Vapers Digest 5th September
Tuesday’s News at a glance:
Big Tobacco Goes Soft – Australia just raised cigarette prices further – Flying with RyanAir – Vape tax brings in millions – and closes PA. businesses – Nicotine in the News – Spot The Difference – Did the smoking ban make the number of childhood chest infections plummet? – FDA vaping regulations: an updated timeline and FAQ – NSP Daily Digest
Big Tobacco Goes Soft
The Washington Free Beacon
On the lakefront a few miles west of downtown sit the only two ugly buildings in the city. There’s the factory, a white whale without windows that appears to have been designed by a blind Soviet commissar suffering from depression. Next-door is a 400,000-square-foot building that spurned the region’s rich quarries in favor of tinted glass—the kind paparazzi-weary celebrities use when they want to be spotted by paparazzi—that give the wooden structural supports a maroon tint. Every architectural mistake has an explanation behind it, and Phillip Morris International’s headquarters is no different. The building, the flacks say, represents the company’s commitment to transparency. They may have wasted $120 million building this hideous metaphor, but this hideous metaphor may well save the tobacco industry—and the lives of a couple hundred million smokers.
They call it “The Cube.”
Australia just raised cigarette prices further
Diane Caruana, VapingPost
Despite having the most expensive cigarette prices in the world, as of yesterday the 1st of September, Australia increased cigarette prices by a further $2.70 a pack
Tobacco tax on cigarettes has just risen by 13%, from 62 cents to 70 cents per cigarette, which equates to a packet of cigarettes which previously cost $32.50, now costing $35.20. Additionally, excise duty on other tobacco products has been raised by 17% from $771.60 to $901.39 per kilogram.
“That’s a $2.70 price hike that will make poor, addicted smokers worse off,” said Liberal Democrats Senator David Leyonhjelm. “The government bans the sale of e cigarettes that contain nicotine, even though these are 95 per cent less harmful than cigarettes. The extortionate taxation of tobacco, combined with the ban on e-cigarettes and plain packaging rules, have generated a booming black market in untaxed, unregulated tobacco run by organised crime. This supports the pushing of drugs and illegal guns,” he added.
Flying with RyanAir
via Kate Bryans and Sue Heimchen
Ryanair changed their terms and conditions on August 10, 2017 and banned e-cig transport on their planes even in cabin baggage! Up to that date it was allowed to bring them of course only in cabin baggage like all batteries, now for some unknown reason they forbid to carry e-cigs. Item 8.9.1 has the details.
Vape tax brings in millions – and closes PA. businesses
The Inquirer, philly.com
Mike Londino didn’t expect e-cigarettes to lead him to his life’s work. He just wanted to quit smoking, and nothing else had worked for him yet. But after vaping helped him ditch cigarettes, he fell in love, as he put it. He decided to dedicate his time to helping others switch from cigs to their electronic cousins.
Three years later, the 29-year-old is manager of Vape O2 in Philadelphia and runs two vape-related companies, one on his own and one with friends.
“If there’s one thing that I absolutely love about the vaping industry,” Londino said last week from the Girard Avenue shop, “it took a lot of the younger adult generation and turned us into business owners and advocates for something that we believe in.”
But if there’s one thing he and nearly everyone else in the industry hate, it’s the levy that threatens their very enterprise: the 40-percent tax on their products imposed by the state legislature last year.
Nicotine in the News
Harry Shapiro
There is a new Holy Grail within the world of tobacco control – the reduced nicotine cigarette which proponents claim will make cigarettes so unattractive that smoking tobacco will be eliminated. This was the thrust of a recent commentary from Scott Gottlieb and Mitch Zeller in the New England Journal of Medicine and is likely to become a major tobacco control policy goal internationally. Scientific evidence is being presented that this works; the Gottlieb commentary cited the FDA-funded study by Eric Donny which has been challenged by Dr Brad Rodhu. No doubt ‘methodologies at dawn’ will be played out in the medical press in the coming months.
The history of reducing the psychoactive element from a product, the whole point of which is the psychoactive effect, does not have a great history. Sticking with cigarettes, the early nineties saw a number of ‘denicotinised’ cigarettes hit the market. My guess is they didn’t go down too well
Low nicotine cigarettes: "the most idiotic idea ever proposed by tobacco control advocates" https://t.co/ahLkbiV6Vy
— Dick Puddlecote (@Dick_Puddlecote) September 5, 2017
Spot The Difference
Dick Puddlecote
You will often hear tobacco controllers talk about how the tobacco industry is evil and has a history of deceiving the public. It’s a central ingredient of everything they do and they have used this to persuade governments to ignore the industry entirely, portraying big tobacco companies as untrustworthy.
The theme was explained in this BBC article last year.
Did the smoking ban make the number of childhood chest infections plummet?
Christopher Snowdon, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist
The BMJ implies that the findings are specific to Britain whereas they are sourced from various junk studies from various countries, but what applies to one country should apply to all and claims have been made in the past about childhood hospital admissions for lower respiratory infections falling by 13.8 per cent in England after the smoking ban was introduced.
So let’s see if it’s true shall we? Here’s something you can do at home. It’s called ‘fact checking’ and at one time journalists were rumoured to have done it.
FDA vaping regulations: an updated timeline and FAQ
Jim McDonald, Vaping360
Update: an FAQ on changes to the deeming rule, and a calendar of remaining deadlines
On July 28, when FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced a four-year delay for the final deadline to submit premarket tobacco applications (PMTA’s) for vapor products (and other newly deemed “tobacco” products), it created some confusion among vapers and vape vendors.
Visit Nicotine Science & Policy for more News from around the World
