Tax Crackdown Defies Science & Reality ~ Public Health Madness ~ Parliament Matters ~ Another Open Letter to the EU ~ Save vaping ~ When the State Becomes the Parent: Autonomy, Reactance, and the Rise of the Black Market ~ Retractions Don’t Repeal Regulation: How Suspect—and Occasionally Fraudulent—Evidence Shapes Tobacco Harm Reduction Policy ~ Fantastic Lives and Where to Ban Them: Europe’s War on Harm Reduction ~ The UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill Has Passed Parliament ~ Nicotine alternatives ‘can turn world smoke-free by 2040’ ~ Beneficiaries of Harm Reduction Reform ~ Putting Smoke Back at the Center of Tobacco Control ~ Rise of the pragmatists ~ Why do so many vape risk studies fall apart under scrutiny? ~ Tobacco and Vapes Bill returns to Lords ahead of vape tax and price rises ~ FDA Memos Show Glas Vape MGOs Stopped at the Top ~ Panel: From Pilot to Progress in Product Authorizations ~ FDA Tobacco Chief Highlights Progress, Challenges in Product Reviews and Enforcement ~ Tobacco and Vapes Bill: the stupidest law ever passed in Britain ~ HOLMAN: To Improve Public Health, Tax Tobacco Products Based on Risk, Not Rhetoric ~ There’s more! Don’t miss these!
The tax crackdown on safer nicotine products in the European Union defies science and reality, warns Greek cardiologist and vape expert Konstantinos Farsalinos. He says he believes that European policymakers are putting lives at risk with their unscientific push for punitive taxes on safer nicotine alternatives such as vapes and eliquids.
Making nicotine replacement therapy products harder to get in India is public health madness, so says the Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA). The organisation tells Planet of the Vapes that India risks making it harder for people who smoke to quit if they initiate a restriction on nicotine gums and lozenges, whilst cigarettes and other tobacco products remain widely available.
Welcome to our second trip to Westminster of the week. We hear from Euan Stainbank asking a question about the Lords Amendment 22 to the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. Also, Mary Glindon thinks there may be benefits to restricting the strength of nicotine pouches. Finally, Graham Leadbitter is concerned about the advertising of nicotine pouches.
Seven pressure groups across Europe have written an open letter to the European Commission DG SANTE, Ursula von der Leyen (President of the European Commission), and Olivér Várhelyi (Commissioner for Health and Food Safety) requesting they stops their unevidenced war on tobacco harm reduction. As part of the missive, the letter urges them to rethink the direction of the upcoming Tobacco Products Directive revision.
As you have probably heard, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill will very soon be the Tobacco and Vapes Act. Its flagship policy is the truly idiotic generational smoking ban. I expect that journalists are already looking for people born on 1 January 2009 so that they can interview them on New Year’s Day. The retail trade is working on a “Decline09” campaign to remind shopkeepers of what to look for on customers’ ID and how to handle objections.
The relationship between a government and its citizens is often described in legal or economic terms, but at its core, it is psychological. It is built on trust, autonomy, and the assumption that adults are capable of making meaningful decisions about their own lives. In Australia, particularly in public health policy, that assumption has increasingly shifted.
Public health systems present themselves as evidence-led. In principle, new findings inform policy, and policy evolves as the evidence base strengthens, weakens, or corrects itself. In practice, however, the process is far less symmetrical. Evidence that supports precautionary restriction tends to move quickly through journals, press releases, NGOs, and media headlines, while subsequent corrections, caveats, or retractions rarely travel as far or as fast.
If you look at the world today, you’ll notice there are really two groups of people. You have Group A. These are the people who actually talk to consumers. They live in the real world. They understand why a father chooses a pouch over a cigarette. They see the guy who wants to stay alert at work without smelling like an ashtray. They listen.
On the 21st of April, the UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill passed its final stage. While it’s been overshadowed by the fallout from the Mandelson security fiasco, the remaining disagreements between the Commons and Lords were resolved. Now, all it strictly needs is the formality of Royal Assent to become an Act.
