Category: Harm Reduction

Bates: ‘Vaping Still Better Than Smoking’
Public Health England is sticking to its long-held conviction that vaping is a better alternative to smoking combustible cigarettes and that never-smokers should be encouraged not to smoke or vape.
Its sixth report on e-cigarettes, “Vaping in England: 2020 evidence update summary,” shows a decline in adults who view vaping as less harmful than smoking—from 45 percent in 2014 to 34 percent in 2019. The report also states that there has not been a major increase in youth vaping and that only 1 percent of youth never-smokers are current vapers.
Based on the report, PHE concluded that vapor products, both nicotine and non-nicotine products, should be regulated, but banning flavors would negatively affect adult smokers who are attempting to quit smoking using vapor products. The report also states that “NHS [National Health Service] England should issue guidance on vaping in mental health trusts to ensure consistency and equity across the NHS” and “the spate of lung injuries and deaths in the U.S. is not attributable to the regulated nicotine vaping products currently sold in England. But all suspected adverse reactions or suspected deaths need to be assessed.”
According to the report, perceptions of harm from vaping among smokers are increasingly out of line with the evidence. “Safety fears may well be deterring many smokers from switching, leaving them on a path to years of ill health and an early death due to their smoking,” said John Newton, director of health improvement at PHE.
Vaping advocates welcomed the report. “[The report] provides further and concrete evidence that vaping has a crucial role to play in changing the lives of smokers around the country, and it dispels the myths that youth vaping is currently a major issue,” said John Dunne, director of the U.K. Vaping Industry Association.
“However, it also tells us that the gross misinformation that has been spread about the safety of vaping has had an effect on consumers’ perceptions of e-cigarettes, which could greatly influence their decision to switch from smoking, which carries significantly more health risk.”
March 10, 2020
Top Doctor: ‘Insufficient Evidence for E-cigs’
There is presently inadequate evidence to conclude that e-cigarettes promote smoking cessation, according to a recent report by the U.S. Surgeon General.
“E-cigarettes, a continually changing and heterogeneous group of products, are used in a variety of ways,” the report states. “Consequently, it is difficult to make generalizations about efficacy for cessation based on clinical trials involving a particular e-cigarette, and there is presently inadequate evidence to conclude that e-cigarettes, in general, increase smoking cessation.”
However, during a press conference, Surgeon General Jerome Adams acknowledged anecdotal evidence for the efficacy of e-cigarettes as a quit-smoking aid.
“I’ve heard powerful accounts from individuals who have used e-cigarettes to quit smoking traditional combustible cigarettes, and there are some studies that are actually reviewed in this report documenting that certain types of e-cigarettes may be associated with quitting in some adult smokers,” he told reporters.
“But it’s also important that we use the entire body of available science to guide our current recommendations,” said Adams.
Released on Jan. 23, the new Surgeon General report is the first since 1990 to focus solely on quitting smoking, which it says is beneficial at any age.
March 9, 2020
Broughton expands
Broughton Nicotine Services has launched an in-house toxicology services division to increase capacity and to better assess the adverse effects of chemical substances associated with e-cigarettes across the global tobacco and nicotine industries.
The addition of this division aims to support companies working in the electronic nicotine-delivery system sector as they collectively strive for a smoke-free future.
The new division is led by Chris Allen, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for Broughton Nicotine Services, and headed by Fozia Saleem, director of scientific affairs and program management for the company.
“We are pleased to launch this new service for clients to complement our initial extensive investment into analytical services to meet the full requirements of premarket applications in the U.K., U.S. and emerging regulated markets,” said Allen. “Having an experienced team of toxicologists and nonclinical experts on site collaborating with our analytical team and external suppliers will help us leverage improved efficiencies for clients and accelerate compilation of scientific data for regulatory projects.”
Broughton Nicotine Services’ new toxicology services division will deliver quantitative risk assessments as well as regulatory in vitro toxicity testing.
March 4, 2020
Vaping still preferable
Public Health England is sticking to its long-held conviction that vaping is a better alternative to smoking combustible cigarettes and that never-smokers should be encouraged not to smoke or vape.
Its sixth report on e-cigarettes, “Vaping in England: 2020 evidence update summary,” shows a decline in adults who view vaping as less harmful than smoking—from 45 percent in 2014 to 34 percent in 2019. The report also states that there has not been a major increase in youth vaping and that only 1 percent of youth never-smokers are current vapers.
