DHSC announces that it will not legalise the world’s most successful smoking substitute   The health department has stated that it will not legalise the oral nicotine product snus The product has driven the world’s most dramatic falls in smoking in Scandinavia It is popular among hardcore smokers who do not want to use inhaled  …

Clive Bates – Vaping and Tobacco Harm Reduction Nicotine without smoke? This discussion takes a brief tour through the science and policy controversies surrounding the concept of tobacco harm reduction: the idea of delivering the mild recreational drug without products of combustion of tobacco leaf. The WHO reports that 8 million deaths are caused annually  …

Fifteen years ago, the World Health Organization developed the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which aims to provide governments with guidelines for reducing tobacco use. Every two years, representatives meet at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to discuss ways in which the FCTC might be improved. The ninth Conference of the Parties (COP9)  …

Tobacco and alcohol are the largest sources of preventable death in the world. Our current treatments are only 15% effective at best. However, psilocybin-assisted therapy has achieved an astonishing 80% success rate in clinical trials. Professor Matthew Johnson is paving the way for this new an innovative treatment to address one of the most damaging  …

The emergence of vaping and e-cigarettes is a relatively new and novel form of harm reduction. The UK has taken a scientific approach to the regulation of vaporisers and has been rewarded with great reductions of new and existing tobacco smokers. However, internationally vaporisers have been met with great distain and in some cases prohibition.  …

By Ian Sliney – Epidemiologist Forty-seven years later I still remember my first cigarette, and I was addicted to nicotine from the first puff. I smoked regularly for twenty years, then following multiple attempts, I kicked the habit cold-turkey after a doctor in Nairobi misread a chest x-ray and warned me I may have a  …

Foreword by Professor David Nutt Lies, damn lies and vaping statistics- To paraphrase Disraeli’s famous critique of statistics the so-called science of vaping now seems to have become even worse than dishonest. In the past 6 months we have seen across the world a deliberate attempt to mislead the public over the harms of vaping  …

Drug Science stands by its e-cigarette analysis from 2014, any way of radically reducing the death toll from tobacco would be a worldwide public health triumph. e-cigarettes are not the solution to end the ever-increasing death toll caused by tobacco. However, they have proven to be an incredibly effective tool for tens of thousands of  …

Around the world, politicians are working to ban e-cigarette marketing, limit their nicotine content, prohibit use in public buildings, and even to ban them entirely. There remains a need for policy makers to become better informed of the relative harms of nicotine delivery systems in order to build a regulatory framework that minimises harm. The  …