Shhh, economic cost of smoking falls by £3bn (according to ASH)
Figures released this week by Action on Smoking and Health calculate that the economic cost of smoking in England is £14bn a year.
According to ASH, £6.6bn is lost to smoking-related unemployment, £6.1bn to smoking-related lost earnings, and £1.3bn in smoking-related early deaths.
Goodness knows how they calculate all this (they must be up all night with their abacus), but the previous figure, published in January 2022, was £17bn so, according to ASH's own calculations, the cost of smoking to the economy has fallen by £3bn!
Not that ASH mentioned this, of course, because it doesn’t fit the narrative that smoking is an increasing financial burden on society, even as smoking rates fall. (Last year ASH claimed the economic cost of smoking was £5bn more than previously estimated.)
Either way, I’d take all these figures with a pinch of salt because it reminds me of a passage from Murder A Cigarette, the 1998 book co-written by the late Lord Harris, co-founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs in the Fifties and chairman of Forest from 1987 until his death in 2006.
According to Ralph:
If laymen dare to question any of these guesstimates and projections, the sophisticated statisticians take refuge behind their computers which have been heavily programmed to incorporate a variety of elaborate assumptions and statistical techniques.
And since researchers have discovered that the bigger the reported risk the better the chance of attracting funding and getting their results published (known in the trade as ‘publication bias’), they have exerted much ingenuity in what is known as ‘data dredging’ – that is, torturing the statistics until they confess!
He was writing about the number of lives allegedly lost to passive smoking, but he could just as easily have been writing about the economic cost of smoking.
I’ll leave it to you to judge.
See: £14bn a year up in smoke – economic toll of smoking in England revealed (May 16, 2023)
Smoking costs society £17bn – £5bn more than previously estimated (January 14, 2022)