ASH Scotland’s Daft Demands ~ The Public-Health Escape Room ~ Australia’s 5.8% Smoking Rate: Accurate, Misleading, or Both? ~ Japan’s Public Health Transformation Due To THR ~ Flaws of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Studies ~ Pouches could trigger next wave of nicotine addiction, experts warn ~ Knowledge is Power ~ Mike Bloomberg’s gift to Big Tobacco ~ Blip Is Shutting Down Less Than 2 Months After Launching Its Nicotine-Free Pouch ~ The Butterfly Effect Or Why Counterfeit Mexican Marlboro Made It To Australia ~ Turkey’s Reported 2040 Tobacco Ban Would Also Target Vapes ~ A levy on the poor. Tobacco tax needs rethink to stop the war ~ FDA finally embraces harm reduction, sees role for vaping | Opinion ~ Blip Under the Radar: How “Nicotine Brain” Ads Collided with Commercial Realities in Tobacco Control ~ Opinion: From habit to health – new paths forward for veterans who smoke ~ Want to cut $4 billion in defense spending? Give troops Zyns and vapes ~ Science Inside | NicoLeaks Supercharges Nicotine Pouch Testing | RegWatch ~ When Happens When Moral Panic Drives Nicotine Policy? ~ People Will Die ~ When Happens When Moral Panic Drives Nicotine Policy? ~
ASH Scotland, in conjunction with “child human rights defenders” and a “leading children’s”doctor, are calling on the UK government to ban all flavoured vape products. The loopy anti-harm reduction organisation ignores scientific evidence, preferring to state that 79% of Scots that it polled agreed with getting rid of the products that have helped millions of adults quit smoking.
You wake at 6.15 am and automatically reach for the packet beside the bed. There are four cigarettes left. You are not a teenager, you are not curious about nicotine, and you are not being seduced by fluorescent packaging on social media. You are 47 years old, you have smoked for 26 years, and you are tired of planning your day around a product you no longer enjoy. You have tried to stop before, more than once, but today you decide to try again.
A quick apology for the length of this piece, but there is simply a great deal of information to work through if we are going to understand properly what Australia’s 5.8% smoking figure does, and does not, tell us.
Australia’s latest smoking statistic sounds remarkably simple: just 5.8% of Australian adults smoked daily in 2025.
K. Farsalinos, MD, MPH, PhD, Science & Public Health
We already knew that Japan has experienced a huge reduction in cigarette sales over the past several years. We now have more evidence, looking beyond sales, on the smoking cessation rates in the country. A government-run, household-sampled, nationally representative survey that has been tracking substance use since 1995, now shows exactly the substitution pattern that we were hoping for.
In my weekly informal literature reviews with Clive Bates, these types of studies are becoming common enough that, rather than repeating my comments each time, I decided to make a post with my generic comments that I can link to in the future.
I focus on EMR studies on nicotine/tobacco use or dependence, but the same flaws probably apply to many other topics where EMR analyses are being published, especially when they are about behaviors that occur outside the doctor’s office.
Discussions about smoking, vaping, nicotine, and harm reduction can move quickly from personal experience to scientific claims, public-health policy, and moral judgment. Whether you are a consumer, advocate, clinician, researcher, family member, regulator, policy expert, or simply a curious observer, it helps to have more than strong opinions. This is a growing collection of free and low-cost resources on interpreting health research, communicating across disagreement, engaging in advocacy, sharing lived experience thoughtfully, and understanding tobacco harm reduction. It is not a reading list for reaching one predetermined conclusion; it is a starting point for asking better questions and taking part in the conversation more thoughtfully.
This graphic takes a little explaining, so bear with me. It tells a story about tobacco policy, smoking rates and the malign influence of billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg.
Let’s begin with news that Philip Morris International, the world’s largest publicly-traded tobacco company, delivered to investors last week at the Barclays Global Consumer Conference.
