Transcription:
Thank you for joining me today.
What's your name and where are you from?
My name is Martin Steinbauer, I'm originally from Austria, from Vienna, but I live in the
United States in New York City, where we run a vaporizer technology company focusing on
sustainability and also youth access prevention technologies.
Is this your first time at GFN conference?
It is.
Thank you very much for inviting me to join you on the sustainability panel.
And what are your thoughts?
It's a wonderful group of people from, I believe, 84 countries, I was told, from very diverse
backgrounds and interests.
So it's been nice to, you know, exchange ideas, both in the formal sessions, but then also
afterwards.
What have been the most interesting sessions so far?
The most interesting sessions to me have been topics on medicinal licensing of ENDS
products and also oral products.
Since we are both a consumer and a medical hybrid product with X and HPHC data and in
a sort of a pharmaceutical background, we are very excited that more people are thinking
about bringing ENDS, not just on the market as a consumer product, but also as a medical
product.
And what product are you involved with at the moment?
In terms of our company, we make nicotine vaporizers that have excellent HPHC and stability
data that have youth access restrictions with form of an NFC enabled vaporizer.
And that also focus on minimizing carbon emissions and focusing on upcycling scheme for components
such as batteries.
Hello Konstantinos, it's nice to see you in Warsaw again.
What are your thoughts about this year's GFN conference?
Well, I think it's a landmark conference after so many years.
It's one of the first conferences focused on tobacco harm reduction and it keeps on engaging
into a debate that unfortunately the other side of the public health movement doesn't
want to be engaged to.
But still I think that it is extremely important in order to solidify our views, our strategy
and our approach because it's for the interest of public health.
So I congratulate the organizers for this excellent meeting once again.
All the speakers and the panelists for sharing their views and their vision for
the future, because it's all about the future.
Unfortunately we have a long, tough battle in front of us.
And that's why I think for the next 10 years, GFN is going to play, at least GFN is going
to play an important role in promoting harm reduction for smoking globally.
Of the panelists of that session, the tobacco control playbook, what are your thoughts?
Well unfortunately, as I said, we're having a tough battle because there is a lot of ideological
predisposition and prejudice against harm reduction for smoking.
While harm reduction as a global strategy for things that even affect our daily lives
has been perfectly integrated in today's society, is accepted by governments and regulators,
is supported by governments and public health authorities, there is a very strong and difficult
to understand in some cases resistance against tobacco harm reduction, despite it involving
more than a billion people worldwide.
And we need to reverse that type of thinking.
We need to reverse that type of ideology.
We need to stick with reality, with the facts, being realistic that unfortunately after
60 years of knowledge about smoking, we still haven't eliminated smoking.
And the best success stories globally, like for example Sweden, is coming from the implementation
of tobacco harm reduction.
That's how you will eliminate smoking.
So we need to convince governments, regulators and the public health community in total that
tobacco harm reduction is part of the solution, not part of the problem.