The Royal College of Physicians Report

In the 192-page document, The RCP lay bare the lies put up against vaping and detail exactly why everyone should embrace electronic cigarettes as a harm reduction tool. When taken together with the Public Health England 95% Safer report, the evidence is now overwhelming – there can be no disputing the fact that vaping is substantially better than smoking and offers an excellent way out of addiction.

Contributors to the report included some of the best-informed members of the research and academic communities:

• Deborah Arnott, ASH
• Richard Ashcroft, Queen Mary University
• Linda Bauld, University of Stirling
• John Britton, University of Nottingham
• Peter Hajek, Queen Mary University
• Ann McNeill, King’s College
• Robert West, University College London

The report covers topics such as the breadth of smoking in Britain, how nicotine affects the body, the role for e-cigarettes in harm reduction and the ethics surrounding its adoption. What it also does it tackle the objections to allowing vaping head on. How many times have we read warnings that vaping can lead society back to the normalisation of smoking and undo decades of progress in reducing smoking-related deaths? The debate over proposals to restrict the use of ecigs in Wales was dominated by mentions of an alleged gateway effect – whereby non-smokers would be tempted into using tobacco cigarettes after using an ecig first. Plus, opponents argue that vaping only provides a temporary escape from smoking, and that vapers return to smoking as a result because they don’t make a clean break. The report crushes all three of their core arguments: “there is no evidence that any of these processes is occurring to any significant degree in the UK.”

As Duncan Selbie from Public Health England says: “The evidence is clear; vaping is much less harmful to health than smoking, and this report further highlights the important role of e-cigarettes in reducing the deadly harms smoking causes.” The chief executive stated that if smokers combined vaping with the services offered by a local Quit program they stood an “extremely good chance of quitting smoking successfully.”

We welcome the Royal College of Physicians Report and hope the government takes on board its messages. We hope that they see that Article 20 of the Tobacco Products Directive will act as a barrier to many of the recommendations and be very detrimental to the nascent British vaping industry.