A final way the tobacco industry is dodging the rules is with e-cigarettes, or “vapes.” Using marketing that illegally targets children, they peddle vapes as a “safer” way to smoke. This tactic has proved alarmingly successful.
SMA condemn the tobacco companies for claiming that vapes are safer, but don’t discuss whether this key claim is actually true. Yet as far as I can see it clearly is true. There is debate about exactly how much safer they are—e.g. how convincing we should find the NHS claim that vapes are 95% safer—but I haven’t seen any credible argument that vapes aren’t safer at all. It’s not ‘dodging’ safety rules to release a considerably safer product.
Further, I think vapes are also pretty good evidence again SMA’s defense of paternalism. If smoking cigarettes wasn’t really a choice, why has the availability of vapes and pouches been associated with a decline in cigarettes? The most natural explanation here is that previously people choose to smoke cigarettes, and then a superior product came along, so people started choosing that instead.
SMA condemn the tobacco companies for claiming that vapes are safer, but don’t discuss whether this key claim is actually true. Yet as far as I can see it clearly is true. There is debate about exactly how much safer they are—e.g. how convincing we should find the NHS claim that vapes are 95% safer—but I haven’t seen any credible argument that vapes aren’t safer at all. It’s not ‘dodging’ safety rules to release a considerably safer product.
Further, I think vapes are also pretty good evidence again SMA’s defense of paternalism. If smoking cigarettes wasn’t really a choice, why has the availability of vapes and pouches been associated with a decline in cigarettes? The most natural explanation here is that previously people choose to smoke cigarettes, and then a superior product came along, so people started choosing that instead.
I also found their neglect to mention to mention smokeless products strange. In Norway and Sweden, for example, snus has been replacing cigarettes.