00:36:36.200 You might see a slight increase in the number of adults consuming it,

00:36:39.460 a slight decrease in the number of under-21s using it.

00:36:42.380 Apart from that, you know, the sun still rises in the morning.

00:36:45.280 Nothing really changes.

00:36:46.520 And the government's raking in millions of dollars.

00:36:48.700 And so the other state's thinking, maybe we should be doing this.

00:36:52.200 Now, where do you stand on prostitution? 1.00

00:36:55.960 Do you believe that we should be legalizing prostitution?

00:36:59.360 Or do you think it should be as it currently is at the moment, illegal?

00:37:03.460 I think we should legalize it for similar reasons.

00:37:05.620 I think that we should be legalizing a lot of things that are currently prohibited.

00:37:10.080 You know, I'm not a fan of prostitution, but it's gone on. 1.00

00:37:14.920 It's the oldest profession. It's gone on forever.

00:37:16.840 and the primarily women who are involved in it are frequently murdered 0.99

00:37:24.660 and beaten up and cheated.

00:37:27.660 It's a terrible situation, really.

00:37:32.320 So given that it's not going to go away

00:37:34.760 and given that there are major risks involved for the people working in the industry,

00:37:39.660 yeah, it should be regulated as it is in Amsterdam,

00:37:42.660 where it seems to work very well.

00:37:44.780 I mean, I don't really see any argument against legalizing.

00:37:48.780 I mean, there's lots of people saying

00:37:50.200 that you're profiting off the exploitation of women.

00:37:53.040 Yeah, well, but the people are doing that already.

00:37:55.020 This is the trouble with a lot of these prohibitionists.

00:37:56.700 They kind of, they just ignore the reality

00:37:59.280 of what happens at the moment

00:38:00.300 and just compare what a legalized market would be 0.94

00:38:03.100 to utopia, which never happens.

00:38:05.460 This is what Peter does.

00:38:06.100 Peter imagines that there is some way in which

00:38:07.860 by just using extreme state force,

00:38:10.620 you can get people to stop taking drugs.

00:38:12.120 And it won't happen.

00:38:13.200 And America has tested this to destruction.

00:38:15.980 You know, you've got people in prison for 25 years on the three strikes and you're out rule because they've been found with a spliff. 1.00

00:38:22.940 Iran, a few years ago, executed somebody twice for drug dealing.

00:38:28.700 They hung him and then it turned out when he was in the morgue, he hadn't actually died and he revived himself and they hung him again.

00:38:38.140 Now, you can't really enforce the war on drugs any more heavily than that.

00:38:41.320 And yet there is still rampant druggies in Iran.

00:38:45.140 If you want something done, send it to Iran. 1.00

00:38:50.020 You've got to make sure, haven't you?

00:38:52.640 Do it properly is what I say.

00:38:55.280 You are exactly the kind of person. 0.97

00:38:57.100 You sound like the kind of person who would approve of hanging. 1.00

00:38:58.940 Hanging twice. 0.89

00:39:00.260 It just sounds more authentic in my voice, doesn't it?

00:39:03.340 I'm a former teacher.

00:39:04.520 I was a teacher for 10 years.

00:39:05.680 And there is undoubtedly an obesity problem in schools,

00:39:10.400 especially, well, teachers and children,

00:39:12.840 but particularly children.

00:39:13.740 I was going to say, especially among the teachers.

00:39:16.940 Now, how much responsibility do people like McDonald's have

00:39:22.460 with the supersizing, with all the rest of it,

00:39:25.100 with the amount of drinks, with the amount of sugar in drinks,

00:39:28.140 with the salt in the chips,

00:39:30.340 and the fact that they are, it's very addictive.

00:39:34.380 And some studies have said it's more addictive

00:39:37.160 than certain drugs, for example.

00:39:39.380 Yeah, well, they would do, wouldn't they?

00:39:43.500 Yeah, cheese more addictive than heroin was a story a few years ago.

00:39:46.300 That was fantastic.

00:39:47.180 Some mouse study proved that.

00:39:49.460 Well, to mice, maybe.

00:39:50.940 Yeah.

00:39:51.220 Yeah, right.

00:39:51.700 They gave some of them heroin, some of them cheese,

00:39:53.320 turned out that mice liked cheese more. 0.94

00:39:54.900 Like you say, it's a thing, isn't it?

00:39:57.400 Well, before I answer your question, can I ask you a question?

00:39:59.600 How many kids were at your school, approximately?

00:40:03.380 At that time, I was working at primary school, so there was 320.

00:40:07.380 And honestly, how many of them would you say were obese?

00:40:11.580 Obese, right, okay. 1.00

00:40:12.760 I would say around 20%, 25%.

00:40:16.260 25%, seriously?

00:40:17.520 Yeah, I was working in Lambeth, which is, drumroll please,

00:40:20.780 the fattest borough in London.

00:40:22.420 Oh, is that right?

00:40:23.020 Yeah, absolutely.

00:40:24.660 That's probably slightly less than the official statistics say,

00:40:28.380 but it still surprised me that it's that many.

