Vapers Digest 6th May

Wednesday’s News at a glance:
Industry Responds to Bill ~ Government Celebrates Tobacco & Vapes Bill ~ CAPHRA Urges Policymakers to Expand the Tobacco Cessation Toolkit ~ Argentina Ends the Ban on Vapes ~ Michael Bloomberg’s MPOWER Empire ~ The Unintended Consequences of Mexico’s Vape Ban ~ The Inquiry That Refused to Ask the Only Question That Matters ~ The Conundrum of Peer Review Invitations ~ TPD in Turbulence: A Reshuffle That Signals More Than Process ~ Real Stories, Real Results: New Online Platform Gives Consumers A Voice ~ The Government ends the ban and regulates vaping and nicotine products ~ ~ Vape metals scare: what the latest study doesn’t tell you ~ President Trump’s Marty Makary Problem ~ Trump Pressures FDA Commissioner to Approve Flavored Vapes ~ FDA Expands Market Access, Authorizes New ENDS Products ~ FDA announces its first OK of fruit-flavored e-cigarettes for adults in major shift under Trump ~ The FDA Finally Moves on Flavored Vapes ~ Banning Cigarettes, Threatening Vapes: A New UK Landscape ~ Condemning Nicotine Pouches, Trump’s Surgeon General Nominee Reveals Her Hostility to Harm Reduction ~ Why do we hate nicotine? ~ A smoke-free generation or a slippery slope? Public health, personal freedom, and the expanding reach of the state ~ THR GLOBAL LAUNCH | Aggregating Personal Testimonies to Impact Policy
Two From Dave Cross, Planet Of The Vapes
Industry Responds to Bill
The UK Vaping Industry Association and the Independent British Vape Trade Association have both reacted to the Tobacco and Vapes Bill receiving Royal Assent. Both welcome the legislation but caution that a balance must be struck to ensure that adult access is not impacted and that measure must be based in evidence.
Government Celebrates Tobacco & Vapes Bill
The Department of Health and Social Care and The Rt Hon Wes Streeting MP have welcomed the Tobacco and Vapes Bill becoming law, saying the next generation will be smoke-free. “The most significant public health reform in generations…will protect children from smoking and vaping,” they say.
CAPHRA Urges Policymakers to Expand the Tobacco Cessation Toolkit
The Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA)
CAPHRA is calling for a more comprehensive, evidence-based approach to tobacco cessation and harm reduction — one that acknowledges the full range of risks faced by smokers and oral tobacco users worldwide, and the diverse ways adults successfully move away from deadly products that includes safer nicotine options for adults.
Argentina Ends the Ban on Vapes
Alberto Hernandez, World Vapers’ Alliance
Argentina has taken a major step by lifting the ban on vapes, in place since 2011, and introducing a regulatory framework for alternative nicotine products. The resolution issued by the Ministry of Health creates a legal pathway for vapes, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco products to be imported and sold in the country, marking an important move away from outright prohibition.
Michael Bloomberg’s MPOWER Empire
David Zaruk, Firebreak
What would you do with $2 billion? If you want to spend it on dominating a global policy issue, you should take a lesson from Michael Bloomberg.
With his latest $400 million round of commitments, an even $2 billion is how much Bloomberg’s two main foundations have spent to single-handedly direct the global tobacco and nicotine control campaign, shaping it to fit his puritan, prohibitionist strategy. This is a case study in how the Big Change movement can be controlled by one wealthy billionaire with ambition and a complex network of organizations.
The Unintended Consequences of Mexico’s Vape Ban
Martin Cullip, Taxpayers Protection Alliance
Mexico’s sweeping ban on vaping products was framed as a decisive public health measure. In reality, it is rapidly becoming a case study in how prohibition can backfire by boosting organized crime, distorting markets, and exposing consumers to greater risks.
When former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador moved to ban the import and sale of e-cigarettes, he positioned the policy as part of a broader effort to protect public health. But, when Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled the ban unconstitutional, the response was not to refine the regulatory approach. Instead, the government doubled down. Under President Claudia Sheinbaum, a constitutional amendment passed in early 2025 that reinforced the ban, placing vaping products in the same legal category as one of the world’s most dangerous opioids, fentanyl.
Alan Gor
Yesterday’s hearing into Australia’s illicit tobacco crisis didn’t just expose a black market problem. It exposed something far more uncomfortable, a system straining under the weight of its own contradictions. The Senate inquiry into the illegal tobacco trade was always meant to answer a straightforward question: how big is the problem, and how do we stop it? Instead, what played out yesterday suggested that the real question is one policymakers are still unwilling to confront. How did we get here in the first place?
