Vapers Digest 25th October

Friday’s News at a glance:

Tobacco and Vapes Bill Latest – Tax Hike Plan Is A Misstep – NHS Data Released – Urgent Need for Harm Reduction Policies – What’s the point of banning Elf bars? – The UK Will Ban Disposable Vapes From June 2025 – FDA Reports Largest-Ever Seizure – Youth Vaping Is Down – CDC Report Misses the Point – To Ban or Not to Ban: – How Australia punished smokers and normalised firebombs – A Smoke-free Nigeria is possible – Voices of Harm Reduction Pt 5: Rebecca Taylor – The Zyn Marketing Fallacy – PackBreaker Ep. 4 (Part 2) : Vape Crusaders

Five from Dave Cross, Planet of the Vapes:

Tobacco and Vapes Bill Latest

Wes Streeting has spoken to Parliament to express his intention to attack vaping. Termed “strengthening the laws on vaping and smoking”, most see the measures as being a retrograde step and will serve to dissuade smokers from switching away from tobacco.

Initially proposed by the Conservatives when they were in government, Streeting has said that Labour intends to present a “more ambitious” version of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill.

Tax Hike Plan Is A Misstep

A plan to hike the tax on eliquid for vapes in the United Kingdom risks undermining the country’s efforts to reduce smoking rates and would increase smoking-related death and disease, according to the leading international health experts. The UK chancellor is reportedly considering the tax increase in the state budget this month. But specialists at Smoke Free Sweden say any rise could drive people who smoke back to far more dangerous cigarettes.

Dr Delon Human, leader of Smoke Free Sweden, says: “Vapes are proven to be 95% less harmful than combustible cigarettes and are helping millions of people who smoke worldwide transition to a safer option.

NHS Data Released

NHS data has been released, detailing the smoking, drinking, and drug use among young people in England – Action on Smoking and Health has used it to demand Government action. The report contains results from the latest survey of secondary school pupils in England in years 7 to 11 (mostly aged 11 to 15), covering a range of topics including prevalence, habits, attitudes, and wellbeing.

In 2023 the survey was administered online for the first time, instead of paper-based surveys as in previous years. This move online also meant that completion of the survey could be managed through teacher-led sessions, rather than being conducted by external interviewers.

Urgent Need for Harm Reduction Policies

The Malaysian Society for Harm Reduction (MSHR) successfully concluded its annual Harm Reduction Conference on 19 October 2024, in Kuala Lumpur. The conference, which brought together local and international experts, policymakers, and health professionals, focused on the critical role of tobacco harm reduction in addressing the smoking epidemic in Malaysia and the broader Asia Pacific region.

Illicit Market Action Required

Urgent action is needed to tackle the illicit e-cigarette market around the world, industry analysts at Tamarind Intelligence have warned. But simply imposing even tighter rules on the whole vape sector is unlikely to be the solution, they say. A challenge to the government to work smart, not harder.

Research by Tamarind into the illicit vape trade has shown that it affects not only manufacturers, distributors and retailers, but consumers too. In many places, illicit products – those that break the law in some way – make up a significant part of the market.

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What’s the point of banning Elf bars?

Christopher Snowdon

Part of me wishes that disposable vapes had never been invented. Until they arrived, it seemed like the battle for tobacco harm reduction in Britain had been won. The kind of people who want to ban everything wanted to ban e-cigarettes, but most people could see that they were a relatively harmless substitute for cigarettes and were helping to drive down smoking rates.

Then along came the Elf bars and Geek bars and the mood began to sour. Whether it was because of the price or the colours or because it was simply a fad, they became somewhat popular with teenagers, just as Juul had become popular with high school students in the USA a few years earlier.

Disposable vapes to be banned from June – BBC

UK Will Ban Disposable Vapes

From June 2025 – Kiran Sidhu

Disposable vapes will be banned in the United Kingdom in 2025, in a bid to curb youth vaping and protect the environment, the government has announced.

The previous Conservative government had announced a disposables ban in January, but then lost the national election in July. On October 23, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), under the new Labour government, confirmed that people will not be able to legally purchase single-use vapes from June 1, 2025. The move applies to England, but the governments of Scotland and Wales have said they will match it.

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Switching from smoking to e-cigarettes

Has the same benefits as quitting without alternatives for patients after coronary angioplasty

Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos

A landmark cohort study from South Korea, published in the European Heart Journal, examined 17.973 smoking patients who had a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for coronary heart disease and had a repeated medical examination after 3 years, to identify how quitting smoking (without the use of any alternative products) and switching to e-cigarette use affects the risk for Major Cardiac Adverse Events (MACE, defined as the composite of all-cause death, spontaneous MI, and repeat revascularization) compared to continuous smoking.

Voices of Harm Reduction Pt 5:

Rebecca Taylor

Rebecca Taylor was a Member of the European Parliament for the UK Liberal Democrats in 2013, when the EU agreed its current rules on vaping. Peter Beckett, our co-founder, was one of the lobbyists in favour of vaping during the process of agreeing those rules. Eleven years later, they sat down virtually to talk about what happened back then, and what we can learn from it.

FDA Reports Largest-Ever Seizure…

Of Unregulated Nicotine Vapes – Kastalia Medrano

On October 22, the Food and Drug Administration announced what appears to be the United States government’s largest seizure of unregulated nicotine vapes to date, totaling an estimated 3 million individual products worth around $76 million. The joint operation with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was carried out in July, following the formation of a federal interdiction task force in June.

