Vapers Digest 2nd September
Friday’s News at a glance:
New report heralds 4.3 million British vapers and a “vaping revolution” – ‘Record’ public response ahead of EU tobacco law revisions – Vaping Success In The UK – ASH resources for local authorities – NNA Welcomes Briefing – Is Banning Tobacco Legal? – Counterfeit Disposables – Adult Ecig Use in Great Britain – EU Commission Must Withstand Pressure – How to Save 100 Million Lives – Listening to Nicotine Users – A Curious Case – Cuts Ice in liquidation – MOPH discusses “e-cigarettes” – Higher e-cigarette taxes could push vapers to smoke – Vape industry urge MoH to halt raids on premises – Nicotine Science and Policy Daily Digest
New report heralds 4.3mil British vapers
And a “vaping revolution” – New Nicotine Alliance
The latest annual report by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) on “Use of e-cigarettes (vapes) among adults in Great Britain” has just been released and concludes that there are now around 4.3 million vapers in England, Scotland and Wales, a significant increase from 3.6 million in 2021.
The report follows a survey of over 13,000 people conducted by polling company, YouGov, earlier this year and contains detailed analysis of current trends in vaping in the country. It also finds that of those who say they vape, 2.4 million are now former smokers having quit smoking entirely.
‘Record’ public response
Ahead of EU tobacco law revisions – Snusforumet
The European Commission was flooded with more than 24,000 responses to its “call for evidence” as it considers possible updates to EU tobacco laws. The majority of respondents indicated support for tobacco harm reduction.
The 4-week window for EU citizens, NGOs, businesses, and other organisations to let policymakers in Brussels know their views about the shape of changes to the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) closed on June 17th.
According to the EU Political Report, the Commission’s “calls for evidence” elicit fewer than 400 responses on average. Only the call for evidence about the digital euro had numbers anywhere close to the TPD revisions response, generating just shy of 20,000 responses in 10 weeks.
Also: Health warning headache for Sweden’s new nicotine regulations
Vaping Success In The UK
Strong Reason To Follow – CAPHRA
“Smoking in Britain is dramatically falling, largely because adults keen to quit have been able to switch to considerably less harmful vaping,” says Nancy Loucas, Executive Coordinator of CAPHRA (Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates).
Her comments come as the UK’s Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) has released a report which it says shows a ‘vaping revolution’ has taken place over the past decade. The report is based on ASH’s annual Smokefree GB survey of more than 13,000 adults, conducted by YouGov.
tl;dr
We’re gonna keep taxing you after you quit smoking, so don’t bother.#cdnpoli https://t.co/BEmh4d7Lw0
— Phil (@phil_w888) September 1, 2022
ASH resources for local authorities
Schools and parents on youth vaping
ASH guidance for schools and colleges to help Designated Safeguarding Leads and others develop consistent, evidence-based policies on vaping.
Download guidance
ASH briefing for local authorities on youth vaping is designed for public health officials and trading standards officers, but also contains useful information for councillors, schools, parents and retailers.
Download briefingThe briefing has been informed by advice from vaping regulators, educationalists and academics from the University of Bristol, KCL and UCL. All references are available here.
ASH factsheet: Use of e-cigarettes among young people in Great Britain 2022
Download factsheet
Five from Dave Cross, Planet of the Vapes:
NNA Welcomes Briefing
The New Nicotine Alliance welcomes the new Action on Smoking and Health briefing and says it sets the record straight on youth vaping. The briefing was launched last week, and the New Nicotine Alliance called it “a timely document which follows a steady stream of alarmist media headlines on the subject in recent weeks.”
The New Nicotine Alliance says the Action on Smoking and Health briefing has been endorsed by several public health organisations and offers up an objective look at current regulation and the latest evidence on youth vaping data from the most up-to-date surveys.
Is Banning Tobacco Legal?
Submissions to the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill have closed, with Parliament’s Health Select Committee now tasked with reviewing public feedback. The Aotearoa Vapers Community Advocacy (AVCA) says one aspect of the legislation that Crown Law will need to scrutinize closely is the Government’s proposed generational tobacco ban.
