Institutions like WHO, regulators, and NGOs are hostile to harm reduction and have shifted their firepower from smoking to safer nicotine alternatives, says Clive Bates, international tobacco control policy expert. Shot on location at GFN 2025 in Warsaw, Bates describes public health’s “war on nicotine” as a misguided, ideological crusade that betrays its original mission of reducing smoking-related disease and death.
Featuring:
CLIVE BATES
Tobacco Control Policy Expert, Counterfactual Consulting
Former Dir. of Action on Smoking and Health (UK)
Clive Bates o X.com
Clive's Website
Transcription:
00:10 - 00:44
[Brent Stafford]
Hi, I'm Brent Stafford and welcome to another edition of Red Watch on GFN.TV. We're here in Warsaw, Poland for the 12th edition of the Global Forum on Nicotine, the annual conference on safer nicotine products and tobacco harm reduction. Joining us today for this interview is Clive Bates, who is a worldwide renowned tobacco control policy expert and former director of ASH-UK. When you look at global tobacco control policy, 50,000 foot view, what's going on?
00:44 - 01:54
[Clive Bates]
Well, let's call them the tobacco control establishment. So the main tobacco control organisations, the WHO, the regulators have adopted a hostile stance to tobacco harm reduction and are trying to pursue tobacco control as it's always been, you know, bans, restrictions, taxes and so on. instead of focusing on smoking, which is the actual problem, they're directing much more of their firepower onto the safer alternatives. So it's not as though they're just neglecting tobacco harm reduction, they're actively hostile to it and moving their focus onto it and their focus off smoking, in my opinion. So I think they're doing exactly the wrong thing. I think they've seen innovations in their world and they are hostile to them instead of embracing them. So they're seeing what I consider to be relatively small risks and defining that as the problem and ignoring absolutely gigantic opportunities.
01:55 - 01:59
[Brent Stafford]
Let me ask you this plainly, and I know the answer, but is there now a war on nicotine?
02:00 - 03:22
[Clive Bates]
They have moved from, I mean, when I started in tobacco control in 1997, we all basically knew what we were doing. We were focused on reducing the burden of disease and death. It was like stopping people living in agony with COPD, dying in misery with cancer. That was what we came to work to do, okay? and we were pretty curious about new ways of doing it and I remember back in the day that we you know I was very worried about the snus ban because we had great results from Sweden showing that snus could dramatically reduce smoking and that that would translate to reductions in cancer and heart disease okay and I thought well there's a straightforward case yet the tobacco control movement at the time was very reluctant to get behind reversing the ban on snus. And I felt that was absurd. And now that is being played out at a much greater scale with vapes, with heated tobacco products, with pouches. Everybody is defining, not everybody, but many, many of the tobacco control groups and academics are defining these products as the problem rather than seeing them as a solution that requires some careful management to realise the opportunities and control the risks.
03:22 - 03:34
[Brent Stafford]
I'd like to mention Canada for a second because there, tobacco control is actually referencing themselves as nicotine control now. And when you see the write-ups in CBC, it's nicotine control.
03:35 - 05:32
[Clive Bates]
Well, again, what's behind that is an evolution of objectives to try to create a new problem to work on. So, I mean, basically the problem, Bren, is if you're in tobacco control or in tobacco control academia, your business is harm and reducing it. Otherwise, there's no point. If there's no harm or the harms are relatively small or ordinary by the scale of normal risks that people take, there's no room for you. There's nothing for you to do. So these products are a kind of existential risk to livelihoods, careers, identities, personal prestige, grants, university departments, conferences, international travel and all the things that go with being in tobacco control. So what they've done is instead of saying, oh dear, the game is up, we must embrace this because this is going to solve the problem we've all been working on. What they've done instead is redefine the problem as nicotine. Now, obviously, nicotine is irreducible in this. All the harm reduction products are nicotine products there to meet the demand for nicotine with nicotine. much lower risk but if you define that as the problem then you still have a role and hence the new designation nicotine control instead of what should be smoking control then tobacco control and now nicotine control so that's just making sure there is a live problem for them to be engaged in and therefore a purpose to them you know we don't have coffee control Coffee contains a psychoactive substance, caffeine, but it doesn't do much harm. So we don't have thousands of people across the world working on coffee control because there's no harm and there's no point to it.
