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Vapers Digest 3rd November

Kevin CrowleyPosted on Posted in Latest News

Monday’s News at a glance:

100 Million Lives – Parliamentary Matters –  COP11 vs COP30: 7 ways FCTC falls short on transparency and harm reduction – Is vaping less harmful than smoking, and does it help people quit? – Vaping: A disruptive innovation of smoking and rapidly replacing cigarettes – Consumers Sound Alarm as WHO COP11 Threatens Harm Reduction – Japan’s success in fight against smoking is an example for the world – Sweden is Officially “Smoke-Free” – FDA Inaction Keeps America Smoking – FDA Signals Openness to THR in FDLI Keynote – Prominent Anti-Vaping Advocate is Misrepresenting Scientific Evidence and Being Unnecessarily Divisive, Polarizing, and Disrespectful – Pre-Registration of Research Plans – Open Letter To Bill Gates – Cochrane Review Highlights Limited but Promising Evidence for Oral Nicotine Pouches – 🚨 Urgent Call for Scientific Integrity at FCTC COP11 🚨 – Anti-smoking own goals – The big lies of ASH – Flawed lab methods may exaggerate vaping risks, major new review finds – Tobacco Regulation: The European Union – Australia’s Tobacco Crackdown Fuelling Black Market Boom – Others Opinion: Vote Down 310, and Send Conventional Wisdom Up in Smoke – Tax hike that will more than double price of vapes will hit smokers trying to quit, warns GP – The deported kingpin, the Chinese gang and the vape brand controlling an Australian black market (PDF)

Two From Dave Cross, Planet of The Vapes

100 Million Lives

A major new report, Lives Saved: 100 Million Lives by 2060, released by international experts in tobacco harm reduction, reveals that more than 100 million premature deaths could be prevented worldwide if adult smokers switch from combustible cigarettes to safer nicotine alternatives over the next 35 years.

Parliamentary Matters

This week, the House of Lords returned to conduct “detailed scrutiny” of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill – time is rapidly running out if you want to influence your MP’s voting intention when it gets back to the Commons. Also, the DUP’s Sammy Wilson is concerned about potential enforcement challenges in Northern Ireland, and Labour’s Adam Thompson wants to prevent ill health.

Is vaping less harmful than smoking, and does it help people quit?

Hannah Ritchie, Our World In Data

A decade ago, most smokers thought vaping was less harmful than tobacco. But ten years on, the opposite is true: the majority say that vapes are just as or even more dangerous.1

You can see this shift in opinion in the chart below.

Vaping: A disruptive innovation of smoking and rapidly replacing cigarettes

Alex Wodak, Pearls And Irritations

Recognised as a concept over three decades ago, “disruptive innovations” are new and improved ways of meeting consumers’ needs that generally sweep away conventional approaches of market-leading firms by a process of creative destruction.

The concept is an apt explanation for the way smokers, and also tobacco companies, are rapidly switching from high-risk cigarettes to a range of low-risk, smoke-free ways of ingesting nicotine. This transition is now as inevitable and unstoppable as the transition from internal combustion engine cars to electric vehicles.

COP11 vs COP30: 7 ways FCTC falls short on transparency and harm reduction

SnusForumNet

As the WHO’s FCTC COP11 prepares to gather in Geneva, the UN-backed COP30 is also set to kick off in Belém: two COPs, two countries – and two wildly different approaches to tackling global challenges. Snusforumet unpacks how COP11 stacks up against COP30 on transparency, media access, and willingness to embrace constructive solutions. Spoiler alert: not all COPs are created equal.

Consumers Sound Alarm as WHO COP11 Threatens Harm Reduction

World Vapers’ Alliance, Yahoo

The WHO’s upcoming COP11 meeting in Geneva is sparking fierce debate, as activists from the World Vapers’ Alliance project a clear message onto the venue: consumers must be recognised, not sidelined.

Michael Landl, WVA Director, called the conference an echo chamber stuck in outdated, anti-science thinking that fails smokers. “Harm reduction isn’t a marketing ploy, it’s a public health necessity supported by hard data,” he said.

Japan’s success in fight against smoking is an example for the world

Dr. Hiroya Kumamaru, Smoke Free Sweden

Over the past decade, Japan has achieved one of the most significant public health shifts in the world. The introduction of heated tobacco products has transformed smoking patterns and placed Japan among the leaders in harm reduction.