Only a handful of vape seizures have previously been reported by the FDA, all of them significantly smaller. The only one that approaches the same scale was reported in December 2023, involving an estimated 1.4 million vapes.

Youth Vaping Is Down;

There Is No Need for Stigmatizing Policies – Lindsey Stroud

Public health groups and policymakers are reiterating concerns about a supposed youth vaping epidemic. State health departments and city councils are implementing strict policies on tobacco harm reduction products, and school districts are using funds from vape settlements to install detectors for e-cigarettes, reflecting concerns about youth vaping.

This is occurring despite a significant decrease in youth vaping. And unfortunately, this continued alarmism is hindering adult access to safer alternatives to cigarettes.

CDC Report Misses the Point

Joseph Hart

The CDC’s National Youth Tobacco Survey results are out. Once again, it’s excellent news: teen smoking and vaping rates are down. In fact, the numbers are so low that the CDC needed to load the dice by suggesting that using nicotine products at any time over the last 30 days now counts as “current use”.

In the past, surveys would include daily or frequent use alongside use within the last month. Then, the media could lump all the figures together to make the problem sound worse than it was.

Smoking and vaping rates …

Among U.S. youth hits 25-year low – Ali Anderson

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) analysed data from the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey to assess nicotine product use among middle school (ages 11 to 13) and high school students (ages 13 to 18).

They found that from 2023 to 2024, current use of any nicotine product among all students dropped from 12.6 per cent to 10.1 per cent (2.80 million students to 2.25 million). The drop is largely driven by a sharp decline in vape use – from 10 per cent to 7.8 per cent (2.13 million students to 1.63 million).

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To Ban or Not to Ban:

How the 2024 Election Could Shape the Future of Smoking

Despite the media’s blind optimism that the Biden-Harris regime will finally end the decades-long War on Drugs, the current administration has taken a hard stance on a more unsuspecting substance: menthol tobacco products. For years the administration has attacked the menthol market through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but they’ve recently taken a step back from their crusade after “immense” public concern. It seems that the candidates are realizing this issue could have a marked impact on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election as the American public becomes less amenable to attacks on their personal freedoms. And much to my chagrin, Donald Trump and I have some common ground here.

How Australia punished smokers …

And normalised firebombs – Christopher Snowdon

The old adage that there is no smoke without fire has taken on a sinister meaning in Australia after a series of arson attacks on tobacconists. The word “series” barely does it justice. “Endless succession” is closer to the mark. When a shop selling illegal tobacco was firebombed in Adelaide last Tuesday, it was the 16th such incident in South Australia and the 130th nationwide since the “tobacco turf wars” began last year. It was followed by another firebombing in Adelaide on Saturday, an arson attack on a gym in Melbourne on Sunday, two tobacconists set ablaze in Melbourne on Tuesday and a smoke shop in New South Wales being ram-raided and blown up yesterday.

SHOCK NEW DATA SHOWS JUST 1 % OF PHARMACIES STOCK VAPES

If the FDA Wants People to Stop Smoking

It Should Stop Meddling in the Vaping Market

An article featured in Annals of Internal Medicine highlights an ongoing effort by the Food and Drug Administration to bring more nicotine replacement therapies (often called NRTs) to market. Although rates have plummeted over the past several decades, smoking remains one of the most common causes of preventable death in the U.S.

The article’s call to action is far from the FDA’s first attempt to promote NRT innovation. In 2019, the agency began revisiting older guidelines and adjusting prior regulatory requirements “to assist sponsors in the clinical development of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) drug products intended to help cigarette smokers stop smoking.”

A Smoke-free Nigeria is possible

Dr. Akinwande Puddicombe

Tobacco use remains one of the most pressing public health challenges of our time, responsible for more than 8 million deaths annually worldwide. Despite decades of anti-smoking campaigns, over 1.1 billion people still smoke, and the numbers remain stubbornly high, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Globally, the healthcare burden caused by smoking-related diseases continues to strain resources, yet millions of smokers find it difficult or impossible to quit.

PackBreaker Ep. 4 (Pt 2): Vape Crusaders

VSML South Africa

Global Action Community Newsletter

Quitting smoking is hard, and the journey is only further complicated by an abundance of online information, not all of which is reliable. News articles are a great starting place to begin your research journey, but the media landscape isn’t perfect: Some stories present relevant, accurate information, but others rely on flashy headlines or rushed reporting that lack the nuance you need to make an informed decision.

The Zyn Marketing Fallacy

Peter Clark – Tobacco Reporter

The social media presence of nicotine pouches has recently come under fire from public health experts. For example, Jai Surana believes that “aggressive marketing” has contributed to the spike in popularity in this product category.

Some perceive that nicotine pouches and e-cigarette markers present their products as a safe alternative to tobacco. With this perception of tobacco substitutes, coupled with the appealing variety of flavors, many are worried that kids will start using these products. Zyn’s robust meme culture and numerous influencers only fuel misconceptions about its marketing.

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On this Day…2023

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

WHO And Delegates …

Should Consider Proof Based Polices At COP10

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Visit Nicotine Science & Policy for more News from around the World

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