Vapers Digest 31st July

ASH Speaks Up

As Planet of the Vapes has been reporting this week, the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has announced an intention to cut business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues and partly funding it by “reviewing reliefs for businesses that do not make a positive contribution” like vape shops. The comment drew swift rebuke from the industry bodies, but a measure of the scale of this error comes in the form of an Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) blog update.

Is Cash Corrupting the Philippines?

The Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates is warning that a Philippines health controversy raises new questions over World Health Organization and Bloomberg policy influence. It states that the fresh allegations involving senior Philippine health officials should trigger urgent scrutiny of how foreign-funded and internationally aligned interests influence domestic health policy.

Ireland is Blocking Switching

Major new research from the harm reduction experts at Smoke Free Sweden shows Ireland’s negative approach to safer nicotine products risks reversing progress against smoking and trapping millions with deadly cigarettes. The report compares Ireland and New Zealand, revealing a striking divergence in outcomes between two countries who once shared the same ambition of becoming smoke-free.

Success and Failure in the UK

Compelling new evidence from the UK’s leading voice on tobacco control shows e-cigarettes are playing an increasingly central role in the battle to reduce smoking, harm reduction experts tell Planet of the Vapes. Unfortunately, they add, the majority of UK smokers now wrongly believe that vaping is as harmful as cigarettes, and warn that this misperception is costing lives.

Two From Alan Gor

The History of Safer

Imagine writing the history of civilisation not through kings, wars, borders, revolutions or empires, but through something much simpler: the history of safer.

Stone became bronze, horses gave way to cars, candles gave way to electricity, and open fires moved into controlled stoves. Look closely enough at human progress and a pattern begins to appear. We rarely solve problems by eliminating the underlying human need. We solve them by finding a better way to meet it. We did not eliminate the need for warmth; we made heating safer. We did not eliminate the need for light; we made lighting safer.

The Future of Nicotine Was Not Invented

There is a convenient story often told about tobacco harm reduction. It says that vaping, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches are simply the latest inventions of the tobacco industry, created to protect cigarette profits, recruit another generation and preserve nicotine addiction under a more respectable name. It is a politically useful story because it removes the need to think seriously about relative risk, consumer behaviour or the possibility that technological disruption may succeed where decades of conventional tobacco control have struggled. Once every smoke-free nicotine product is labelled an industry trick, the product itself no longer needs to be judged by what it does. Its origin is treated as sufficient evidence against it.