A harm reduction approach should not stop at those who are still smoking. What about the millions who have already moved to safer nicotine products - and still depend on access to them? If public health is about reducing harm, shouldn’t their voices count too?
Transcription:
00:00 - 00:04
[Paddy Costall]
What we should be doing is educating people. You know, if you do this, this will happen.
00:05 - 00:48
[Brent Stafford]
Paddy, all these years, to this day, everyone talks, rightly so, about the person who is still smoking and how do we serve them and help them make that switch. When we look at the regulators and the restrictions and the bans, it's in relationship to that smoker. My question is, and I'll use U.S. numbers as an example, there's 25 million Americans who have already switched or are in the process of switching to safer nicotine. Tens of millions. And so the restrictions and bans affect people who have switched years ago, but they still need to be able to access their vaping products. What about them?
00:48 - 02:51
[Paddy Costall]
The big issue is that The most important cohort are those who are smoking, the older people who are smoking, because they are shortening their life expectancy by doing so. I mean, I know there's a calculation can be done on that. I'm not a statistician, so I won't even attempt it. It's been discovered a long time ago that if people stop smoking in their 20s, by the time they're in their 40s, it's as if they've never smoked. The body will recover and all the rest of it. But what has happened is that the policy makers, and the influences in the anti-THR camp have shifted the goalposts, so we've got to protect the children. We could just ignore these people. They're written off. They're damaged goods. There's nothing we can do about that. But what about the children? And that's the whole focus of it. And that is where... It's been shown. It's a fallacy. It's been shown that you know the numbers of high school students vaping Yes, you can manufacture the numbers, you know, they do it frequently. Yeah once a week. That's frequently It depends how you define them or once a month, you know or ever use but it depends how you define it and I think that's where the problem lies these older people don't count and Because they don't fit the scenario. They don't fit what people want to. They don't want to describe these older people who just sit there quietly. and unobtrusively stealth vape. They're not blowing clouds everywhere. They're not sitting in a tattooist's chair and having their heads shaved and dressing in leather. All that kind of, the demonisation of it all. They're just ordinary people.