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Smoking and vaping crackdown consultation launched as Rishi Sunak pledges 'smoke-free generation'
Plans to crack down on teen vaping and create a "smoke-free generation" are due to be laid out in a government consultation published today.
Among the proposals that will be consulted on include making it an offence for anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 to be sold tobacco products and restricting the flavours and appearance of vapes to make them less attractive to children.
Restricting sales of disposable vapes and possibly increasing their price will also be considered, as will the introduction of new powers for councils to hand out on-the-spot fines to those who are selling vapes to under-18s.
The government wants any changes to not hamper efforts to encourage adult smokers to switch from smoking to vapes.
The UK-wide consultation, which is open for eight weeks, comes just days after Rishi Sunak pledged to raise the legal age for buying cigarettes in England by one year every year in his speech to Tory Party conference in Manchester.
Smoking causes around one in four cancer deaths and 64,000 in England alone, costing the economy and wider society £17bn each year.
Selling vapes to children is already illegal, but recent statistics show that cheap, colourful and sweet-flavoured vapes are targeted at youngsters.
Mr Sunak said he was "wasting no time to deliver on that promise" of creating a smoke-free generation.
England's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said that while vaping was less dangerous than smoking, it "still has risks and can cause addiction".
"Vaping can be useful for smokers to quit, but should not be marketed to non-smokers and marketing them to children is utterly unacceptable," he said.
He said the changes will be subject to a vote in parliament but this will be a free vote, as was the ban on smoking in public places and raising the smoking age to 18.
Source: Sky News, 12 October 2023
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Wes Streeting: Children born under Labour ‘will be healthiest ever’
The Labour Party will make children born today “the healthiest generation that ever lived”, the shadow health secretary has pledged.
Promising reform that would “turn the NHS on its head”, Wes Streeting said the health service could “once again be the envy of the world”.
Speaking at the party conference in Liverpool, he said care would move from hospital to community, systems from analogue to digital and attitudes from only treating sickness to prevention.
Streeting reiterated a series of commitments aimed at improving children’s health, including mental health services in schools, breakfast clubs to offer nutritious food and a supervised teeth-brushing programme for the youngest pupils, as well as action on vaping.
He said: “To those in the vaping industry who have sought to addict a generation of children to nicotine with flavours like rainbow burst and cotton candy ice, you have been warned — a Labour government will come down on you like a ton of bricks.”
Labour has said it will encourage its MPs to push through government plans to eventually ban smoking, gradually increasing the age at which cigarettes can legally be bought so nobody born after 2009 will be able to do so.
He said: “At the heart of [Keir Starmer’s] mission-driven approach is this idea: transformation of the National Health Service must go hand in hand with a transformation of the health of the nation.
“A child born in Britain today should live to see the 22nd century. I want them to be part of the healthiest generation that ever lived. That’s Labour’s ambition for children.”
Source: The Times, 11 October 2023
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Steve Barclay ‘alarmed’ at threefold rise in vaping among children
The health secretary has expressed alarm at the number of children who vape tripling in three years, as ministers took the first step towards banning candy-coloured disposable versions of the product.
Steve Barclay said he was concerned “as a dad” by e-cigarettes being marketed like sweets.
While Barclay said vaping was better than smoking, he added: “For people that don’t smoke, they shouldn’t be vaping.”
Consultation has been launched on plans to crack down on youth vaping and ban smoking altogether, to create the first “smoke-free generation”.
Barclay said that “It’s important we get the policy right, because actually vaping does have a role to play, particularly for adults that smoke. Vaping is better than smoking. But for people that don’t smoke, they shouldn’t be vaping.” He added “the marketing with bubblegum, the marketing of vapes like it’s a sweet shop … has to stop”.
The move to raise the legal age people can buy cigarettes at would stop people becoming addicted to smoking and finding it harder to quit, said Barclay: “If we can stop people smoking in the first place – four-fifths of them starting before the age of 20 – then obviously, that has a huge impact in terms of preventable health…It’s the single biggest change we can make in terms of public health.”
The move to ban smoking already has the backing of health experts, Labour and other opposition parties, as well as the leaders of the devolved nations.
Several Tory MPs have signalled their opposition to the plan, including the former prime ministers Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.
Source: The Guardian, 12 October 2023
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Revealed: Pro-vaping Tory MP’s all-expenses paid trip to Big Tobacco summit
Rishi Sunak declared war on smoking at Tory conference last week. But while the prime minister was talking tough on tobacco, one of his own MPs had just returned from advocating for vaping at a major international conference funded by Big Tobacco, this newsletter can reveal.
Adam Afriyie told the audience at the Global Tobacco Nicotine Forum (GTNF) in Seoul last month that proponents of the “precautionary principle” in public health - such as advocates of curbs on vaping - were “sacrificing lives…on the altar of virtue signaling.”
