The advent of alternative nicotine delivery products (including vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches) has led many tobacco control institutions to lose sight of their public health purpose.
For a significant majority of anti-smoking activists and researchers, their hatred of the tobacco industry – or industry of all kinds, in many cases – has become more of a priority than the goal of helping people to quit smoking.
However, when it comes to the Europe-based Smokefree Partnership (SFP), it seems that their members have even completely forgotten the name of their own organization.
The SFP, a collection of tobacco control entities from around Europe and funded by the EU Commission, has spent the past month producing recommendations intended to destroy smokefree products which help people quit smoking. This strategy will only protect combustible cigarettes – which do, indeed, produce smoke – from competition.
Despite its stated vision of “a world free from the death and suffering caused by tobacco,” the SFP’s X (formerly Twitter) account recently described a ban on nicotine pouches in Belgium as “great news.” Nicotine pouches are not only smokefree products, they also contain no tobacco and there is no evidence whatsoever that they cause death or suffering.
This came soon after the organization produced position papers containing prohibitionist recommendations for EU Member States on e-cigarettes and heated tobacco, neither of which involve combustion and are therefore smokefree products.
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The SFP’s recommendations for vapes were a ban on all cross-border sales, prohibition of single use vaping products, bans on marketing and advertising, plain packaging, legislation to ban vaping in public places, and application of taxation.
One must wonder at the mentality of people who call themselves a partnership to achieve a smokefree world while fighting hard to remove all smokefree products which compete with cigarettes.
Despite the Cochrane Library – the gold standard of literature reviews – estimating vaping to be twice as effective as nicotine replacement therapy at helping smokers to quit, the SFP is working hard to put them out of sight and out of mind to the people who need them most.
SFP’s policy recommendations would limit access to safer alternatives for smokers trying to quit, obstruct harm reduction, and arguably drive individuals back to combustible tobacco. Banning cross-border sales would undoubtedly encourage the growth of an unregulated black market of unsafe and untested products, and taxation would blur perception of the far safer nature of vaping products when compared to smoking.
Banning disposable e-cigarettes (which serve as an entry point for smokers looking to try vaping) removes a proof-of-concept product on spurious grounds. Strict restrictions on packaging and labeling will further damage the already declining public perception of the huge difference in risk between vaping and smoking. This will only perpetuate use of the products SFP claims to want to eradicate. At the same time, imposing taxes on these products will deteriorate or remove the financial benefit of switching from lethal cigarettes to an alternative which is orders of magnitude less harmful.
Big Tobacco executives from the 1970s and 1980s would look on these measures and be thoroughly impressed at their potential for creating doubt and confusion in order to bolster cigarette sales. The SFP could have had very successful careers as Merchants of Doubt in the tobacco industry of old.
Its recommendations for heated tobacco are straightforward. They simply deny that there is any potential for harm reduction and demand the products “be regulated in the same way as cigarettes which includes the same tax rate, a ban on advertising and promotion, labeling requirements, ban on flavors and the use of products in public places.” Furthermore, the SFP states that “a heated tobacco product is a tobacco product for smoking” despite not one, but two, European court cases, in Germany and Sweden, ruling that combustion is not involved so they are categorically not tobacco products for smoking.
Vaping has led to tremendous reductions in smoking prevalence for countries such as the UK, New Zealand, and France. Heated tobacco has cratered cigarette sales in Japan and South Korea. And, Sweden and Norway have experienced dramatic falls in smoking due to smokeless oral tobacco products and nicotine pouches replacing combustible use.
Spending EU Commission funding unwisely, the SFP opposes all these products. It is far from clear which part of the Smokefree Partnership is interested in making Europe smoke free.
Martin Cullip is International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.
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