We are increasingly disappointed by the attitude of politicians toward tobacco harm reduction in the United Kingdom.
The change has been breathtaking. Britain was once regarded internationally as a leader in recognising that lives could be saved by moving away from combustible tobacco and switching to much safer nicotine products. Today, that progressive approach is being rapidly dismantled.
The government appears increasingly determined to treat vaping, nicotine pouches and other reduced risk nicotine products as though they were cigarettes. This threatens to undermine one of the most successful public health developments of modern times.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently claimed, extraordinarily, that vape shops provide no benefit to communities. Why, then, does the government's Swap to Stop scheme provide adult smokers with free reusable vape starter kits to help them quit smoking? Products which are supplied by independent businesses that the Prime Minister has now dismissed as offering no benefit to society.
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) has described Mr Burnham’s comments as “knee-jerk” and “unhelpful”, and rightly so. Vaping has played a significant role in the dramatic decline in smoking in Britain. Smoking rates are now at historic lows, and there are more people who vape than smoke. This should be celebrated as a major public health success.
ASH has warned that a majority of the public now incorrectly believes that vaping is as harmful as smoking or more harmful. On the face of it this is wrong but doubly so when the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities has concluded that vaping presents only “a small fraction of the harms of smoking.”
Yet the government consultation on tobacco and vape packaging, appearance and display proposes measures that make safer nicotine products seem as harmful as cigarettes. The new proposals are to hide vapes, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco behind screens, just like cigarettes; to ban advertising, just like cigarettes; to impose plain packaging, just like cigarettes; to restrict flavours, just like cigarettes; to ban vending machines, just like cigarettes; to control the shape, colour and size of devices, just as the government controls the shape, colour and size of cigarette packets.
This is on top of a new vape tax which will be imposed in October which more than doubles the cost of many vape liquids, and a desire to ban vaping in public places without any scientific evidence whatsoever that vape aerosols have any negative health impact on bystanders.
Britain now appears to be moving toward a regulatory model that increasingly treats safer nicotine products as if they were combustible tobacco, for no valid reason whatsoever.
The government's approach is particularly difficult to understand given its own stated commitment to reducing smoking. If smoking remains an urgent public health problem, policymakers should be making it easier for smokers to move away from cigarettes, not making effective alternatives increasingly harder to access.
Britain once showed the world what sensible tobacco harm reduction could achieve but now our policymakers seem determined to throw that achievement in the gutter.
Consumers deserve better. Smokers deserve better. And the public’s health deserves better than policies that will drive people back towards cigarettes which government claims it wants them to quit.
That is why we have established a campaign website to help consumers respond to the government's proposals. If you care about protecting access to safer nicotine products and preserving Britain's successful harm reduction approach, please visit the website, read the proposals and make your voice heard in the public consultation which closes on 2nd October.
The future of tobacco harm reduction should be based on evidence, proportionality and consumer choice, not ignorance and populist misinformation from politicians who should know better.