05:33 - 05:58
[Brent Stafford]
So the shifting of the goalposts as they've done here, I can't help but think a bit of like, you know, Greek mythology and teleology and a telos, like the end game, the telos. of tobacco control was the end of smoking-related disease and death. And now they switched that to this new telos, and it almost makes it feel religious in nature.
05:59 - 10:28
[Clive Bates]
I think that's essentially what's happened. I mean, you remember the pioneering era of, you know, 1960s, you go back to the Royal College of Physicians, the groundbreaking Surgeon General's reports were focused on disease. They were focused on cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, okay? People having miserable lives and early deaths because of smoke inhalation, okay? now we move forward 50 years we have a way of consuming nicotine that doesn't involve smoke inhalation in fact we've had that through snus and smokeless tobacco for many years people have never wanted to embrace that as an alternative and what these alternatives have done is bring to the surface that there were previously underlying different goals and objectives. So there were people who were like me, I would say, who was focused on death and disease. My father died from smoking related disease and I've always been committed to reducing disease. But there have been drug prohibitionists There have been people who worry about addiction. There have been people who worry about exposure of bystanders, you know, the non-smoking rights activists. They're all coming from a slightly different place. Now, when there was only smoking, you could unify all of those. You could basically say we're all in it, all of these things tick all boxes. So we're good to go. We can fight the tobacco industry. They've got nowhere to go. They're a bunch of evil bastards. And, you know, we know what we're doing. And life was simple. I remember it was, you know, back in 97, it was pretty simple. There was one unambiguous enemy. There was one unambiguous problem. And you went all out to fight with it. The problem is when you take that business model and that mindset into a world that's very different and much more complicated. There are now ways... in which you can help people who are going to get ill from smoking by getting them to switch to a lower risk product. But you have to accept that they're gonna continue to use nicotine. And is that trade off worth having? In my view, yes it is. Because use of nicotine comes with relative, it's not completely benign, but it comes with relatively minor risks to health. And although people use the word addiction, it's nothing like as bad as people make out or as the way that loaded term is used. So, Nobody really wants this, but if you want to get public health results, you have to be clear on what your goal is and go relentlessly after it. And if you continue to have the goal of reducing disease, death, welfare impediments, all the hundreds of things that are well-documented, effects of smoking, everything to do with eyesight, to peripheral vascular disease, to heart attacks, to... being unable to run upstairs, being hated by your grandchildren, being excluded, all of these things you can deal with with these new products. But no, that's not good enough for some people. And let me just say why I think that is. I think tobacco harm reduction is counter-cultural for most of the people in tobacco control. So if you work in tobacco control, your toolkit is measures imposed by the state that are generally punitive coercive and stigmatizing. So taxes, restrictions, bans, graphic warning labels designed to humiliate and mock you, campaigns that are designed to sort of intimidate you and so on. is completely different with tobacco harm reduction. That's about well-informed, empowered consumers making choices in their own interests, paying their own money on their own initiative to reduce their risks and stop smoking. Interacting with private sector innovators who produce new products that they like, so it's done voluntarily rather than by force, in a lightly regulated market that focuses on consumer protection rather than forcing behaviour change. Now that is a completely different mindset to the historic mindset of tobacco control and that's why I think they're running into real clashes because they don't think that is the right way to solve this problem.
