Experts Share Evidence About Flavours in Submission to Dutch Government

Source from:  Vapingpost 02/23/2021

A public consultation on the recently announced flavour ban which was originally meant to close on the 19th of January, had been extended to the 2nd of February. The Government website stated that this extension was granted “due to popular demand.”

In line with this, a press release by the World Vapers’ Alliance (WVA) had pointed out that this consultation had gathered the largest number of responses ever collected in a health-related public consultation in the country. More importantly, the vast majority of the responses, at 98.54% opposed the ban, equating to 746 responses out of the total 757 submissions recorded on the official website until now.

A  number of health experts and entities spoke against the ban. “By taking measures to make vaping less attractive (notably by proposing a ban on all non-tobacco flavours for e-cigarettes), it threatens to degrade the appeal of a low-risk rival to cigarettes, provide regulatory protection to the cigarette trade, prolong smoking, obstruct quitting, and add to the burden of disease and death. All this in the name of protecting youth, while managing to harm both adults and adolescents,” said public health expert Clive Bates in a blog.

The public never responds to regulations in the way intended by lawmakers

He added that there is a problem is in believing that the public will respond to regulations in the way intended. He pointed out that this is never the case, and most users resort to the black market to obtain their products of choice. “Experience suggests foreseeable perverse consequences will be the result of the ill-conceived prohibitions of much safer alternatives to smoking, including flavoured e-cigarettes.”

To this effect, in a submission to the Dutch government, twenty-four international experts have set out the arguments and scientific evidence in detail in the hope “to spare Mr Blokhuis later embarrassment and, even more importantly, to avoid yet more death and disease from smoking in the Netherlands.”