Tobacco Control Sophistry: Won’t Someone Think Of The Children?

When I started writing many years ago, I did my share of sales copywriting. It was primarily direct response copy, and the products included hair loss medication, vitamins, and a “system” to help men with dating. It was not my finest hour.

I always found the work a bit grimy, but it was interesting on a technical level. When the only metric that matters is conversions, and the product is something that people don’t really need, the writing needs to dig deep.

The really good direct response copywriters I knew had a firm grasp of psychology. Their copy was focused on speaking to the subconscious, not the rational mind. The logical mind, with all its objections and suspicion, was the enemy.

Instead, they used words to lever primal urges, tapping into status anxiety, greed, inadequacy, and fear. Basically, anything that could motivate someone to abandon their senses and press that big red BUY NOW button.

Suvuton Suomi

Anyway, I was thinking of all this today when I saw a couple of posts on X/Twitter. The first one was from Savuton Suomi (Smoke-Free Finland).

What age is the child in the picture? Maybe six or something. It’s a really cheap and inelegant way to prey on the most primal urge of all: protecting our children. In the twisted world of Tobacco Control, children are being stalked by Big Tobacco operatives, luring them into “nicotine addiction” with a range of flavours. It’s paranoid fiction of the worst kind.

Also, your name is Smoke-Free Finland. Pouches and vapes are smoke-free products. Their adoption is something that you should celebrate, even if it makes your organisation irrelevant.

Bhekisisa

Bhekisisa is a self-proclaimed “independent media organisation” based in Johannesburg. They cover health and social justice issues across Africa.

According to their website, Bhekisisa is the Zulu word for “to scrutinise.” Also, according to their website, “most of Bhekisisa’s funding comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”

I’m not sure if donor-funded journalism gets to sound the horn about being independent. This article from the Global Investigative Journalist Network underlines the problem, suggesting:

“Donor-funded reporting can skew the country’s news agenda to donors’ priorities and deter coverage of donors that badly need scrutiny.”

So, does this article manage an even-handed approach?

While I wouldn’t say it’s the most biased article on nicotine pouches I’ve read, it’s certainly closer to activism than it is to journalism.

One of the biggest problems is that it relies far too heavily on the perspective of Lekan Ayo-Yusuf, who is Chairperson of the School of Health Systems and Public Health in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Pretoria.

I didn’t know anyone had job titles that long outside of North Korea. But the comparisons don’t stop there. Check out this for a reality-bending piece of shameless propaganda from Ayo-Yusuf that goes completely unchecked in the article:

Lekan Ayo-Yusuf compares calling nicotine pouches a form of harm reduction to saying it’s safer to jump from the tenth floor of a building instead of the fiftieth floor. “In the larger scheme of things, you still die.”

This is cheap sophistry and bad science. Nicotine is relatively harmless and, at 95% safer than cigarettes, a better analogy would be jumping from the ground floor or the 19th floor.

For Ayo-Yusuf’s calculations to work, nicotine would need to be two-thirds as destructive as smoking. He’s either ignorant or lying. Maybe both.

Ayo-Yusuf also gets the last quote, and it’s more garbage.

“When nicotine is marketed to children who don’t smoke, you’re not reducing harm, you’re adding harm.”

It’s not marketed to children, though, is it? The author lets Ayo-Yusuf’s appeal to emotion slide, with the only “evidence” of this remarkable claim being a paper that, and I’m not joking here, talks about how nicotine pouch manufacturers used “young adults” and urban settings in their advertising. So, adults, not children.

Final thoughts

Truth, research, and critical thinking are hazards for people who are trying to hawk garbage. Sleazy copywriters have no choice but to tap into primal fears and urges to convert their marks because they understand the product is crap.

If donor-funded journalists and health bodies believe in their message, why do they need to appeal to emotion, stoke fear, and obscure the truth? I’m starting to suspect that they know that they need to keep lying to keep the money flowing.