Smoke Gets in Your IQs

There’s not much more revolting than the tobacco industry. Well, OK, there’s racist scum like Trump and Turnbull. And there’s greasy media apologists. And Bill Gates. And Mia Farrow.*

Alright, the world is full of awful people. But you get the point: it is difficult to be on the side of smoking and tobacco-pushing sociopaths.

Difficult, but not impossible.

Recently, the media was full of shock and horror at a new study on smoking. It was widely reported that 2/3 of people who try one cigarette end up as “daily smokers”. This was the conclusion of a meta-analysis, covering over 200,000 respondents from eight surveys. Professor Peter Hajek, one of the study’s authors, noted the meta-analysis constituted documentation of the “remarkable hold that cigarettes can establish after a single experience.”

Which is crap, and obvious crap. The implied suggestion that a single cigarette can turn a person into a helpless addict is nothing but Reefer Madness madness.

How can a respected and sophisticated academic study come to such a conclusion? Well, it doesn’t.

Anyone who has read the great debunking by Susan Traynor‘s son knows to never take a statistical study, much less a one sentence summary of a study, at face value. In this case, and as the authors of the study properly and cautiously note, that “2/3 of people” hides a wide variance in survey quality, response rates and response types.

More fundamentally, and astonishingly, the study (paywalled) never attempts to clarify, much less define, the term “daily smoker”. How many days does that require? The appendix to the study suggests that only three of the eight surveys included in the meta-analysis asked about “daily” smoking with specific reference to a minimal time period, the periods being 30 days, “nearly every day” for two months, and six months.

Of these three studies, the 2013 US NSDUH survey, which used the 30-day period, had around 55,000 respondents and the highest response rate, of around 72%. Amongst those respondents, about 50% of those who had ever smoked had at some time been “daily smokers” (i.e. for 30 days). Hardly insignificant, nor an insignificant time period, but a significant step down from “2/3 daily smokers”. (For some reason, the figures quoted in the meta-analysis, though close, are not identical to the figures in the NSDUH survey; specifically the number of people answering “YES” to the questions “CIGEVER” and “CIGDLYMO” differ.)

Even accepting the meta-analysis as sufficiently accurate, so what? What does it actually indicate? Reasonably enough, the authors suggest that their study has implications for efforts to stop people becoming regular smokers. The authors are tentative, however, rightly leaving the policy analysis for another forum. In particular, in the study the authors never make any claim of the “remarkable hold” that a single cigarette can have, nor do they make any remotely similar claim.

The “remarkable hold” line, which was repeated verbatim in almost every news report, originates from a media release from Hajek’s university. Of course barely any media organisations bothered to look beyond the media release, or to think for half a second before copying and pasting.

There is indeed a remarkable hold here. It is the remarkable hold university media units have on news organisations, which don’t have the time or experience or basic nous to be properly skeptical of the over-egged omelettes routinely handed to them on a platter.

Update: Just a quick addition, for those might doubt that Turnbull is racist scum.

* Yeah, yeah, no one knows, except Mia and Woody. But I believe Moses.