10:29 - 11:00
[Brent Stafford]
I often think that there's a simple equation, but for secondhand smoke and but for nicotine being addictive, there would be no control in tobacco control. So we're in this part where secondhand smoke is really not an issue anymore. So they've kind of lost that because that secondhand smoke was the real reason that they were able and the state was able to take the rights of individuals, right? And now if nicotine is not really all that big of a deal, what do they have left?
11:00 - 14:04
[Clive Bates]
So look, the In a way, the state was right to say, okay, there's a clash of rights here. Your right to smoke in a public space, my right to breathe clean air are in conflict. And it's quite legitimate for the state to say, well, if that's a harmful emission, and they concluded it was harmful, then we will intervene and we will control exposures in this space. So that was a kind of tobacco control measure that had legitimacy and a lot of public support. Many years for it to come through because you know you had large numbers of smokers who obviously didn't like the restrictions on their freedom but you also had large numbers of non-smokers who did like the underwriting of their freedom in some ways. Now that's a you can say well maybe people didn't have to go in those bars that allowed smoking but in the end you know government's focused on the workforce in places that well these people in a sense don't have a choice it's like a workplace occupational exposure you're good we're not we're not going to allow this anymore okay so fine so those exposures have now gone or have changed completely you know We don't have any evidence that these secondhand vaping exposures are any sort of material health risk and it was always very marginal with smoking exposures. So now that argument has gone. Addiction, We, you know, the word is banded around incredibly loosely, but it really means a physiological dependence, a compulsive behavior that leads to net serious harm, okay? And that second part of the definition of addiction is often overlooked. So if you're just dependent on something or you have a compulsion to use it or something, but it doesn't do you any harm, then you're into talking about things that are more like coffee and less like fentanyl. So, you know, it's not as straightforward. It is addictive or it's not. It's not addictive if it doesn't cause net serious harm. And a lot of vapers, a lot of pouch users be quite happy with using these products because they think they're getting something from the nicotine. It's pleasurable. It helps them concentrate, helps them relax. it might improve memory or cognitive functioning or whatever. So they feel the benefits are worth the cost. Now when the costs are cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, it's a bit harder to make that case and then you say well you're only continuing this because you are dependent and that dependence is harming you and therefore we could call it an addiction. But it's not obvious that you can call vaping or pouch use or heated tobacco product use an addiction in my view. But that's a contested language really. But I think it doesn't make sense unless there is a net serious harm. And then you can start bandying that term around, although professionally people don't use it anymore.
14:05 - 14:20
[Brent Stafford]
So continuing along on tobacco control, there's a group that we haven't actually discussed much on RegWatch is the World Conference on Tobacco Control. Is that correct? Yeah. Who is that group? And they just met, did they not?
14:20 - 15:24
[Clive Bates]
So the World Conference on Tobacco Control is actually renamed used to be every four years the World Conference on Tobacco or Health okay and it's quite an interesting change of name actually because they're stressing control and not stressing health in the name of the conference the last one that they're held every four years the last one was held in Cape Town The one that should have been in 2022 didn't work very well because of COVID and there was disruption and so on. So this, the one it's actually next week in Dublin is going to be the first big gathering of this. Now in the past, this conference has been put on by the major cancer and respiratory disease charities. So like the union and everything, this one is going to be put on with extensive sponsorship from Bloomberg Philanthropies. And it's very much a Bloomberg evangelical gathering as far as I can see.
15:25 - 15:28
[Brent Stafford]
Are these tobacco controllers from governments around the world?
15:29 - 16:06
[Clive Bates]
I think that they will have a mixture of the Irish government is one of the sponsors. So I think they'll have a mixture of government officials, a mixture of non-governmental organizations, Academics, there'll be a lot of people who've been funded by philanthropists like Michael Bloomberg. This will be their big gathering and their chance to have a sort of total immersion in that ideological coaching in a way. They'll be taught how to think and what to think about the emerging issues in tobacco control.
16:06 - 16:08
[Brent Stafford]
So it's a revival.
