Panel: Putting Consumers First

Toward the end of the Putting Consumers First panel held during September’s Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum in Seoul, South Korea, Matt Drodge, research director at Walnut Unlimited, made the point that while nicotine consumers were all different, they all wanted to be able to make informed decisions about whether to continue smoking combustible cigarettes or when and how to make the transition to new nicotine products.

Of course, nicotine users can make such transitions only in countries where regulations allow them to do so, and the moderator of the panel, Nancy Loucas, public health policy expert and executive coordinator of the Coalition of Asia Pacific Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA), made the point that the panelists represented countries forming a continuum of nicotine regulation.

Panelist Samrat Chowdhery, former president of the International Network of Nicotine Consumer Organisations, told participants that he felt unhappy about representing India, a country that had put consumers last by effectively banning vapes. Chowdhery said this is a pity because India does not have a strong or widely used public health network, so prevention, including through the use of safer alternatives, is vital, as it is in other parts of the developing world where 80 percent of tobacco users live.

Fiona Patten, leader of the Reason Party and former member of the Legislative Council of Victoria, who was unable to attend the GTNF in person and instead recorded a video message, apologized for representing Australia, a country that she said is leading the way on what not to do around tobacco harm reduction. Patten said that Australia’s “so-called medical model” of regulation is so onerous that 99 percent of Australians who are looking for a safer way to consume nicotine are being forced onto the black market.

Alex Clark, CEO of the Consumer Advocates for Smoke-Free Alternatives Association, who also did not attend the event, but appeared via a live link, said the premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) system in the U.S. appears to consumers to be acting as a very tight bottleneck on the products they have access to; no flavored products have been authorized through the system, only variations of tobacco. Beyond the PMTA system, there was also concern that a methodical state-by-state, municipality-by-municipality effort to severely restrict the availability of lower risk products would continue. Clark said that while he hopes that in the future people will be able to find products they can trust, he questioned why there has to be a delay. What is needed now is to disseminate the idea that nicotine users are not just data on a spreadsheet and to get that message out, elevating it up the chain to the regulator.

Clarisse Yvette Virgino, a Philippines-based member of the CAPHRA, had a more positive tale to tell because a “wild journey” that had seemingly been headed toward prohibition had ended with regulation. The regulations were somewhat burdensome, however. Retailers had a lot of rules to comply with, and there was a problem when it came to consumer choice because manufacturers had withdrawn certain products, such as juices, rather than go through the process of complying with what were stringent requirements.