In this episode Peter Beckett sits down with Dr Christopher Snowdon, Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute for Economic Affairs, to discuss whether or not nicotine is part of the culture war, or is it something that unites more than it divides.
Peter Beckett: Chris Snowdon, welcome to Clearing the Air. Thanks for joining us. So, you and I don’t agree on anything really. And yet, we do agree on vaping.
Christopher Snowdon: It makes me think I might be wrong about vaping.
Peter Beckett: Yeah, that’s fair enough. But what I don’t understand is there does seem to be a sort of weird culture war. It’s not just about vaping; it’s about what the WHO calls this appalling phrase: commercial determinants of health.
Christopher Snowdon: Unhealthy commodity industry.
Peter Beckett: Yeah, exactly. And it’s not like people who are right-wing enjoy a vape or a glass of wine any less than people who are left-wing. So why is this? Why does it feel for people who live this like a culture war?
Christopher Snowdon: I wouldn’t agree that it fits into what I consider to be a culture war, where you have people lining up on completely different issues in what seems like a totally arbitrary manner. Some people call it the “omni-cause”; if you know what somebody thinks about socialized healthcare—the NHS in Britain—and what’s going on in Gaza, you can probably predict what they’re going to believe on a whole range of other issues, even though there is no connection between them. Once you get into the left or the right, you tend to agree with everything.
Peter Beckett: You mentioned Gaza and healthcare. I sort of consider myself on the center-left of the spectrum, and I think that the way the NHS is organized is a bit of a disaster.
Christopher Snowdon: You’re in favour of having it, right, you don’t want to have an insurance system?
Peter Beckett: I would have a social insurance system.
Christopher Snowdon: Because you live in Europe and know things can be better.
Peter Beckett: Yes, I know it works.
Christopher Snowdon: Okay, well, this is the problem with trying to generalize. The culture war does tend to generalize about people’s opinions, but it usually predicts fairly accurately. There are groups of opinions that people tend to have, even though the particular issues have nothing in common and there might not be any logical consistency between them. I’m not sure that vaping comes into the same kind of idea of a culture war. What I think is similar is that there are some very strongly held opinions based on very little or no evidence—often contrary to the evidence—and completely counterproductive considering what people claim to want. So that has a feel of the irrational nature of the culture wars about it to me.
Peter Beckett: I guess that’s what I’m getting at. I don’t know whether it’s endemic to public debate in 2026 or whether it’s just very acute when it comes to this particular issue.
Christopher Snowdon: I would say let’s consider the possibility that most people don’t have very strong opinions about this at all and we’re just a bit too far into it. But amongst people who are vaguely interested, if you take Britain in recent weeks, we’ve had this what was called a “vape shop fire” which took down Scotland’s busiest train station. Then you had a meningitis outbreak that was somehow blamed on vaping. It was like scare stories about vaping. So it has become part of the culture for reasons that elude me. People have strong opinions about a lot of things these days when they really shouldn’t. If they have a strong opinion about something, it tends to lead them to a political conclusion. In other words: “I don’t like vaping, therefore it should be banned.” I don’t think I’m romanticizing the past too much to say that 50 years ago, that wouldn’t generally be the leap you would make. You can like or dislike something, but if you thought that thing should therefore be mandatory or illegal, most people would think you were a bit of a nut.
Peter Beckett: There’s something particularly British about looking at a situation that you don’t like and saying, okay, we must ban it.
Christopher Snowdon: I would say that there’s quite a bit of that goes on in Brussels.
Peter Beckett: Which politician was it? I think it was Blair who was trying to deflect from an issue and said to Alastair Campbell, “Okay, we need to deflect from this. We must ban something.”
Christopher Snowdon: Oh really? I didn’t hear that. That wouldn’t surprise me at all. That does seem to happen.
Peter Beckett: But there is something about British culture. We love a good ban.
Christopher Snowdon: Yeah, we do these days, but I don’t think we’re alone in that. Brussels loves a good ban as well. Generally, when you do opinion polls, a good chunk of the public—usually a majority—are in favor of banning something, even if they don’t really understand what it is. I think this generational tobacco ban in the UK is a common thing; people don’t know what it is. They think it’s about stopping children from smoking or buying cigarettes, or they think it’s something to do with smoking in pubs, and it’s got nothing to do with either of those things. The fact that people are ignorant doesn’t seem to stop them having very strong opinions and then wanting to use legislation to enforce them.
Peter Beckett: I want that on my gravestone. Just because people are ignorant, it doesn’t stop them having opinions.
Christopher Snowdon: Yeah, and it kind of should. People should be more relaxed about not having opinions on some things. There’s a whole range of things I don’t really have an opinion about.
Peter Beckett: What do you not have an opinion on?
Christopher Snowdon: I don’t really have an opinion on the Palestine thing; I’ve never paid much attention to the Middle East.
Peter Beckett: I’m the same.
Christopher Snowdon: I know a lot of people care passionately about it, but I just don’t know enough to really have a strong opinion.
Peter Beckett: That’s an interesting point. There are two things that I studiously refuse to have an opinion on. One is the Middle East; I don’t understand it.
Christopher Snowdon: We have more in common.
Peter Beckett: And the second one is the trans debate. I don’t know anything about it. But people have very strong opinions on these things. Is there an argument for just giving less of a fuck?
Christopher Snowdon: Yeah, about a lot of things. If you don’t know anything about it and it’s got nothing to do with you.
