Bill Wirtz is the senior policy analyst for the Consumer Choice Center. He focuses specifically on evidence-based policy-making, agricultural and trade policy, as well as lifestyle choice. Originally from Luxembourg, he publishes in German, French, and English. He has appeared in Fox News, Sky News, Le Monde, Times of London, Le Figaro, Die Welt, The Hill, and other major news outlets in the world.
Bill also runs the weekly European CCC podcast “ConsEUmer”. He is the author of the original Consumer Choice Center podcast series “Fun Police”, which has already launched its second season and delves into the issue of neo-prohibitionism, the movement that attempts to ban “vices” such as vaping, smoking, drinking, gambling, and others.
Speak Freely: Neo-protectionism and the nanny state have seen an intensive resurgence in Europe in recent years. There is mounting pressure on politicians to regulate the free choices we make about our bodies, under the pretext of protecting public health. Should we abolish the “fun police”?
Bill Wirtz: We should indeed abolish the fun police, and that’s because as individuals, we should make our own choices when it comes to our own bodies. There is this growing amount of people who think that most individuals are incapable of making those decisions themselves and therefore it should be passed onto the government. They come from different perspectives. Some of them come from a religious perspective because they for religious reasons think it’s not good to gamble or smoke or drink and they want to legislate it away. That was very common in the past, for instance the prohibitionist movements that made alcohol illegal in the United States. They were very religiously inspired and there was also this idea that as an individual created by God, you need to live a clean life in the image of God. Religiously, I find that to be interesting because Jesus famously turned water into wine. So he wasn’t completely opposed to alcohol.
This strain of neo-prohibitionism has now transformed into a public health lobby. These are people who say: a lot of these things are not good for you. And that’s true. People can ruin themselves financially with gambling. They can drink themselves into alcoholism. And smoking, as we know is not good for you. Their conclusion however is that we should have prohibition. And they don’t quite say prohibition. Specifically, they don’t say we need to make it illegal, but they essentially recommend all the steps that will lead to prohibition. So if you make a product more expensive, some people will never have access to it, because they’re on lower incomes. If you say you can’t consume it here, you can’t consume it there, then it becomes so difficult that it leads to a quasi-ban with all the negative consequences of prohibition. So what we wanted to do with “Fun Police” is to explain who the neo-prohibitionists are and what do they want to achieve? Explain how they operate, how they are funded and give people the intellectual firepower to address a lot of the claims that are made by these people. We address everything smoking, vaping, gambling and alcohol, and we gave it a bit of a storytelling mode so that people feel enthralled by the concept.
SF: What do you think is the state of the fight against neo-prohibitionism? On one hand, it seems that libertarians have made some ground with respect to the war on drugs. Germany is legalizing marijuana, various states in the US have tried decriminalizing some far more potent substances. So it seems that in this aspect we are winning, but on the other hand, we have Great Britain attempting to ban smoking cigarettes entirely for the new generations. Are we losing the war against the nanny state?
BW: Well, you are asking the question in the right way because there is this interesting dichotomy where at the same time, there is states in the US that essentially legalized certain what we call hard drugs. But then on the other hand, they want to restrict vaping, which helps a lot of people stop smoking, which all seems a bit contradictory. You can drive a car and vape or smoke a cigarette. You shouldn’t drive a car, after you smoke cannabis. So there is actually more severity to a lot of the things that are treated easier. To some extent on the left-side of the political spectrum, cannabis has been a darling issue. Whether it is environmentalist or socialist parties, some of them have been in favor of that.
I would wager that the German legalization of cannabis is hardly a real legalization, because they create cannabis clubs that are gonna be lefty, artsy theater clubs where you go and pick up your weed. It is not a legal market like Colorado, where it is a real business. So I wonder about this too, because you have the people that say all of these things are bad for you, and therefore they should be banned and they don’t apply the same logic to other substances. I think that there is just a political narrative building that happens and it should apply to cannabis as well, but you kind of want to have this win as a politician. Especially, when you’re losing the youth vote. So if you are Chancellor Scholz in Germany, who as a Social Democrat,fails to attract young voters because they’re going to the Greens or elsewhere. So he is trying to loop them back in with cannabis. Then on the other side, who is the most obsessed with kids potentially vaping? It is usually the Gen. X, and they are also a heavy voting bloc. So there is a lot of politics happening here and it varies from country to country. There are countries that are pretty good on vaping and there are countries that are pretty bad on cannabis. It just moves with the polling. So whatever the latest survey says, that is how politicians move about this. If you’re looking for consistency, you are probably not going to find it.
SF: Is the situation very bleak concerning the power of consumers, who are unable to form any effective pressure groups and affect change in the world? They are kind of the smallest political minority on earth, that cannot organize well even if they are bothered by the neo-prohibitionist legislation, since it is usually a relatively minor issue in their lives.
