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November 26th, 2019
I did a Twitter chat with the Campaign for Safer Alternatives on the typical objections raised to tobacco harm reduction. For those interested in the responses but who missed the live chat or got as confused as I did in trying to follow threaded answers, here is the chat as it unfolded over 15 questions with everything in the right order. November 4th, 2019  The secret weapon against smoking – facing an existential threat from zealous regulators Read, share or print this post as a formatted PDF. American vapers and vaping businesses will shortly enter a period of chaos and existentially threatening regulation. First will be a ban on almost all flavours – everything except tobacco flavour and possibly menthol and mint. That is likely to shut down nearly every vape shop and e-liquid company that isn’t part of a tobacco company. Then by 12 May next year, any surviving vaping companies and will have to comply with the hugely burdensome, opaque and unpredictable pre-market tobacco application process. Going into 2020, the industry will be in crisis and vapers and smokers will be in danger of losing one of the most important innovations of the century. This post focuses on the first of these – the ban on flavours. Here are twenty things you should know about the US vaping flavour ban. October 7th, 2019
I have been pleased to collaborate with ASH (New Zealand) – Action for Smokefree 2025 – on a report on how vaping and other low-risk technologies could help get New Zealand back on track to meet its high profile target to have less than 5% smoking by 2025. The report is called: A Surge Strategy for Smokefree Aotearoa 2025.
…and these are all available here on the ASH Zealand web site. Key features of wider interest include a focus on: (1) inequities (Māori smoking rates are over 30% and tax-driven policies add a further inequitable burden of harm to marginalised groups); (2) the concept of ‘risk-proportionate regulation’ as a framework to exploit the major opportunity while containing the relatively minor risks. I include below the main report executive summary (more detailed than the two-page summary above): >> read the full post September 9th, 2019 The enemies of innovation are on manoeuvres This week there will be a meeting of tobacco regulators under auspices of the FDA-funded WHO Global Tobacco Regulators’ Forum (GTRF) in the Netherlands and part of the preparation for FCTC COP-9, which will be held in 2020, also the Netherlands. Two leaked papers from WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO) suggest that WHO is building up to an attempt to treat reduced risk products no differently to cigarettes or with even greater hostility. August 29th, 2019  Abstinence-only or alternatives? I am proud to be a co-author of a commentary published today in The Lancet: Nicotine without smoke: fighting the tobacco epidemic with harm reduction (PDF) with Robert Beaglehole (lead author), Ruth Bonita and Ben Youdan. In a nutshell, we take issue with the anti-innovation stance of WHO and many groups working in public health:
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