Vaping in Bradford. Why the Council voted down a more liberal approach.

Last week Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors voted down a motion I submitted to Bradford Council calling for a 'vaping friendly city'. This motion set out how Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians had described vaping as "at least 95%" safer than smoking and argued that we should be more positive about e-cigarettes as an effective aid to quitting smoking. The proposed resolution was to conduct a review of current policies with a view to being more open to vaping in public places.

Now the dust has settled I thought I'd share with you the main reasons given by those voting down the motion (other than the real reason for Labour's opposition - this was a Tory motion and we don't vote for Tory motions). This is from memory but I think captures the essence of the debate - supporters of vaping will be very familiar with the arguments.

1. "But 5% of something very harmful is still harmful"

2. "People don't like the smell of vaping - and what about asthmatics?"

3. "There isn't enough evidence that vaping isn't harmful."

4. "We've got used to people not smoking in offices, this is a step backwards."

5. "The flavours smell horrible and are targeted a children."

6. "Here's an opinion piece from the British Medical Journal that says vaping doesn't help people quit

7. "There's no evidence that liberalising rules on vaping encourages people to switch"

We then got three very specific arguments.

8. "It would confuse people because our neighbouring authorities have different policies."

9. "We don't have to lead, to fly the flag, all the time, we don't have to do this."

10. "Officers in public health* are too busy to conduct a review."

*Bradford spends best part of a million quid on smoking cessation.

And finally

11. "We should be talking about more important things for the District than vaping."

It was a pretty depressing episode. I've learnt that, even with a pretty modest motion asking that officers look at our approach to vaping, the controlling Labour group will vote stuff down - "Not-Invented-Here Syndrome" I call it and this combines with a knee-jerk tribalism ("must be a bad idea if the Tories are proposing it") to make it hard to make progress.

Where we go from here I'm not sure. Putting another motion to Council won't work and I'd already tried approaching public health and the council's HR department directly (they chose not to reply). We've made - and will continue to make - the case through the press. Maybe Bradford's vapers are happy to muddle through with a mish-mash of different attitudes towards what they do. And perhaps public health (and Labour councillors) are happy to conflate smoking and vaping because it suits their disdain for what seems like a decidedly working-class habit.

In the end any change will only come through the 20,000 or so Bradford vapers putting pressure on the Council to change. Right now I've gone as far as I can take it.

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Smoking cessation: it stopped being about health years ago

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In 2003 Hon Lik registered the patent for the first modern electronic cigarette since when millions of people across the world have stopped or significantly reduced their consumption of regular old-fashioned cancer-sticks. There is no doubt - really, there is no doubt - that this is one of the biggest public health boons ever. Instead of people having their lives cut short by using combustible cigarettes to get a hit of nicotine, they'll mostly be using a delivery system that's pretty near harmless - as harmless as getting a caffeine hit by pouring hot water over coffee beans.

The smoking cessation business (or most of it - there are a few notable exceptions) has spent almost every waking hour and bucket loads of research cash since Hon Lik registered that patent trying to discredit the electronic cigarette and the practice of vaping. Urged on by the pharmaceuticals industry and tacitly back by Big Tobacco these so-call smoking cessation folk have acted to protect their business interests - funding, jobs, research grants - rather than accept that vaping disrupted smoking by making it possible to enjoy the lift from nicotine without the health costs of smoking.

And these people refuse to accept the reality and are still throwing money at research into new smoking cessation devices:

Chemists at the University of Bristol have been awarded £930,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop potential new aids to help smokers stop smoking.

Professor Tim Gallagher, in collaboration with Professor Adrian Mulholland (School of Chemistry) and Dr Richard Sessions (School of Biochemistry), will use a combination of synthetic chemistry, computational modelling, structural biology and pharmacology to develop potential new smoking cessation agents.

I'm sure the science here is fascinating but do we really need to spend nearly £1 million of taxpayers money (especially in these tough times for public funding) on researching "potential new aids to help smokers stop smoking". That's 'potential' aids not actual aids that can be put on the market for smokers to use. What we'll have instead is some quite interesting chemistry (all those ligands and that partial agonism) but little practical health value. And all this at a time when there's a pretty damned effective aid to quitting that the same government funding this research wants to limit, stop from being effectively promoted and placed in the "we rather disapprove of this sort of thing" category of consumer goods.