Increased use of smoke-free nicotine products such as vapes and oral pouches can turn the world ‘smoke-free’ by 2040, according to ground-breaking new research by international health experts.
As this entry to Skip’s Corner goes live, I will be speaking these words on the ATNF stage in Leesburg, VA. This keynote will be the lead-in for the panel that follows:
Adults Who Smoke: The Beneficiaries of Harm Reduction Reform
Moderator:
Dr. Jasjit Ahluwalia – Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Professor of Medicine, Brown University School of Public Health and Alpert School of Medicine
For decades, tobacco control was organized around an almost moral clarity. On one side stood a familiar horizon: quit smoking, give up nicotine, break the circuit of dependence. On the other stood everything that threatened that ideal. Abstinence remained close to virtue; nicotine, almost always, to suspicion. It was an architecture at once normative and symbolic: the field knew how to name the enemy with the same confidence with which it named salvation.
One of the best commentaries I have ever seen on the future of tobacco and nicotine has just been published in the prestigious journal, Nature Health.
Beaglehole, R., Bonita, R., & Pang, T. (2026). Smoke-free nicotine products can accelerate the end of the smoking epidemic. Nature Health. 20 April 2026. DOI 10.1038/s44360-026-00121-1 (Access)
Disclosure: I know and admire all three authors, who have each held senior positions in the World Health Organisation earlier in their careers.
The UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill has returned to the House of Lords for further scrutiny, as MPs and peers enter the final stages of parliamentary “ping pong” and pressure mounts from retailers and industry over its potential impact.
The legislation, which aims to create the first “smoke-free generation”, would ensure that anyone born on or after January 1, 2009 can never legally be sold tobacco. It also gives ministers sweeping new powers to regulate products, packaging and information requirements for tobacco, vapes and related products.
A small California vape maker is accusing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of sidelining its own science after newly released internal records showed agency reviewers backed authorization for several flavored Glas products that were later blocked by senior leadership.
The story centers on Glas Inc.’s premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) for its G2 system, submitted July 21, 2021, covering an age-gated device and eight pod products.
The panel on the FDA’s nicotine pouch pilot program, moderated by Roxana Weil from McKinney Specialty Labs, was a great discussion between the FDA’s Cristi Stark, Reynolds American’s Carolina Garcia-Canton, Altria Client Service’s Sydana Rogers Hollins, and Kleinfeld, Kaplan, and Becker’s Stacy Ehrlich about the status of the pilot program and what both the FDA and the industry have learned from in the process.
Dr. Bret Koplow, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), sat down for a fireside chat to kick off the second day of the American Tobacco and Nicotine Forum (ATNF) in Leesburg, Va. Christopher Greer, president and CEO of the Nicotine Resource Consortium, led the discussion on behalf of industry leaders eager to hear more about the inner workings of the regulatory agency.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which is soon to receive royal assent, is the most empty-headed and illiberal piece of legislation passed in my lifetime. It is a pathetic epitaph for a vacuous political class, a sad fart from the rotting corpse of Blairism, and a new low for the nanny state. Waved through by the political pygmies in the House of Commons and cheered on by the freedom-hating gibbons in the House of Lords, it has given a quick dopamine rush to self-righteous windbags as the British state crumbles around them.
On Tax Day, most Americans were reminded how much of their hard-earned money goes to fund government. While we know how much income taxes we pay, there are some taxes that are not as transparent. For example, state excise taxes on certain products, such as nicotine, vary greatly and don’t always follow sound public policy or common sense. Let me explain why.
After more than 20 years at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — most recently as director of the Office of Science at the Center for Tobacco Products — I’ve watched public health policy evolve as evidence improves. Tax policy should evolve, too. Decades ago, lawmakers and regulators treated all tobacco and nicotine products as essentially the same
Thailand is famous for being one of those countries that has chosen to ignore the ever-growing volume of scientific evidence and successes experienced by progressive nations when it comes to electronic cigarettes. Faced with the prospect of fines, jail, or being thrown out of the country, what did one British vaper discover when holidaying?