The bill limits the number of retailers able to sell smoked tobacco products, aims to make tobacco products less appealing and addictive, and prohibits the sale of tobacco products to anyone born in 2009 or after.
Counterfeit Disposables
Police and Trading Standards officers have carried out yet more raids on stores. This time, shops in West Yorkshire and Lancashire have been targeted and counterfeit disposable vapes have been seized and removed from sale. The UK Vaping Industry Association has spoken out against illegal vape sales and pointed to the guidance available on its website.
Stores in Skelmersdale and Ormskirk were targeted by the Police and Lancashire Trading Standards.
Adult Ecig Use in Great Britain
Action on Smoking and Health has released its 12th annual update covering adult vaping in Great Britain. The headline figure is that 4.3 million people are now using electronic cigarettes, but the anti-smoking charity says it is not yet clear whether any changes in attitudes or behaviour resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic are permanent or substantial.
The charity’s deputy chief executive, Hazel Cheeseman welcomed the increase in smokers switching to vaping: “There are now five times as many vapers as there were in 2012, with millions having used them as part of a quit attempt. However, they haven’t worked for everyone. Just under half of smokers who have tried them have stopped using them and 28% have never tried one at all.”
EU Commission Must Withstand Pressure
The European Union Commission must withstand the anti-vape pressure, says the World Vapers’ Alliance. Last week, the EU Commission announced the registration of a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) entitled ‘Call to achieve a tobacco-free environment and the first European tobacco-free generation by 2030’.
The organisers, a Spanish public health NGO called NoFumadores, propose to ban the sale of tobacco and nicotine products to all citizens born after 2010.
How to Save 100 Million Lives
Clive Bates
Innovation and creative destruction in the evolving tobacco market will render cigarettes obsolete and end the burden of smoking-related disease—if we let it.
Let’s play strategy consultants. Imagine an international public health agency has hired us. We are tasked to advise on reducing the global burden of noncommunicable disease associated with tobacco and nicotine use and how to do it as deeply and rapidly as possible. Our assignment is to propose a clear-eyed, unemotional and results-driven approach to addressing this problem. What would we do?
Listening to Nicotine Users
Cheryl K. Olson
Skip Murray used to be one of the forgotten smokers. “I think people that have a life like my background are invisible to the people who have more influence in the world,” she says. “I hate to use class terms, but lower class.” Heavy drinking and mental illness ran in her family. Her memories include events psychologists would call “adverse childhood experiences.”
When Murray started smoking at age 10, no one paid any mind. Today, in her sixties, she gets her nicotine from a vaping device. She and her son (who suffered a heart attack at age 29) both used vapor products to quit cigarettes.
A Curious Case
Stefanie Rossel
In June, long-simmering criticism of the way the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is handling premarket tobacco product applications (PMTAs) culminated in a public uproar. “The whole regulatory process is becoming surreal now,” wrote Clive Bates, an independent public health and sustainability advocate, on his blog The Counterfactual. Bates was referring to the agency’s June 23 marketing denial orders (MDO) for all currently marketed Juul Labs products in the United States and compared them to the FDA’s previous marketing authorization of 22nd Century’s low-nicotine combustible cigarette. “No one could make a vape product even remotely as toxic as a cigarette,” Bates stated, “but guess which one got the green light.”
Cuts Ice in liquidation
Guillaume Bailly
Cuts Ice, the maker of Red Astaire, has gone into receivership. Its assets, including the T-Juice brand, were sold to liquidate debts. The Red Astaire and the entire T-Juice range should benefit from investment logic.
It’s a shock on the planet vape: the manufacturer Cuts Ice, famous for its T-Juice brand and its no less famous Red Astaire, was placed in compulsory liquidation on August 8, and part of its assets were sold to Supreme Plc.
Created in 2012, Cuts Ice was among the pioneers in Europe in the development of complex liquids. The London company created by Nigel Quine started with Vamp Vape and Jack The Ripple liquids, before releasing Red Astaire in 2015, a considerable success which will sell 4 million copies for the year 2016.
