Tag: Quit for Good

  • COP Urged to Implement Harm Reduction

    COP Urged to Implement Harm Reduction

    From left to right: Lorenzo Mata, Nancy Loucas and Jay Jazul

    Consumer advocacy group Quit for Good asked the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) to consider the lives of more than a billion smokers when it convenes the 10th Conference of the Parties in Panama next week. 

    Lorenzo Mata Jr., president of Quit for Good, said the WHO should implement FCTC Article 1 (d) on harm reduction strategies to help smokers.  The treaty defines tobacco control as “a range of supply, demand and harm reduction strategies.” 

    “Offering safer nicotine products to millions of adult smokers who want to reduce their exposure to toxic substances from smoke is common sense. This is what tobacco harm reduction (THR) is all about, which the WHO FCTC refuses to implement despite being part of the global treaty,” Mata said.

    Representatives from countries that are signatories to the FCTC will meet in Panama for the 10th Conference of the Parties this year, after the meeting was canceled in November 2023, to tackle major topics such as how to treat “novel and emerging tobacco and nicotine products.”

    The Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA) said blocking the use of products that can help save smokers’ lives is against the mission of the FCTC—a global treaty endorsed by most countries. 

    “People who smoke should have the right to access less harmful alternatives to smoking, and the WHO FCTC should focus on helping them. We need a pragmatic campaign to reduce the harm caused by smoking, rather than a dogmatic, deceptive, ineffective campaign to compel abstinence,” CAPHRA executive coordinator Nancy Loucas said.

    Loucas said the annual reviews of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, formerly Public Health England, have consistently shown that vaping carries a fraction of the risks of smoking. “Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting vaping products as less harmful alternatives to smoking, the WHO has consistently disregarded the positive role that vaping can play in tobacco control,” she said.

    “It is time for the WHO FCTC and its member states to listen to the voice of the people that they are supposed to fight for and not against—the over 1 billion smokers whose lives are in danger if they continue to smoke,” she said.

    Loucas’ views were echoed by Jay Jazul, lead convener of the Harm Reduction Alliance of the Philippines (HARAP). “E-cigarettes do not threaten public health but provide smokers with an exit from smoking, which is the real problem,” he said. “The WHO’s failure to substantiate its claims against e-cigarettes and labeling these innovative products an emerging threat to public health is worrisome.”

    “The nicotine was not the problem, it was the delivery system that was the problem. We’ve known that for 50 years,” said David Sweanor of the University of Ottawa at a recent conference in Korea.

    “The best example of how products that don’t burn tobacco can benefit public health comes from Sweden, which has the lowest smoking prevalence among men in the European Union and consequently the lowest tobacco-related mortality,” said Lars M. Ramström, the principal investigator at the Institute for Tobacco Studies, which recently published a paper on the topic. Ramström served as a WHO expert and as secretary general of the 4th World Conference on Smoking and Health.

    “The meeting of the world’s health leaders in Panama, the COP10, represents a unique opportunity to take a fresh look at the most recent evidence with an open mind. After all, if Sweden had followed WHO’s advice from 20 years ago and banned snus, tobacco-related deaths in Sweden would have been much higher and the only unintended beneficiary profiting from such advice would be the cigarette industry,” said Ramström.

    In the runup to COP10, industry representatives have raised concerns about the exclusion of stakeholders from the discussions.

     

  • WHO Report ‘Unscientific”: Mata

    WHO Report ‘Unscientific”: Mata

    Lorenzo Mata Jr. (Photo: Quit for Good)

    A public health advocacy group based in the Philippines has criticized the latest report of the World Health Organization on the use of electronic cigarettes, saying the global body undermines the significant progress made in public health over the past two decades as smokers transitioned to smoke-free products.

    Lorenzo Mata Jr., president of Quit for Good, said the WHO’s continued demonization of e-cigarettes disregards the wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that smoke-free alternatives such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and snus have helped millions of smokers in countries like the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan and Sweden successfully quit smoking.

    “The best available clinical and population studies consistently show that vaping has led to adult smoking cessation. While it is necessary to monitor youth vaping, a complete ban on e-cigarettes will only exacerbate the smoking epidemic and its associated serious health conditions,” Mata Jr.  said in a statement.

    As a Filipino physician, Mata said the WHO’s failure to differentiate between the risks of e-cigarettes and combustible tobacco is unscientific.

    Last month, the WHO issued a statement calling for urgent action to safeguard children and prevent the adoption of e-cigarettes based on what Quit for Good insists is a misrepresented account of the scientific evidence to fit its predetermined conclusion to ban e-cigarettes or regulate them as strictly as far more dangerous cigarettes.

    Additionally, the WHO provided data indicating that the global market for electronic cigarettes grew from $7.81 billion in 2015 to $22.35 million in 2022. Between 2018 and 2022, the disposable e-cigarette market expanded by 116 percent, encompassing over 550,000 different products.

    Mata said the WHO’s diagnosis of the situation is flawed, as it fails to acknowledge the significant decline in harmful substance exposure resulting from smokers switching to e-cigarettes and other smoke-free alternatives, or the fact that smoke-free products work for many smokers better than traditional smoking cessation therapies.

