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** 25 March 2024
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** UK
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** Civil servant in charge of vaping policy met with e-cigarette giant (#2)
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** Jordan North: How safe is vaping for my health? (#6)
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** ‘The cost of dealing with disease is growing all the time’: why experts think sugar taxes should be far higher (#7)
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** UK
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** Civil servant in charge of vaping policy met with e-cigarette giant

A public health official responsible for tobacco and vaping policy met with the e-cigarette company Juul and provided information on UK policy ahead of the company launching its vapes in the UK, new documents reveal.

Martin Dockrell, tobacco control programme lead at England’s public health body, met Juul’s co-founder and two other company executives in private while attending a nicotine conference in Warsaw, Poland in 2017.

Public Health England kept no record of the dinner, which came at a time when Juul products were driving a youth vaping in the United States, but details have emerged in a documents released as part of a multi-million dollar US settlement over youth marketing claims.

In internal emails, one Juul executive subsequently recounted to colleagues that Dockrell and the head of a leading anti-smoking charity who also attended the “excellent” dinner had been “very, very supportive of launching Juul in UK/EU” and had offered advice on UK market regulation.

Other emails show Dockrell was due to meet a consultant working for Juul for a drink while in Brussels in late 2017 and in 2019 he was included in a list of “current allies” produced by the e-cigarette company, The Times and investigative global health website The Examination can reveal.

Dockrell, who took up his role at Public Health England (PHE) in 2010, has been an influential figure in shaping the UK’s pro-vaping approach. This stance, which has aimed to encourage smokers to switch to safer alternatives like e-cigarettes, has been criticised for contributing to an increase in youth vaping in the UK which started around 2021.

During the dinner in June 2017, Dockrell and Deborah Arnott, who heads the public health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), reportedly told Juul that the UK’s medicine regulator and PHE would be supportive of the company launching in the UK as “they want to see an attractive switching product made by a non-big tobacco company”, according to Juul emails.
Arnott said she and Dockrell had paid for their own meals and disputed Juul’s characterisation of the meeting, saying it was a “misleading account of a discussion about the UK regulatory framework for e-cigarettes”.

She said the charity occasionally “met with industry both to gather intelligence and to inform the delivery of more effective regulation and tobacco control measures” and denied it was inappropriate.

Dockrell declined to comment but the Department of Health and Social Care said he did not provide any advice to Juul that was not publicly available.

Source: The Times, 23 March 2024

Editorial Note: These are the quotes provided to The Times in full

Professor Nick Hopkinson, Chair of ASH said “This is a non-story, based on an unreliable industry report, which raises no issues of probity or conflict of interest.”

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of ASH, said, “Juul executives have given a misleading account of a discussion about the UK regulatory framework for e-cigarettes they had with Martin Dockrell and myself in 2017, just as documents confirm they did for a similar discussion with Health Canada around the same time. ASH has been at the forefront of tobacco control for more than 50 years and has never accepted commercial funding, nor acted to help companies with their commercial interests. It is the case, that in pursuit of our objectives to protect and improve public health we have, on occasion, met with industry both to gather intelligence and to inform the delivery of more effective regulation and tobacco control measures.”

See also: Use of e-cigarettes among young people in Great Britain ([link removed] )
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** Jordan North: How safe is vaping for my health?

Presenter and podcaster Jordan North started vaping to try to give up cigarettes. He found himself reliant on both - and wasn't happy. Confused by conflicting reports about the potential harms of vaping, he has been looking at the evidence himself for a BBC Three documentary.

North says he started smoking when he was just 16, after many failed attempts to quit, North says vaping really helped him cut down on cigarettes. However, he soon found himself to be addicted to vaping.

The number of people vaping in the UK has tripled in 10 years, according to Action on Smoking and Health with health experts promoting them as a quitting aid with fewer toxins than in cigarettes.

North visits Dr Stephen Childs during the documentary to learn more about the components of vapes. Dr Childs tells North that e-liquid contains nicotine, which is the addictive substance, alongside a small amount of other chemicals used for flavour.

Many of those chemical flavour enhancers are used in food but there is some concern around the impact of inhaling them.

North also grapples with the scale of the illegal vape market in the UK, with illicit vapes comprising up to a third of all vapes on sale according to Trading Standards. North states that “when we visited shops selling vapes and looked online, we found examples of” illicit vapes containing 10 times the legal level of nicotine.

He also highlights a recent sample of 24 illicit vapes tested by the Inter Scientific laboratory in Liverpool, nearly a third of which contained lead and “almost 90% of the samples contained high levels of nickel.”

In January, the UK government said it was going to ban disposable vapes in order to tackle a rise in youth vaping. It also said it would give Trading Standards the power to issue fines on the spot for people found selling the illegal products.

In January, the UK government said it was going to ban disposable vapes in order to tackle a rise in youth vaping. It also said it would give Trading Standards the power to issue fines on the spot for people found selling the illegal products.

However, North is considers that we don’t just need to ban disposables “we also need to get the dodgy ones off the street”.
North concludes that there is still “unknowns” with vapes, even if they are better for your health than cigarettes.

Source: BBC News, 23 March 2024 See also: Nicotine vaping in England: 2022 evidence update ([link removed]) and ASH Addressing common myths about vaping: Putting the evidence in context ([link removed]) and Use of e-cigarettes among adults in Great Britain ([link removed])
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** ‘The cost of dealing with disease is growing all the time’: why experts think sugar taxes should be far higher

Sugar Taxes have now been introduced in 108 countries, including the UK who introduced a levy on sugar sweetened soft drinks in 2018. However there is a sense that their full potential has not been reached.

In December, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report saying that in some cases tax levels are relatively low in most countries and not optimised to achieve public health goals such as incentivising people to choose healthier alternatives by subsidising the cost. As an example, the report found that 46% of countries that impose sugar taxes on soft drinks also place taxes on bottled water.

The lack of a strategy for directly funnelling money from sugar taxes into promoting healthy foods, drinks and lifestyle choices remains one of the biggest criticisms of existing sugar taxes around the world.

Laura Cornelsen, associate professor in public health economics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says that there is no way to hold the UK government accountable for the pledges made when the sugar tax was first introduced.

“It is not great that there is no information on what the money collected from the levy has been used for, despite the government’s initial promises to allocate all of it to provision of sport and breakfast clubs in schools,” she says.

While taxes have initially been focused on soft drinks – because sugar consumed in this way has a far more direct impact on blood sugar levels and the risk of disease – polls taken around the world have indicated public support for expanding their scope to cover a broader range of unhealthy foods. In February, surveys taken for the Times health commission found that 53% of respondents backed extending it to foods high in salt.

Models have also predicted that higher sugar taxes could yield enormous economic benefits for governments worldwide. Raising prices on sugary drinks by up to 50% could generate revenues of $1.4tn (£1.1tn) over the course of half a century.

Amid the continuing cost of living crisis, Cornelsen says there is a reluctance by UK policymakers to contemplate anything that would push food prices higher, although she backs recommendations published in the national food strategy.

But ultimately, food taxes alone will not be a panacea in the fight against rising rates of obesity and chronic illnesses. Cornelsen says that there is also a need for restrictions on the advertising and promotion of unhealthy foods, simpler and more effective food labels and, most importantly, making healthier alternatives more affordable for lower-income families. She also argues that there is a need for a clearer labelling of the quantities of ingredients such as artificial sweeteners, which have come under the spotlight in the past couple of years because of concerns that they may be having an impact on our health.

Source: The Guardian, 24 March 2024

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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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