A warning from history as campaigners in Ireland and Scotland target vaping
Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 9:00 My colleague John Mallon was on a local radio station in Ireland yesterday talking about vaping.
We don’t actively seek to do interviews that are exclusively on vaping but he was booked last week to talk about a subject that has been bubbling away and was featured at the weekend in the Sunday Times Ireland - Vaping epidemic may be blowing up among teenagers.
The paper quoted Luke Clancy who has moved on since I first met him in 2004 when he was a cheerleader for the smoking ban in Ireland.
Yet despite vaping being an obvious ‘success’ story in terms of helping a significant number of smokers to quit, the former director of ASH Ireland still isn’t happy:
Luke Clancy, director of Tobacco Free Research Institute Ireland, believes children as young as 12 are becoming addicted to vaping, which is having an adverse effect on their brains. He said research showed that using the products also has a small impact on breathing and taste.
The Sunday Times’ article follows a report by the Joint Committee on Health that called for a ban on all flavoured e-cigarettes.
Published last month the Committee’s report - which I wrote about here - got very little coverage but it has not gone unnoticed by anti-smoking campaigners in the UK who are determined to clamp down on e-cigarettes too.
At the weekend the Sunday Times Scotland reported that:
Scottish ministers are coming under pressure to ban the sale of vapes that mimic the smell and taste of confectionery, following a surge in children turning to e-cigarettes.
Sound familiar?
Leading the campaign is Sheila Duffy, chief executive of ASH Scotland, who said:
“We are extremely concerned about the massive increase in children and young people using vapes in Scotland. The sweet tastes and vibrant colouring of e-cigarettes that are particularly attractive to young people and are major contributing factors to this upsurge need to be addressed.
“We are watching developments in Ireland with interest following their parliament’s health committee recently recommending prohibition on the flavouring of all vapes. ASH Scotland would welcome similar measures being considered and implemented by the Scottish government to reduce the appeal of these health-harming products to children and young people, and to eliminate the presence of toxic e-liquids that have not been safety tested for inhalation.”
The problem is that banning flavoured vapes will have a huge impact on the product’s core consumer, adults who are trying to quit smoking or have successfully quit by using e-cigarettes (although I don’t buy the argument that many will revert to smoking if flavoured vapes are prohibited).
As I’ve noted before, ASH Scotland’s hostility to vaping may be in marked contrast to its counterpart in London but the idea that ASH (UK) are paragons of liberty when it comes to e-cigarettes is a fallacy.
Restrictions on e-cigarette branding, including the introduction of plain packaging for vaping products to deter young people from vaping, has been on ASH’s agenda for some time.
Sooner or later, I’m sure, they will unite around a shared vision of a world without nicotine, and that will include the use of e-cigarettes.
To put this in perspective, do you remember when Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce a comprehensive ban on smoking in the workplace? It could never happen in the UK, we were told. Saner voices will find a compromise, especially in pubs and clubs.
But that was before Jack McConnell, the first minister of Scotland, spent a morning in Dublin visiting two or three carefully chosen pubs and then returned to Holyrood singing the praises of a law that had been enforced only a few months earlier.
Similar legislation was duly introduced in Scotland, with England, Wales and Northern Ireland meekly following suit.
If vaping advocates in England think a similar chain reaction can’t or won’t happen again they could be in for a BIG surprise.
The lesson is, keep a eye on Ireland, where some politicians would love to lead Europe in banning flavoured vapes, and beware a Scottish Government that will do almost anything to be different to Westminster.
As we all know, this is about politics not health.
Reader Comments (3)
This is why vaping advocates should have fought for smoking as prominently as vaping on the grounds of free choice instead of attacking smoking on the grounds that vaping is allegedly healthier.. As Churchill once said something like : you cannot appease the crocodile in hope it eats you last.
We hate to say we told you so but ....
Nicotine as an Addictive Substance: A Critical Examination of the Basic Concepts and Empirical Evidence
by Dale M. Atrens
2001
"The present review is a critical analysis of the concepts behind and the empirical data supporting the view that tobacco use represents an addiction to nicotine. It deals with general aspects of the notion of addiction, while concentrating on specific problems associated with incorporating nicotine into current frameworks. The notion of addiction suffers from unprecedented definitional difficulties.
The definitions offered by various authorities are very different, even contradictory. Definitions that reasonably include nicotine are so broad and vague that they allow many trivial things, such as salt, sugar, and watching television, to be considered addictive.
Definitions that exclude the trivia also exclude nicotine. The addiction hypothesis, in general, is strongly shaped by views that certain drugs bring about a molecular level subversion of rationality. The main human evidence for this is verbal reports of smokers who say that they can't quit.
On the other hand, the existence of many millions of successful quitters suggests that most people can quit. Some smokers don't quit, but whether they can't is another matter.
The addiction hypothesis would be greatly strengthened by the demonstration that any drug of abuse produces special changes in the brain. It has yet to be shown that any drug produces changes in the brain different from those produced by many innocuous substances and events. The effects of nicotine on the brain are similar to those of sugar, salt, exercise, and other harmless substances and events.
Apart from numerous conceptual and definitional inadequacies with the addiction concept in general, the notion that nicotine is addictive lacks reasonable empirical support. Nicotine does not have the properties of reference drugs of abuse. There are so many findings that conflict so starkly with the view that nicotine is addictive that it increasingly appears that adhering to the nicotine addiction thesis is only defensible on extra-scientific grounds."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002204260103100202
But the vaping advocates had a product to sell and agreed with the FDA and the surgeon general that nicotine was indeed addictive.
Only the Pharmaceutical industries are allowed to knowingly sell "addictive" products to the public.
The antismokers of England have been playing this game for over 400 years.
"The problem is that banning flavoured vapes will have a huge impact on the product’s core consumer, adults who are trying to quit smoking or have successfully quit by using e-cigarettes"
Almost half of the vapers who did quit smoking never had the intention to quit but are accidental quitters, and there's even a higher percentage of dual users who wich to stay dual user. Adults who want to quit are NOT the core consumers, only a minority. Just like smokers, those who choose to smoke outnumber by far those who want to quit but are so addicted they can't.
But tobacco control must be getting pretty desperate hoping they can change the demand of a product by limiting the supply. What is the most likely thing that will happen if you limit the supply of a product that is already in popular demand?
- Vapers will start smoking again
- Vapers will quit vaping as well
- Vapers will buy from a black market
- Vapers will buy unflavoured and add the flavour themselves.
...
- Non vapers will be less likely to take up vaping
The impact on vape shops and the tax revenu on vaping will be considarable but the impact on current core consumers would be minimal. It might have a huge impact on what evangelic vape advocates consider the "future core consumers" and it would make their ambitions to convert every smoker even more unrealistic.
One should not buy into the trap when talking about core consumers to confuse current users and unreal futuristic ambitions to create a smoker free world. For the time being let's look at the world as it is.