“Back in 2011 when Smokefree 2025 was launched, it was viewed as doable albeit requiring serious and deliberate government programmes and intervention. However, nine years on we’re still sadly miles off,” said AVCA co-director Nancy Loucas, in a recent press release.
Earlier this year, Loucas had explained why the recently implemented Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Bill, would be counterproductive to achieving this goal. “A huge opportunity has been missed to make risk-reduced vaping products more accessible to smokers in order to reach the SmokeFree 2025 goal set by the government,” she said.
Loucas has emphasized that any vape/tobacco tobacco-related actions must dovetail with the country’s smokefree action plan. “Finalising the vaping regulations and the smokefree action plan must not been done in silos. The two are intrinsically linked, with vaping an effective tool towards Aotearoa achieving the smokefree goal. It should be regulated proportionately.”
EU data show that lower nicotine levels lead to higher toxin consumption
Meanwhile, public health professor Chris Bullen has said that studies show that when consuming relatively low nicotine levels, non-smokers do not get addicted to nicotine and that smokers manage to cut down or quit. Sadly, data from Europe where such a cap has already been set, have indicated quite the opposite.
Data have shown that forcing smokers who are trying to quit to consume lower levels of nicotine than they are used to, only compels them to use the products more often than they normally would, hence consume more toxins, or else simply revert back to using more harmful tobacco products.
Read Further: NZ Herald
New Zealand Proposes Vape Products Should Carry Health Warnings in Māori
I wonder if US FDA and these folks are even remotely considering the fact that if you grow a tobacco plant with low nicotine that will reduce it’s natural defences and it is basically more susceptible to pests and likely need liberal doses of pesticides to make that difference up. Pesticides which will find their way into the finished product and ecosystem.
That and the fact if they force all the tobacco companies to do this, the likely route to get there in a reasonable amount of time winds up being genetic modification, GMO. Asking anyone to do something like that at the flip of a switch really should be a non-starter.
The real question to me is: how many smokers are they going to throw under the bus to test unproven methods of trying to reduce uptake?