Vapers Digest 31st July
Monday’s News at a glance:
Study supporting the evaluation of the Tobacco control Acquis – Stakeholder Interview – The road to FCTC #COP10 – Stigma and Misinformation Maintain the Devastating Toll of Lung Cancer – Real Talk About Nicotine – Spanish Doctor Calls For Risk-based Approach – 45 Experts Write to Oz Parliamentarians – UKVIA Questions Scottish Government – American Heart Association Still Refuses to Tell the Truth About EVALI – Medical Journal Retracts Vaping Study – FDA Plans to Kill Disposable Vapes – Denmark’s “Vaping Evangelist” – The Great Flavor Debate – Ouest-France Gets it Wrong
Study supporting the evaluation…
Of the Tobacco control Acquis – Stakeholder Interview
European Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates
July 2023. ETHRA participated in a targeted stakeholder interview which was the final part of the European Commission’s consultation on the evaluation of the legislative framework for tobacco control. ETHRA partner Damian Sweeney and public health partner Clive Bates represented ETHRA in the interview. A summary of the questions and answers is below.
Download our summary here.
The road to FCTC #COP10
COPWatch
COP10 preparations are advancing when it comes to the FCTC Secretariat. The provisional agenda and some other documents were published earlier this month.
Going from the agenda we can expect a fully packed discussion on substantive items. Readers will remember that COP9 was virtual and that although discussions were tortuous (refresh your memory with our COP live reporting), there was no discussion on ‘substantive items’. This in person COP10 in Panama promises to be a proper bun fight – and we just wonder whether the allotted week will be sufficient.
We will be analysing the available documentation and will share our thoughts on those with you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are some of our quick observations.
Stigma and Misinformation….
Maintain the Devastating Toll of Lung Cancer – Kim “Skip” Murray
August 1 is World Lung Cancer Day. Although this is the 12th iteration of an annual bid to spread awareness, lung cancer remains not only rampant, but plagued by stigma and misinformation.
When one out of every 16 Americans will receive a lung cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, the data show a staggering number of deaths that could have been prevented. Every day, approximately 382 people in the United States die from lung cancer—about the number that would fill a Boeing 777.
Annually, the US averages over 130,000 lung cancer deaths from smoking, plus over 7,000 more lung cancer deaths from secondhand smoke. Nearly 90 percent of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking, and the disease accounts for a large portion of over 8 million smoking-related deaths worldwide each year.
Stop Smoking Start Vaping is now available FREE as an e-book. You can download a PDF copy for personal use from the website below ⤵️
This book dispels the myths about #vaping and provides a step-by-step guide on how to make the switch from smokinghttps://t.co/YFj2uJEaUT
— Dr Colin Mendelsohn (@ColinMendelsohn) July 30, 2023
Real Talk About Nicotine
Handwaving Freakoutery
There is no greater public health failure of this century than the CDC’s approach to nicotine messaging. Not only is the public misinformed about cigarettes, vapes, and the good and bad effects of nicotine, the public continues to get more and more misinformed over time. That misinformation is killing people, the CDC is doing it on purpose, and the only way to counteract it is to spread the scientific truth through unofficial channels.
Herein, we will discuss in scientific, objective terms the good and the bad about nicotine, the good and bad of tobacco, the good and bad of vaping, the very awful things the CDC are doing to hide all of this, the number of people the CDC kills per year by their very awful behavior, and what you can do to save a life.. This is long. Let’s begin…..
Three from Dave Cross, Planet of the Vapes:
Doctor Calls For Risk-based Approach
Doctor Josep María Ramón Torrell, head of the Bellvitge Hospital’s Smoking Unit, asked last week for a risk-based ranking of nicotine delivery products. The risk-based ranking is needed, Torrell explained, so that consumers can know what the health risks of each product are and can make informed decisions.
In this ranking, the doctor explained to journalists, combustion tobacco should be the riskiest nicotine delivery product, with a score of 100 points. He proposed nicotine gums and patches to be the products with the lowest score (between 3 and 5 points), while electronic cigarettes would score between 7 and 8 points and snus and heated tobacco between 20 and 30 points.
45 Experts Write to Oz Parliamentarians
Forty-five public health and addiction experts have written to all state, territory and federal members of the Australian parliament expressing concern about vape proposals. They are urging lawmakers to listen to the Australian National Advisory Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ANACAD) as Health Minister Mark Butler proposes a “vaping crackdown”.
The letter fully endorses the Council’s concerns about the proposed regulations which seeks to turn a failing de facto ban into an even harsher (and doomed to continue failing) ban.
UKVIA Questions Scottish Government
The UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) has expressed concerns about impartiality and personal bias in a letter to Scottish politicians who have been calling for a ban on single-use vapes. The trade body says such an approach would unfairly impact on low-income smokers and, like in Australia, create a thriving black market. UKVIA also asks why vapers have been excluded from the discussions as this runs contrary to government guidance.
