Vapers Digest 4th March

Friday’s News at a glance:

Scottish consultation on e-cigarette advertising – The NNA responds – San Diego VA Physician Promotes Unsupported Fear – Sweden Introduces Bill to Prohibit Flavored Vapes – National Tobacco Strategy is set to fail…again! – Survey Proves No Teen Risk – Dodgy Darlo Dealings – NNA Responds To Scottish consultation – GFN•TV – UKVIA Supports Homeless Shelter – Bills to Ban Synthetic Nicotine by Stealth – Vaping on NHS backed by more than a third – What science should we be following? – Watch Your Mouth – Hiding vapes from view won’t help to prevent smoking – Vape bill to strengthen flavor ban – Teen Vaping: What We Get Wrong – Vaping could be key – Cigarette smoking back in vogue – The changing tobacco epidemic – Clearing the haze: – Nicotine Science and Policy Daily Digest

Scottish consultation on advertising

Christopher Snowdon, Velvet Glove Iron Fist

The Scottish government is running a public consultation on banning e-cigarette advertising. It’s exactly the kind of thing the SNP would do. Devolution doesn’t give them many levers of power to pull so they tend to pull them all. And since they don’t have much ability (or inclination) to liberalise anything, it’s a one-way ratchet of illiberalism.

Obviously, they shouldn’t do it, but let’s look at their reasoning…

The NNA responds …

To the government’s Independent Tobacco Review

At the beginning of February, The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Sajid Javid, announced an independent review into tobacco control policies in order to achieve the government’s target of making England smoke free by 2030.

The review is led by Javed Khan, OBE, who is tasked with providing “independent, evidence-based advice that will inform the government’s approach to tackling the stark health disparities associated with tobacco use” and is expected to report back in April. Mr Khan has appealed on Twitter for suggestions as to how the smokefree target can be reached on the hashtag #IndependentSmokingReview.

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Three States Have Bills to Ban….

Synthetic Nicotine by Stealth – Alex Norcia

Legislators in three different states—Georgia, Maryland and Mississippi—have recently introduced bills that would only allow the sale of vapor products authorized by, or pending authorization from, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Each piece of legislation would also establish directories to inventory authorized vapor products. The lists would eventually be made public.

The proposed restrictions seem somewhat counterintuitive, since the FDA has denied thousands of producers through its premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) process. These manufacturers already cannot legally sell their products in the United States, even if some are fighting back in court…

Sweden Introduces Bill …

To Prohibit Flavored Vapes – Jim McDonald

The Swedish government has formally proposed a ban on non-tobacco vape flavors, including menthol. The proposed law covers nicotine and non-nicotine e-liquid, and also captures regulatory authority over all synthetic nicotine products.

If passed, sales of flavored vape products will be illegal beginning Jan. 1, 2023.

The bill, titled “Stricter rules for new nicotine products,” was introduced last week by the Ministry of Social Affairs, and is currently being reviewed by the Council on Legislation (Lagrådet), which assesses the legal validity of proposed bills before legislators consider them.

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San Diego VA Physician Promotes ….

Unsupported Fear of Brain-to-Bladder Vaping Dangers & Diseases

Brad Rodu, Tobacco Truth

During my 26-year career as an oral and maxillofacial pathologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, I had the opportunity to participate in diagnosis and treatment of patients at the Birmingham Veterans Administration Medical Center (VAMC). There I observed a high rate of smoking among veterans (confirmed here) and an elevated rate of admissions for related serious illnesses. Many patients would drag their IV lines, catheters, nasogastric feeding tubes and other medical equipment outside in order to satisfy their craving for cigarettes.

When I enrolled smokers in the first-ever open label pilot study of reduced risk products (Skoal Bandits, study published here), I expected veterans to be likely adopters of smokeless tobacco products, but I was unable to convince the VA to offer their patients that option.

Vaping and Lung Inflammation and Injury – Clive Bates

National Tobacco Strategy is set to fail…

Colin Mendelsohn

The Department of Health is seeking feedback on how to reduce smoking in the draft National Tobacco Strategy 2022-2030. This is an opportunity for vapers to be heard before the anti-vaping policy is locked in for the rest of the decade.

Please make a submission before the deadline of 24 March 2022. More information about making a submission can be found here. My submission is available here and may help you to prepare your own.

