Vapers Digest 25th March

Monday’s News at a glance:

Hired guns and hatchet jobs – There’s some products that shouldn’t be there – CoEHAR welcomes the International partners of Replica – UCL Cheek DNA Research – Slovenia’s Bad Flavour Ban – 7 reasons why Parliament should oppose the vaping Bill – #sonoflibertyradio – Dr. Colin Mendelsohn – Unlikely support for vapes has government fighting a losing battle – Labor’s vape crackdown an ‘idiotic piece of public health policy’

Hired guns and hatchet jobs

Christopher Snowdon

It’s hard not to laugh when they turn on their own. Action on Smoking and Health’s longstanding CEO Deborah Arnott and her former colleague Martin Dockrell, who is now tobacco control programme lead at the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, are the target of a hatchet job in The Times today.

So what? Civil servants are allowed to speak to people from industry. They should be encouraged to speak to people from industry and then they might draft better legislation. There are rules about meeting the tobacco industry but Juul was an independent vape company in 2017. Neither Arnott nor Dockrell are politicians, no money changed hands and there is nothing wrong with chatting to people at a conference. If their advice to Juul has been reported correctly, they made a good point.

Episode 15: Chris Snowdon

Taxpayers Protection Alliance

In this episode of TPA’s Across the Pond podcast, Chris Snowdon, head of Lifestyle Economis and the Institute of Economic Affairs, based in London. Chris is one of TPA’s Good COP experts and joins Martin and Lindsey to dicuss Good COP and Bad COP in Panama in February, the recently announced UK vape tax and generational tobacco ban, and the moral panic by public health and governments.

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There’s products that shouldn’t be there

News Talk

Yesterday a new poll found that 76 percent of vapers believe a flavour ban could lead to more young people smoking.

While some 71 percent of smokers claimed that they would not switch to vaping if flavours were banned.

So what does this mean for the future of flavoured vaping?

Sean was joined by Joe Dunne, Founder and Co-Owner of Hale Vaping…

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CoEHAR welcomes …

The International partners of Replica

Today marks the start of the Replica 2.0 Annual International Meeting, which brings together the International partners of the project for an intense training week

The Replica project aim is to replicate and validate the results from well-known international studies in the field of tobacco harm reduction.

The project can count on the collaboration with renowned international research centers: Universitas Padjadjaran (Indonesia); the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac (Serbia) and the Temple University-SHRO (USA).

Two from Dave Cross, Planet of the Vapes:

UCL Cheek DNA Research

A team of researchers at University College London have published a study looking at the impact of vape on cheek cell DNA causing the media to have a predictable response. The team stated that “e-cigarette users with a limited smoking history experience similar DNA changes to specific cheek cells as smokers”.

The authors of the study said: “This study is an incremental step in helping researchers to build a deeper understanding of the long-term effects of e-cigarettes on health. Although it does not show that e-cigarettes cause cancer, studies with long-term follow up are important to assess whether e-cigarettes have harmful effects and, if so, what they are.”

Slovenia’s Bad Flavour Ban

The Parliamentary Committee on Health in Slovenia has approved proposed amendments concerning tobacco-related products. The amendments, endorsed by the members of parliament, primarily focus on vaping, leading to the prohibition of all flavours except tobacco, including menthol flavour.

Liza Katsiashvili, Operations Director at the World Vapers’ Alliance, told Planet of the Vapes: “During the committee session, certain statements from experts were deemed alarming and, to a considerable extent, misleading. For instance, it was claimed there is no disparity in harmfulness between conventional tobacco smoking and vaping. Contrary to this assertion, scientific evidence suggests that vaping is significantly less harmful than smoking. In fact, according to Public Health England, vaping is 95% less harmful.

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7 reasons why Parliament should …

Oppose the vaping Bill – Colin Mendelsohn

MARK BUTLER HAS INTRODUCED his vaping Bill to Parliament. If I were a member of Parliament, I would oppose the Bill. The current regulatory model has failed and will only get worse with the proposed changes. Here are 7 reasons why a new approach is needed.

The reality is that vaping is here to stay whether we like it or not and it needs to be regulated better.

A better regulatory model is for nicotine vaping products to be sold as adult consumer products from licensed retail outlets with strict age verification, like tobacco and alcohol.

#sonoflibertyradio – Dr. Colin Mendelsohn

We are doing things a little different tonight. Dr. Colin Mendelsohn will be live with us for a special #sonoflibertyradio. We will be discussing his unretirement, Gestapo tobacco control in Australia, and turning people desperate to quit 🚬 into criminals. 10pm Eastern on YouTube, X, and Rumble.

Unlikely support for vapes …

Has government fighting a losing battle

Given the spectacular failure of the war on black market cigarettes you might have thought governments would be wary of opening a second front in the nicotine war by trying to eliminate vaping.

But the desire to police other people’s behaviour is strong among Australia’s public health bureaucrats and – after years of inaction – they have found in Mark Butler a man prepared to introduce “world-leading” legislation to outlaw the sale, supply, commercial possession, and the advertising, as well as the manufacture, of vapes in this country.

Labor’s vape crackdown …

An ‘idiotic piece of public health policy’

Remember the great success of alcohol prohibition in the US?

The year was 1920.

Alcohol consumption and production stopped overnight. Never again did a drop of grog pass the lips of a Yank.

Oh, hang on. That didn’t happen at all.

Booze buying continued unabated and created a whole new black market to line the pockets of organised crime gangs.

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On this Day…2023

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

Expert Reaction to study of teen vaping

And persistent smoking in the US

“This paper, using data from several waves of the longitudinal PATH study in the US, attempts to reconcile contradictory findings in the literature which show that while use of e-cigarettes is associated with subsequent cigarette smoking in youth, adolescent smoking rates have continued to decline at the same that e-cigarette use by youth increased dramatically in the US. This helpful analysis replicates the longitudinal association of e-cigarette use with later smoking initiation and continued smoking, suggesting there is a greater likelihood to start and to continue to smoke if youth had been an ever or current e-cigarette user at an earlier wave. Crucially, however, it also shows that, irrespective of e-cigarette use, very few adolescents initiate smoking later on (around 4%) and even fewer continue to smoke (depending on the measure of how established smoking is, this was as low as 0.2% for daily smoking in this sample). ”

Holiday Problems

Dave Cross, Planet of the Vapes

With the holiday season approaching, vapers still run the risk of breaking the law if they take their kit to some popular destinations. While electronic cigarettes have been welcomed by most medical practitioners and politicians in the United Kingdom, the same can’t be said for countries relying on tobacco income or funding from anti harm reduction billionaires. From fines to the risk of prison, here are some of the places UK vapers need to be wary of.

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