Stories

At least twice as many school pupils smoke cannabis as smoke tobacco. Cannabis is illegal, tobacco is legal. If legality meant anything, the figures should be the other way round. Smoking, like alcohol and narcotic drugs, is both enjoyable and harmful. The state’s job is to regulate the balance. Health education, together with nudge measures like banning smoking in public places, have cut tobacco consumption steadily since 2000. [...]

A recently announced plan by the United Kingdom to ban the sale of disposable vapes is among the latest efforts by countries to limit access to e-cigarettes to curb their use among children. In the U.S., electronic nicotine delivery systems have been a public health concern for years after their introduction into the market in 2007. Monthly e-cigarette sales in the country increased from 15.5 million units in 2020 to 22.7 million in 2022, according to a recent study cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they are the most common tobacco product used by young people.

A public consultation to help determine the future of vaping in Ireland has come to an end. The results aren’t yet known, but tobacco harm reduction advocates are nervous about the potential outcomes. The consultation, conducted by the Department of Health, began in November 2023 and ended on January 5. It asked the public to participate in a survey, picking from different measures to “decrease the appeal of nicotine inhaling products to young people, further denormalize smoking, and improve public health.”

PESHAWAR - Public Health Stakeholders of Khyber Pakh­tunkhwa on Monday called for unanimous and aggressive efforts to permanently ban the use and sale of e-cigarettes and vapes in the province for the best interest of public health and sustainable tobacco control. Blue Veins, a civil society organ­isation, conducted a public health stakeholder consultation to delib­erate on the interim ban by the KP government on vapes and e-ciga­rettes.

A former vaper worried about the impact on his long-term health has warned that the “barrier of entry” to vaping is currently too low as he welcomed the Government’s plans to ban disposable e-cigarettes. Disposable vapes are set to be barred after the Government announced on Monday new measures to tackle the number of young people taking up vaping. Expected to be introduced across the UK, the ban will also ensure manufacturers produce plain packaging and will change how vapes are displayed in shops, moving them out of children’s sight.

Now both snus, tobacco free snus (nicotine pouches) and ecigs are threatened by both the WHO and the EU. The Moderate party in government in Sweden and its Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson have always defended snus as a way to reduce tobacco harm. The Swedish Democrats, the Liberals, Christian Democrats and the Center Party agrees. We thus have a clear party majority in the Swedish Parliament for tobacco harm reduction. It is mainly thanks to the availability of snus, nicotine pouches, ecigs and heated tobacco that we have by far the lowest rate of daily smokers, 5.6% according to the Public Health Authority (2022) and by far the lowest rate of tobacco-related diseases in the EU. [...]

The World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Tenth Conference of the Parties will discuss next generation tobacco control policies, as the incoming New Zealand Government receives strong international condemnation for repealing recent tobacco control measures. In November, the Tenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP10) of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) was to occur in Panama. Significantly, COP10 marks two decades since the adoption of the WHO FCTC. Disappointingly, COP10 was delayed to February 2024 due to security concerns around (unrelated) large-scale protests in Panama City. [...]

Nicotine has suddenly found its way into the churn of America's never-ending culture wars. After Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for a federal probe into "Zyn" nicotine pouches last week, the GOP backlash was swift. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a "Zynsurrection." Other GOP lawmakers, outing themselves as Zyn users, urged Schumer to "come and take it." Among them was Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who told Business Insider that he took up the product "four or five years ago" as a safer alternative to the cancer-causing spitless tobacco he once used.

In their latest attack on personal freedom and individual liberty, progressive New York Sen. Chuck Schumer is hard at work pitting working-class Americans against the elite establishment with his attack on Zyn. Zyn is a popular tobacco-free nicotine product that’s widely used by the type of blue-collar men and women I was proud to represent for years in Congress. Zyn is dangerous, Schumer claims, because he believes it’s being aggressively marketed to kids via social media. To be clear, the legal age to use any tobacco and nicotine products, including Zyn, is 21. [...]

The UK government has decided it will ban disposable vapes and suggests it will ban vape flavours. This will trigger more smoking, more illicit trade and more workarounds. The problem of youth vaping is a non-problem and the government is reacting to a moral panic it doesn't understand. You may be aware that the UK government is in the process of caving in to a moral panic on vaping while taking pointless action on smoking.