Christopher Snowdon: Yeah, about a lot of things. If you don’t know anything about it and it’s got nothing to do with you. I have an interest in good policy around tobacco harm reduction because I use pouches and vapes, I used to smoke, and I’ve written a lot about it. So, I consider myself fairly well-informed. But there’s no reason most people should have much of an opinion either way. They should probably trust the experts. But then this is the problem: a lot of the experts, particularly outside Britain, are dreadful and deliberate purveyors of misinformation—the World Health Organization being the most obvious example.
Peter Beckett: I had Tikki Pang on this show, and he said something super interesting. I put the words into his mouth, but he agreed with it. He said the WHO are kind of the anti-vaxxers of the public health debate on this issue.
Christopher Snowdon: Yeah, but that’s what it is. Except we’ve got 15 years of data. Anti-vaxxers at the time were arguing over months of data.
Christopher Snowdon: The pro-vaccine people only had months of data, but that didn’t matter because six months is a long time in vaccine development. And 15 years is a very long time for anything. You get my point.
Peter Beckett: Obviously we can extrapolate a little bit. To get back on topic: how did you pick up this issue with vaping?
Christopher Snowdon: I picked up a vape in 2009. I’d just written a book about the anti-smoking movement, and within about three years I’d taken up vaping full-time. I’m not evangelistic about it, but I do want to defend it because I don’t particularly want to go back to smoking. The public health people seem much keener on me stopping smoking than I’ve been—actually, they don’t seem to care. The whole government policy in Britain seems to be to get people back on the fags. If they bring in this vaping ban, when I go out, I will become a social smoker again because I’m not going outside every five minutes; I’ll just go outside once an hour to have a smoke.
Peter Beckett: The thing that I really liked about giving up vaping is that I have a cigarette once a quarter. I don’t need to worry about it or feel like I’ve failed.
Peter Beckett: The anti-smoking movement will say you have failed because you have a cigarette once a quarter.
Christopher Snowdon: You’d be very unlucky, I think, to get lung cancer from that.
Peter Beckett: I think, I think that’s right. But why does doing something good for your health have to be unpleasant?
It goes back to the temperance movement. The American temperance movement advocated at one point putting methanol in spirits.
Christopher Snowdon: So they did. They poisoned the industrial alcohol.
Peter Beckett: Yeah, exactly. Right. Are there not comparisons here? Like why does if I if I want to give up smoking, why can I not enjoy it?
Christopher Snowdon: I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I can’t relate to the killjoy mentality. Deliberately poisoning industrial alcohol because people were secretly using it for booze—killing people as a direct result and knowing it—is extreme.
Peter Beckett: And knowing that you’re doing it.
Christopher Snowdon: And kind of joking about it afterwards, which is what the Anti-Saloon League did. As my friend Dick Puddlecote always says, it’s not about health. A lot of the time it’s about money; other times it’s about good old-fashioned Puritanism and fanaticism. When you’re happy for people to die for your ideology, something has gone askew. You see the same thing with the vaping debate; they’re effectively making sure more people die than need to by discouraging vaping at this scale.
Peter Beckett: I mean, I don’t say this about the entire tobacco control movement, because it’s not true of everybody. But it does kind of feel like they just don’t like us very much. Us being people who enjoy using nicotine.
Christopher Snowdon: Yeah, they don’t like consumers. They don’t really see consumers as individual agents who can make decisions for themselves. They see people as pawns pushed around either by the government or by the industry acting for profit. The idea that people themselves have a choice doesn’t really cross their minds, so they ignore us. They think these products are only purchased because industry “pushes” them, whereas economists know demand exists because people want to buy. People have been drinking alcohol for hundreds of thousands of years; that’s why there is an industry to sell it to them.
Peter Beckett: Do you have a book to plug?
Christopher Snowdon: I will do soon. There’s one coming up in the summer. We haven’t decided on the name yet, so I’m not sure. Central thesis is that it’s not generally evidence based in the world of public health, it is much more to do with kind of short term political pressures, opinion polls, money, sometimes to some extent, but it’s basically just the failure of democracy to produce good results.
Peter Beckett: Okay. So I’m going to give you another three minutes because you said failure of democracy, and that’s kind of where we started. Is it not? A small group of people, who never smoked, make decisions about tobacco harm reduction for millions of people, who don’t understand the choices available to them.
Is that a failure of government or is that a failure of public information?
Christopher Snowdon: It’s certainly a failure of public health, whose primary job is to give the public accurate information. Knowledge about vaping has gone backwards massively in the last 15 years. Most people now think vaping is at least as bad as smoking. Insofar as public health is part of government, it’s a government failure. I wouldn’t call it a democratic failure because that sounds like blaming the public, which isn’t fair; it’s not their responsibility to read every study carefully.
Peter Beckett: Well, no, exactly. But there is a gap.
Christopher Snowdon: Yeah, there’s a huge information gap. And there are people responsible for that—some in government and some in the WHO. They are a massive agency who are consistently spreading misinformation.
Peter Beckett: The problem is they’re not government funded. And we’ve had a whole bunch of people on here who have a lot of experience with W.H.O., and they have all to a man said the problem is funding, and the problem is the fact that it’s not government funded.
Christopher Snowdon: It is a bigger problem that Bloomberg provides the money. But the UK do give a lot of money and I don’t see why.
Peter Beckett: All right, Chris, thank you very much for your time.