The figures are striking. Since heated tobacco was introduced in 2014, cigarette sales have dropped by more than half, the steepest decline in the nation’s history.[1] Smoking prevalence has fallen from 21% to 16% in less than 10 years.[2] Millions of Japanese smokers have chosen heated tobacco in place of cigarettes, leading to a measurable reduction in exposure to harmful toxicants.[3]

Sweden is Officially “Smoke-Free”

Joseph Hart, The Daily Pouch

October 25th will forever be remembered as a glorious day in harm reduction history as Sweden became the first country to become “smoke-free”. Let’s take a look at how and why the Nordic country achieved this incredible milestone.

What is “smoke free”?

A country is considered “smoke-free” if less than 5% of the adult population smokes every day. There are a few African countries (Ghana, Ethiopia, and Nigeria) with sub-5% smoking rates, but they never had high prevalence, even during smoking’s heyday.

FDA Inaction Keeps America Smoking

Lindsey Stroud, Issues & Insights

This week, British American Tobacco (BAT) announced it has “paused a pilot plan to launch an unlicensed disposable vape in the U.S.” The decision marks a reversal for the tobacco giant, which had planned to introduce a product still awaiting a marketing order from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – despite submitting a premarket tobacco application (PMTA) the agency has yet to act on, along with millions of others.

BAT’s decision reportedly comes in response to the FDA’s purported fast-tracking of PMTAs for certain nicotine pouch products.

FDA Signals Openness to THR in FDLI Keynote

Timothy S. Donahue, Nicotine Insider

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration publicly recognized tobacco harm reduction as a key part of its regulatory approach during this year’s Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI) Tobacco and Nicotine Policy Conference, marking what several industry and scientific stakeholders describe as the most significant statement from the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) in years.

Prominent Anti-Vaping Advocate is Misrepresenting Scientific Evidence and Being Unnecessarily Divisive, Polarizing, and Disrespectful

Dr. Michael Siegel, The Rest of the Story

On his blog, Professor Stan Glantz, a highly respected researcher in the anti-tobacco field (and a former mentor, role model, and hero of mine), has posted a set of slides with the title “E-cigarettes Increase Harm to Smokers, So Should Not Be Promoted as a Harm Reduction Strategy.”

In the presentation, Dr. Glantz claims that: “There is now a large scientific literature that, in fact, e-cigarettes increase rather than reduce harm, which moots industry arguments that they should be promoted as a part of modern tobacco control.“

Pre-Registration of Research Plans

Arielle Selya PhD, Selya Behavioral Science Substack

What is Pre-Registration?

Pre-registration is an early stage in the research process where the investigators design a study and statistical analysis plan, and sometimes state their hypotheses about what the results will show, and crucially post this plan publicly and date-stamped before embarking on the research project. A common platform for pre-registrations is the Open Science Foundation.

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Open Letter To Bill Gates

Allison Boughner, American Vapor Manufacturers

Dear Mr. Gates,

I was heartened to read your open memo on environmental policy this week, calling for a “rethink” and a “pivot” away from rigid orthodoxies where “human welfare takes a backseat.”

Your words resonated deeply because they echo the same outlook so many of us in the tobacco harm reduction community have been voicing.

That’s why I implore you to apply that same principled reflection from your memo to your longstanding opposition toward nicotine vaping products and the funding you’ve directed toward intractable prohibition groups.

Cochrane Review Highlights Limited but Promising Evidence for Oral Nicotine Pouches

Lindsey Stroud, Tobacco Harm Reduction 101

A new paper published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews examines the role of oral nicotine pouches in helping adults quit or reduce their use of other tobacco and nicotine products. As a novel harm reduction tool gaining popularity worldwide, nicotine pouches could help shape the American tobacco landscape, and it is imperative that policymakers stay informed on emerging evidence. The review evaluated whether oral nicotine pouches – such as Zyn and Velo – can help adults quit or reduce smoking, whether users experience fewer harms, and whether there are any short- or long-term health risks associated with their use.

Anti-smoking own goals

Christopher Snowdon, The Critic

Robert Conquest’s third law of politics is that the behaviour of bureaucratic organisations is best understood by assuming they are controlled by a secret cabal of their enemies. This could explain why the likes of the World Health Organisation seem so intent on propping up the cigarette trade. Indeed, it is quite possible there would be fewer smokers today if the anti-smoking movement had never existed.