BW: Well, it depends on what topic it is specifically. For instance, our friends at World Vapers Alliance, mobilize consumers of harm-reducing products to raise their voice, sign petitions, e-mail members of the parliament. They are fairly successful in what they do. The UK is clearly moving in a bad direction on this issue, but you can mobilize a lot of consumers. Of course, the reason for that is because of the size of the part of the population that vapes. If you are a smaller group, then you feel it is easier to band together. But as a consumer in general, to make you care about the sugar tax and telecommunication regulation and all of these things, that is pretty complicated. As the Consumer Choice Center, sort of this all-encompassing thing, it is harder to have that mobilizing factor.
The best way consumers express their wishes is on the marketplace with products they buy or do not. Let me give you a practical example. In Denmark in 2011 or 2012, the government implemented a fat tax. This was a tax on saturated fat consumption of more than 2.3% to protect public health. What consumers did is they drove across the border to Germany to buy products or they downgraded on the quality of products, so they bought store brands. But they kept the exact same nutrient and fat consumption that they previously had, they just downgraded to offset the price of the tax by having lower-quality products. So this was a clear indication that consumers didn’t want this and it was the same parliamentary majority within like 15 months, that abolished it. Consumers had not really raised their voices as such, there was no election upcoming, but there was a clear indication in the consumer behavior. That happens in a lot of fields. I like to give the example of veganism. 20 years ago if you went to a restaurant, you asked for a vegan option that might be difficult. Through market behaviour, vegans and vegetarians have actually achieved change in the sense that if you go to a restaurant today and you ask for a vegetarian option, there is not going to be a problem, and nobody raises an eyebrow anymore. And a lot of the people that back in the day said we just need to ban meat, they were wrong and nobody would have supported. Vegans changed the market demand to such extent that now every place will offer a vegetarian and often a vegan option as well. Even to people that previously were arguing for bans, they had recognized that there is a market mechanism that helps them achieve their goals.
SF: You’ve touched a bit on this point, but who are “the fun police”? Who are the people that are trying to intrude into the decisions we make about our bodies?
BW: There is specific organizations organized in specific issue area. So for instance in alcohol, you have a group called Movendi International. This is an NGO and it was actually renamed a couple of years ago. It used to be called the Independent Order of Good Templars, which is straight out of a Dan Brown novel. I think they should have kept that name, that sounds so cool. They are a 200-year-old prohibitionist organization that has a religious foundation. They are actually funded by running a private lottery in Sweden, which is hilariously ironic. They go to the World Health Organization, UNODC, which is the UN body on drugs and crime and their official partners and they make recommendations. For example they made a report for Health Canada, which is the Ministry of Health in Canada and in that report, they said that the previous governmental guideline that said that you should only have two drinks per day was false and actually, it is two drinks per week. They fiddled with the numbers until they had that result. And now you can say – well that is just a recommendation. But to the health ministry in Canada, that is a scientific opinion that needs to eventually match with the regulation. So they are using the salami tactic in getting to this quasi-prohibition or slowly moving towards a prohibitionist sentiment. By releasing reports by being on TV, all of these things. Whether they are called European Public Health Alliance or Movendi or any of those, they have a lot going on. In the anti-vaping field we have Michael Bloomberg with Bloomberg Philanthropies and he gives an incredible amount of money to all types of groups. Some of them are called moms against vaping, they are all these types of groups that are concerned citizens. They go out there and say that we should ban all these things and do not mind the black market, since it is a problem to solve later. Each and every sector has their own sort of subgroups that host each other at their conferences. It is a whole clique. Still, it is fewer people than you would think. When they do a protest it is usually 10-12 people. There is not that many people actually in this space, but they are pretty effective at making this argument. So I wanted to make a a series that would outline some examples of how they operate.
SF: Any type of pressure group with “Mom’s” in their name is usually pretty terrible. Let’s take a closer look at the precise areas people seek to enforce prohibition in. Is there a push for entirely banning smoking in countries other than Great Britain? Is this something that we can see widespread in the future?
BW: The UK wants to be the first country to have a generational ban on smoking. So that means that anyone born after the 1st of January 2009 will not be able to legally purchase cigarettes. So instead of implementing prohibition outright, you essentially have this moving goalpost where each year you add more people to the list of people that will not be able to purchase cigarettes. To the result that one day if you go into a shop they will have to ID you because somebody who is 40 years old can buy cigarettes, but somebody who is 39 cannot because they are too young, which is very strange. So the UK wants to become a smoke-free country. There have been examples of countries that completely banned cigarettes. Bhutan a few years after the COVID outbreak ended their 10 years of prohibition on tobacco. It was a completely failed experiment because it turned out that after prohibition, cigarettes became a lot cheaper on the black market, because now the black market controlled the entirety of the supply and they were able to produce it for much cheaper, so smoking rates skyrocketed in Bhutan during prohibition. Then when the government legalized cigarettes again, the legal market was too expensive for people. So it was a completely failed experiment. So bad, almost on the level of US prohibition. It was a complete failure.