As I say, smoking cessation stopped being about health years ago. Now it's more about preserving the jobs of smoking cessation advisors and the funding of researchers. The minute there was a breakthrough disruptive technology - one produced without government research funding and promoted successfully through a free market - the smoking cessation funding should have gone and the research investment directed into other areas of public health challenge. But the public health isn't about health at all really, is it?

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Why we shouldn't be banning vaping

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Via the estimable Dick Puddlecote comes the report on this piece of research:

Safety evaluation and risk assessment of electronic cigarettes as tobacco cigarette substitutes: a systematic review

The authors look at 97 studies examining the health impacts of vaping. And what do they find:

Currently available evidence indicates that electronic cigarettes are by far a less harmful alternative to smoking and significant health benefits are expected in smokers who switch from tobacco to electronic cigarettes. Research will help make electronic cigarettes more effective as smoking substitutes and will better define and further reduce residual risks from use to as low as possible, by establishing appropriate quality control and standards. 

Note that folks - "significant health benefits are expected in smokers who switch". We should be encouraging these things not trying to ban them or ban their promotion.

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Passive vaping and New York's health fascism

I wrote about some emerging research showing no link between passive smoking and lung cancer:

The article describes a large prospective study that "confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke." 

And, in writing about this I noting that the authors were back-pedalling rapidly on the reasons for smoking bans - 'denormalising' smoking rather than protecting health.

Today, in a development that further reveals the willingness of the Church of Public Health to act without evidence, New York City Council is deciding whether to apply the same controls to e-cigarettes as apply to regular cancer sticks:

In late November, a month after banning the sale of the devices to people under 21, the City Council surprised the sector by introducing a bill that would treat electronic cigarettes like their tobacco counterparts, prohibiting use in restaurants, bars, workplaces and even parks.

There is no evidence to support the main contention of the ban's proponents - vaping looks like smoking so will act to promote the latter. Nor is there evidence that there are any significant health risks that result from vaping let alone from 'passive vaping'. But this doesn't stop New York's nanny-in-chief:

At a recent public hearing of the bill, Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley challenged the notion that e-cigs are healthier than tobacco smokes...

Dr Farley knows this is a lie, just as the tobacco controllers have known since the day they proposed smoking bans that passive smoking is at worst a very minor risk factor in lung cancer. What is even worse is that, by effectively banning vaping, New York will remove the incentive for smokers to switch to less harmful e-cigs. And that means more deaths.

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...and they want to stop you using them?

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...e-cigarettes that is:

In smokers not intending to quit, the use of e-cigarettes, with or without nicotine, decreased cigarette consumption and elicited enduring tobacco abstinence without causing significant side effects.

This is proper science showing how effective electronic cigarettes are as a means of quitting. And the health fascists, public health obsessives and new puritans want to stop you using them because there might be some unspecified, unknown way in which they aren't 'safe'.

It isn't about health. It's about control.

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Stupid, stupid, murderously stupid...

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It was going to happen, they were going to get their way, they couldn't allow e-cigarettes to succeed. So they've set about killing them:

"Reducing the harms of smoking to smokers and those around them is a key Government health priority. Our research has shown that existing electronic cigarettes and other nicotine containing products on the market are not good enough to meet this public health priority.

“Some NCPs are already licensed and the Government's decision to work towards medicines licensing for all these products is designed to deliver quality products that will support smokers to cut down and to quit.

“The decision announced today provides a framework that will enable good quality products to be widely available. It’s not about banning products that some people find useful, it’s about making sure that smokers have an effective alternative that they can rely on to meet their needs."

Some 1.3 million people have already switched to e-cigarettes. To stop this process is stupid.

It's stupid because e-cigarettes are 99% safer than smoking regular cigarettes

It's stupid because e-cigarettes are not a medicine - unless a cup of coffee is a medicine

It's murderously stupid because it means that people will die unnecessarily.

But then it never was about health, was it.

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E-cigarettes - a case of 'not-invented-here' syndrome

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As ever Clive Bates hits the nail on the head over the egregious pseudo-debate within public health over e-cigarettes:

That’s because they have lost sight of their real goal – which is to reduce cancer and other diseases, not just to campaign for tobacco control policies.  But e-cigarettes have arrived like an insurgency, coming from nowhere creating opportunities for smokers rather than restrictions.  Public health workers have played no part in this uprising, they haven’t ‘approved’ the products, they don’t know much about them or why they are popular, and most importantly they aren’t in control.  I think they are professionally affronted and are responding with a regulatory and rhetorical broadside to fight back.