Consider the history. The smoking rate in Britain more than halved between 1950 and 1990 without any heavy-handed measures.

The big lies of ASH

Christopher Snowdon, Velvet Glove Iron Fist

Hazel Cheeseman, the head of Britain’s most dishonest pressure group ASH, has taken to the pages of The Grocer to tell small retailers what is good for them. You might think that owners of convenience stores know their business and customers better than someone who has only ever worked in public affairs, but the say-anything, do-anything prohibitionists at ASH have long maintained that selling cigarettes is holding corner shops back. Cheeseman writes…

Flawed lab methods may exaggerate vaping risks, major new review finds

Ali Anderson, Clearing The Air

Most laboratory studies using a popular vaping exposure system likely overheated vape aerosol, producing unrealistic toxin levels.

Only 14 of 40 studies gave enough detail to reproduce how the aerosol was generated.

Many ran a high-power device with very low airflow, conditions the authors say don’t reflect real-world vaping.

Researchers call for clearer reporting and better airflow so experiments match normal consumer use.

Tobacco Regulation: The European Union

Tobacco Insider

November 2025: Luxembourg issues a de-facto ban on nicotine pouches

The Luxembourg parliament has passed Bill No. 8333, which transposes Directive (EU) 2022/2100 into national law and significantly widens tobacco- and nicotine-product regulations. Under the new rules, flavourings in heated tobacco products are banned. Moreover, advertising and sales of nicotine pouches to minors are prohibited, nicotine pouch packaging must carry health warnings, and nicotine content is capped at 0.048 mg per pouch/gram (“de-facto ban”). Additives like CBD and caffeine are also banned, and vending machines must display warnings with no promotional graphics. Health organisations welcomed the reform, though industry voices warned that the strict limits may amount to a de facto ban and could prompt cross-border trade or illicit market activity.

Australia’s Tobacco Crackdown Fuelling Black Market Boom

OMNY.FM

Mike Jeffreys speaks with Dr Joe Kosterich about the surge in black-market tobacco sales. He says Australia’s heavy cigarette taxes and restrictive vaping laws are repeating the mistakes of 1920s alcohol prohibition — driving demand underground and enriching criminals.

With legal cigarettes overpriced and vaping hard to access, black-market sales and consumption are rising. Dr Kosterich argues harsher penalties won’t solve the problem and points to New Zealand’s model, where sensible regulation has cut smoking rates and kept the black market small.

Other’s Opinion: Vote Down 310, and Send Conventional Wisdom Up in Smoke

Jared Whitley, Westword

Recent history is littered with examples of the conventional wisdom being wrong, and everyone from world leaders to top CEOs to rank-and-file voters winding up gobsmacked when they failed to consider the possibility that everything they believed to be true turned out to be false.

Tax hike that will more than double price of vapes will hit smokers trying to quit, warns GP

Eilish O’Regan, Irish Independent

Tax hikes that will double the price of some vapes from today will hit people relying on them to quit cigarettes, addiction expert and GP Garrett McGovern has warned.

Dr McGovern, who is based in Dublin, said he was concerned at the knock-on impact of the move on smokers of traditional cigarettes, as the tax of 50c per millilitre is imposed on all e-liquids.

“There should be no barriers put in the way of people who are trying to quit cigarettes,” he said.

The deported kingpin, the Chinese gang and the vape brand controlling an Australian black market (PDF)

Chris Vedelago, The Sydney Morning Herald

Australia’s illegal tobacco cartel has joined forces with a mysterious Chinese crime gang to infiltrate and control the local vape market.

The syndicate’s brand of choice, Alibarbar, is being pushed into hundreds of shops across Australia in a market takeover driven by threats and extortion.

On this day…2023

Knives out for nicotine pouches

Christopher Snowdon, Velvet Glove Iron Fist

Swedish MEP Charlie Weimars has blown the whistle on the EU’s plan to ban nicotine pouches. In a tweet (translated below), he provides a screenshot from a leaked report that crossed his desk.

Harry’s blog 122:

Tobacco harm reduction is a human rights issue

A guiding principle of the World Health Organization (WHO) established in 1948, was the universal right to health. Although not expressed in these terms, the implication is that nobody gets left behind even if behaviours which potentially threaten health like illegal drug use and unprotected sex meet with societal disapproval.

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

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