A government U-turn on e-cigarettes

My Times Thunderer article on vaping:

 

The government now says vaping with e-cigarettes
is such a good thing that we should be prescribing it and smokers
should be rushing to take it up. It’s 95 per cent less harmful than
smoking, it’s helping people to quit tobacco and there’s no
evidence it’s a gateway into smoking: rather the reverse.

Doing a U-turn when you’ve spent two years building brick walls
on the other carriageway is challenging. The obstacles that the
government will face in encouraging vaping are more than a little
of its own making. The Public Health England review that changed
the government’s mind is concerned “that increasing numbers of
people think e-cigarettes are equally or more harmful than
smoking”.

I wonder why people think that. Could it have anything to do
with the fact that in the government’s last major announcement on
e-cigarettes in June 2013 it recommended (through the Medicines
& Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA) “that people
do not use them”? Or that last year the chief medical officer
told New Scientist that e-cigarettes were one of
the UK’s three great health threats?

Or that in September 2013, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt,
was lobbying MEPs to create heavy regulations on e-cigarettes by
insisting that all should be regulated as medicines? This resulted
in an effective ban on strong e-cigarettes and on consumer
advertising — which will come into force next year.

The truth is, the evidence that vaping is a game-changer in the
fight against tobacco has been obvious for years, but a combination
of yuk-factor gut instinct, drug-company lobbying and dislike of
private sector innovation led the public health mandarins to build
obstacles to it.

The new report is full of delicious coded admissions that this
was a big mistake: “The absence of non-tobacco industry products
going through the MHRA licensing process suggests that the process
is inadvertently favouring larger manufacturers, including the
tobacco industry, which is likely to inhibit innovation in the
prescription market.” Yup, some of us made that point a while
ago.

The Department of Health should have done a proper impact
assessment at the start. The extraordinary result is that Mr Hunt
will now have to navigate the onerous regulations of vaping that he
was the driving force in imposing across Europe. Still, he deserves
congratulations for having the courage to do a U-turn.