The consumer packaged goods startup lived up to its name: Blip. The nicotine replacement therapy brand that made products aimed at helping Gen Z quit smoking and vaping is shuttering less than two months after a major product roll out that expanded the company’s offerings into a popular and growing category for younger consumers.
Australia has long been renowned for some of the toughest tobacco control measures in the world. It was among the first countries to ban indirect cigarette advertising through the sponsorship of sport and cultural events in the early nineties. The various Australian states all raised the minimum age to purchase cigarettes from 16 to 18 by the end of the same decade. Graphic warnings on packaging replaced text messages in 2005, and world first standardized (or “plain”) packaging was introduced at the end of 2012.
Turkey’s ruling party and Health Ministry are reportedly preparing a nationwide tobacco sales ban beginning Jan. 1, 2040, according to a Sept. 15 report by Azernews. The proposed definition of tobacco products would also cover e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products, hookahs, and products containing synthetic nicotine, not just cigarettes.
James Martin, Edward Jegasothy, Michael West Media
Something has gone awry with the politics of tobacco control in Australia. Conservative and right-wing politicians have embraced harm reduction. Meanwhile, Federal Labor, the Greens and much of the public health establishment are defending a punitive sin tax and prohibition-style restrictions on less harmful products.
They are even using the same tough-on-crime rhetoric and policies favoured by the most enthusiastic drug warriors: dealers targeting and addicting kids, alarmist and ill-informed ‘gateway’ theories, and ever more resources and powers for enforcement agencies.
All movements have phases. For decades, tobacco control focused on reducing smoking and educating Americans about health risks. That effort produced historic progress, saving millions of lives. But success in the past does not guarantee success in the future. As cigarette smoking continues to decline and new nicotine products enter the market, tobacco control has entered a new phase focused, not on smoking, but nicotine. This phase has (wrongfully) equated the harms of nicotine and smoking, and ignored that vaping gives adults the best chance of quitting cigarettes. Thankfully, the Food and Drug Administration has, for the first time, embraced harm reduction in tobacco control.
Our nation has made noteworthy progress in reducing smoking rates. Most public health and prevention efforts have rightly focused on youth and young adults with the understanding that preventing initiation early protects long-term health and reduces future disease. Yet tobacco use among veterans has remained stubbornly higher than in the general population. As a result, veterans continue to bear a disproportionate share of tobacco-related harm.
With the national debt hitting $40 trillion, pressure is building for the federal government to identify spending cuts. In the coming weeks, we can expect to hear familiar refrains: Republicans need to agree to slash defense and farm-country spending; Democrats need to agree to slash government-funded healthcare and welfare spending. Knowing Washington, it’s unlikely either party will agree to big cuts. So the best hope of budget restraint will be trimming here and there that cumulatively add up to something significant.
Nicotine pouches are among the fastest-growing nicotine products in the U.S. and UK, yet most people know little about what they contain, how they are tested, or how their risks compare with smoking.
That knowledge gap leaves the door wide open to the same misinformation and moral panic that’s plagued nicotine vaping for more than a decade.
In this episode of RegWatch, Dr. Lindsay Reese and Dr. Marina Murphy of Haypp Group introduce the expanded NicoLeaks website, a free public resource containing independent laboratory results for more than 1,000 nicotine pouch products.
A clear and worsening division within public health has turned the debate over nicotine into a moral panic, with potentially dire consequences. Shot on location at GFN 2026 in Warsaw, Poland, longtime nicotine researcher and former University of Geneva professor of public health Jean-François Etter examines the irrational push to prohibit safer nicotine products. He explores public health groupthink, how arbitrary nicotine limits leave people underdosed, and why innovation may ultimately render opponents of tobacco harm reduction obsolete.
A study by the San Diego State University (SDSU), released data comparing the different levels of in-home air pollution caused by a number of factors commonly present in households, including cleaning products, smoking and vaping.
‘There is now agreement based on the current evidence that vaping e-cigarettes is definitely less harmful than smoking tobacco’, health bodies in Scotland have stated for the first time in a historic consensus statement.
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