Arielle Selya PhD, Selya Behavioral Science Substack
Peer review is a burden and the whole process is dysfunctional, as I’ve written on before:
Peer review is also essential for academic publishing, and again in theory everyone recognizes its importance, but in practice it’s a thankless, unpaid task. It takes hours to thoroughly read a manuscript and formulate constructive criticism, and even this is not enough: I often don’t find critical problems until I try to re-analyze the data from scratch. But that doesn’t usually happen in peer review, due to time constraints and data not always being available. As I mentioned above, there is no incentive from universities for researchers to do more than the bare minimum.

TPD in Turbulence: A Reshuffle That Signals More Than Process
POUCHFORUM
A quiet internal move in the European Commission is sending unusually loud signals across Brussels. The Tobacco Products Directive, one of the EU’s most sensitive health files, has been reassigned after a negative scrutiny opinion. Behind the technical language lies a more fundamental problem: the evidence base is under question. At the same time, political pressure is building around the figures shaping the file. Taken together, this is no longer just about process. It is about credibility.
Real Stories, Real Results: New Online Platform Gives Consumers A Voice
Diane Caruana, Vaping Post
The consumer is often the missing voice in global debates on tobacco harm reduction, with the discussion typically dominated by policymakers, academics, and advocacy groups. Few people who have quit smoking with either the help of safer nicotine alternatives or by abstaining completely are ever consulted. This is something a new initiative seeks to change by addressing actual lived experiences.
The Government ends the ban and regulates vaping and nicotine products
Derecha Diario TV
The national government put an end to the prohibitive scheme on nicotine products and moved forward with a comprehensive regulation that covers vapers, heated tobacco and nicotine bags, with the objective of ordering a market that until now operated mostly informally.
Vape metals scare: what the latest study doesn’t tell you
Ali Anderson, Clearing The Air
A new vape study is fuelling fresh fears about toxic metals – but experts say the science behind the headlines is far less clear.
Published in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, the research explored whether metals from vape aerosol can build up in lung tissue. Using a mouse model, scientists exposed animals to aerosol from a refillable device and reported detecting metals including nickel, copper and lead in both the aerosol and lung tissue.
President Trump’s Marty Makary Problem
Allysia Finley, Wall Street Journal
Has any Trump administration official caused more political headaches for the president than Marty Makary? His Food and Drug Administration has turned into a soap opera, with real lives hanging in the balance.
Start with the FDA’s arbitrary rejections of rare-disease and cancer drugs, which have spurred an outcry from patient groups and physicians. In each case, the FDA reversed prior guidance and contrived technical pretexts to deny access to a life-saving drug.
Trump Pressures FDA Commissioner to Approve Flavored Vapes
Liz Essley Whyte, Natalie Andrews, Wall Street Journal
A frustrated President Trump over the weekend upbraided Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary for not moving quickly enough to approve flavored vapes and nicotine products, according to people familiar with the discussions.
In a series of weekend calls while in Florida and conversations at the White House on Monday, Trump sought advice from his advisers about Makary and the importance of flavored vaping to young MAGA voters, the people said.
FDA Expands Market Access, Authorizes New ENDS Products
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today authorized the marketing of four Glas electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) through the premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) pathway. Each product is an e-liquid pod containing 50mg/ml (or 5%) of tobacco-derived nicotine. The authorized pods include Classic Menthol, Fresh Menthol, Gold, and Sapphire. This action marks the FDA’s first authorization of non-tobacco and non-menthol ENDS products.
FDA announces its first OK of fruit-flavored e-cigarettes for adults in major shift under Trump
Matthew Perrone, AP News
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced its first authorization of fruit-flavored electronic cigarettes intended for adult smokers, a major policy shift that comes after months of appeals to President Donald Trump from the vaping industry.
The FDA Finally Moves on Flavored Vapes
Cliff Douglas
Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump directly pressured FDA Commissioner Marty Makary to move on long-stalled approvals of flavored vaping products.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-pressures-fda-commissioner-to-approve-flavored-vapes-9dad81eeThen this afternoon, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the authorization of several new vaping products from a company called Glas, including—for the first time—flavored options beyond tobacco and menthol, under careful conditions.
A look back at how things have moved on or otherwise…
Digital minister backs e-cig sales
INNCO | Weekly Issue | May 2nd, 2022
It’s always a pleasure to greet you. The Topic of the month is the statements of over 100 respected scientific and public health organizations that have reviewed the evidence and agree that safer nicotine alternatives are in fact safer. If you like to tweet these statements is as easy as just clicking any statement you will like to post. Check them out here.
A Confused Approach to Harm Reduction
Marc Hyden
If you want consistent approaches from the government to society’s many problems, then you’re likely to be disappointed. Nowhere is this clearer than in the responses to the tobacco and opioid epidemics—both of which have proven incredibly deadly. Despite tobacco and opioid-related deaths both being inextricably linked to addiction, many states treat them differently and have adopted different responses at their own peril, but there’s a better way.
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