The draft strategy lacks urgency. It sets a very modest goal of <10% adult daily smoking by 2025. In sharp contrast, New Zealand  recently set a target of <5% daily adult smoking by 2025 for all population groups including Maori and Pacifica groups. Vaping is a key element of this plan.

Five from Dave Cross, Planet of the Vapes

NNA Responds To Scottish consultation

Last week, we detailed how the Scottish government is relying on a series of ridiculous statements to support nonsensical and dangerous proposals. Consumer charity The New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) has responded to the government’s consultation document and made a submission on the related website.

The NNA believes the Scottish government’s proposals seek to place unnecessary obstacles in front of raising awareness about vaping products in Scotland.

Survey Proves No Teen Risk

A survey among New Zealand’s young teenagers proves non-smoking youth are not taking up vaping according to the Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates. Smoking among the country’s teens has fallen to its lowest levels in over 20 years, while very few non-smoking students take up vaping, the significant study of secondary school students shows.

“Vaping rates might be up, but these are overwhelmingly young people who were smoking in the first place,” says Nancy Loucas, Executive Coordinator of the Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA).

GFN•TV

The Global Forum on Nicotine is launching GFN•TV to broadcast nicotine science, policy, news and updates throughout the year. GFN•TV is seen as “a natural next step” after in-person, online and hybrid conference successes. The news programme launches 3 March and GFN•TV will broadcast live from #GFN22 in Poland in June.

GFN, which has taken place in June every year since 2014, is the only international conference to focus on the role of safer nicotine products in helping people switch away from smoking. Hosting world-leading experts, nicotine consumers and advocates, GFN addresses the scientific, regulatory and policy issues related to safer nicotine products and their crucial role in tobacco harm reduction.

Dodgy Darlo Dealings

Darlington becomes the next location to experience a Trading Standards crackdown as officers target illegal sales to under-18s. The action follows a coordinated response to the growing problem of vape products (mainly disposables) illegally imported into the country, containing illegal amounts of nicotine, and sold without a care to who is making the purchase.

Darlington Borough Council’s trading standards team has been on the receiving end of multiple reports of dodgy shop owners selling vape products to children. Worried parents pressed the officers into taking action, but they weren’t alone as reports have also come in from responsible businesses and the police.

UKVIA Supports Homeless Shelter

The UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) has joined forces with the Ipswich Night Shelter, a project run by the Selig (Suffolk) Trust (a registered charity providing services and support for those who become homeless), to support people staying across the winter months to switch to a less harmful alternative to combustible cigarettes.

The Ipswich Winter Night Shelter operates across the winter, from November through March, and provides a number of en-suite bedrooms in their purpose-adapted premises for people from Ipswich who have found themselves homeless.

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Vaping on NHS backed by more than a third

Graham Walker

Should e-cigarettes be available on NHS Scotland prescription? More than a third of those asked in a new survey believe they should.

GoSmokeFree.co.uk questioned 1,200 respondents to gauge their views toward vaping as a means of helping smokers cut down their tobacco use and subsequently, reduce the overall harm to society.

A significant 35 per cent thought vaping products should be made available on prescription, considering their benefits in terms of helping cigarette smokers kick the habit.

What science should we be following…

On novel tobacco products – and how far? – Barnaby Page

Before Covid vaccines came along, there were essentially two ways to control the spread of the pandemic: limit encounters between people, and where they were unavoidable, inhibit the virus’s ability to move from one person to another.

In their most familiar forms these were manifested in lockdowns and masks, for example. But in a judgement of the situation driven entirely by these two goals, it would have been equally reasonable to demand that everyone wear biological-warfare-grade protection 24/7 for a year, and to shoot them dead if they left their home without it.

Feb 2022 with Professor Billie Bonevski

Jamie Hartmann-Boyce and Nicola Lindson discuss emerging evidence in e-cigarette research and interview Professor Billie Bonevski.

In this episode Assistant Professor Jamie Hartmann-Boyce and Dr Nicola Lindson discuss the emerging evidence in e-cigarette research and interview Professor Billie Bonevski. This podcast is a companion to the electronic cigarettes Cochrane living systematic review and shares the evidence from the monthly searches.