16:08 - 17:48
[Clive Bates]
I see it as very much as a religious gathering, a kind of hajj for tobacco control and they're all going to be immersed in the words and wisdom of Michael Bloomberg and his massive complex of activists and academics. There'll be meetings on the tobacco and nicotine end game and It will be a remarkable experience for people there but they will be living within a bubble of groupthink that is intensely reinforcing. They will be immersed in a set of ideas that actually collapse on contact with reality but they will not expose themselves to reality they will carefully exclude anybody with a dissonant opinion they will sort of see if anybody has a dissonant perspective they'll label them as a fellow travel of the tobacco industry and not therefore not welcome So, it's going to be, it's the worst kind of conference. It's the type that is there to reinforce groupthink. No one will be challenged with real world evidence. No one will be challenged with contrarian opinions. The consumer voice will not be in the room. The people most directly affected and harmed will not have a say. It is a religious meeting for the people involved in this giant act of faith that is tobacco control and ultimately focused on the elimination of nicotine. So it's like a war on drugs gathering focused on nicotine.
17:49 - 17:58
[Brent Stafford]
And they'll certainly spend some time experiencing the lived experience of children that they'll have there.
17:58 - 20:10
[Clive Bates]
Well, they... If it's like other conferences, they sort of bus in these, you know, specially coached children. They give them, you know, funny little signs to wave, to have demos, and they have them make speeches and everything. It's the most appalling way to treat young people, okay, in my view. You know, I'm father to a nine-year-old daughter. I would never want her to go anywhere near something like this. Because the whole thing about kids is you've got to get them to think critically. You've got to get them to ask questions and be curious, to see different sides of things. You don't want them dipped in a particular ideology and coached in what is right and told there are certain things that are wrong and that you should never say or think, that is not an educational thing. That's like recruiting child soldiers or it's like gross manipulation of young people who are sort of intellectually susceptible. And again, it's a little bit like a religion. You get kids to adopt religious belief by indoctrinating them at an early age. before they have time to question their faith. Next thing you know, you've got them for life. So I find it really despicable, the use of young people in these gatherings. And they use them at the COP. And I use the word, use is the right word. This is adults. This is adults ventriloquising through the voice of young people. It's not how young people would spontaneously understand these issues. And these might be kids whose parents, you know, What's the worst thing that could happen to a 14-year-old girl? You get home from school and mum says, I've got cancer. Surely we should be thinking, well, that's the worst possible thing. How do we stop mum getting cancer? So it's just so manipulative and so exploitative and shielding them from a whole different way of looking at this issue. I think it's inexcusable, to be honest.
20:11 - 20:13
[Brent Stafford]
It's like dipping them in goo.
20:13 - 21:18
[Clive Bates]
Yeah, it's like an immersion in a sort of sickly slime that doesn't really contact well with reality. So we can ban all these flavours, but what happens? They get supplied by a black market. Now, why would a 14-year-old or a 16-year-old know about that unless the responsible adults in the room raised it with them? How would they know that the economics research says, you know, if we ban flavours and they're all calling for flavours to be banned, we've got scientific economic evidence that smoking rises. So who in the room is going to expose those kids or in fact the rest of them, including the adults, to the dissonant knowledge that if you ban vaping flavours you get more smoking and who is going to own that scientific observation and make people aware of it and then question whether they still think it's the right thing to do ban flavours and actually the answer to that is no one because that view has been excluded from the room.
21:19 - 21:35
[Brent Stafford]
You mentioned COP 11 and it's coming up in Geneva this fall. So just tacking along here, we've got WHO and the FCTC, COP 11, which is the official meeting of all the tobacco controllers. What do you expect for COP 11?
