In Addition to Offsetting Reduced Cigarette Volumes, E-cigarettes Might Help Tackle Illicit Trade (II)

Source from:  Tobacco Reporter  10/12/2013

In January this year, it was announced that BAT had joined the board of directors of the American Society for Cellular and Computational Toxicology, and that Richard Tubb, one of the longest-serving White House physicians, had been appointed as a nonexecutive director of British American Tobacco PLC.

The record—and this would be only a part of it—speaks for itself. And yet, reading through all of this I get the feeling that something is missing. And I cannot help thinking that BAT might think so, too. According to a story in EurekAlert, in March, the company said that it was pressing on with research into cigarettes that delivered reduced levels of toxicants despite the fact that it didn't know whether it would be possible to prove scientifically that such cigarettes reduced health risks.

"There are already tobacco and nicotine products available, such as snus and e-cigarettes, that are known to pose [a] substan-tially lower risk than cigarettes," David O'Reilly, group scientific director at BAT, was quoted as saying.

"And we don't know whether it will be possible to scientifically prove that reduced-toxicant cigarettes reduce health risks. But we believe reducing smokers' exposure to cigarette-smoke toxi-cants continues to be an important research objective, given the numbers of people who smoke and the numbers who are likely to continue to smoke for the foreseeable future."

This seems a rational approach up to a point, but equally you could argue that it makes little sense. If history has taught us any-thing, it's that to reduce the harm caused by tobacco it is neces-sary, above all else, to encourage people to stop inhaling tobacco smoke. The way to go seems to be to convince cigarette smokers to switch to the other products O'Reilly mentioned: snus and e-cigarettes. And of these two, for a number of reasons, the one that seems to be winning the race is the e-cigarette. 

To be fair, BAT has, in a way, tried to be pivotal in this regard. In a press note earlier this year that deserved to be given more prominence and to have received more cover-age than—as far as I am aware—it got, the company said that a survey of general medical practitioners in the U.K. and Sweden had revealed that some held the view that one of the greatest health risks from smoking was nicotine.

"Nicotine is the addictive component of tobacco smoke, but unlike some other constituents of tobacco smoke, it is not carci-nogenic and, according to the U.K. Royal College of Physicians, 'medicinal nicotine is a very safe drug,"' the note said. "Switching to alternative nicotine products such as nicotine gums and electronic cigarettes can, therefore, help many smokers quit smoking or cut down, thereby reducing exposure to tobacco smoke and the associated harm."

But despite the fact that the company is aware of this, its for-ays into the e-cigarette and other related harm-reduction arenas (excluding tobacco cigarette technology) seem, for a company with such resources, to have been patchy. In April 2011, BAT announced that it had established Nicoventures to focus exclu-sively on the development and commercialization of innovative, regulatory-approved nicotine products, and in June of the same year, it said that Nicoventures had entered into a joint venture with Kind Consumer to develop and market a nontobacco nicotine inhalation device that would mimic the "psychological rituals and routines" of smoking. Two years later, nothing of any practical consequence seems to have happened, though, clearly, that might change spectacularly if regulatory approval is forthcoming in respect of a cigarette-like nicotine product.

Meanwhile, in those two years and more, companies without the clout of BAT have been assiduous in developing and launching onto the market e-cigarettes that are quite possibly already starting to have a practical effect on reducing harm.

Nevertheless, perhaps because regulatory approval for the Nicoventures products was taking longer than had been expected, BAT announced in December last year that it had acquired CN Creative, a U.K.-based company that specialized in the develop-ment of e-cigarette technologies intended to offer smokers a less risky alternative to cigarettes. BAT said that CN Creative, which had its own research and development facilities, currently had several e-cigarettes on the market and new, innovative e-cigarette technologies in the development pipeline.

But in July, it was BAT that said it had launched on the U.K. market its first e-cigarette. Vype, it said, would be made available initially online, though there were plans to move it into main-stream retail outlets starting in September 2013. The announce-ment seemed odd because it did not mention CN Creative and described Vype as the company's first e-cigarette. In fact, the product is out of the CN Creative stable and therefore not the first for that company, though it could be seen as being the first e-cigarette launch for the group looked at as a whole. But there's something else, too. Why would BAT, a company with strong sustainability credentials, launch an e-cigarette only in dispos-able form, even though a rechargeable version is promised "in the near future"?

It is almost as if the Vype announcement was rushed out, and it is not difficult to see why that might have been the case. But, if it was rushed out, it is difficult to see also why BAT (along with the other multinationals) is not taking e-cigarettes more seri-ously. After all, as well as helping to plug the falling volumes hole,  e-cigarettes have the potential to wipe out the illicit trade in ciga-rettes without the need for persecuting people who try to avoid cigarette taxes only because they cannot afford to pay them. Enditem