The MP for Windsor - who was declared bankrupt in December - has often talked in the House of Commons about the benefits of vaping as a tool to quit smoking. He hit the headlines earlier this year when it was revealed that he had failed to declare that his wife owned shares in a vaping retailer - shares she still owns, according to Companies House filings.
Andy Rowell, investigators editor of the Tobacco Control Research Group at Bath University, said Afriyie had “questions to answer” about his appearance at the Global Tobacco Networking Forum, whose sponsors include Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco and e-cigarette maker Juul.
"Adam Afriyie’s constituents might well ask why he is flying halfway around the world to appear at a conference funded by the tobacco industry, full of tobacco industry lobbyists,” said Rowell.
Afriyie was not the only British conservative voice in Seoul. Mark Littlewood, outgoing director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, moderated a session on ‘reinforcing scientific research’. Also speaking at GTNF was Littlewood’s partner and former IEA staffer Angela Harbutt. Harbutt had previously run ‘Hands Off Our Packs’, a now defunct tobacco-industry funded astroturf campaign opposed to anti-smoking legislation.
This week the IEA newsletter heavily criticised Sunak for supposedly bowing to “the ‘public health’ mob” in moving to ban smoking. The IEA has previously received funding from British American Tobacco.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of health charity ASH, said that views of Afriyie and the IEA “do not represent the views of the public or the health community.”
Afriyie is vice chair of the all party parliamentary group (APPG) on vaping, which has been criticised for taking funding from the UK Vaping Industry Association, which has tobacco industry as members and on its board.
Source: Democracy for Sale, 12 October 2023
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Wales: Vapes should be prescription only, Mark Drakeford says
Vapes should only be available on prescription for people quitting smoking, Mark Drakeford has said. The first minister said he was "attracted" to Australia's policy of restricting the sale of vapes to pharmacies.
He has backed UK government plans that could see a ban on disposable vapes.
Medical experts had "significant differences" of opinion over whether they helped people quit tobacco, he added.
Mr Drakeford said: "In Australia for example the only way you can get an e-cigarette is by prescription. You can't buy them in shops. Only through a medical prescription as part of a supervised attempt to give up smoking are they available.
"And do you know, I would be attracted to that idea myself."
A failure to change the law in 2016 means the Senedd does not have the power to restrict the use of vapes.
At that time, when Mr Drakeford was health minister, the Welsh government wanted to ban vaping in enclosed places where children were likely to be present, but its plans were thwarted when it lost a vote in the Senedd.
Source: BBC News, 12 October 2023
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US: Illicit E-Cigarettes Flood Stores as F.D.A. Struggles to Combat Imports
Some vapes are appearing with increasing nicotine levels that approach those in a carton of cigarettes. U.S. regulators did not authorize them, but have failed to keep them off shelves.
The latest flood of illicit e-cigarettes is arriving from China in Barbiecore colors and fruit, ice cream and slushy flavors, and accounts for a major share of the estimated $5.5 billion e-cigarette market in the United States.
The F.D.A. “has been dealt a very difficult hand, and a lot of which includes putting the genie back — or stuffing the genie back — in the bottle,” said Erika Sward, assistant vice president of advocacy for the American Lung Association. “And I don’t envy them for that.”
And though the F.D.A. has fired off hundreds of warning letters, the effect is barely felt: Flavored vape sales have surged 60 percent over the past three years, to 18 million vaping products a month in June from 11 million a month in early 2020, according to the C.D.C. Foundation.
When the F.D.A. received expanded authority to regulate e-cigarettes in 2016, the objective was to draw a new line in public health: Smokers would have an alternative to traditional cigarettes, and tobacco use among minors would remain at historic lows.
Seven years on, nearly 40 percent of e-cigarette users are 25 or younger, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And of the 2,000 or so vaping and e-cigarette products on the market, the agency has only given the green light to about two dozen of them, and it still has to deal with a backlog of applications, according to research on the industry.
The lengthy, opaque approval process, marked with legal challenges and defiance of the F.D.A.’s decrees, has opened the door to the shape-shifting influx of unauthorized vapes that come by air, land and sea from factories in China (where flavored vapes are outlawed).
The confusing mix of product statuses has prompted the Energy Marketers of America, an organization representing retailers, including convenience stores linked to gas stations, to file a petition with the F.D.A. seeking clarity about which e-cigarettes the stores can legally sell.
Stores are “well positioned to aid in the fight against illegal and dangerous products by keeping them off their shelves,” according to the petition.
Source: The New York Times, 10 October 2023
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ASH Daily News is a digest of published news on smoking-related topics. ASH is not responsible for the content of external websites. ASH does not necessarily endorse the material contained in this bulletin.
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