21:36 - 25:25
[Clive Bates]
Well, COP 11 is a place where you know, health officials and health ministers can go and feel powerful and potent. They can stand up, they can put their flag up and they can make an impassioned speech from the floor about how they want to ban everything and that they're, you know, They've brought forward this new legislation. Everyone will applaud. They'll get an award from the NGOs there and they'll feel loved and cherished and they'll feel important and potent. They'll feel as though they're doing something. So it's really a kind of massive therapy session for government officials and NGOs to feel like they're doing something. But almost everything that they're doing and almost everything that's celebrated by WHO and by the COP environment is counterproductive. So, you know, they'll try and make a big deal out of prohibiting e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products. And of course, you know, they've done that in India, for example. WHO gave an award to the Indian Health Minister for doing that. Nobody's actually looked at what happened. And of course, there's a massive black market in India in vapes. You can get them anywhere. Which means that they're being supplied in an informal economy, probably backed by criminal enterprise, unregulated products. no one really knows what's going on, massive amount of law breaking, probably driving corruption so that police officers are bribed to look aside and so on. Who is really owning, not what's written on the black ink text of these laws and what they want to achieve, but what is actually achieved? And that's the discussion that they never have in the COP. No one's asking, okay, Brazil, you banned e-cigarettes here. Your regulator Anvisa has washed their hands of it. So we now have an unregulated market in vapes in Brazil. Who's asking questions about that? Mexico writes a ban on vapes and heated tobacco products into the constitution. Okay, so to make it really difficult to reverse. So who is so confident that the evolution of scientific knowledge and insight in this won't require or justify a reversal of that, yet they'll have made themselves a problem that's extremely difficult to reverse. Nobody should be writing that kind of measure into a constitution. You should be responsive to changes in understanding, changes in scientific knowledge. Who's asking questions about that? Taxation, WHO's really trying to get no distinction to be made between different nicotine products so they're all taxed at a high rate. Okay, we've got scientific, we've got economic evidence that differences in tax cause people to shift between the products. So if you raise the tax of a much safer product, you're going to get, other things being equal, a greater demand for the more dangerous product. Who's taking ownership of that and who is discussing it? Never do these issues get raised in the COP meetings. And one of the reasons for that is that they carefully exclude anybody who might raise them from the NGO observers. They don't allow people in who have dissonant views because they just assume that those are tobacco industry views. But they're not. They're just reality-based views based on science and economic understanding.
25:25 - 25:33
[Brent Stafford]
And to point out, obviously, is that with the climate change cops, they allow the oil companies and fossil fuel companies to be involved.
25:33 - 27:33
[Clive Bates]
You know, there could not be a greater distinction than there is between the UNFCCC, the climate negotiations, and the WHO FCTC. So almost anybody with a legitimate interest in the coal industry, the nuclear industry, the oil industry, the automotive industry, the aviation industry, all of which are involved in greenhouse gas pollution, are all represented in the room and have their views taken. Now, nobody Nobody has to say to a government, then you shouldn't just do what the fossil fuel companies or the nuclear companies or the automotive companies tell you because they know that. In the FCTC though, those views have been excluded completely, deliberately, and not just the companies involved, but the consumers involved. So everybody's handpicked to be supportive. And one of the requirements of being an observer at the FCTC is that you have to support the treaty. In other words, it's only for believers. And fine, I support the treaty, but I don't support WHO's implementation or interpretation of it. And I would like to be able to go to the COP meetings and say that, make my case, talk to delegates. There's plenty of reasonable people in the room, but they don't always hear the other side of the story, because the other side of the story is being positioned as if it's a tobacco industry story, and it's not. It's a different view of public health. And lots of people agree with me in public health, I'm not like some sort of loner in this, public health community and academic community, but they're not in the room, they're not powered with lots of money, and I'm not either, lots of money to go in and fly to these meetings and make the case and then find that they're excluded by WHO's selection criteria.
27:34 - 27:50
[Brent Stafford]
So I'd be amiss to not ask about the UK and a little bit about what's going on in Europe. Has the UK stepped back? I mean, the disposable ban is in. You can't help but think, at least from our side, from North America, that things have changed there.
