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Vapers Digest 5th June

Kevin CrowleyPosted on Posted in Latest News

Friday’s News at a glance:

ASH Scotland Wants Money ~ Disposable Vapes Use Drops ~ LGA Demands More Bans ~ The Great Tobacco Control Failure: ABS Data Exposes Australia’s Illicit Nicotine Boom ~ CAPHRA warns push for ASEAN vape ban ignores science ~ Sweden Blocks EU Tobacco Tax Hike as Talks Resume ~ EU finally recognises Sweden’s smoke-free success ~ The TED has fallen (tbc..) ~ Sweden blocks EU tobacco tax directive to protect its smoke-free success ~ Tobacco Harm Reduction IS Harm Reduction ~ Applause for a Nicotine-Free Future? Not So Fast. ~ How Generation AIDS sees Harm Reduction ~ Vaping has prevented up to 100 billion cigarettes being smoked in Britain, new analysis suggests ~ Reversing The FDA’s Vape Decision Would Hand The Market To Chinese Smugglers ~ The Name We Choose for What Happened ~ France’s Criminilization of Nicotine Pouches Raises Questions Over Tobacco Harm Reduction Policy ~ Tobacco racket. Swedes go smoke-free while Australians light up with criminals ~ Nicotine use soars by 40% in eight years as Australian black market explodes ~ 70% of Edinburgh vapers not purchased disposable vapes since UK ban ~ Can’t Tax the Rich? More States Target Nicotine — and the Working Class ~ Michael Bloomberg’s war on vaping puts criminals over consumers ~ Tobacco Regulation: European Union ~ USA: Nicotine Pouch Tax

Three From Dave Cross, Planet Of The Vapes

ASH Scotland Wants Money

ASH Scotland is calling on leaders to ‘demonstrate strong political will’ by committing to uplift tobacco and nicotine control funding – i.e. to give it more money. Historically, a strongly risk averse and prohibitionist organisation, often making negative statements about vaping, ASH Scotland wants Scotland’s political leaders “to seize the generational opportunity of the Tobacco and Vapes Act coming into law”.

Disposable Vapes Use Drops

YouGov survey data, commissioned from anti-smoking charity Action and Smoking and Health (ASH) shows that, one year after the government introduced a ban on disposable vapes, there has been “a dramatic decline in their use among both children and adults”. The disposable ban was introduced under single-use plastics legislation and came into force on 1st June 2025. ASH says the law was intended to protect the environment by reducing the use of single-use products and to deter use among children.

LGA Demands More Bans

The Local Government Association (LGA) is calling for a change to the definition of single-use vapes to close an industry loophole, reduce vape waste, and prevent dangerous bin lorry and waste fires. Rather than address the reasons why vapers are not recycling their products, it wants to see reusable vapes banned.

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Skip Murray, Skip’s Corner – Let’s Talk!

World Vape Day and World No Tobacco Day fall one day apart. That timing makes the contrast hard to ignore. As I watched posts on social media over those two days, the contrast was even deeper than in years past.

In many areas of public health, harm reduction is treated as practical, compassionate, and evidence-informed. Public health organizations recognize that people do not always stop risky behaviors immediately, completely, or as professionals might prefer.

Reversing The FDA’s Vape Decision Would Hand The Market To Chinese Smugglers

Evan Swarztrauber, The Daily Caller

Contraband behaves like water: it finds the lowest, easiest path, and when you close one channel, it pools somewhere else. Anyone who has worked a port of entry knows it in their bones. It is also the lesson a group of U.S. senators seems determined to ignore.

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did something it had never done before. After years of scientific review, it authorized four vaping products made by Glas Inc., an American company in Inglewood, California—including two non-tobacco flavors.

The Name We Choose for What Happened

Claudio Teixeira, Disobedient Margins

I ~ The Lung and the Void

In late July 2019, a man in his early twenties was admitted to a hospital in southeastern Wisconsin with an oxygen saturation below 85 percent. A level consistent with acute respiratory failure. He was an athlete. He didn’t smoke. He had no known history of lung disease. He was coughing up blood. He breathed with the visible effort of someone trying to pull air through a thick liquid.

The CT scan showed diffuse ground-glass opacities with whitish patches scattered across the lungs, as if an oily substance had reached the alveoli and altered their surface.