00:40:31.400 Because I won't go into it now,

00:40:32.780 but if anybody wants to check out my articles on this,

00:40:36.160 I've written quite a lot about how the childhood obesity measure

00:40:39.020 just does not measure childhood obesity,

00:40:40.920 particularly when they measure it nationally.

00:40:42.740 So I've got big questions about the size of the problem.

00:40:47.900 But there is no doubt that there are more fat children

00:40:50.600 than there were when I was at school.

00:40:53.840 And the question is, what, if anything, can you do about it?

00:40:58.340 The junk food thing, the McDonald's and so on,

00:41:00.540 obviously comes up a lot.

00:41:02.300 I'm not really aware of a great deal of evidence

00:41:04.560 showing that obese people or children or adults go to McDonald's or any other fast food chain

00:41:10.600 more than your average person, actually. It seems to be taken for granted that there is link,

00:41:16.080 but I'm not sure really there's very much compelling evidence suggesting that. I mean,

00:41:20.980 my view is it's mainly about physical activity. It certainly isn't about sugar. I mean,

00:41:26.000 a lot of the stuff I write about involves just having to explain using routine statistics that

00:41:32.020 a lot of things people believe are simply not true, right?

00:41:34.320 So sugar consumption has fallen since the 1970s.

00:41:37.220 That is a fact that seems to surprise nearly everybody.

00:41:40.080 But it is a fact beyond question.

00:41:42.340 BBC's more or less show did an episode about this recently.

00:41:45.440 They had a fact-checking program on the BBC, much needed.

00:41:48.480 And they confirmed that, yeah, sugar consumption has gone down.

00:41:53.080 Calorie consumption has also gone down since the 1970s.

00:41:56.900 um so given that there was relatively little obesity in the 1970s we haven't got very reliable

00:42:03.140 statistics funnily enough but it seems to be assumed it was probably no more than about five

00:42:06.760 certainly no more than 10 percent it's currently about 26 percent if sugar consumption has gone

00:42:13.260 down and calorie consumption has gone down over that period it's not obvious that the cause of

00:42:17.480 this is people gorging themselves with food let alone gorging themselves with sugar or sugary

00:42:22.120 drinks. That's not to say some people aren't fat because they drink three liters of coconut. Of

00:42:27.360 course they are. The people are obese for all sorts of different reasons. But looking at it from

00:42:31.300 the population level, there isn't really a smoking gun there. What there is a smoking gun for, I

00:42:37.220 think, and again, it's quite hard to get statistics on this, is physical inactivity. Now, given that

00:42:43.240 we haven't been putting Fitbits on people for the last 50 years, it's kind of hard to work out the

00:42:47.300 trends. Public Health England say that physical activity has gone down by 24% since the 1960s,

00:42:52.680 which seems a kind of spuriously accurate figure for something that doesn't seem very well defined.

00:42:57.500 But I think, broadly speaking, that is correct. And I think common sense tells you that. If you

00:43:01.800 just look at what, not just people's daily lives, you know, all the, you know, you don't even need

00:43:07.500 to stand up to change a TV station anymore, right? You know, there's so many labor-saving devices

00:43:11.560 at home. But more importantly, occupationally, you know, there are just millions of jobs over

00:43:17.120 the course of the last 50 years have gone from being manual to being office jobs and it's

00:43:22.540 interesting that you saw the rise in the beastie initially with the the middle class it was you 0.51

00:43:26.440 know your classic fat man who was going to die of heart disease was your your city banker or

00:43:33.240 something like that right that was how it used to be and over time it's now uh predominantly

00:43:37.880 or disproportionately more working class people blue color people who would have been blue color

00:43:42.620 but of course now they've got white collars on because they're working in in tele sales or in

00:43:45.880 offices or what have you. So I think that realistically, you've got to look at physical

00:43:50.680 activity. And there is stuff you can do with that, of course, in schools, because you've got a bit

00:43:54.680 more control over people when they're children going to school. You haven't got much control

00:43:57.980 over adults. There is no form of regulation, really, that you can bring in that certainly

00:44:02.560 wouldn't be totalitarian to get people to exercise more. I don't think many people want to take the

00:44:07.020 Japanese approach of doing 20 minutes aerobics before you start work. So there isn't a lot that

00:44:12.420 the government can do about it. And as a result of there not being much the government can do about

00:44:15.440 it, people don't really talk about it.

00:44:22.820 Chris, if people want to follow you on Twitter and follow your writing, where do they go

00:44:26.300 for that?

00:44:26.780 CJ Snowden on Twitter.

00:44:28.680 I've got a blog called Velvet Glove Iron Fist.

00:44:31.320 Obviously, I work for the Institute of Economic Affairs.

00:44:33.280 And I've got a book called Killjoys, which you can download from iea.org.uk, which is

00:44:38.520 my kind of general critique of paternalism.

00:44:41.560 Fantastic.

00:44:41.960 we'll check out all of that

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00:44:53.420 and I think that's it guys

00:44:54.880 we will see you in a week from now

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TRIGGERnometry - July 07, 2019

＂We Should Legalise Most Drugs＂ - Christopher Snowdon

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