Based on the report, PHE concluded that vapor products, both nicotine and non-nicotine products, should be regulated, but banning flavors would negatively affect adult smokers who are attempting to quit smoking using vapor products. The report also states that “NHS [National Health Service] England should issue guidance on vaping in mental health trusts to ensure consistency and equity across the NHS” and “the spate of lung injuries and deaths in the U.S. is not attributable to the regulated nicotine vaping products currently sold in England. But all suspected adverse reactions or suspected deaths need to be assessed.”
According to the report, perceptions of harm from vaping among smokers are increasingly out of line with the evidence. “Safety fears may well be deterring many smokers from switching, leaving them on a path to years of ill health and an early death due to their smoking,” said John Newton, director of health improvement at PHE.
Vaping advocates welcomed the report. “[The report] provides further and concrete evidence that vaping has a crucial role to play in changing the lives of smokers around the country, and it dispels the myths that youth vaping is currently a major issue,” said John Dunne, director of the U.K. Vaping Industry Association.
“However, it also tells us that the gross misinformation that has been spread about the safety of vaping has had an effect on consumers’ perceptions of e-cigarettes, which could greatly influence their decision to switch from smoking, which carries significantly more health risk.”
March 4, 2020
After the Split

What does Brexit mean for tobacco and vaping?
By Clive Bates
The U.K. government has banned the word Brexit—or at least insisted the word is used only to describe a joyful event that happened in the past. Having promised in the U.K.’s December general election “to get Brexit done,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson has declared that Brexit was officially “done” when the United Kingdom left the European Union on Jan. 31, 2020.
But Brexit is not, in reality, done at all. Far from it. Almost every aspect of the future relationship between the U.K. and the EU remains to be negotiated: terms of trade in goods and services, food, farming, fishing, pharmaceuticals, financial services, aviation, aerospace, automotive, energy, immigration, data protection and sharing, security and justice cooperation—the list is endless and will consume British politics for years.
Buried deep in that list is the question of the U.K.’s approach to those aspects of tobacco regulation that are under EU jurisdiction but now revert to control by the U.K. government.
Given the U.K.’s stated intent not to extend the transition period beyond the end of 2020, it will all need to be done in a breathtakingly short timetable.
Where does this leave tobacco and vaping? Unfortunately, the only truthful answer at this point is “we just don’t know.” The statements of politicians are unreliable—more like populist banter or strutting negotiating postures than declarations of genuine intent. However, we can take a look at the options.

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What is the most important EU legislation that covers tobacco?
In the EU, jurisdiction over tobacco is split between the now 27 member states and the European Union. Some matters are regulated at the EU level and others (for example, age restrictions or smoking or vaping in public places) are regulated at the national or subnational level. There are three main areas in which the EU has jurisdiction: cross-border tobacco advertising, a framework for tobacco excise duties, and tobacco product regulation, which is meant to harmonize product regulation to facilitate trade within the EU’s internal market with a high level of health protection.
Advertising
The EU’s tobacco advertising regime prohibits any form of tobacco advertising, promotion or sponsorship that is capable of crossing a border (TV, radio, internet, newspapers, etc.). It does not apply to fixed advertising such as billboards or advertising in shops. The U.K. legislation goes further than required by the EU directives and bans almost all tobacco advertising, whether transboundary or fixed. Outside the EU, Parliament could potentially change this legislation, for example, to allow the advertising of reduced-risk products such as heated or smokeless tobacco products based on a pro-health harm reduction argument. The EU law on the advertising of vapor products is implemented by the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), and this imposes more or less the same restrictions on vapor advertising as the Tobacco Advertising Directive applies to cigarettes. In the case of vaping, however, the U.K. has used its national discretion to allow fixed advertising, which is governed by a code set up by the U.K. Committee of Advertising Practice.⁴ The U.K. could, at least in theory, apply this code to all advertising for vapor products, including transboundary advertising. Again, the justification would come from the government’s determination to reach its 2030 smoke-free goal.
