A newly published book has offered some serious arguments about benefits of vaping and the troubles of tobacco.
A newly published book, “E-Cigarettes and the Comparative Politics of Harm Reduction: History, Evidence and Policy”, has offered some serious arguments about benefits of vaping and the troubles of tobacco.
The book has made policymakers of health in India sit up and take notice, ostensibly because public health campaigners in India and some parts of the world have routinely used fear campaigns to highlight risks of e-cigarettes.
They have rarely attacked tobacco manufacturers. Such is the power of the campaign that in Australia, opposition to e-cigarettes has become something of a moral crusade against youth vaping and smoking.
“This was demonstrated, first, by the rapidity with which the EVALI outbreak in the US was used to brand e-cigarettes as dangerous products and, second, by the slowness to acknowledge the evidence that cannabis vaping had played a major role in the outbreak. What distinguished the fear-based campaigns against e-cigarettes from earlier efforts to reduce smoking was a willingness to claim harms—often related to behavioural and personality changes in youth who vaped—that arguably went well beyond the evidence,” says the book, edited by Virginia Berridge, Ronald Bayer, Amy L. Fairchild and Wayne Hall.
The book explains in detail how fears were raised in the UK by some tabloid newspapers at the time of EVALI. It was then described that EVALI is a serious medical condition in which a person’s lungs become damaged from substances contained in e-cigarettes and vaping products.
This led to a significant shift in UK public attitudes towards e-cigarettes after media reports of EVALI. However, public campaigns about e-cigarettes in the UK have not been based on fear. Indeed, public campaigns explicitly promoted e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to smoking and a tool for cessation. “This may in part be because of the Science Media Centre, which has called out some of the more dubious research claims about the risks of e-cigarettes that have been promoted by the tabloid media,” says the book.
The UK has had a long history in tobacco control of nominally outsider organisations working with the government while publicly maintaining an “outside/activist” role. ASH was one organisation that had its anti-tobacco origins in the 1970s when it worked closely with the Labour Minister of Health David Owen to introduce tobacco control policies. ASH had changed its policy stance by the early twenty-first century to encompass harm reduction within its tobacco endgame agenda. Nicotine was seen as playing an essential role in ending tobacco smoking in British society. Deborah Arnott, ASH’s chief executive, who was adept at coalition building, developed a cohesive group of prestigious institutions to support the concept of nicotine harm reduction well before e-cigarettes came on the scene. This was accomplished in parallel with her advocacy of a smoking ban in public places so that the connection between the two policy objectives were made plain. Vaper activists were important in Europe where they worked with MEPs to secure the defeat of a move to treat e-cigarettes as medicines, highlights the book.
Are Indian health ministry officials listening, following some of the global agenda to cut smoking? Consider the case in the UK, where activists were successful in bringing a “user” dimension to the discussion of policy and research on e-cigarettes. People who smoked had never figured in policy discussion at that level, apart from the emergent discussion of inequality and lone motherhood in the 1980s. But the policy role of the “user” had become prominent in the illicit drugs field and the smoking field followed suit in the 2000s. There were also links with stop smoking services, which had a strong pro-user ethos. In Australia, the State Cancer councils took over its advocacy role. Nigel Gray and Ron Borland, two leading anti-smoking advocates, were open to the use of e-cigarettes for tobacco harm reduction. There were no pro-vaping activists in Australia who were as well organised or as effective as those in the UK. Several small groups were established, but they did not prove sustainable with limited funding. “This left pro-free market groups with connections to the tobacco industry to make the case for a more liberal e-cigarette. This enabled these groups to be easily discredited and public health advocates to unfairly portray all advocates of e-cigarettes as astroturfed tobacco industry fronts,” the book adds.
The book explains in detail how tobacco harm reduction can never be achieved if scientific evidence is ignored to promote the sale of cigarettes, but ban on vaping and other heated products which have a lesser amount of tobacco. “It remains to be seen whether enough doctors will ignore the hostility to e-cigarettes within the organised medical profession and prescribe nicotine to smokers,” says the book.