ATS Beats A Broken Drum
“Claims that e-cigarettes are a harm reduction tool remain unproven,” says the blinkered American Thoracic Society
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by Dave Cross
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Lynn Schnapp, President of the ATS, responded to the FDA’s announcement: “E-cigarettes are not ‘safe’ and the claims that e-cigarettes are a harm reduction tool remain unproven. All e-cigarettes have significant health risks including nicotine addiction and respiratory disease.”
The ATS said it noted that the FDA has finally issued decisions on e-cigarette products that constitute a large share of the e-cigarette market. “This is an important step by the FDA to finally reign in the U.S. e-cigarette marketplace.”
Continuing, it stated: “We are concerned that the agency has approved Vuse products with high nicotine concentration. While we appreciate that the FDA rejected RJR/Vuse application for flavoured e-cigarette products, we note with concern that the agency has not yet rejected the Vuse application for menthol e-cigarette products. The presence of any flavoured e-cigarette product poses an unacceptable risk to our nation’s youth. The ATS calls on the FDA to protect our nation’s youth by rejecting all flavoured e-cigarette products – including menthol flavoured e-cigarettes.”
It’s long since ceased to be surprising to hear so-called public health bodies in America trotting out lines of half-truths and misinformation. Dr Michael Siegel marked the American Thoracic Society’s card back in 2017.
The Professor at the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health, has 32 years of tobacco control experience. He previously worked on the other side of the fence and knows how these anti-vaping organisations think.
Back then, he wrote: “For months, I have been arguing that the major anti-tobacco groups in the United States have been waging a war against electronic cigarettes that is motivated not by a pure concern for the public's health, but by an ideological opposition to the idea that anyone could get pleasure from nicotine in whatever form -- even if they are improving their health and saving their life. Today, the American Thoracic Society made it official.”
Siegel said the ATS, “is willing to throw away the lives of smokers in order to promote the radical ideology that no one should derive pleasure from nicotine in any form, even if it is a life-saving switch from deadly cigarettes to very low-risk e-cigarettes.”
While Siegel had it spot on with “the underlying philosophy of all the major anti-tobacco groups, and even of many health departments and agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state health departments in California, Vermont, and Washington” - history proved him wrong on ex-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who demonstrated himself to be equally blind to evidence.
Meanwhile, Siegel’s final words are proving to be prophetic: “Discouraging youth from using e-cigarettes should not come at the expense of wiping out 99% of the e-cigarette market, depriving millions of former smokers of the product they are using successfully to stay off tobacco cigarettes, and risking tens of thousands of these former smokers returning to cigarette smoking because their vaping products are taken off the market.”
Vaping and tobacco harm reduction in the United States stands on a precipice.
Photo Credit:
Photo by Matthijs Smit on Unsplash
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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