Excise duties
The tobacco excise directive mainly harmonizes definitions and sets limits for different components of tobacco excise duty. This directive is not especially constraining on U.K. excise policy options for, say, cigarettes or hand-rolling tobacco. However, the U.K. may wish to establish particular categories in its excise framework for vaping, heated tobacco, smokeless or oral nicotine products. Even while still a member state of the EU, the U.K. has been free to do this. I doubt that Brexit will make much difference to U.K. excise duty policy unless the EU moves in a direction that is especially hostile to tobacco harm reduction—for example, by requiring nonzero minimum duties on vaping or duties on heated products that approach those on cigarettes. Tax changes in the EU require unanimity among the EU’s member states, so the U.K., as a member, would have had a veto on tax changes hostile to tobacco harm reduction.
Product regulation
The most fertile ground for U.K. divergence from the EU’s regulatory system would be to revise or remove the many rules in the TPD that are pointless or counterproductive. Firstly, and most obviously, the U.K. should lift the ban on snus. This prohibition, with its origins in a 1980s U.K. moral panic over Skoal Bandits,⁶ has no scientific, ethical or pragmatic basis and is probably the worst piece of EU legislation ever written. The prohibition on claiming that “a particular tobacco product is less harmful than others” should be replaced as it is obviously unrealistic. Other areas for divergence could be those aspects of regulation that needlessly harass vapers or otherwise degrade the vaping experience and, in doing so, function as a de facto protection of the cigarette trade—for example, the limits on tank size and refill containers, insert leaflets, excessive warnings, limitations on nicotine strength, and the restrictions on transboundary advertising and online retailing. The U.K. has the means to shape a truly world-leading, risk-proportionate approach to tobacco and reduced-risk products.
At least as important as rolling back poor regulation in the existing directive, the U.K. may choose to diverge to avoid even worse regulation that may lie ahead. By May 2021, the European Commission has to review the functioning of the 2014 TPD and, in light of that review, make proposals for new measures. Statements from European politicians and officials do not suggest that a pro-tobacco harm reduction epiphany is imminent, and vaping advocates can expect the next TPD to become more restrictive and intrusive, not less. For example, there may be restrictions on flavorings, packaging, ingredients or internet commerce. In pursuit of its “smoke-free 2030” goal, the U.K. could decline to implement counterproductive future measures.

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But what will the U.K. actually do?
You may have noticed a lot of use of “could,” “may” and “potentially” in the discussion above. This is because it is not yet clear if or how the U.K. would use its theoretical freedom to regulate unilaterally. This prompts a further series of questions.
Will the U.K. ultimately have the option to diverge from the EU?
Modern trade agreements do more than just eliminate tariffs and quotas; they also try to reduce nontariff barriers such as incompatible regulation. We do not yet know whether the U.K.’s eventual trade agreement with the EU will allow for divergence. The EU’s concern is to establish “a level playing field,” preventing the U.K. from competing with the EU by lowering environmental and labor standards or by allowing state subsidies that would lower the cost of production. That wouldn’t necessarily include the tobacco legislation, but it is still possible that the U.K. will agree to comply with EU tobacco regulation for one particular reason. This is that the TPD will continue to apply in Northern Ireland (part of the U.K.) as part of the peacekeeping effort to keep an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (part of the EU). The problem for Prime Minister Johnson is that divergence from EU regulation hardens the inevitable internal border that forms between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. And that, to say the least, is a political minefield.
Even if the U.K. has the option to diverge, will it use it?
There will be many advantages to remaining in step with the EU (for example, reducing trade friction and having a single set of business standards), so U.K. politicians will have to carefully weigh whether the costs of divergence will be worth the benefits. On the other hand, they also need to show that there was a purpose to Brexit and that better regulation is possible. But would they choose the highly controversial issue of tobacco policy to make the case for liberalizing regulation? I doubt it would be the first choice.
Out of the room
Leaving the EU means that U.K. officials and ministers are now excluded from developing legislation and policy at the EU level. It also means that the U.K. public no longer has elected Members of the European Parliament to appeal to if the EU institutions come up with terrible proposals.
Yet because regulatory divergence will have costs, it is possible that the U.K. will continue to comply with these directives. Brexit will have impacts on the EU too. With the exit of the U.K., the pro-harm reduction movement in Europe has lost its strongest ally and the buttress against the “abstinence-only” policy. That will have knock-on effects internationally because the EU is a highly influential player in the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. So, as the U.K. assumes its new independent status, it may find itself entangled with European Union regulation but no longer allowed in the room where the real decisions are made.