Hiding vapes from view …

Won’t help to prevent smoking – Pete Cheema

Scotland wants to be smoke-free by 2034. This is a laudable and critical ambition to ease avoidable, costly pressures on our under-strain and overstretched NHS and to save lives. Further restrictions on how vaping products are promoted will not help to achieve that. I am certain, in fact, that they will only work directly against those ambitions.

I know a Scottish government consultation on new curbs surrounding the advertisement of vaping products — including a ban on in-store promotions — does not have the intention of hampering the drive for people to stop smoking.

Watch Your Mouth

Cheryl K. Olson

Surveys show that the public perceives nicotine as the devil behind most of the cancer and heart disease caused by smoking. E-cigarettes and nicotine-replacement therapies alike are misperceived as relatively risky by many smokers. Even physicians are likely to believe nicotine is dangerous. The now entrenched view of nicotine as public health villain is the predictable result of years of emotion-based anti-vaping campaigns from government and advocacy groups and a steady drip of media reports on the latest perceived danger or deception from the nicotine industry.

Vape bill to strengthen flavor ban

Manila Bulletin

The bicameral conference committee’s report on consolidated House Bill 9007 and Senate Bill 2239, also known as the Vape Bill, will ban the sale of e-cigarettes with flavor descriptors that appeal to the youth.

This was revealed by Rep. Sharon Garin, House Committee Chairperson for Economic Affairs and a member of the Vape Bill house bicam panel, to members of the media.

“With the passage of the Vape Bill, we are solidifying the provisions of RA 11467 and Executive Order 106 issued by President Rodrigo Duterte and in particular banning the sale of e-cigarettes with flavors other than menthol and tobacco….

Teen Vaping: What We Get Wrong

About This ‘Serious Problem’ – Cameron English

If you’re a parent, the chances are good that you know at least one other parent who worries about everything: toxic baby food, pesticides, stranger danger, drug use, COVID—you name it, they’re worried it’s going to kill their children. These examples are all real risks to our kids, but part of developing your parental skills is learning how to properly assess risk and respond to it. [1] In an ideal world, educators would help moms and dads through this arduous process by giving them accurate information.

Clearing the haze:

New stats give us a better picture of youth vaping

Working in the drug space, we’re used to misinformation clouding scientific evidence and influencing the public debate. And judging by much of the rhetoric over the past few years, the topic of vaping hasn’t been immune.

That’s one of the reasons ASH’s new Year 10 Survey , visit external website, released today, is useful. It provides a solid statistical evidence base of what is happening with smoking and vaping amongst Year 10 students, which can then help to inform our response.

Vaping could be key ….

To reducing number of smokers in Malaysia – Dale John Wong

Amid the push to greatly reduce the number of cigarette smokers in Malaysia, a panel of experts has agreed that providing people with alternatives like e-cigarettes could greatly assist in achieving that objective.

The experts provided their opinions at a media roundtable that took place in conjunction with the release of a report released in January, 2022 by the Datametrics Research and Information Center (DARE) titled Clearing the Smoke – A game-changer in Malaysian smoking issues.

Cigarette smoking back in vogue

Amid vaping crackdown

Cigarettes appear to be having a moment. Despite decades of public health messaging that has driven home the message that smoking is a dangerous and damaging habit, there are increasingly troubling signs that the practice is, once again, becoming “cool.”

The shift is particularly prevalent among people in their mid-twenties, apparently inspired by the aesthetic of cigarettes as presented on social media. Amid the fatalism of the COVID-19 pandemic, cigarette sales in the United States increased in 2020 for the first time in two decades.

The changing tobacco epidemic

Adriana Blanco Marquizo

The latest archaeological discoveries suggest that humans in North America may have used tobacco some 12 300 years ago—but probably completely differently from the use one sees nowadays.1 It was undoubtedly in the nineteenth century, with the creation of the Bonsack machine, when tobacco use as we know it, began and rapidly expanded.2

Around the 1940s and 1950s, the link between tobacco consumption and lung cancer was established, and by the end of the 1990s tobacco use was already the leading cause of premature death around the world.

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On this Day…2021

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

Characterising vaping products in the UK:

An analysis of Tobacco Products Directive notification data

Blessing Nyakutsikwa, John Britton, Ilze Bogdanovica, Alan Boobis, Tessa Langley, Wiley Online Library

ABSTRACT/Aims:

To analyse content and emission data submitted by manufacturers for nicotine‐containing vaping products in the UK in accordance with the European Union Tobacco Products Directive.

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