Spain's health minister recently announced a ban on disposables and flavours and advocates fear a previous proposal to ban sales online and in vape shops may also come back into play. World Vapers Alliance's Alberto Gómez Hernández gives Joanna Junak the lowdown on the proposals, explaining why advocates think it will be disastrous for public health.
Transcription:
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Joanna Junak: Hello and welcome! I'm Joanna Junak and this is GFN News on GFN.TV. Changes in regulations regarding the ban on the sale of disposable e-cigarettes and their flavours have recently become a hot topic across Europe. In this episode we will explore the changes proposed by Spain in this recently announced plan. Joining us today to share more information regarding the proposed changes is Alberto Gomez-Hernandez, Policy Manager at the World Vapors Alliance. Hello Alberto, thank you for joining us today. Could you please tell us what you do and what your area of interest is?
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Alberto Gomez Hernandez: Yes, so I am Alberto Gomez Hernandez. I am the policy manager of the World Big Press Alliance. And my area of interest is mainly the regulation of alternative nicotine products and what their impacts of these regulations is on public health and on consumers. And my work, it mainly focuses on advocating for tobacco harm reduction policies that helps smokers switch to safer alternatives and that improve public health. So one of our goals at the World Red Press Alliance is to have consumers' voices heard in the corridors of power, in the national parliaments, in the public health institutions, and to have their interest at the center of the public health regulations. And so to ensure that, I mainly engage with policymakers, with governments, with health ministries, and try to brief them on tobacco harm reduction, on vaping, and how this tool can be used to improve public health.
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Joanna Junak: Okay, let's talk about the draft amendment introducing a ban on the sale of disposable vapes and their flavors. What are the key changes being introduced?
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Alberto Gomez Hernandez: Well, to be honest, we do not really know yet what the details are because the draft hasn't been published. It's just the government has been announcing a series of measures for the last months or even for the last years, I would say. And very recently, the State Secretary for Health announced that the draft will be published soon. It should be published by the time we are recording this, but I think they are always a bit late. In this draft, he announced that there will be a ban on disposable vapes and a ban on vaping flavors. So mainly what they're trying to do with these measures as they present them is to prevent youth vaping and to prevent access from minors to the products. But we think, obviously, this is a very bad way to do it. We don't think they can achieve it this way. And we think that they're going to have huge unintended consequences that are going to impact very negatively on both adult vapors, adult users of nicotine products, and on the public health. Other than those two, the ban on disposable vapes and the ban on flavors, the draft could include some other measures that have been included in the national smoking control and prevention plan, such as, for example, further restricting the packaging of the products and the information that they contain. But this, again, we are not sure yet because we haven't seen the drafts and we hope to have the details soon.
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Joanna Junak: But that's not the only regulation the government is working on. We've also heard about an amendment to the sales ban regulations. Could you tell us a bit more about it?
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Alberto Gomez Hernandez: well this amendment is a proposal to run the sale of vaping products both online and specialized shops in vape shops i think this was proposed in june of 2022 so over two years ago now by the ministry of health but it has been sort of on hold since then um we think that such a van would hugely harm consumers because it will make access to the products much more difficult and obviously it will destroy the vaping sector in spain which has a few hundreds of vape shops and companies that produce devices and illiquid. So definitely it is a very bad idea. Even the national markets and competition commission said that this is not good, that this is going to reduce competition and hard consumers. And they asked the government to please push this measure back. And since then, since they announced it to the public opinion, it has been on hold. It hasn't been announced anything yet. We know for sure that it's not going to be in this draft that includes the disposable and flavors ban because it's a whole different regulation. But we think since this is also included in the smoking control and prevention plan, where they say that they want to equalize the regulation of sales across all tobacco products, we think we might hear news about this soon in the coming months.
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Joanna Junak: Okay, so let's go back to the current proposal. What is the position of the World Vapors Alliance regarding these proposed regulations?
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Alberto Gomez Hernandez: Yeah, well, obviously we 100% oppose these bans, both the disposable vapes bans and the flavor bans. We think that obviously it is great that they want to protect children. We also want to protect children. We think regulation to protect them is necessary, but we think these bans are not going to prevent them from accessing their products and they are going to harm other users. First of all, on disposable vapes, we believe that the one-fits-all solution approach does not work, and that consumers should always have as many options as possible to choose from, to try and see what works best for them. And disposable vapes are actually a very cheap and easy way to try vaping and to use vaping products. And these two are great incentives, I think, for all people or people that is not experienced with their products to try them, see if they like them, see if they work for them, and then to make the full switch into vaping and move on to more complex devices. And about the flavor one, of course, there is a lot of evidence on vaping flavors, stating how they are important for smokers to quit. In general, we just think this is a bad idea and they should take a completely different approach. We think this regulation is very likely to have a lot of unintended consequences and that they are going to harm public health. They are going to worsen public health rather than improve it. We think that by banning disposables and flavors, we are risking pushing a great amount of vapors back into combustible cigarettes or to force them to buy products in the black markets, products that we don't know which exactly which ingredients they exactly contain, whether they are safe or not, where they are produced, they have no traceability. So we think in general, there is a lot of evidence from similar ones in the United States and in all European countries showing that this leads to higher smoking rates, especially among the youth. So we think that both measures are very negative and that they should be put back What we defend is a world regulated by vaping markets that allows for easy access to all consumers and where flavor products are available for adults to quit. That's what we want. And we think that binding these products outright is going to counteract the progress that we have made in hand reduction in the past 20 years.
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Joanna Junak: And when can we expect binding decisions from the government?
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Alberto Gomez Hernandez: Well, we are expecting the draft amendment to come up in the following weeks at the moment of this Again, as the Secretary of State for Health announced, it should be either this week or next week. He said in the coming weeks, but we don't really know. And after that, it should go through the Council of Ministers. It's not going to go through Parliament. They should have a small vote there among the government, which we expect to be positive, and then it should be implemented next year if they pass it in the following weeks.
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Joanna Junak: Thank you, Alberto. We will keep an eye on the situation. That's all for today. Tune in next time here on GFN TV or on our podcast. You can also find transcriptions of each episode on the GFN TV website. Thanks for watching or listening. See you next time.