Author: Bill Tarling

“The Aotearoa Vapers Community Advocacy (AVCA) will challenge Parliament’s Health Select Committee tomorrow morning, saying the Government’s vaping bill in its current form runs the risk of protecting Big Tobacco. Director of AVCA, Nancy Loucas, says the submission highlights some glaring omissions that prevent the bill from being comprehensive and risk proportionate. It also warns that vaping must be regulated differently to smoking, given it’s considerably safer and effective in helping smokers quit tobacco.”

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Vaping Bill Could Create More Community Harm

“The coronavirus isn’t just an excuse to implement bad policies with little or no debate. Officials can also use the situation to abandon good reforms. They do both in New York’s new $117 billion budget, which Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed in the middle of the state’s continued COVID-19 disaster. (599 New Yorkers died Sunday, bringing the state’s death toll of 4,159.) The budget implements a number of bad regulations while abandoning or scaling back some good ones. And the whole budget was hammered out behind closed doors and passed with very little discussion or debate. So: more rules telling New Yorkers what they can and cannot do (with a heavy emphasis on “cannot”), an unwillingness to trim even the lowest hanging fruit off the drug-war tree, and an unwillingness to introduce some transparency in police conduct, even as the state pushes another product—flavored vapes—into the black market, which will almost certainly lead to more arrests. They packed quite a lot into that budget.”

BILL TARLING – If the legislators weren’t on hand to cast a “NO” vote, their vote was automatically counted as if they voted in favor of passing the disastrous and corrupt budget bill

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New York’s New Budget: No Legal Weed, No Fracking, No Flavored Vapes, No Police Transparency. But You Get E-scooters!

“Last year’s vaping ‘epidemic’ now looks like a rinky-dink panic from a different age, but those who orchestrated it are not letting go. There is zero evidence that vapers are at greater risk of catching coronavirus and no reason to think they are more likely to die from it. Nevertheless, when asked about relatively high rates of COVID-19 among young Americans, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told a television audience that ‘it could be because we know we have a higher proportion of people in the United States and also in Italy who vape.’ Turning this baseless speculation into implicit fact, he added that ‘we don’t know if that’s the only cause.’”

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Beware the COVID-19 nannies!

“BBC’s Healthcheck UK Live follows bartender ‘Ace’, a smoker, as he successfully uses vaping to improve his health and reduce his tobacco-related harm. Along the way we meet Dr Nick Hopkinson from the British Lung Foundation, who issues some no-nonsense facts about vaping. Patches made him dizzy, gum tasted foul, so every quit attempt ended in failure. Following a health check by Dr Nick, Ace is “100% there” to starting his next quit attempt. With box mod in hand, Ace compiled a video diary to cover the ensuing weeks. Ace reported feeling a lot more energetic, he’s taken up running and feels much better. He’s been halving his nicotine content of his liquids and is looking forward to stopping using nicotine altogether. Yet again, vaping proves its worth as a tobacco harm reduction and smoking cessation tool.”

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Healthcheck UK Live

“Dr Caitlin Notley, a harm reduction expert University of East Anglia (UEA), has issued advice to smokers attempting to quit during the COVID-19 lockdown. She says, “It’s more important than ever for smokers to quit, and ex-smokers to remain smoke free.” Dr Notley leads the Addiction Research Group at UEA’s Norwich Medical School and researches tobacco smoking cessation and electronic cigarette use. She also leads a Neonatal unit Smoking Cessation intervention development study. She says that ex-smokers should resist the urge to relapse, given the likely higher COVID-19 risks for smokers, adding that those who have switched to vaping should not return to smoking. Dr Notley thinks that those who still smoke should be encouraged to switch to vaping.”

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Choose Vape

“Months after numerous states reactively banned or overly regulated e-cigarettes, researchers at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy conducted a study and concluded that vaping offers significant health advantages over smokable tobacco, and that bans are an inappropriate response to a limited problem at the expense of society at large. A commonly proposed solution: a prohibition on vaping products to head off an industry in its infancy. But as the Baker Institute study makes clear, that’s a misguided plan. Just 15 percent of e-cig users of all ages never smoked cigarettes before, which means that for 85 percent of vapers, e-cigs act as a substitute for cigarettes. Given these complexities, a total ban on vaping is a rather poorly targeted measure to prevent nonsmokers from using e-cigs. Moreover, it comes at the expense of the majority of vapers who seek to improve their health by reducing or quitting smoking.”

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Vaping Bans Are Bad for Public Health

“Smoking cessation counselling alone might not serve the purpose, but with an additional intake of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes can help people quit smoking more successfully, as per a new study. In the clinical trial presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session Together with World Congress of Cardiology (ACC.20/WCC), researchers, however, cautioned, that the health effects of e-cigarettes are unknown, and they should not be used for any purpose other than smoking cessation. Overall, those using nicotine-containing e-cigarettes were 2.4 times more likely to quit than those who did not vape at all.”

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Intake of e-cigarettes with smoking cessation helps to quit faster

“Altria Group Inc. pulled out of the e-cigarette market in the fall of 2018 because of a secret deal with rival Juul Labs Inc. — not because of the public-health concerns it cited publicly at the time, according to antitrust officials. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission revealed the agreement between the two companies in an antitrust complaint made public Friday. Juul’s “executives made clear their position that Altria could not remain a competitor in the relevant market if there was to be a deal,” according to the complaint. During negotiations, Juul insisted, “and Altria recognized, that Altria’s exit from the e-cigarette market was a non-negotiable condition for any deal.””

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Altria quit e-cigarette market in secret deal with Juul, antitrust officials say

“The state budget approved overnight Thursday was crafted against the backdrop of a pandemic and economic crisis. The final budget bans flavored and menthol e-cigarettes. Sen. Brad Hoylman, D-Manhattan, was also a sponsor of the flavored vaping products ban, which Cuomo had attempted to implement through an executive order late last year. The directive never went into effect as it faced a court challenge from the vaping industry. Hoylman said the pandemic offered an “impetus” to address the youth vaping crisis, as COVID-19 is a respiratory illness.”

NOTE: There has been no direct scientific correlation between e-liquid vapor products and COVID-19

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Paid sick leave, flavored e-cig ban, bail changes in state budget

“Ahead of a global meet in November 2020, vapers in India have written a letter to the Union Ministers asking to revise the government’s position on smoke-free nicotine products such as electronic cigarettes and snus. The Association of Vapers India (AVI) asked them to revise the government’s position on electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) ahead of the ninth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP9) to the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO-FCTC) which will be held in The Hague, Netherlands. Every member country of WHO, including India, has been asked to submit a summary of its position on ENDS. AVI said that while the Indian government has already taken a position on ENDS by banning their sale through an ordinance and then passing a law in the Parliament last year, personal use and consumption is not prohibited.”

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Vapers ask Centre to revise position on E-cigarettes