Scientists Slam Extended Singapore Ban

Source from:  factasia.org 06/25/2015

Leading figures in tobacco control worldwide have asked the Singapore government to reconsider its June 15 announcement of a "significant extension to its tobacco control programme banning a range of tobacco and nicotine products from December this year."

In an open letter to the city-state's health minister and the permanent secretary for health, Professor Gerry Stimson (Emeritus Professor, Imperial College London and Visiting Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and former Action on Smoking and Health director Clive Bates call for the government to reconsider the move.

The extension of a ban on electronic nicotine delivery systems (including e-cigarettes) to include new and upcoming technologies is not in consumers' interests, they argue. Such products offer current adult smokers a way to switch from conventional tobacco products to a much less harmful way of getting their nicotine, a way that is "far less risky than smoking".

The letter encourages Singapore "to adopt a world-leading progressive policy in this area - based on proportionate risk-based product regulation, protective marketing restrictions, a fair excise risk-based regime, accurate information and advice to consumers and a recognition that excessive regulation has harmful unintended consequences through the protection of the cigarette trade."

Both Stimson and Bates have argued consistently that a ban on e-cigarettes has the opposite effect to that intended. Instead of reducing smoking rates, it means that smokers have no alternative other than to quit altogether - other smoking-cessation therapies proving largely ineffective - and the danger of death and disease is retained instead of being mitigated via less harmful alternatives. "There is strong consensus among scientists that nicotine products that do not involve burning tobacco are far less risky than smoking," say the experts in their letter.