It has to be asked… Is Linda McAvan MEP, European Parliament rapporteur for the Tobacco Products Directive, in an unholy alliance with the tobacco industry? >> read the full post
|
|||||
|
May 7th, 2013 I felt moved to write to MEPs To: the ENVI committee rapporteur for the Tobacco Products Directive, Linda McAvan MEP CC: ENVI MEPs 7 May 2013 Dear Ms McAvan I wanted to make a few points about the draft tobacco products directive, your draft report and some of the points raised by you and other members on 24 April (from 16:43) I hope this will be useful additional input in advance of your hearing on e-cigarettes on 7 May and deadline for amendments the following day. I apologise for the length of this communication, but there is rather more to say than I would have hoped. >> read the full post April 22nd, 2013  Key votes in July and September – everything still to play for. We’re getting closer to serious position-taking and the first decisions in the European Parliament. So here is a post with my suggestions for amendments to the directive and some information for anyone interested in following what is going on in the process. The most important thing is the ‘harm reduction’ agenda – finding ways to decouple taking the not-very-harmful drug nicotine from the very harmful way of taking it by smoking cigarettes – mainly through low-risk alternatives nicotine products such as smokeless tobacco or e-cigarettes. >> read the full post April 15th, 2013
See what they did there…? It’s either medicines regulation or ‘unregulated’. We call this framing bias – and they were rightly criticised for it. But the idea persists that e-cigs are unregulated, and it is the reason why some people think they should be regulated as medicines. In reality, there is very little in the European Union that is ‘unregulated’. Most products fall under general consumer protection legislation. Here is a selection of the key EU directives and regulations that already apply (or could be applied) to e-cigarettes and other non-medicinal nicotine containing products: >> read the full post April 10th, 2013  Warning: nicotine may induce authoritarian urges, warped judgements and loss of purpose Smokeless tobacco products, e-cigarettes and novel nicotine products have astonishing potential to reduce the expected one billion premature deaths from tobacco in the 21st Century. Yet some health organisations are spreading misinformation, stoking up unwarranted fears and pretending there is much more risk and uncertainty than there really is. So to provide some balance here is a collection of on-the-record quotes from researchers, experts and others who have grasped the important and disruptive significance of these developments. Enjoy! >> read the full post April 8th, 2013
March 29th, 2013 Christian Engström, the Swedish Pirate Party MEP, makes the case for unbanning snus to the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) – also here on his blog. He is a shadow rapporteur to that committee, and they will provide an opinion to the Parliament on the European Commission’s proposal for the revised Tobacco Products Directive. March 25th, 2013  Completely counter-productive assessment of the value of e-cigarettes Oh dear … Israel planning to ban e-cigarettes. I’ve responded to the consultation as below. You’ll need Google translate (the screen shot above is generated by Google) and I ended up sending my response to the site administrator as it was rejected by the web form on the site. Here’s my response. If you know Israeli vapers, please pass this on and extend my offer of solidarity. >> read the full post March 22nd, 2013
No smoke. Why the fire? and E-cigarettes: Vape ’em if you got ’em What to make of this…? March 21st, 2013
Lars Ramström and I have released a critique of the Commission’s case as set out in the Impact Assessment that accompanies the proposed revised Tobacco Products Directive. Our response is: A critique of the scientific reasoning supporting the proposed measures relating to oral tobacco. To sum up: >> read the full post March 14th, 2013
Letter to The Times, 14 March 2013 on how misguided excessive regulation threatens one of the most promising technologies for public health – the e-cigarette. >> read the full post March 9th, 2013
A. Neither are medicines Would it actually be legal to classify e-cigarettes as medicines? A landmark legal case involving the classification of garlic capsules suggests the European Court of Justice would not accept this definition. Other recent legal cases in member states support that interpretation. Let’s look at whether e-cigarettes really are medicines… >> read the full post March 1st, 2013
As it happens, the generalised version of this very question is under consideration by the UK Government – through its Balance of Competences Review. This is part of the British effort to ‘redefine the UK relationship with Europe‘ prior to a referendum on the UK membership of the EU by 2017. This posting includes my response to the Department of Health component of that review. February 24th, 2013  Sweden is a stunning outlier in European Union smoking rates – and the benefits are lower death rates from tobacco-related disease – now and locked in to the future Spreadsheet data, charts and sources and look at this too. February 24th, 2013  European Parliament: heading for an own goal? On Monday 25th February 2013, the European Parliament committee that is scrutinising the proposed EU Tobacco Products Directive holds a public hearing, and take evidence from invited witnesses. The committee is the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee (known as ENVI). This post provides links to the hearing details and my tobacco harm reduction briefing sent to all ENVI committee members in advance of the hearing. The committee needs to take the harm reduction agenda seriously – if they get it wrong, they will harm health and protect the cigarette industry. February 8th, 2013  Over regulating the alternatives is a form of protection for the most harmful and dominant form of nicotine delivery – cigarettes E-cigarettes represent an amazing market-based, user-driven public health insurgency. From nowhere to €500m in Europe, the market is growing rapidly and already almost equals the market for NRT, according to the European Commission’s consultants (see chart and Matrix report p21). Without anyone in the professional public health field doing anything and without spending any public money, smokers have been quitting, switching and cutting down using e-cigarettes. Enter the regulators… >> read the full post January 27th, 2013 Victory! 19 April 2013… Press Complaints Commission notice issued. January 6th, 2013 The European Commission has published a draft directive on tobacco products. Unfortunately it bans and obstructs much lower-risk alternative to cigarettes, such as smokeless tobacco and e-cigarettes, so its effect would to protect cigarettes and harm health. However, it is not too late to do something about it. >> read the full post December 5th, 2012
