2018/01

I noticed this piece in The Conversation yesterday (it also popped up on another, unrelated news site), and unlike the usual vaping related articles, it wasn’t penned by the illustrious Simon Chapman.

Of course, just because it wasn’t written by Chapman doesn’t mean it’s going to be a positive article. After all, The Conversation is his own playground.

I’ve written about regulations and standards before, and my views haven’t changed. The BSI PAS was in response to the TPD and thus had to operate within the confines of that Directive, which as we know is very limiting in what can and can’t be done. From regulation flows bad standards. From good standards flows good regulation. The downside is good standards can (and do) take years to put in place.

Leaving aside the fact that I haven’t posted for a while (almost two months), it isn’t particularly surprising to find that a) the media are at it again, and b) tobacco control researchers are at it again.

We have seen this kind of study before, at around the same time of the year, where some ‘research’ makes some claim about how e-cigarettes are “worse than originally thought”. We’ve recently seen a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) in the US which largely mirrors the findings from the UK’s Royal College of Physicians; I do plan to go over that at some point - time permitting.