A classic, unmistakeable case of 'not-invented-here' syndrome. E-cigarettes cannot be an effective tobacco control product for the simple reason that they weren't created by tobacco control professionals or their 'partners' in the pharmaceutical nicotine business.

Gradually - at least among those who have thought about this - the e-cigarette is getting acceptance. Here's Professor Paul Aveyard, Nice guidance developer, GP and Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Oxford:

Professor Aveyard said he will tell patients that using e-cigarettes is ‘better than smoking.'

Now while there's a little 'damning with faint praise' to all this, it's better than the usual 'it looks a bit like smoking so it must be wrong' argument we hear from public health.  This neanderthal outlook acts only to ensure the continued success of the cigarette business - banning e-cigs which is what the EU is inching towards would be great for tobacco companies and a poor do for the million plus UK smokers who have already switched to e-cigs.

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Bradford Council and e-cigarettes

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I can now confirm that Bradford Council doesn't have a policy on e-cigarettes - this means, as the Council Leader told me, that people can use them on Council premises until such time as some nannying fussbucket introduces a policy to ban them.

This seems to be good news although I'd love to see if people have tried!

Let's remind ourselves why it's good news:

"Nicotine itself is not a particularly hazardous drug," says Professor John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for the Royal College of Physicians.

"It's something on a par with the effects you get from caffeine.

"If all the smokers in Britain stopped smoking cigarettes and started smoking e-cigarettes we would save 5 million deaths in people who are alive today. It's a massive potential public health prize."

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Quote of the day - for our friends in public health

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The right approach is not to denormalise smoking, but to normalise e-smoking. Those who enjoy nicotine will be able to continue to use it, while everyone else will be spared both the public-health consequences of smoking and the nuisance of other people’s smoke. What’s not to like?

Absolutely.

They do not give off smoke and contain no tobacco....

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...but they are not popular with the nannying fussbuckets:

Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association, says employers are right to be cautious given the lack of data on the long-term effects of e-cigarettes and thinks it could give employees the wrong message.

Dr Nathanson said: "They are designed to look like smoking so what they do is they renormalise the concept of smoking, just at a time when we've all got used to the fact that smoking in the workplace is not normal nor allowed."

As ever, read that carefully - e-cigs "give the wrong message". And that message is that smokers must be shunned, stigmatised, denormalised. A product that does little or no harm - even the woman from ASH Scotland on Five Live this morning admitted they were much safer than smoking - must be stopped because it looks like smoking.

Presumably we'll be banning sucking pencils now? After all that's like smoking isn't it?

And fire risk? NHS Fife must be joking - you'd have to work hard at setting fire to something with an e-cigarette. This is just scrabbling around for excuses to ban something. Pathetic.

It really is time we started to behave like grown ups on this subject. E-cigarettes are safe and really can help people quit smoking. Why on earth are the anti-smokers so opposed?

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How the EU would rather smokers died than quit

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Perhaps we need to ask why the EU wants to ban the most effective means of tobacco harm reduction. Take snus, for example, this is the result of their widespread use in Sweden:

But consider this: Sweden has the EU's lowest rate of male smoking and consequently the lowest rate of lung cancer and emphysema. The health risks of snus are non existent – perhaps explaining why Sweden also has some of the lowest oral and oesophagal cancer rates in the world.

The EU already ban snus everywhere but Sweden. And now they want to ban e-cigarettes - presumably because they're not made by Pfizer and don't seem to make people kill themselves:

Pfizer make the anti-smoking drug varenicline, marketed in the US as Chantix and Champix in the EU. Endorsed by Action on Smoking and Health, it is associated with mood changes, depression and over 200 suicides. Pfizer are now subject to a class action from victim’s families and there is strong evidence that they suppressed these findings before the Food and Drug Administration licensed it.

There is no evidence at all the e-cigarettes harm anyone - not the user, not the person sat alongside, no-one. Yet the EU proposes to stop them - presumably because they're not made by big pharmaceuticals companies.

It seems that the EU, the anti-smoking lobby and 'Big Pharma' would rather smokers die than let them have access to proven means of reducing harm from smoking. And would rather ban e-cigs than fund studies to confirm that they are effective in reducing harm and in encouraging cessation.

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