General

Saturday night was a night of glitz, glamour and awards. It also sparked a lot of media attention. Not for who won awards particularly, although there was some coverage on that, but for seemingly everyone’s favourite celebrity vaper. Leonardo DiCaprio. This in itself isn’t the root of the hypocrisy, oh no.

That all comes in the media backlash towards Mr DiCaprio and his ‘deeply troubling’ lifestyle choice.

Apparently a few folks over at the American Lung Ass’n are a bit miffed at the idea of a high-profile celeb not smoking.

You will of course remember the slew of scary sounding headlines between Christmas and the New Year, each one blindly repeating the same headline and the contents of a press release of a terrible study without any regard whether or not the press release relates to the study in any way shape or form.

I picked apart the press release and study the day after it appeared on the Eureka Alert site, as did Fergus Mason. Adam Jacobs (The Stats Guy) also pulled it apart and called it Dangerous Nonsense and rightly so. Linda Bauld with some help from Suzi Gage published a rebuttal in The Guardian, which didn’t get anywhere near the coverage that the original article received of course.

It doesn’t take much to spark some errant thinking and lengthy discussions. In this instance it was the release of the final quarter statistics of 2015 from the Smoking Toolkit Study which is of course performed by Professor Robert West. This survey is used, along with other evidence, to inform those that need to know how many folks are smoking, whether or not they quit smoking and how they quit.

If you are a regular Twitter or Facebook user you would have come across the latest shenanigans from the Chicago Department of Health that was launched amid much fanfare by none other than the Mayor himself. The VapingTruth campaign designed to increase youth awareness.

So what do we have here then? A “public education campaign” to increase youth awareness (The Children™) on the public health risks of e-cigarettes. Oh there’s a surprise. An education campaign to increase awareness on the “risks” of e-cigs.

There is an unfortunate conflict in the realms of public health, tobacco control and the vaping community. All sides effectively want the same thing, to an extent or so they say. Public health would like the general public to be as healthy as possible, and where necessary follow the rules they think are best for all of us. Tobacco control are so ingrained in their “fight” against ‘Big Tobacco’ that anything that vaguely resembles tobacco or smoking must be stopped at any cost. While us vapers just really want to be left alone to enjoy our choice.

At least, in Canada it is. You will of course remember Bill 45, curiously entitled “Making Healthier Choices Act” which effectively makes it illegal to use/sell or display e-cigarettes; curiously when I first read Bill 45, I immediately thought “this is the TPD on fucking steroids”. I was, in fact completely fucking wrong.

You see, the Minister for Public Health, one Lucie Charlebois, has taken an extreme Drakeford-like approach to the “epidemic” of e-cigarettes with the introduction of her Bill 44. This Bill is supposed to “strengthen” the Tobacco Act of 2005 and is designed to “greatly help to reduce smoking rates in the province”.

If there’s one constant in this multiverse it is the incessant need for folk to have to blame someone else for their stupidity. In some (rare) cases, it is actually the fault of the product either through some kind of wacky early-life failure or through some product design flaw. Sadly, the majority of these kinds of cases is simply down to Darwinism. I mean, a classic case of this is, of course, the McDonald’s Coffee Case…

As many of you will no doubt be aware, the UK implementation of the Tobacco Products Directive is coming whether we like it or not. September 3rd saw the closure of the official public consultation on the majority of the implementation regulations. Today saw the publication of additional ‘guidance’ under Article 20 section 5. Specifically all about the advertising portion of Article 20.

Article 20(5) of the Tobacco Products Directive 2014/40/EC requires EU member states to introduce restrictions on the advertising of electronic cigarettes. In the UK, the proposed implementation will consist of changes to the Communications Act 2003, free-standing new regulations and changes by Ofcom (the communications regulator in the UK) to the BCAP Code and Broadcast Code.

It’s one of the hottest topics in public health right now. It’s divided scientists and researchers across the globe. It’s even divided the community on some aspects of it. Vaping. A consumer driven market that has enabled 2.6 million people (UK) to either reduce the harms of smoking or stop smoking full stop.

The question that rattles around in my head regularly is why is this topic so divisive and why are so many intent on heavily restricting it? To that end, I try to go back to basics, with a little help from some friends.

“Much has changed since we ran the inaugural Summit in 2013, when calls for medicinal licensing and outright bans on e-cigarettes were dominant”.

Reading that in the introduction and welcoming statement in the e-cigarette summit programme highlights, at least in the UK, just how far things have come. When you have the likes of Professor Ann McNeill, Professor Robert West, Professor Linda Bauld, Professor Marcus Munafò, Dr Konstantinos Farsalinos, Professor John Britton, Professor Peter Hajek, Professor Ricardo Polosa talking about e-cigarettes folk sit up and listen. The list of names that gave talks is far longer. Including Clive Bates, Louise Ross, Lorien Jollye, Sarah Jakes, Professor David Abrams, Oliver Kershaw, Andy Morrison, the Department of Health represented by Alette Addison, Public Health England by Rosanna O’Connor.