Vapers Digest 7th March
Tuesday’s News at a glance:
Scottish government consults over plan for extra advertising regulation – NHS Cutbacks Impact – A safe battery that lasts longer and charges faster? – Leicester NHS Shows Further Support for Vaping – Nicotine in the News – Smoking numbers hit new low as Britons turn to vaping to help quit cigarettes – Vaping firm VIP in administration with 265 jobs at risk – Czech Republic introduces comprehensive new national legislation on e-cigarettes – Controversies: Misleading headline about e-cigarette and nicotine – NSP Daily Digest
Scottish government consults over plan for extra advertising regulation
Freddie Dawson, ECigIntelligence
Scotland’s government is to launch a consultation over plans to regulate advertising and marketing of e-cigarettes more tightly than in the rest of the UK.
As the ruling Scottish National Party exercises its right to regulate differently from the Westminster government, it plans to bring in legislation to increase the restrictions on e-cig advertising and marketing beyond those prescribed in the European Union’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) and implemented in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
NHS Cutbacks Impact
Mawsley, Planet of the Vapes
Smoking cessation services face a battle on two fronts; on one side the NHS is desperate to making budget savings and on the other they are seeing fewer people come through their doors thanks to electronic cigarettes. But what will happen as the impact of the Tobacco Products Directive is felt? How are smokers going to be educated about the potential vaping offers if advertising is banned and the Quit centres have closed?
Last year, 64,736 attempts were made to give up smoking with the support of NHS smoking cessation services. The previous year it stood at 67,935, representing a drop of 5% – largely attributed to the growth in popularity and success of vaping.
A safe battery that lasts longer and charges faster?
Jim McDonald, Vaping360
One of the inventors of the lithium-ion battery has developed a new kind of cell that charges faster, lasts longer, and is safe from overheating or exploding.
Future vaping innovation will depend on improvements in battery technology. As vape devices incorporate more features and power, and safety becomes a primary goal, batteries that perform reliably for longer periods and with less risk are a necessity.
Now a team at the University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering, led by 94-year-old lithium-ion inventor Prof. John Goodenough, have developed the first all-solid-state batteries. The new tech could be used wherever lithium-ion cells are used now, including electric cars, small electronics, laptops…and vape mods.
Leicester NHS shows further support for vaping
Mawsley, Planet of the Vapes
Doctor Sanjay Agrawal, Leicester NHS Trust, discusses e-cigarettes compared to smoking in a publically released video. Agrawal was recorded at the 2016 World Conference of Lung Cancer (WCLC) of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) in Vienna, Austria.
“We know that smoking is still the biggest single cause of lung cancer. More than 85% of people with lung cancer have it probably because they smoked. We know that about a third of people who come to our lung cancer clinic are still smokers, and so we need to do whatever we can to help them stop smoking.”
Nicotine in the News
Harry Shapiro, NSP
Back in the day, I worked in the library of the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence. The collection policy was literally everything in English on illegal/non-medical drug use. We ended up with one of the best English language drug libraries in the world. But there was a lot of dross – and the one category we soon dropped were animal studies. Researchers would inject a rodent with high levels of the psychoactive THC, watch it fall over and then declare that cannabis caused everything from cancer to Ebola. And we would be sent many similar studies, so reproducability wasn’t the issue, it was just pointless with no relevance to real world situations and just a way of building up a publishing record.
And this same nonsense is being inflicted on the world of e-cigarettes. The American Heart Association are claiming that vaping causes severe strokes and poses a higher risk of severe strokes than smoking. This claim is based on a study where those mice exposed to e-cigarette aerosol for 10 days or 30 days had more severe strokes than those exposed to tobacco smoke.
Smoking numbers hit new low as Britons turn to vaping to help quit cigarettes
Sarah Boseley, The Guardian
The number of smokers in Britain has reached its lowest point since records began in 1974, according to new data, while more than a million people say they are using e-cigarettes to help them quit smoking.
The latest data from the Office for National Statistics shows that 17.2% of adults in the UK smoked in 2015, down from 20.1% in 2010.
See also the Office for National Statistics
Death by TPD. 15% incr smoking prev in Denmark after implement of TPD. Cancer inst warns #ecig #vape. https://t.co/C9LxSMAhbk
— G. Karl Snæ MD (@KalliSnae) March 6, 2017
Vaping firm VIP in administration with 265 jobs at risk
Belfast Telegraph
E-cigarette firm VIP has collapsed into administration, putting 265 jobs at risk.
FRP Advisory has been appointed as administrator to Must Have Limited, which trades as VIP and has 165 retail stores across the UK.
VIP, which is based in Radcliffe, Greater Manchester, will continue trading and all 265 staff will be retained while FRP seeks a buyer for the business.
Its US owner, Electronic Cigarettes International Group (ECIG), said Must Have Limited was placed in administration after it was left unable to pay taxes of around three million US dollars (£2.5 million) to HM Revenue and Customs.
Czech Republic introduces comprehensive new national legislation on e-cigarettes
Lexology
The new legislation is a result of the national transposition of the so-called Tobacco Products Directive (2014/40/EU) (the “TPD”). Some provisions of the TPD regulating e-cigarettes were already included in the amendment of Act No. 110/1997 Coll., on Foods and Tobacco Products, effective from 7 September 2016. Nevertheless, the capstone of the e-cigarettes regulation, Decree of the Ministry of Health No. 37/2017 Coll., on Electronic Cigarettes, Refills and Herbal Products Intended for Smoking (the “E-cigarettes Decree”), became effective only on 1 March 2017, almost a year after the deadline for harmonisation laid down by the TPD (20 May 2016).
Controversies: Misleading headline about e-cigarette and nicotine
Jérôme Harlay, Vaping Post
A misleading headline in the journal Nature implicates e-cigarettes in a study on the effects of nicotine on cultured smooth muscle-like cells.
A scientific article [1] published in the famous scientific journal Nature is deliberately alarming about e-cigarettes, with a headline reading: “Myofibroblast differentiation and its functional properties are inhibited by nicotine and e-cigarette via mitochondrial OXPHOS complex III“. The findings of this study funded by a Chinese grant reveal in fact that nicotine inhibited myofibroblast differentiation and that the effect of e-cigarettes and nicotine are similar.
Call to Action
Changing how YOUR Council sees vaping
Vapers in Power
There is only one council in the entire country with a decent attitude towards vaping.
Thanks to the work of Freedom to Vape we now know that the vast majority of councils lump vaping in with smoking, against the advice of both Public Health England and the Health and Safety Executive.
Visit Nicotine Science & Policy for more News from around the World
