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2013-10-01 12:20:43
As regulators wrestle with e-smokes, the tobacco industry is changing fast
THE vapoteurs who gathered on a windy island in the Seine on September 19th
brandished e-cigarettes in one hand and flyers inciting the populace to defend
them in the other. On October 8th the European Parliament is to vote on a
proposal to regulate the devices as if they were medical products. Brice
Lepoutre, president of the Independent Association of Electronic-Cigarette
Users, is outraged. We are at the dawn of a revolution in the fight against
tobacco, he says. He will join like-minded Europeans in Strasbourg at a
demonstration against the proposal before the vote.
Smoking is falling in most rich countries, but vaping is rising. In Europe 7m
people are thought to be using e-cigarettes, which vaporise a solution
containing nicotine without the toxins from burning tobacco. Sales of e-cigs in
America may treble this year, according to figures from Bonnie Herzog of Wells
Fargo, a bank. She thinks their consumption could overtake that of ordinary
cigarettes in a decade. If regulators let them.
Health authorities worldwide are struggling to deal with this new way of
getting a nicotine kick. E-cigarettes are sold as leisure products and as such
are covered by safety and quality standards wherever these exist and are
implemented. But leaving them, like shoes or beds, to such catch-all rules
makes some regulators uneasy.
A growing pile of studies say they are far safer than normal cigarettes and at
least as good at getting people to quit smoking as nicotine patches and gum.
But they too are based on that addictive substance. Churned out by hundreds of
suppliers using materials from China and elsewhere, the quality and labelling
of e-cigarettes on sale are uneven.
One worry is that young people will be lured into a dependence on nicotine they
would otherwise have avoided though so far the numbers who had never smoked but
have become regular users of e-cigarettes seem minuscule. Another concern is
that smokers who might have quit their expensive and inconvenient habit will
carry on, switching to e-cigs in places where smoking is banned though some
studies suggest e-cigs do encourage them to smoke less tobacco. A third fear is
that these strangely trendy products will reglamorise smoking after years of
campaigns, tax increases and restrictions have relegated it to the doghouse.
One approach is simply to tighten manufacturing and product standards, or bring
in a specific set of rules rather like those governing cosmetics. But there are
other considerations. Electric smokes compete with cigarettes yet do not in
most places face the same restrictions, to say nothing of excise taxes. They
compete with smoking-cessation products yet do not usually have to secure prior
approval for products or make them to pharmaceutical standards. If they are
required to do either, their price will rise, variety will fall and the uptake
by consumers, who are overwhelmingly smokers, will be cut.
Health authorities used to smiting nicotine are broadly unkeen on e-cigarettes.
The World Health Organisation does not encourage them. America s Food and Drug
Administration is expected to propose restrictions in October. In 2009 it
claimed that e-cigarettes were unapproved medical products, but a court said
they should be regulated as tobacco products instead.
The staid tobacco industry is beginning to wonder if it is reaching a Kodak
moment , its version of the point at which the world s leading maker of camera
film realised that consumers had gone digital, and it was too late to chase
them.
To avoid that fate the tobacco firms are beginning to appropriate what Goldman
Sachs, an investment bank, has called one of the world s eight most disruptive
technologies. Most have taken stakes in e-cigarette companies or developed
their own products. They are working on other sorts of less-toxic offerings
too. Philip Morris International expects to market a device to heat rather than
burn tobacco by 2017. Next-generation products at British American Tobacco
include a nicotine-inhaler, for which it hopes to get regulatory approval in
Britain. Whichever way consumers and regulators jump, the tobacco giants
intend, unlike Kodak, to have a product to peddle.
Back in Strasbourg, the bars are buzzing as deals are struck on amendments to
be proposed by October 2nd. Fans of e-cigarettes hope to carve out an exemption
from medical regulation for those that do not claim therapeutic properties.
Most agree (including e-cigarette makers) that they should not be sold to
children, and that quality controls could be strengthened.
But these are details. The goal, according to Clive Bates, a former director of
Action on Smoking and Health, a British campaigning group, and a tireless
advocate of e-cigarettes, is not to lose the chance of millions of smokers
switching in whole or in part to a relatively benign alternative. The market
is producing, at no cost to the taxpayer, an emerging triumph of public health,
he says.