UKVIA has sounded the alarm bells in relation to a government review on the environmental impact of single-use e-cigarettes. The review, commissioned by the Scottish government was jointly prepared by Zero Waste Scotland and Dr Dominic Hogg of Equanimator Ltd.
Two from Michael Siegel, The Rest of the Story:
American Heart Association Still Refuses
To Tell the Truth About EVALI and Makes No Specific Recommendation that Youth Avoid Vaping THC Products
In an American Heart Association (AHA) “scientific statement” published this week in the journal Circulation, the AHA continues to confuse the public about the so-called EVALI (e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury) outbreak that occurred in 2019, suggesting that it may be due to “flavoring agents,” “viruses,” or “bacteria” and that no specific agent has been identified as the cause.
Despite the fact that vitamin E acetate was found in a miraculous 94% of bronchoalveolar lavage fluids of EVALI patients, that no putative contaminant has ever been found in a non-tainted nicotine-containing e-cigarette
Medical Journal Retracts Vaping Study
For Political, Rather than Scientific Reasons
The journal BMC Public Health has announced that it will be retracting a paper it published last October which concluded that the use of electronic cigarettes has helped accelerate the decline in cigarette smoking.
The study, entitled “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults,” analyzed U.S. population-based data on trends in e-cigarette consumption and smoking prevalence from approximately 8 years prior to when e-cigarettes became popular in the U.S. through 2019. T
FDA Plans to Kill Disposable Vapes
One Warning Letter at a Time – Jim McDonald
The FDA issued warning letters yesterday to three vape product distributors, ordering them to remove certain disposable vapes without FDA authorization from their commerce websites. The letters—and the accompanying FDA press release—are the latest salvos in the FDA’s futile war on disposables.
“FDA is committed to keeping a finger on the pulse of the rapidly evolving e-cigarette landscape, including through a variety of scientific assets equipped to quickly identify products with high youth appeal,” FDA Center for Tobacco Products.Director Brian King said in the press release.
Denmark’s “Vaping Evangelist”
Helen Redmond
When I interviewed Kim Dabelstein Petersen in the back of an empty midtown-Manhattan coffee shop, he had just attended a meeting at the United Nations (with Dr. Riccardo Polosa, a leading tobacco harm reduction researcher from Italy).
Dabelstein Peterson is one of Denmark’s leading THR advocates. Our conversation a few years back also revealed him as a warm, no-nonsense, person who desperately wants everyone who smokes to have access to safer nicotine products. He calls himself a “vaping evangelist.”
The Great Flavor Debate
Allison Boughner
A recent article I saw caught my attention, adult ice cream flavors are on the rise. Confirming what we already know, adults love flavors and flavors drive the sales in most other things that adults consume every single day.
The article starts by stating: “One of the greatest things about being an adult is that no one can stop you from eating ice cream for breakfast if that’s what you want.” Not necessarily a healthy breakfast choice but hey, adults can do what they want, right?
So why do people have such a negative opinion on flavors when it comes to tobacco harm reduction?
Ouest-France Gets it Wrong
About Nicotine Pouches – Joseph Hart
A recent article in Ouest-France highlights some of the issues and attitudes that the nicotine pouch industry must overcome in the battle to help people quit smoking.
Ouest-France is a venerable daily newspaper with around 2.5 million readers. So, it’s fair to say that they have a considerable influence on public opinion. For all you non-Francophones out there, Ouest-France means West France. The publication covers the Brittany, Lower Normandy and Pays de la Loire regions.
Sadly, their piece of nicotine pouches, or “white Snus” as they call it, falls below the journalistic standards you might expect from a prominent newspaper.
On this Day…2022
A look back at how things have moved on or otherwise…
Nicotine And The Weirdness Of Harm
Clive Bates, Tobacco Reporter
The availability of nicotine with minimal harm justifies a complete rethink of our approach to this legal recreational drug.
Whisper it quietly, but people use nicotine for a reason. Nicotine has psychoactive effects that provide functional benefits and pleasurable sensations to its users. Neal Benowitz, a global authority on nicotine, writing in the U.S. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology in 2009, summarized the effects: “In humans, nicotine from tobacco induces stimulation and pleasure and reduces stress and anxiety. Smokers come to use nicotine to modulate their level of arousal and for mood control in daily life. Smoking may improve concentration, reaction time and performance of certain tasks.”
The Big Tobacco Control playbook
Harry’s blog 114:
Huge disruption has been caused by the evidence that non-combustible vaping and heated tobacco products and Swedish-style snus can have a game-changing impact on reducing death and disease from smoking. The advent of these products has disrupted industry thinking while governments have been trying to play catch-up with often knee-jerk and harmful revisions to tobacco control policies. But the disruption has been most keenly felt within the global public health community.
Organisations have been founded, professional careers and reputations built, and millions of research dollars acquired based on the immutable division between the devils of Big Tobacco with their lethal products and the angels of public health. The tobacco wars were fought on the premise that there were irreconcilable differences between these warring factions.
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