France’s Criminilization of Nicotine Pouches Raises Questions Over Tobacco Harm Reduction Policy

Diane Caruana, Vaping Post

France’s infamous ban on nicotine pouches has sparked a real debate about tobacco policy all over Europe. Under France’s new rules, nicotine pouches are not just regulated and restricted; their production, importation, possession, transport, distribution, and use have been criminalised. Violations could carry penalties of up to five years in prison and fines of hundreds of thousands of euros.

Tobacco racket. Swedes go smoke-free while Australians light up with criminals

James Martin, Michael West Media

This week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) revealed that a staggering 80% of cigarettes sold in Australia were through illegal channels as of December 2025. The wreckage surrounding the black market is sadly familiar: tens of billions in forgone excise, early signs we may be facing the first rise in smoking since the 1990s, and a sustained wave of violence that has produced more than 280 firebombings, alongside homicides, kidnappings and extortion.

Nicotine use soars by 40% in eight years as Australian black market explodes

Jordyn Beazley, The Guardian

Australians are consuming more nicotine than they were eight years ago but are spending less, new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows, as 80% of the cigarettes smoked by the nation last year were cheaper illegal products.

The analysis released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Wednesday showed the amount of nicotine consumed around the country soared by 40% between 2017 and 2025, despite population growth rising by just 14%.

70% of Edinburgh vapers not purchased disposable vapes since UK ban

Phoebe Smith, Edinburgh News

One year on from the UK’s disposable vape ban, new survey data from Haypp, a leading global retailer of alternative nicotine products, suggests the ban has not worked as intended and has instead pushed some vapers towards illicit products or a return to smoking.

Can’t Tax the Rich? More States Target Nicotine — and the Working Class

Randall Bloomquist, NH Journal

The political chant is “tax the rich,” but in at least 15 states, lawmakers looking for revenue are reaching instead into the pockets of smokers, vapers and nicotine-pouch users — disproportionately working-class consumers.

Take Delaware. After Democrat Gov. Matt Meyers’s 2025 effort to raise income taxes on top earners failed to get through the legislature, lawmakers turned their revenue targeting toward nicotine users. They moved to raise the cigarette tax by more than 70%, double the tax on vaping liquid and impose a new 40% wholesale levy on nicotine pouches.

Michael Bloomberg’s war on vaping puts criminals over consumers

Martin Cullip, Washington Examiner

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken to one of his own news channels to deliver a broadside against flavored vaping products. This diatribe is remarkable for its flagrant contradictions, staggering lack of self-awareness, and complete lack of understanding about harm reduction.

Bloomberg warns that the Food and Drug Administration’s recent authorization of flavored vaping products will “prove deadly for kids.”

PDF File: Michael Bloomberg’s war on vaping puts criminals over consumers

Two From Tobacco Insider

Tobacco Regulation: European Union

The European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) has adopted its recommendations on the revision of the EU Tobacco Excise Directive (TED), proposing significantly lower tax increases and longer transition periods than those set out by the European Commission.

The reform aims to modernize a framework largely unchanged since 2011, addressing the rise of new nicotine products such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products, and nicotine pouches, while also accounting for inflation and reducing tax disparities across Member States.

USA: Nicotine Pouch Tax

The New York Governor signed a 75% wholesale tax on nicotine pouches into law. The measure differs from the state’s cigarette tax, which is set at $5.35 per pack. The state expects the tax to generate an additional $50 million annually for the Health Care Reform Act fund beginning in fiscal year 2028. State officials have argued that nicotine pouches present public health concerns and should be taxed in the same manner as traditional tobacco products.

On this day…2017!

A look back at how things have moved on or otherwise…

Still Angry – And Getting More So!

Geoff Cliff

For a variety of reasons, I haven’t added to this blog for a long time. It might be thought that I am less angry than I was, but that is far from the truth. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been as angry as I am these days. I’m angry at the government, at the National Health Service, the European Union, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations – and, above all, the international body that was created by – and which now appears to own – all of the foregoing, known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

The Numbers are in

Plain Packaging STILL Doesn’t Work – Paul Barnes

As with most debates from tobacco control, plain packaging there remained one, quite crucial, point that was conspicuous by its absence. No one could categorically say that plain packaging would work. Not one person could stand up and claim that drab, olive-green packs with larger warnings would amount to much of a decrease in smoking prevalence.

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