Supreme expands vaping brand with acquisition of Cuts Ice Ltd
MOPH discusses “e-cigarettes”
On September 1, 1965, at the meeting room of the House of Representatives, Náy Pakkorn Đạn Charoenphon, Chairman of the House of Representatives, and Mr. Phại Phạn, Phại Phạp, Chairman of the House of Representatives attended the meeting of the House of Representatives to consider and study the factors submitted The effect on the health system and the monitoring of the enforcement of the law on public health, with the agenda of the meeting including the review of academic data supporting the management of tobacco and electronic cigarettes, with the participation of qualified persons, including Mr. Dockrell, Head of Tobacco, Evidence and Implementation at the Office of Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), England Health Ministry.
Six months after ‘vape to quit’ programme
Almost half of participants smokefree
E-cigarettes are increasingly popular as aids to stop smoking, according to new research that looked at over 1000 participants in Canterbury’s Te Hā – Waitaha smoking cessation service. The products used to quit smoking varied by ethnicity, with Māori having the lowest percentage using e-cigarettes, and the highest percentage using nicotine sprays. Researchers held follow-up phone interviews with 100 participants who had chosen the “vape to quit” strategy, and found that after six months 16% were smoke and vapefree, 31% were smokefree and vaping, 31% were smoking and not vaping, and 22% were smoking and vaping.
Local, international experts say…
Harm reduction tools must use reduced-risk products
Local and international harm reduction experts recently shared the potential of vaping as an effective smoking cessation tool at a forum entitled Managing Smoking Addiction in Malaysia hosted by the Malaysia Society for Harm Reduction (MSHR).
The forum featured Advanced Centre for Addiction Treatment Advocacy (ACATA) president and local addiction therapy advocate and practitioner Dr Arifin Fii and international experts Dr Alex Wodak AM, Emeritus Consultant, St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney and Professor Dr Paul Newhouse, Director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, United States.
Higher taxes could push vapers to smoke
Sujata Srinivasan
A recent study from the Yale School of Public Health suggests that higher taxes on e-cigarettes could drive younger vapers to turn to traditional cigarettes.
Connecticut has a $4.35 tax on a pack of cigarettes — among the highest nationally — and a 10% wholesale tax on e-cigarettes for an open tank.
“We would want to tax e-cigarettes lower to incentivize people using a more lethal product, cigarettes, to reduce their risk,” said Michael Pesko, a health economist at George State University, who co-authored the study with Yale’s Abigail Friedman. He spoke on Connecticut Public Radio’s “Where We Live.”
Vape Industry urge MoH to halt raids
NST Business
KUALA LUMPUR: The actions of the Malaysian Ministry of Health (MoH) to raid and seize from the vape industry in the past few days have affected many vape businesses in the Klang Valley, impacting small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, resulting in revenue losses in millions.
This move appears to come on the back of the vape industry disagreeing with the recently presented Bill by the MoH that equates vape to cigarettes as well as the proposed GEG (Generation End Game) policy that will ban the vape industry in the future.
On this Day…2021
A look back at how things have moved on or otherwise….
Public health will reap benefits from busines investments in harm reduction or non-combustible alternatives (NCAs) to cigarettes, according to a UK-based fund manager.
“I think there’s a lot of upside from industry investment in harm reduction, if we can move the discourse beyond that ‘Big Tobacco’ mental model and refocus the conversation on a more open-minded conversation and look at what consumers want,” Jonathan Fell, founder of U.K.-based Ash Park, said.
Denied FDA Authorization,
Vaping Companies Start to Explore Loopholes
Alex Norcia, Filter Magazine
On August 26, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) denied the first marketing applications for about 55,000 flavored e-cigarette products from three small companies.
The applicants “lacked sufficient evidence that they have a benefit to adult smokers sufficient to overcome the public health threat posed by well-documented, alarming levels of youth use of such products,” according to an FDA press release. (The evidence does not actually support this stance.)
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