Thanks to everyone who attended last night’s webinar on vaping.
The meeting over-ran its allotted hour (by a mere 30 minutes!) but we had five panellists and I was keen that members of the audience who wanted to say something had the opportunity to do so.
Thanks to John Dunne, director-general of the UK Vaping Industry Association, and Joe Dunne, spokesperson for Respect Vapers, for engaging with us.
Thanks too to our other panellists - Daniel Pryor, head of programmes at the Adam Smith Institute who has another paper on vaping out shortly, long-term vaping advocate Judy Gibson, and confirmed smoker Dan Donovan.
As a current smoker Dan was heavily outnumbered on the panel but he gave an eloquent explanation of what smoking (and the aroma of tobacco) means to him and how it helps his mental health (something David Hockney has also commented on).
Like many smokers Dan has tried vaping and, more recently, heated tobacco but neither work for him.
When it came to the audience participation part of the meeting, the views of confirmed smokers dominated the discussion and we had a fiery contribution from Pat Nurse that would have burned the ears of any PMI exec who happened to be listening.
We also heard from Mark Butcher who some of you may remember from older posts. Mark is a radio presenter based in Geneva. He’s also an advocate of heated tobacco - specifically iQOS - which he has been using for six or seven years.
The overall result was a frank and lively discussion that I would like to think will lead to greater dialogue between smokers and vapers who respect each others’ choices and believe in “each to their own”, which was pretty much the message of the meeting.
Unfortunately I suspect that confirmed smokers will continue to be ignored by organisers of reduced risk/smoking cessation events who perhaps feel uncomfortable that there is still a substantial number of people who enjoy smoking and don’t want to quit.
The ‘We like smoking and we’re not quitting’ message is not something they want to hear so they put their hands over their ears and effectively cancel one of the largest groups of nicotine users, most of whom they hope will one day quit or switch to one of their preferred reduced risk products.
I was tickled, btw, by Dan Donovan’s observation that he enjoys Forest’s webinars because he can light up without feeling awkward.
In other online meetings, he said, eyebrows will be raised so he doesn’t feel he can do it without someone making a negative comment or even judging him. (I may have paraphrased that. I’ll have to check exactly what he said but that was the gist of it.)
Anyway, we’ll post the video online in due course. I had a major technical issue before the event (my home broadband stopped working hours before the event) so I had to drive 60 miles to a friend’s house in Watford to find a working connection.
It was all a bit stressful.