Clive Bates is the director of Counterfactual Consulting and the former director of Action on Smoking and Health (U.K.).

March 1, 2020
Stronger Together
The European Tobacco Harm Reduction Initiative demands rules that consider the relative risk of various tobacco-related products.
By Stefanie Rossel
Times are getting tougher for tobacco harm reduction in Europe: The recent outbreak of vaping-related lung illnesses and deaths in the U.S. have negatively impacted sales in Europe’s leading e-cigarette markets. The EU is currently reviewing its Tobacco Products Directive (TPD2). In 2020, the Netherlands will host the World Health Organization’s ninth Conference of the Parties.
To promote safer nicotine use and sensible regulation of reduced-risk products (RRPs) across Europe, a group of consumers launched the European Tobacco Harm Reduction Initiative (ETHRA) at the end of September 2019. The group demands regulation that considers the considerably lower risks of reduced-risk products. It wants RRPs to become affordable and untaxed products.
Twenty partners from all over Europe have already joined ETHRA, including the French consumer association SOVAPE, the New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) and EU for Snus. Tobacco Reporter spoke with Martin Cullip, chair of the NNA, who was involved in setting up ETHRA, about the organization’s next steps.
Tobacco Reporter: What was the idea behind establishing a pan-European consumer initiative?
Martin Cullip: The treatment of reduced-risk products around the world varies region by region. In discussions with fellow advocates from different continents at conferences such as the Global Forum on Nicotine, it was clear that we were facing different challenges based on where we lived. In Europe, the Tobacco Products Directive has meant that our region is comparatively sensible in this area of policy, although obviously there are things that could be improved. It was felt that—especially with new regulatory challenges on the horizon—a consumer-led association to deal with specifically European issues could deliver benefits to the harm reduction approach in our region and amplify the voice of the many hard-working grassroots associations operating across the continent. In just a couple of months, we have enlisted 20 partner associations and are organizing to effectively move the consumer voice forward.
What will be your next steps?
We have seen a couple of positive developments in states where our partners have an interest but also negative ones. We hope to raise awareness across borders to what is happening around us and learn from each other how to best engage with policymakers and ensure that consumers are heard.
What are the most pressing issues at the moment as far as vaping in the EU is concerned?
An imminent threat is the EU’s upcoming review of TPD2, implemented in 2014. Earlier this year, the EU health commissioner’s office claimed that “E-cigarettes may be less harmful, according to some reports, but they’re still ‘poison,’” so it appears that despite EU regulations presenting some of the most progressive and effective public health protections in the world around e-cigarettes particularly, some in the EU are still intent on turning back the clock and trying to implement damaging and counterproductive restrictions on safer nicotine products. With the extremely vaping-skeptic World Health Organization due to hold their Conference of the Parties in The Hague, Netherlands, this year, Europe could be a crucible where future regulations will be formed. We in ETHRA hope to ensure that consumers are central to that debate when it comes.
What is your organization’s response to the current challenges for vaping following the events in the U.S., which have also cast a shadow on vape sales in the EU?
Currently, there is a lot of alarm and false information in Europe following events in the USA. We have seen a number of countries taking this as an opportunity to propose restrictions and bans on vaping products. Our partner organizations will be working to correct this by engaging with policymakers to dispel the many myths that surround harm reduction.
It is important to highlight that e-cigarettes, as regulated under the current TPD, do not present hazards such as [those that have] happened with illegal THC cartridges in the U.S. It is clear that the panic in the U.S. is being orchestrated to some extent by those who claim to be a force for good in public health but who are instead working to an ideological agenda regardless of the harm it will cause to millions of people.
We must reiterate that no good can come from banning safer products and creating a huge black market in Europe to match the one in the U.S., which is the source of all the illness and deaths over there.
Which role does snus play in your concept of tobacco harm reduction?
We think the U.S. FDA [Food and Drug Administration] granting one company license to make reduced-risk health claims around snus is a very positive development and one which should embarrass the EU.
There are decades of evidence from Sweden that snus is vastly safer than smoking, and there is no valid reason for a ban being inflicted on EU member states. With the U.S. government accepting officially that snus reduces harm—and allowing manufacturers to display this on their packaging—we have a perfect example of how good regulation of snus could be beneficial for public health in the EU.