I think Chris Snowden from the IEA says it best. Any time you introduce nicotine or alcohol to a society, there is no way you can get rid of it. Smoking was illegal in public in Nazi Germany. You would not be able to tell from the movies or the documentaries because nobody cared. Even the most authoritarian state is not able to get people to stop. If you went to a remote island where people never had cigarettes and you said cigarettes are now illegal – sure because they wouldn’t even know what it is. But the moment people have it, people want to keep it, and the question should not be how do we get rid of it with government action, but how do we provide an alternative that is safer? And then people can make their own choices, because if they just crave nicotine, maybe instead of smoking cigarettes, they should use a nicotine pouch or electronic cigarette, which is much safer than combustible cigarettes.
SF: The European Union loves regulation as much as the next guy. So what do you think will be its focus? What can we fear from the European nanny state?
BW: Well, so that’s a complicated question this year because we have elections in June and a lot of things change after elections, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. In 2019, we got one of the worst European parliaments because it was “greener” and “leftier” than it ever had been before. And as a result of that we we got the European Green Deal and we got all these public health impulses from the EU. But we will see after this election. Not everyone on the right side of the spectrum is necessarily good on this topic either. They do not always understand this either. They have sort of an inkling to be a bit better, but I am always the one who says let’s wait and see because I do not trust them.
The European Union has something called the Tobacco Products Directive. In that directive, they also regulate vaping, which is very strange because vaping does not contain tobacco. One of the ideas that we have been arguing against is a ban on flavours for electronic cigarettes. The politicians pretend that if you put flavours in these liquids kids become interested in them because clearly, adults do not like flavours. When I get ice cream, I get flavourless ice cream, because I do not care about flavours whatsoever as an adult, right? So this is very silly and they do not realize the importance of flavours in e-cigarettes, because when people stop smoking, the last thing they want to taste is the same flavour again. Countries like the Netherlands, which has banned flavours, only allow a couple of them. Two of them are mint and tobacco flavour. When people switch, they want to have something more refreshing like strawberry and so on to treat it as something that helps them get away from this craving for tobacco smoking. So that is a regulation that hopefully the EU will at least keep postponing or completely reject from their draft board because it is a terrible idea. It will not work and it will drive a lot of people back to smoking cigarettes, which is not good.
SF: In the research paper written by the Consumer Choice Center on this very topic, in the conclusion, it is said that there is room for creating a counterculture that would be aimed at countering this new prohibitionism. How do you think this should look like?
BW: As somebody from the libertarian tradition I believe, you can make a prediction about what culture can be, but it is never good to get the inkling that you need to dictate what culture should be, right? I mean, that is sort of the essence of the belief. But I think that whether it is the yellow vests in France or the farmer protests now, when you build up too much regulation, you get a clog in your pipes and people feel angry and they do not exactly know what they are angry at. When people protest the European Union, they never know in front of which building to protest because it is so complicated to understand how it really works. And that is sort of how people feel when they become overregulated. They can not pinpoint exactly what happened, but they know they are not happy. I think this is something that might happen in this space as well. Right now, if the tax on nicotine goes up by 0.5%, it is really hard to get people interested. But there will come a point where the glass is full and then it overflows, and then people will rebel against it. I think that is something that we’re trying to allude to as in let’s not have it get to that point. There is so much happening in this space, so many public awareness campaigns. Everyone knows all these things are bad for you and nobody’s giving them up. Drugs are super popular, you never see them advertised. These things they run in the culture and they are not going anywhere.
SF: Do you think we are a bit too frail in our approach to countering the nanny state? So I think for instance, about Jacob Sullum from Reason who wrote a book titled: “Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use”. Is this more radical approach dangerous or useful?
BW: Well it depends on who you are talking to, right? For us the the most important message should always be: prohibition has all these adverse consequences. The sort of the friedmanite argument for liberties: look at all the practical implications of your rules. But there also needs to be the moral argument. The moral argument being: don’t tell me what to do. I get to make my own choices. I am an individual. I get to make my own choice. That argument always needs to come first, and then we can talk about all the negative consequences. If you take, for instance, cigarette smoking, we talk a lot about harm reduction because that is exponentially more threatened now than cigarettes. Again, this is very strange. If you wanted to ban anything, you would ban cigarettes and then later, maybe look at harm-reduction tools. Cigarettes are not as much under threat because the government gets so much revenue and taxes from cigarettes, which is why they never fully get rid of it. They have this dichotomy where on one hand they say they want to get rid of it, but on the other hand, they make so much money from the sales of a pack of cigarettes, because a pack of cigarettes costs less than thirty cents to produce. It is a crazy amount of money and tax that goes into the coffers of the government. The approach that is being taken now to counter that is to say look if you want to smoke cigarettes you know the consequences. Go ahead and do it. That is people’s prerogative. The reason we focus so much on harm reduction is because it is a perverse situation we find ourselves in that the safer option gets harsher scrutiny. It is a bit like if we lived in a parallel world where some people talked about banning cars, but the government at the same time was actually focused on banning seatbelts. They would be like that is the one we need to ban. Seatbelts are the evil thing. Like what? Why? No. Driving a car is not safe, but it is safer with a seat belt. So you can lure more people in. It is completely counterintuitive to people that this has happened.