November 12th, 2012 Dear delegate I am writing as you gather in Seoul with colleagues from around the world from 12-17 November 2012 for the fifth Conference of the Parties of the FCTC. Your work is vitally important in the global struggle against cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory illness, and I wish you well with your negotiations and deliberations this week. However, I would like to ask you to consider two important and difficult but related issues: >> read the full post November 11th, 2012 I gave an interview recently about nicotine and tobacco harm reduction – you can read it here. But it’s nothing like as good as Gerry Stimson, one the of the greats of public health, explaining it here on YouTube. It is a great blend of genuine concern for health, scientific insight and respect for individual choices all embedded in real world understanding of behaviour. He calmly explains how smokeless tobacco or e-cigarettes work as low risk alternatives to smoking cigarettes and why this is a crucial public health strategy. September 19th, 2012
May 22nd, 2012
But surely banning any type of tobacco can only reduce the size of the overall tobacco market and therefore be good for health? No, not at all, it just isn’t that simple… This post gives my personal take on this important public health issue. The reason for allowing it on the market is that smokeless tobacco is an effective substitute for smoking, but far less hazardous to health than cigarettes. The chart to the left puts it quite well. It models the effect on life expectancy of switching from smoking to a type of smokeless tobacco (‘snus’ or Swedish oral snuff) at a given age. These are dramatic findings. Given the addictiveness of nicotine and how difficult some smokers find quitting even if they really want to, banning this option amounts to death by regulation. What has gone wrong? >> read the full post December 20th, 2007
The Sudan programme has had a fantastic start through a two-year project to create a Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment for Sudan, which was published this year and is one of the best surveys of the challenges of a developing country environment you will find anywhere – a tribute to the energy and drive of Andrew Morton, who led the effort. The assessment develops some 85 recommendations, and our job here is to make as much of that happen as we can. >> read the full post November 15th, 2007
I don’t want to do a full scale critique of biofuels – not least because that would be to enter an already crowded field [see Biofuelwatch and Global Subsidies Initiative, for example]. But it’s worth looking at how narrowly-focussed, bottom-up policy-making now means we have somehow put the most financial support into the worst ideas… >> read the full post November 4th, 2007
I think you might rapidly develop a hog’s appetite for wild risk taking. And that is, in essence, what is wrong about the financial markets – the incentives of individual traders and managers are not aligned with the interests of those whose money they manage. >> read the full post November 1st, 2007
Way past bedtime on 17th December 2005, frazzled European leaders decided how to spend just under one trillion Euro. They set the EU’s budget framework from 2007 to 2013 – and committed €947 billion or just over 1% of EU GDP over the period. The chart shows the breakdown of the 2007 budget by major theme – dominated as ever by agricultural subsidies and ‘regional’ policy or what is now known as ‘cohesion’ policy (spending in poorer regions of the EU, supposedly to bring them closer to the EU average). >> read the full post October 25th, 2007
October 19th, 2007
The real situation, at least as I see it, is as follows: >> read the full post October 9th, 2007
Sometimes you can be wading through a report and hit something that abruptly tells you it isn’t really worth reading on: the report is mad and you are wasting your time. And so it happened when reading through the SDC report Tidal Power in the UK, and coming across Table 33 on page 119 – see left. >> read the full post |
|
||||
|
Copyright © 2013 The counterfactual - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
|||||
On 30 November, the draft EU Tobacco Products Directive was circulated for inter-service consultation (ie. sent round all other Directorates General in the European Commission). Its contents are not yet public, but it is widely thought to maintain the ban on snus and to impose strict restrictions or even bans on reduced risk non-combustible tobacco products, e-cigarettes and novel electronic nicotine devices. I cannot sufficiently stress how wrong and harmful that would be, given the role these products play as alternatives to smoking. I remain ever hopeful that good science, ethics and law (and common sense) will eventually prevail. To that end, I have written to the new Commissioner, Dr Tonio Borg, to suggest he makes five changes to the Commission’s approach. Here’s the letter: 
Campaigning by so-called health groups to ban much less hazardous alternatives to smoking is dangerous, unethical, lazy with facts and utterly without regard for the people they are supposedly trying to help – see my detailed post 