27:50 - 31:07
[Clive Bates]
Things have changed in the UK and not in a good way. We've been losing key personnel in the main agencies but I think what happened is and it's hard to know whether this was manufactured or purely accidental but a kind of moral panic developed along North American lines in the UK in late 2023 And that was just like six months of relentless media coverage. Now, I don't have any proof of this, but I would say there was professional PR behind that. There was so much of it. It was so relentless. It was so professionally done. It was all misunderstandings. It was all, you know, completely, you know, just like the American moral panic. The newspapers loved it. And I think that changed minds. It caused people to say, well, we can't cope with this. And it was it was wall to wall. OK, now, whether that was some body, you know, companies or philanthropists or whatever who thought, well, OK, the UK is seen as the leading example on harm reduction. We need to break this and, you know, get them to reverse or whether it just happened spontaneously. I don't know. But the effect was to make it attractive to politicians, just as it was in the States, to come out and sound like they were the defenders of youth and that there were predatory companies involved and everything. And that has set us back a long way. We've got a ridiculous tobacco and vapes bill going through but all the public health people seem to have signed up to it. The main anti-smoking measure is this smoke-free generation thing which solves exactly the wrong problem. It bans purchase of cigarettes by people born after the 1st of January 2009 or tobacco products. Those people will never be smoking for life. Those people who are currently 15, 16 years old, they're not gonna grow up as smokers age 60, 70. They're gonna be shifting to other products or quitting completely. The big smoking problem in Britain is people middle-aged adults born well before 2009 who are smoking regularly and have been made afraid of the alternatives you know they don't trust the alternatives they've been spooked by the negative coverage and so on that's our smoking problem and that's what we should deal with younger people yes some will take up vaping but some of those or most of those probably would have taken up smoking in a world without vapes or you know the ones who wouldn't have taken up nicotine in any form they're not particularly exposed to great risks and they'll probably be a transient phenomenon because they wouldn't be the people with a great propensity to use nicotine in the first place. Otherwise they would have been smokers. So we have completely got this problem back to front. We are doing a pointless measure on smoking and we're doing an anti-vaping measure that will prove to be a pro-smoking measure.
31:07 - 31:17
[Brent Stafford]
And then you have Spain, France, Netherlands. I mean, there's a bunch of countries across Europe that seem to be really taking a hard stand.
31:19 - 33:35
[Clive Bates]
You know, it's amazing to watch. We have had the case study of snus in Europe for people to learn from for the last 40 years or so. There's extremely good data in Sweden. We know that after a confected moral panic in the late 80s, the European Union banned snus throughout the EU with the exception of Sweden. We know that Sweden has by far the lowest rates of smoking and that Sweden has by far the lowest rates of smoking-related cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory illness because of snus. Somehow, no one has learned the lessons that when we banned that product in the rest of Europe, we were denying 100 million European smokers access to those products for no good reason. 700,000 deaths a year from smoking in the EU. So a huge death toll, much lower in Sweden, and we had a proof of concept that could have been generalized to the whole of the EU. We now can generalize that through vaping and pouches. And what are they doing? They're trying to ban those as well. So it's like no lessons have been learned from the experience of snus. And that includes, okay, politicians and the media, fine. Maybe you don't expect to have a memory that goes back to the early 1990s. But the public health community should be able to understand what happened. In Britain, the chief medical officer who does this for a job and is well well compensated for it should be able to look back into history and say hang on we made a massive error in the late 80s by banning snus are we going to are we about to do the same stupid thing again and the European Commission should be able to do that these are highly paid policy professionals It's not like they're just talking about this in some bar room in Brussels and giving their opinion. They are professionally required to do the right thing and they have learned nothing.
33:36 - 33:49
[Brent Stafford]
On our side, you know, we talk about the smokers and switching them over, but what about the tens of millions of people that have switched and they're not planning on quitting nicotine anytime soon? They need to be a focus too, don't they?