    “E-cigarettes do not threaten public health but provide smokers with an exit from smoking, which is the real problem. Labeling these innovative products an emerging threat to public health is worrisome because the WHO essentially tells smokers that continuing smoking is better than switching to e-cigarettes. This is patently wrong,” he said.

    Quit for Good highlights that countries that banned e-cigarettes did not eradicate vaping but instead inadvertently created an unregulated underground market that poses risks to public health due to the absence of regulatory standards.

    Mata said these bans only benefit unscrupulous criminal gangs that are happy to sell these products to anyone, including children, without any controls as to what’s in them or how they’re made.

    According to independent public health experts, e-cigarettes and other smoke-free products offer an opportunity to combat smoking-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease and lung disease by transitioning to nicotine products with significantly reduced risk and no combustion.

    Commenting on a similar WHO report published earlier, Peter Hajek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London, said: “Given the tremendous benefits this transition would bring to public health, it is paradoxical that the WHO has adopted such a strident anti-vaping stance that risks impeding this progress. This new report perpetuates this tradition, calling for a ban on less risky alternatives while freely allowing the sale of tobacco. The report misrepresents evidence and should come with a prominent health warning.”

    John Britton, an emeritus professor of Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, said the WHO still fails to differentiate between addiction to tobacco smoking, which leads to millions of deaths annually, and addiction to nicotine, which does not.

    “The WHO appears content with the inconsistency of recommending medicinal nicotine products for treating smoking addiction while advocating the prohibition of consumer nicotine products that serve the same purpose, but more effectively. The WHO is correct in discouraging non-smokers, particularly children, from using any nicotine product. However, for over a billion tobacco smokers worldwide, electronic nicotine delivery systems are part of the solution, not the problem,” Britton said.

    Mata said many countries, including the Philippines, have in fact chosen to embrace scientific evidence and regulate the use of innovative smoke-free products such as e-cigarettes to provide smokers with better options to quit.

  • Quit for Good Signs THR Statement

    Quit for Good Signs THR Statement

    Lorenzo Mata Jr. | Photo: Quit for Good

    Quit for Good, a public health advocacy group based in the Philippines, has joined other scientific organizations and associations across the world in calling for the adoption of tobacco harm reduction (THR) to save smokers and help improve people’s lives.

    “We endorse the consensus statement of SCOHRE—the International Association on Smoking Control and Harm Reduction—to remind the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) Conference of the Parties of the growing support and scientific basis for THR strategies that it continues to ignore,” said Lorenzo Mata Jr., president of Quit for Good.

    “The THR approach, which the Philippines acknowledged when it approved the vape law in 2022, provides smokers with better options, such as smoke-free alternatives, when quitting is not achievable,” said Mata, a Filipino doctor.

    Quit For Good is one of the 14 scientific organizations on four continents that support the consensus statement of SCOHRE that the WHO FCTC should no longer ignore the evidence in support of THR. It is also one of the two organizations based in the Philippines that signed the statement, the other being the Harm Reduction Alliance of the Philippines (HARAP).

    SCOHRE, an international scientific association of independent experts who promote a new approach to smoking control policies, issued the statement as the WHO FCTC prepares to convene the 10th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP10) Nov. 20–25, 2023, in Panama.

    “Rather than viewing them [THR products] as a threat to public health, the WHO FCTC should look at them as tools that can help more than a billion smokers around the world quit smoking. It has been well documented that it is the smoke, and not nicotine, that causes serious diseases among smokers,” said Mata.

    Mata said the U.K. and Sweden models prove that harm reduction works. He said providing safer nicotine products to reduce harm for smokers is common sense as smokers are already offered nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) to quit or reduce harm.

    “NRTs, however, are largely ineffective in making smokers quit. Why not give them highly successful and innovative products that are at least 95 percent less harmful than cigarettes?” said Mata, referring to smoke-free products such as vapes. “These products are much better than confining smokers to a lifetime of smoking without any viable alternatives. Other doctors should explore these options if they really care about their patients.”

    Mata said the COP10 meeting in Panama should focus on scientific evidence that there are safer nicotine products and that restrictive and prohibitionist policies that penalize smokers only lead them to continue smoking and suffer from the lack of better alternatives.

    The consensus statement of SCOHRE noted the mounting scientific evidence that THR strategies can contribute to reducing the detrimental effects of smoking and that switching to less harmful products will have a tremendously positive effect for many people who smoke cigarettes.

    “Healthcare and public health professionals need to continuously raise awareness to every person who smokes cigarettes and to the overall population about the adverse effects of smoking and that they can be also limited by tobacco harm reduction, i.e., with novel safer alternatives to cigarettes. We need to increase the knowledge that empowers people to pursue better health,” according to the consensus statement.

    Aside from Quit for Good and HARAP, other groups that supported the SCOHRE consensus statement are the European Medical Association, New Nicotine Alliance in Ireland, Platform for the Reduction of Harm due to Tobacco Consumption in Spain, Indonesian Tar Free Coalition (KABAR), DIRETA in Brazil, Tunisian Society of Tobaccology and Addictive Behaviors, Associazione Nazionale Consumatori Vaporizzatori Personali (ANPVU) in Italy, Densaulyk Harm Reduction Association in Kazakhstan, Polish Society of Public Health, New Nicotine Alliance in the U.K., UKVIA and the Hungarian Scientific Association for Harm Reduction and Environmental Diseases.