Tobacco Groups Seek To Overturn Australia’s Vaping Ban

Source from:  Financial Times 04/02/2019

Big tobacco companies are seeking to overturn Australia’s ban on vaping in a bid to prise open one of the last untapped developed markets for the $25bn-a-year ecigarette industry.

Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco have made submissions to an Australian parliamentary inquiry that is considering whether ecigarettes should be legalised.

Vaping companies have provided seed funding for a doctor-led charity leading the fight to legalise ecigarettes, and last week PMI sent its top marketing executive to Sydney to promote its transition towards smoke-free vaping products.?

“Right now, smokers don’t have the ability choose non-burn [vaping] products, which we know are 90 to 95 per cent better [for you],” Marian Salzman, PMI’s senior vice-president of global communications, told the Financial Times.?

“Others are making a decision about your health if you are a smoker.”

Ms Salzman rejected health officials’ concerns that vaping would entice new recruits to smoking and said that PMI’s IQOS ecigarette product was not sold to non-smokers at its retail outlets. She called government bans on ecigarettes “morally reprehensible” because they removed a tool smokers could use to successfully quit the traditional cigarettes habit.

Australia, Turkey and Mexico are the only three OECD countries that have not legalised ecigarettes containing nicotine. A repeal of Australia’s ban would be a victory for the big tobacco groups in a country with the world’s toughest anti-tobacco laws.?

The lobbying campaign comes amid a global debate over industry claims that vaping is better for people’s health than smoking, given an absence of long-term studies.

PMI, the world’s biggest tobacco company by sales, has said it wants sales of smoke-free products to comprise almost 40 per cent of total revenue by 2025, versus 13 per cent in 2017. It now directs about 80 per cent of its research-and-development spending and almost half of its commercial spending, which includes marketing, towards its smoke-free products.?

Ms Salzman, formerly chief executive of Havas PR North America, was recruited by PMI to rehabilitate the company’s reputation, which has been tarnished over decades as it targeted young consumers and sought to downplay the risks of smoking.

Her decision to join a tobacco company surprised many in the public relations industry, not least because her father died of lung cancer.?But she said her father knew cigarettes were bad for him and that it was his choice to smoke.

“My father continued smoking after he had 40 per cent of his lungs removed and lived for another eight years, and he’d be constantly sneaking outside with a pipe or cigarettes. So I can’t blame tobacco for that.”?

Ms Salzman said critics should not “just scream us down” when PMI advocated for the repeal of the ban on ecigarettes, as the company tries to transition to ecigarettes and away from tobacco.

Greg Hunt, Australia’s health minister, told the FT he supported the existing ban. But pressure from backbench MPs who have been lobbied by tobacco groups has prompted the government to commission an independent study on ecigarettes.

Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration classifies nicotine as a dangerous poison that cannot be sold without a specific permit, and no tobacco company has submitted a vaping product for assessment by the agency.

Health advocates say vaping is part of a distraction programme by the tobacco industry, which continues to market and sell cigarettes that are known to kill more than 480,000 people a year in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

They say the vaping industry is following the tobacco companies’ play book, targeting young people with flavoured ecigarettes, and funding their own health studies and advocacy groups.

PMI recently inked a $5m content deal with the youth-focused Vice Media, while in Australia two vaping companies provided seed funding for?the doctor-led pro-vaping advocacy group, the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association.

“Given their [the tobacco industry’s] long history of lies and deceit, why should anyone accept what they now claim?” said Mike Daube, professor of health at Australia’s Curtin University and an anti-smoking advocate.
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