Experts concerned with booming markets for illicit vaping products, call for stringent regulations to stop them
Speakers at the just-ended 7th Summit on Tobacco Reduction have expressed concern over the booming markets for illicit smoking and vaping products, fearing this will expose the youth to harm.
United Kingdom (UK)-based Louise Ross and Professor Marewa Glover of New Zealand challenged countries to come up with stronger regulations to stop them in order to reduce harm among users.
Ross and Glover further recommended the banning of disposables and strengthening regulations around the packaging and names of e-liquids, which could impact popular vapes used by adults.
Ross is a former nurse and care home manager. She created and launched the first vape-friendly stop smoking service in the world, in 2014, as part of her role as service lead for Leicester City’s Stop Smoking Service. She also works for the National Training Center for the smoke free app digital.
On the other hand, Glover is a leading tobacco control researcher in New Zealand. She has worked on reducing smoking-related harm for 31 years. She is recognized internationally for her advocacy on tobacco harm reduction; and locally was a Finalist in the New Zealander of the Year Supreme Award in 2019 recognising her contribution to reducing smoking in NZ. In 2018.
In her presentation, Ross observed said there is a huge problem of illicit market for smoking products in a number of countries, including Australia.
“The problem with an illicit market, of course, is that youth may access the illicit market. Don’t care about age restriction, they will sell to anybody, right? So we, we do have quite good proof coming from these countries have taken this approach of what will happen,” she said.
She also observed that there are higher smoking rates among the poor than the general population people who are using debt management services as well people in extreme poverty.
She said smoking has become the only area of flexibility in the way they manage their household budget. It is about a third of the price of smoking natural cigarettes that can release money for them to try more children.
“Smoking rates are much higher amongst populations. So these are a perfect way of having that conversation about switching any other senses where it’s gotten regularly. One of the biggest challenges is incorrect information about smoking,” she said.
But Ross complained that there is too much incorrect information on the dangers of smoking, adding that even healthcare professionals as well as nurses have wrong information about “popcorn lung”, a theoretical risk that has never been identified as a diagnosis of patients.
“People talk about swapping one addiction for another, the same nicotine that they’re using, especially between and it’s the smoke of things, not the nicotine. Many, many people assume that nicotine is the most harmful chemical in a vapor. It’s the smoke and the carbon monoxide people are fretting about so called Youth epidemic. But actually, you know, when you look at the figures, we see that most youth use is experimental, only the people, the young people who are using it, are often smoking otherwise, and certainly in England, around 80% of young people have neither smoked nor baked. So this talk of an epidemic really doesn’t help the adults people talk about those being unregulated,” she said.
Ross said it is against this background that the UK is currently going through what she termed as “a very, very stringent process of safety checks, quality checks and so on”.
“People assume sometimes it’s worse than smoke, but in fact, we know again, because of the absence of smoke in what you inhale from a vape, it is much, much safer. People talk as well about needing to stop vaping as soon as possible. In my clinical experience, we find that if people switch to vape and stop too soon, they may well go back to smoking. So I’d encourage people to think that, you know, keeping vaping, but maybe reducing the strength when they feel comfortable to do so is probably the way to go. Don’t rush to stop vaping, though, because that will likely trigger a return to smoking,” she recommended.
This notwithstanding, Ross commended the UK and US Governments for introducing and promoting tobacco harm reduction products, which she said are displacing smoking, citing heated tobacco products in the UK.
She said these heated tobacco products are regulated although advertising them is banned.
“So very few people know about those. The current government has just introduced a risk proportion of tax on the heated tobacco products. So the tax has now been reduced by 50% but no advertising. So people don’t know about that product. Mainly people know about flavour. And the USA is even showing a rapid drop in smoking. Youth in New Zealand and in the US are already below 5% very low smoking rates now, even though there’s a lot of measures to try and prevent youth from accessing vapes, the scientific evidence that tobacco harm reduction products are the predominant cause of this decline is becoming stronger and stronger,” said Ross.
But Ross observed that the prohibition slows the reduction of the smoking prevalence rate and thus will cause an unacceptable delay in the reduction of smoking related deaths.
On the other hand, Glover said New Zealand rolled out the smoking cessation campaign in 2000 as a measure of reducing the harm.
However, she expressed dissatisfaction with the number of people quitting.
“This is for 15 years and above and we were down to 6.8% daily smoking. You can see this drop off. So a decade ago, we were at 16.4% and this is averaging across the whole country,” said Glover.
But Glover expressed excitement with the declining disparity of adult and young smokers in New Zealand and other Asian countries.
She observed that in a society where both parents smoke, there is a much higher rate of initiation among their children too.
“So we’ve always had this disparity. But what we’ve seen here, if you look at 2019, 20 and onwards, is a rapid decline, and the likely life is showing the uptake of vaping among Māori. So definitely bringing that disparity down, reducing that disparity and this is the most rapid decline, the most effective intervention that has ever occurred to reduce Māori smoking rates. So I’m very happy about that. When I started 31 years ago, Māori smoking was at 50% men and women, 50% so New Zealand European were, a decade ago, sitting at just below 15%,” she said.
Glover attributed this reduction to the uptake of vaping. She said vaping is displacing smoking very effectively in New Zealand.
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