“We’re very lucky in this country
to have a health department and a
government that really understands
vaping and gets behind it as
part of their smoking cessation
programme”
The chair of The Science and Technology Committee has said
“e-cigarettes could be a key weapon in the NHS’s stop-smoking
arsenal.” A recently published report from the committee urged
the government to relax vaping regulations to encourage more
smokers to switch to e-cigarettes.
The committee received more than one hundred pieces of written
evidence and heard from 25 witnesses over a four-month period
this year.
The final report reinforces the message that smokers who are unable
to quit altogether would be much better off using a reduced-risk
product than continuing to smoke.
According to the cross-party committee, TRPR regulations on tank
size and nicotine strength could be putting smokers off vaping and
were arbitrary measures that do “not appear to be founded on
scientific evidence.”
The committee also stated that bans on advertising and medical
claims about e-cigarettes could mean that smokers are not getting
the message that vaping is safer than smoking.
Among their recommendations, the committee suggested that
leaflets recommending that smokers switch to vaping be inserted
into cigarette packets. Tobacco product inserts were outlawed by
the government in 2016.
The TRPR remains a frustrating battleground between the industry
and the government. The committee called on the government to
“shift to a more risk-proportionate regulatory environment” reflective
of the relative harms of nicotine products post-Brexit, the goal
being to encourage positive behaviours such as acceptance of
e-cigarettes and reduction in tobacco use.
While the public and the government have been largely receptive
to vaping, the report highlighted the misperceptions that continue
to dissuade many of the UK’s remaining nine million smokers
from embracing e-cigarettes.
Many people erroneously believe that vaping falls within the remit of
the smoking ban. Instead of treating vaping the same as smoking,
the committee argued that there should be a dialogue to help
inform more appropriate evidence-based rules than those fuelled
by misperceptions about the supposed harms of passive vaping.
Norman Lamb, chairman of the parliamentary committee, said:
“Current policy and regulations do not sufficiently reflect this and
businesses, transport providers and public places should stop
viewing conventional and e-cigarettes as one and the same. There
is no public health rationale for doing so.”
The report also dismissed claims that e-cigarettes and e-liquid
flavours are creating a gateway to smoking and encouraging
young people to use nicotine products.
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