‘Consumers: The Key Stakeholders’

Photo credit: GTNF

I’m currently attending the two-day Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum in London.

Launched in Rio in 2008 as the Global Tobacco Network Forum, GTNF has taken me to places I never expected to visit - like Bangalore and Bologna - as well as cities such as Cape Town, Antwerp and New York.

There was talk of the event going to South Korea until the pandemic intervened and the 2020 conference was held exclusively online.

This year it’s a hybrid event with around 150 delegates in attendance and 700 registered to participate online.

In recent years GTNF has evolved into an event that predominantly promotes smoking cessation via tobacco harm reduction.

The shark was arguably jumped in 2017 when Philip Morris International (PMI) used the conference as a platform to announce the launch of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World.

Although I still see some veteran ‘smoker-friendly’ faces in the audience, Forest seems to be in a minority of one when it comes to speaking out on behalf of those who enjoy smoking and don’t want to quit.

Yesterday I took part in a session called ‘Consumers: The Key Stakeholders’ and it was noticeable during the Q&A session that no-one in the audience had any questions about my contribution.

Instead, their questions were mostly related to vaping.

It was noticeable too that the GTNF Twitter account - which is assiduously tweeting the main points made by every keynote speaker and panellist - chose to ignore my more ‘controversial’ comments.

There was no mention, for example, of my criticism of PMI or some vaping advocates. That was neatly airbrushed from the ‘official’ report.

Elsewhere on social media my comments enjoyed a little more traction.

One person tweeted, ‘Some great points from Simon, very well made. Companies shouldn’t be stigmatising their own consumers’, to which another person replied, ‘I agree. He made me squirm a little bit. That was a strong dose of truth. He really made me think.’

I believe a video of the session will be posted online in the coming days. In the meantime here are my closing comments:

To conclude – yes, consumers ARE the key stakeholders but when we talk about consumers we have to acknowledge that not every smoker is the same, a point made by Stefan Bomhard this morning.

Many smokers don’t want to quit. The important thing is to understand why and respect their choice, just as we respect those who do want to quit or switch to reduced risk products.

Unfortunately - and this is my final point - there is a clear attempt to divide and conquer – and vaping advocates, including the vaping industry, are some of the worst offenders.

In my view all recreational nicotine users should be fighting this battle together, because we should be defending consumer choice for everyone, not just smokers who want to switch to reduced risk products.

But in my experience that isn’t happening and by allying with or allowing the stop smoking brigade to drive a wedge between different types of nicotine user we are weakening the efforts of those who truly believe in freedom of choice and personal responsibility, and if we lose that battle we will lose the war on nicotine too.