E-Cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products are considered by the majority of public health bodies, scientists and medical physicians to be much safer than combustible tobacco. The UK’s Public Health England (PHE) and Royal College of Physicians (RCP) considered them to be at least 95% safer. Sadly, prohibitive regulations threaten to decimate legitimate manufacturers and vendors in the US. The measures in the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) are wide-ranging and sharply restrict the freedom of e-cigarette producers to sell their products to smokers, let alone to market them effectively or create new, improved products. In India consumers have been jailed for daring to choose a safer alternative to smoking, whilst in Dubai all vaping products are summarily banned. Just ignore the huge range of cigarettes, cigars and rolling tobacco as you pass through their duty-free shops, this is patently a mirage.
Vaping – E-cigarettes
Also known as e-cig, electronic cigarette, personal vapouriser, (ENDS, ANDS, ENDS/ENNDS – used exclusively by The WHO who inexplicably insist on using their own terminology) e-hookah, e-shisha, e-nargile, vape pens.Put as simply as possible: vaping is the careful and controlled heating of a solution of vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, food grade flavourings and nicotine diluent into a vapour. It is not smoke, this is a very important distinction. The vapour produced does not contain the tar, carbon and 4000+chemicals that are present in combustible tobacco smoke.
Vaping is the use of technology to emulate the action/feel of smoking without the element of combustion. This allows users satisfying and vastly safer ways of enjoying nicotine, or just the sensation of smoking (many consumers choose not use nicotine), without being exposed to the toxic and carcinogenic cocktail of chemicals from combusted tobacco.
Millions of smokers globally have already made the successful transition from smoking to vaping, on their own. It is truly a global consumer driven health revolution and they have science on their side. Studies have shown that vaping is 95% less harmful than combustible tobacco/ smoking from esteemed health authorities/experts such as Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians (who were the first, in 1962 to make the connection between tobacco smoking and lung cancer and, at that time, were ignored by WHO for that discovery at the time).
And still, the WHO FCTC COP and governments across the world refuse to even acknowledge that harm reduction can be safer, enjoyable and satisfying as well as save lives. People are using these products to quit smoking not because
of government initiatives, but despite them.
Snus
(also the very similar product “moist snuff” in the USA/Canada)Using tobacco orally is vastly safer to smoking tobacco even in its most dangerous formulations. Not acknowledging this and informing consumers about this results in doing actual harm and shows disrespect for consumer rights to make informed choices that will promote health.
Swedish snus is the most well studied form of oral tobacco to date, and has a history in Sweden spanning 100 years before the emergence of widespread cigarette smoking.
Oral tobacco in the form of Swedish snus has again seen almost a half century revival of growing popularity since 1970. Swedish snus is replacing cigarette smoking, and has considerably supported the decline of smoking in Sweden, continuously since 1970. Norway is quickly catching up and Swedish snus use in Norway has grown from a margin product at 4% to taking over 30% of a simultaneously shrinking total tobacco market in a decade.
Yet, since 1992 Swedish Snus has been banned in the entire EU 28 country bloc with a derogation only for Sweden. According to a prominent US Tobacco Harm Reduction scientist, Professor Brad Rodu, Swedish levels of snus use hypothetically in the entire EU, could have saved the lives of over 6 million Europeans who have died as a direct result of smoking tobacco.
Other nicotine products
Heat not Burn (HnB) products are products that heat but do not burn actual tobacco (e g IQOS), to produce an inhalable gas that is technically low in combustion/pyrolysis substrates. These products are therefore in a position somewhere between combustibles and smokeless tobacco products. This is a relatively more recent product category and products are being developed mainly by the traditional transnational tobacco corporations. Studies on toxic and carcinogenic emissions from the inhalation matter from these HnB product also suggest that they are vastly safer than regular combusted tobacco like cigarettes. In Japan the popularity of switching to these new Harm Reduction products has the market demand surpassing the available product supply. HnB products represent an important development in Tobacco Harm Reduction.