Evidence from countries such as Sweden and Norway shows that snus could play a vitally important role in attracting many smokers away from lit tobacco. It is long past time that the ban on snus in the EU was overturned, and we hope to make that case repeatedly going forward.
Where will funding for ETHRA come from?
Currently, ETHRA has no funding whatsoever except for a seed donation from Vapers in Power, a former pro-vaping political party in the U.K., which had a credit balance left from its vaping members when it disbanded. This was used to set up the website, but apart from that, funding isn’t currently an issue. As a collective of autonomous consumer associations across Europe, ETHRA relies on input from passionate volunteers from self-funded partners who give their time and expertise for free. It may be that we need to crowdfund in the future for certain projects, but that will be considered as and when the circumstances arise.
The European Citizens’ Initiative Vaping is NOT Tobacco is gathering signatures to make the European Commission treat vapor products differently than tobacco (see “A Call for Common Sense,” Tobacco Reporter, December 2019). Would it make sense for ETHRA to cooperate with them?
We understand that some partner organizations are optimistic about the initiative, but others are not. We have five main principles, which all our partners have signed up to. Apart from that, it is up to each partner to decide their own course. As an entity, ETHRA has no mandate to offer a view either way.
February 13, 2020
PMI Topman Sounds Alarm About Harm Reduction
The historical opportunity offered by smoke-free alternatives to reduce the health impact of smoking is in jeopardy due to misinformation and calls for prohibition, according to Andre Calantzopoulos, CEO of Philip Morris International (PMI).
Writing in Fortune, Calantzopoulos said that thanks to rapid advances in science and technology, better alternatives now exist for adults who would otherwise continue to smoke.
However, the opportunity for trajectory-shifting progress in public health is endangered by public confusion and prohibitionist legislation.
Calantzopoulos pointed to the U.S. where recent incidents of lung illness attributed to black market THC products have been conflated with the use of unadulterated legal e-cigarettes. At the same time, media have been widely reporting on the valid concerns around the use of e-cigarettes by youth, he said.
“This combined coverage has left many men and women who smoke confused about smoke-free alternatives,” Calantzopoulos wrote.
Compounding the issue, he added, a handful of tobacco control NGOs in several countries have seized the opportunity to call for legislation that either prohibits some or all smoke-free alternatives or severely restricts smokers’ access to and ability to learn about these products.
“If regulators respond to these calls by choosing a prohibitionist route over a science-based approach, the opportunity for progress in public health may be lost,” Calantzopoulos cautioned.

January 21, 2020
’95-percent’ claim stands
Contrary to its claim, a recent critique does not debunk the statements made by Public Health England (PHE) and the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) that vaping is at least 95 percent less risky than smoking, according to Clive Bates, director of Counterfactual Consulting.
Writing on his blog, Bates examined the authors’ propositions and found them wanting.
“Not a single word of their paper addresses the supposed foundation of their critique—that PHE/RCP are wrong, and the risks of vaping are likely to exceed 5 percent of those of smoking,” Bates wrote.
While the paper contains several baseless assertions that are irrelevant to the “at least 95 percent lower” relative risk claim (gateway effects, smoking cessation efficacy and secondhand aerosol exposure), it says nothing about the relative magnitude of smoking and vaping risks, according to Bates.
“No analysis, no data, no evidence—nothing that discusses relative risk and why PHE/RCP are supposedly wrong. Niente. Nada. Rien. Nichts. Nothing,” he wrote.
January 20, 2020
‘Harm reduction at risk’
The historical opportunity offered by smoke-free alternatives to reduce the health impact of smoking is in jeopardy due to misinformation and calls for prohibition, according to Andre Calantzopoulos, CEO of Philip Morris International (PMI).
Writing in Fortune, Calantzopoulos said that thanks to rapid advances in science and technology, better alternatives now exist for adults who would otherwise continue to smoke.
However, the opportunity for trajectory-shifting progress in public health is endangered by public confusion and prohibitionist legislation.
Calantzopoulos pointed to the U.S. where recent incidents of lung illness attributed to black market THC products have been conflated with the use of unadulterated legal e-cigarettes. At the same time, media have been widely reporting on the valid concerns around the use of e-cigarettes by youth, he said.
