Tuesday 24 April 2018

Tobacco Control's Retarded Understanding of Economics

Things have been hectic at Puddlecote Inc recently hence the lack of content here, but some of that busy-ness is down to something quite momentous which could be on the horizon. The drafts have been piling up but I'll get round to them sometime.

Starting with this. Oh boy!

Next time any tobacco controller tries to tell you they understand everything about how the world works - because they always claim to - simply point them at this hilarious nonsense.


This is in response to a crash in Altria shares following less than expected growth in the iQos HnB platform. Yes, growth, because sales are still on an upward trajectory, just less dramatic than was forecast.

Previous to this, sales of iQos in Japan have been phenomenal, wildly better than any tobacco control initiative in history. According to the Financial Times ...
Shipments of traditional cigarettes fell more than 7 per cent, following an 11.5 per cent decline in the first quarter of 2017, while shipments of alternative “heated units” rose to 6.4bn from 1.2bn in the same quarter last year. 
During the quarter, almost 9 per cent of Philip Morris’s worldwide revenues came from “reduced risk products”, compared with 1.8 per cent a year earlier, with much of this shift occurring in Japan.
This is quite simply unprecedented. The biggest sea change in shifting smokers away from lit tobacco in the world. Ever.

As CNBC reports, the correction to stock prices was just a market reaction to growth - yes growth - slowing.
Philip Morris International shares plummeted 16 percent in the company's worst day since it spun off from Altria in 2008, after PMI posted mixed first-quarter results and said growth of iQOS, its heat-not-burn tobacco product, slowed in Japan.
However, in the cult-like battle that tobacco control is waging against tobacco companies, this was a straw that had to be clutched. So the {cough} wise and knowledgeable 'experts' in the tobacco control industry duly did so, retweeting this hilariously ignorant article with knuckle-dragging enthusiasm.

How stunning success in Japan which has dramatically reduced the sales of cigarettes can be described as "no-one wants" these products anymore is anyone's guess. But then, tobacco control has lived in its own wibbly-wobbly world of mendacious woo for so long that it must be difficult, after a while, for them to work out what is real and what is not. It's not like they're that bright to begin with, after all.

What is actually happening here is that the tobacco control industry is embarrassed that after decades of sucking on the taxpayer teat to the tune of hundreds billions of pounds, they have never once been able to produce results anywhere near as dramatic as this.

Graph pinched from this article, do go read it

And nor will they ever. Because they're morons who have completely abandoned any fig leaf that they are interested in helping smokers and improving public health. As we saw in Cape Town recently, they don't care what smokers do, they only care about bashing industry.

And if they have to support vacuous and incorrigibly retarded articles written by people who have about as much business savvy as a three year old, then that'll do for them, Tommy.

It's quite scary that governments listen to cretins like that, isn't it? 



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