Imagine the outcome if your local park football team took on Real Madrid. This is equivalent to the challenge faced by tobacco harm reduction consumer activists trying to take on the well-funded and well-organised global cartel opposing the use of safer nicotine products. Consumers are shut out of the international debate and denied a seat at the table while their lived experiences are ignored or dismissed as utterances in the service of Big Tobacco.
The same problem is faced by experienced and credible THR researchers trying to find a home for their papers in mainstream academic journals. Papers are rejected on vague and spurious grounds related to links to the tobacco industry. The only criteria should be – does the research stand up to scrutiny?
There is a welter of global evidence demonstrating that the switch away from smoking both improves and even saves lives. But this evidence rarely if ever gets any headline attention. In the context of the dramatic rise in sales of vinyl, the media narrative of the teen vaping epidemic plays out like a stuck record.
So it is gratifying to see the publication of a ground-breaking paper, which, for the first time, looks at the health of those who vape without any established history of regular smoking. Previous research has faced the problem of co-founding factors where smoking still potentially impacts on the health of those who vape even after they have stopped smoking. Some infamous research has tried to claim harmful effects of vaping in those who had, it was later revealed, suffered ill-health while still smoking.
The research team for this new study is based at the Italian Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction (CoEHAR). The team divided the cohort into two groups, one group who regularly vape and a control group who have never used any nicotine or tobacco products.
The headline finding was that the difference in respiratory health (including respiratory symptoms such as coughing or shortness of breath) between vapers and a non-vaping control group was “below the threshold of clinical significance”.
But more generally, the main points are that this is the first study to be conceived and led by nicotine consumers, who, in a nice touch, are given lead author status. And equally important, the first such paper to be published in one of the journals of Nature no less.
There is still a battle to be fought within academic circles of confirmation bias against the benefits of THR and the hidden conflicts of interest where medical and public health organisation funders have a history of promoting an anti-THR agenda. However, hopefully, the approach by Nature might help bring more of the lived experience of using safer nicotine products backed by evidence-based science into the light.