“This combined coverage has left many men and women who smoke confused about smoke-free alternatives,” Calantzopoulos wrote.
Compounding the issue, he added, a handful of tobacco control NGOs in several countries have seized the opportunity to call for legislation that either prohibits some or all smoke-free alternatives or severely restricts smokers’ access to and ability to learn about these products.
“If regulators respond to these calls by choosing a prohibitionist route over a science-based approach, the opportunity for progress in public health may be lost,” Calantzopoulos cautioned.
January 20, 2020
Doubling Down
Imperial Brands’ innovation and science director, David Newns, discusses the company’s mission to offer the world’s smokers something better than cigarettes.
By George Gay
I occasionally wonder why, given the obstacles strewn in their path, some of the companies aiming to advance the cause of tobacco harm reduction by developing next-generation products (NGPs) don’t abandon their quest—a thought that was brought into even sharper focus last year by the tribulations surrounding the issues of flavor bans and lung disease in the U.S. Of course, for a number of reasons, the major tobacco manufacturers could not abandon their harm reduction products completely, but, with solid traditional tobacco product businesses behind them, they could surely ease back on the accelerator pedals of their NGP development motors.
And this was the basis of one of the questions I raised when I had the opportunity on Nov. 26 to speak on the telephone with David Newns, group innovation and science director for Imperial Brands. Was it worth investing in NGP innovation and the science underpinning it given the often irrational but effective opposition that was aligned against such efforts? “I think that at times when things get harder, the only option is to double down,” said Newns. “We’ve made a commitment as a company to offer something better to the world’s smokers—that’s our mission—and therefore, we can only double down on our investment and double down on the hard work it takes to do the science and to have those difficult conversations with regulators and government agencies. The business is absolutely committed to delivering on that mission.”
Newns, who joined Imperial Brands two years ago when it acquired Nerudia, the NGP innovation business he co-founded, is responsible for what he describes as a global community of about 300 people involved in two core areas: product innovation and product science. The innovation team, which is based largely in Liverpool, England, is charged with developing products for Imperial Brands’ NGP portfolio, which currently includes vapor products, heated-tobacco products and oral nicotine-delivery (OND) products. The product science team, meanwhile, is responsible for the scientific assessment and safety of those products: ensuring the company delivers products that meet its own product stewardship standards and deliver the potential to reduce, at population levels, the harm caused by tobacco consumption. It also works with regulators on getting those products approved.
Newns’ teams work within all NGP categories, including some not yet in commercial distribution. They work on innovations that can be implemented quickly—steps forward that, for instance, might deliver different nicotine or flavor experiences to consumers—and they work on game-changing innovations whose potential lies further in the future. Imperial Brands’ innovation processes, Newns said, were based on its being consumer led but also on consumer leading. It was a consumer-led organization that spent a lot of time with consumers, understanding their wants and needs. But, at the end of the day, consumers didn’t know what they didn’t know, and it was Imperial Brands’ role to bring them to a place they never knew existed.
Looking outward
Newns readily admits that achieving such game-changing shifts is easier said than done, but he indicated that one way forward was to make a cultural shift. While Imperial Brands operated within an industry that traditionally was quite insular, his company differentiated itself by looking outward, he said. It had a team that scoured the world talking to inventors, potential partners and anybody who could add value to its processes, and it was in touch with agencies that specialized in predicting the future, particularly consumer trends. In fact, he ended the interview with a request to anybody who thought they could help Imperial Brands on its harm reduction “journey” to get in touch. “[W]e are not going to do this on our own,” he said. “No one knows all of the answers, but together, we can certainly make harm reduction a reality.”
Most of the projects Imperial Brands is working on already have some kind of open innovation input. For instance, Newns said, the company was working currently on nicotine droplet size—cooperating with partners who could help the company better understand this aspect of its products. Overall, it was about leveraging those sorts of capabilities and employing Imperial Brands’ skills in putting together the acquired data and knowledge so as to accelerate the pace of bringing better products to consumers.
At the same time, however, Newns cautions about the industry trying to get too far ahead of itself. Ten years ago, he said, when vaping started, the industry made a promise to smokers that it hadn’t yet fulfilled: It was going to make switching from smoking to vaping fairly easy. A lot of people had subsequently tried vaping and discounted it, so it was the industry’s responsibility to make good on that original promise. And in this respect, a lot had been learned about what consumers wanted, and the technology had changed in line with those demands, so some people were returning to vaping. But it was necessary even at this stage to ensure that expectations were managed appropriately. The industry was not going to replicate the combustible cigarette with something that was not a combustible cigarette.
