Vapers Digest 12th August

Wednesday’s News at a glance:

Let’s Talk E-Cigarettes ~ Pouch Ruling Should Prompt Rethink ~ Scientists Stand Corrected ~ [Contribution] Why South Korea is losing the struggle against smoking ~ New Peer-Reviewed Research Reinforces What the Data Has Shown for Years: Vaping Has Saved Canadian Lives ~ Journal Entry – A Light Going Out ~ The Safe Place in My Inbox: A Farewell to Filter ~ Finding Optimism in the Tobacco Harm Reduction Maelstrom ~ A Statement About Filter ~ Ireland’s nicotine flavour ban ‘would trap smokers with cigarettes’ ~ When What Burns Seems Cleaner Than What Produces No Smoke ~ You Cannot Enforce a Marketplace into Compliance ~ Is nicotine good for you? Part 1.5 – the social welfare losses of restricting and vilifying nicotine ~ Low-Nicotine Cigarettes Did Not Increase Smoking Frequency ~ PROTECT Act would Protect Smoking, Harm Taxpayers, Consumers & Public Health ~ Playing Offense | U.S. Vape Industry Rejects All-or-Nothing Regulation | RegWatch

Three From Dave Cross, Planet Of The Vapes

Let’s Talk E-Cigarettes

Nicola Lindson and Jamie Hartmann-Boyce are both members of the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group where they work on reviewing the e-cigarette research literature to find new studies, building Cochrane systematic reviews of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation and interventions for quitting vaping. In addition to the living systematic review they run the Let’s Talk E-Cigarettes podcast. This month, Stefanie Gratale joins them to discuss her work looking at natural tobacco marketing.

Pouch Ruling Should Prompt Rethink

The Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision to authorise reduced-risk claims for specific nicotine pouch products should prompt a policy rethink across Asia Pacific. It adds that too many governments in the region still treat cigarettes, high-risk smokeless tobacco, and smoke-free nicotine products as if they carry the same risk, even though that approach distorts regulation and misleads consumers.

Scientists Stand Corrected

Vape science has long been plagued by individuals playing fast and loose with data and sources. This week sees a pair of papers that have run into trouble. The first claims that smokers change their smoking behaviour when they also adopt vaping. This has met with rebuke from the lead author of one paper they use to support their conclusions. The second paper has been retracted in its entirety due to errors in data analysis.

[Contribution] Why South Korea is losing the struggle against smoking

Dr. Marewa Glover, Korea Herald

Every year, smoking kills more than 68,000 South Koreans. Yet instead of making it easier for people to move away from cigarettes, South Korean policy continues to make that transition harder.

It taxes some safer nicotine products more heavily than cigarettes, tells people who smoke that all nicotine products are equally harmful and regulates lower-risk alternatives as though they were combustible tobacco.

The result is predictable: progress against smoking has stalled.

New Peer-Reviewed Research Reinforces What the Data Has Shown for Years: Vaping Has Saved Canadian Lives

The Hamilton Spectator

In response to a recent wave of alarming media coverage about vaping, the Canadian Vaping Association (CVA) is urging journalists, policymakers, and the public to look past the headlines and toward the growing body of peer-reviewed research on nicotine vaping products (NVPs) as a smoking-cessation and harm-reduction tool.

Journal Entry – A Light Going Out

Alan Gor

I’ve been sitting with the news that Filter is closing, trying to understand why it feels like such a personal loss.

I was never part of the organisation. I watched its work from a distance, as a reader. Yet somewhere along the way, Filter became part of my own story.

When I entered the tobacco harm reduction debate, I didn’t lack opinions. I had lived experience, questions and a growing sense that many of the people making decisions simply didn’t understand the lives their policies affected.

Finding Optimism in the Tobacco Harm Reduction Maelstrom

Kiran Sidhu, Filter

In my worst moments, reporting on the tobacco harm reduction space, as I’ve been doing for the past four years, can feel hopeless. Eight million people continue to die of diseases related to combustible tobacco use each year. Yet all over the world, the smoking-cessation tools most capable of transforming this situation are banned, restricted and smeared.

Considering what I do more closely reveals a kind of paradox, however.

If I view tobacco harm reduction (THR) from the outside, it seems as if nothing changes. The task—to inform and convince policymakers that THR is simply harm reduction, and that we already have the tools to dramatically reduce the world’s biggest cause of preventable death—is ostensibly a simple one.

A Statement About Filter

Will Godfrey, Filter

Filter is shutting down this week. We were unable to survive an increasingly difficult funding landscape, like too many other harm reduction and independent media organizations in these times. It’s a sad moment for those of us who have cared about the publication. But I don’t think we need to be despondent.

A few of us got together to conceive Filter in 2017. Our mission, as we framed it, was “to advocate through journalism for rational and compassionate approaches to drug use, drug policy and human rights.” Our aims included countering dominant, damaging media narratives about drugs and people who use them.

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