In this regard, Newns said that Imperial Brands was working on, and saw a lot of scope for, technologies that went beyond its current core NGP categories, though he again warned that bringing these to market would take time, partly because of issues to do with consumer acceptance. Vaping was more than 10 years old, and it was still not trusted by a large proportion of consumers, so Imperial Brands would develop new technologies, new products and new categories but commercialize them only when consumers were ready to use them.
Flexible solutions
This idea of consumers being ready—or not—is an interesting one because Newns made the point that once smokers had made the leap of accepting vaping, they were more ready to look at other, perhaps more radical, changes. But each consumer was unique, and products of the future needed to be flexible enough to allow different consumers to use more than one product and use them to suit their particular needs, which might change throughout the day.
Imperial Brands’ Blu vapor brand is said to provide an example of this type of flexibility. The closed system Myblu was a convenient device with a wide range of nicotine strengths and flavors from which consumers could choose what was right for them at particular times of the day, Newns said. And work was under way on a new generation of the brand, with one aim being to develop a device that would make it easier for smokers to switch to vaping.
Blu is available in 21 markets and is said to be doing well in many of those markets. And while 21 might not seem huge given that there are something like 190 countries in the world, Newns tends to look at this issue from the other end of the telescope where your gaze is focused on 169 potential markets. The existence of 21 markets for Blu was the wrong way to look at things, he said, because it represented only a snapshot in time. It was more important to consider where the smokers were than where the vapers were. In Germany, Imperial Brands had created the closed system vapor market from nothing, and that had been highly successful for the company. If you didn’t launch in markets where there were no vapers, you would never create a new market.
Newns accepts that the market situation is complicated by vaping bans, restrictions and simple economics, especially in countries such as India that should offer amazing opportunities, but he said that Imperial Brands’ mission was to convert a billion smokers to better products, even if that meant doing it one smoker at a time.
Focusing on what you can control
The trouble is that there is a major obstacle to such progress, at least in the U.S. and those countries that tend to follow where the U.S. leads. Powerful, influential agencies in the U.S., urged on by various special interest groups, have laid trip wires for the forward steps the vapor industry has tried to make, especially last year. But Newns refused to be swamped by the negative. He accepted that a lack of facts and data had led to initial missteps by some in the U.S. over the outbreak of acute lung disease among a number of people using vapor devices. He said that though the focus of investigative efforts had since narrowed to vitamin E acetate, a thickening agent not used in any Blu products, those missteps had a significant, detrimental effect on harm reduction. But his reaction was to say that it was the industry’s duty to focus on those things that were within its control, and those things were developing products that could be shown scientifically to add an overall population health benefit then trying to convince regulators and governments to join the industry on its harm reduction journey.
When I protested that getting regulators and governments on board had often proved all but impossible, Newns pointed to the ongoing reconsideration of the proposed U.S. federal ban on vaping flavors that had been set in motion after the industry and consumers had made fact-based presentations on the role that flavors played. And in the U.K., the government had been consistently positive about vaping for a sustained period of time. Even when things got tough in the U.S. last year, the U.K. government had doubled down on its support for the vapor category. “And I think that’s the policy that leads to better health outcomes for populations,” he said. “Hopefully that instills the confidence for smokers to move to better alternatives. I think that messages that are not clear lead to confusion and paralysis.”
This makes it sound as if it is all about vaping when it is not. In the spring of 2019, Imperial Brands entered the heated-tobacco product arena with the trial launch of Pulze in Fukuoka, Japan—a trial that, according to Newns, prompted “really great” feedback and led to the nationwide launch of the product at the beginning of November. Consumers were said to have liked the futuristic look of the device and to have appreciated that using it left no lingering smell.
Meanwhile, in the OND category, Imperial Brands’ Zone X tobacco-free snus (branded as Skruf, the company’s traditional snus brand, in some markets) was said to have been launched and well received in Austria and Germany, two countries that are not traditional snus markets. Newns described the product as “exciting,” one that allowed people to consume nicotine while driving or performing other activities that required them to use their hands.
January 17, 2020