33:50 - 35:56
[Clive Bates]
Well, I mean, Brent, one of the most absurd things is that the tobacco control community in the United States have seen that there's all these illicit products on the market or not regulated by FDA. Many of them perfectly good products, they're just not authorised by FDA. And their demand, 78 of these organisations banded together to write to FDA, Department of Justice and Customs and Border, protection to say that they should clear the market of these products now you've got 20 million people using these products in the United States what's going to be the effect of clearing the market of the products that the vast majority of them use okay why would you want to do that what if you were successful how many of them would go back to smoking you know how many of them would just you know, start to use these products that are now essentially not very popular, obsolete and very simple tobacco industry vaping products. Nothing wrong with them having those products on the market, but they do not meet the demand from 20 million American vapers. So you've got recklessness here. If you try and solve the problem by enforcement, you'll be forcing a lot of people back to smoking. People, about a third of those American vapers are dual users. So they're smoking and vaping, and we hope that they're on a journey to exclusive vaping. But what happens if you take away their vapes? They become exclusive smokers. How can that be a sensible thing for tobacco control and public health groups to call for is completely irresponsible. So you cannot solve this problem through enforcement. You can only solve it by through authorizations of far, far more products. And I suggest a target of say 4,000 vape products on the market to create a lawful market that competes with the illicit market and essentially drives it out. And that's the way to solve the problem.
35:56 - 36:08
[Brent Stafford]
So here at the Global Forum on Nicotine, this year is trying to address the mischaracterizations and misconceptions around vaping. How do you suggest that we do that?
36:10 - 39:36
[Clive Bates]
Well, I think making the case for vaping, there's two elements to it. And I think the two elements are processed in different parts of the brain, in different parts of politics. So first of all, one of the things I find most persuasive is the stories told by vapers, by consumers, by people who have struggled with quitting smoking, have tried all the official pharmacotherapies, NRT, behavioural counselling, hypnosis, acupuncture, you name it, they've been through the gamut, and they've finally, a story to tell that they've tried something, you know, it could be vapes, it could be heated tobacco, it could be pouches, it could be snus, and it's like, oh my God, this works. This works for me, okay? I love those stories and I think we won a big battle in the European Parliament back in 2013 because vapers told those stories in very eloquent and very moving terms. So that gets the interest, the human stories behind all this. And that gets people intuitively aligned with the idea of harm reduction because they've got a relatable case study to work with. But nobody can make the argument for that in policy terms without you know, the scientific backup. So why is it that we think these products are much safer? We know. Biomarker studies. We know that the toxicant levels are far, far lower. Can't be anything else. We see people's health improve when they switch to these things. People, you know, subjectively and objectively, all kinds of markers change. Does it display smoking or add to it? Is it a diversion or a gateway? We've got good evidence on that now, that these products are substitutes. So if people start vaping, they're going to be doing less smoking. We know that regulation, if you crack down on vaping with regulation, you get more smoking. So we know that they're substitutes. What is the argument on young people? We've seen the arguments switch over to, well, we've got to protect young people from addiction. Well, In a world without vaping, a lot of those young people would have taken up smoking. The young people who are most vulnerable may have parents or guardians or important adults who are smokers for whom this will be a massive welfare improvement that will save money and improve family life. So what about bringing that argument into the room? Okay, there might be a few young people who take up nicotine vaping pouches who would never previously have smoked and never used nicotine. Let's be realistic, how bad is that? How seriously, how bad is that? We know that these products are much less risky than smoking. We know that there will be people who would otherwise have smoked. How do we weigh up the benefits to the young people who would otherwise have smoked against the detriment to young people who would otherwise never have used nicotine. There's no question about it. The benefits to those who would otherwise smoke are huge and massively outweigh the detriments to people who take up nicotine. And for them, it would probably be transient anyway because they probably don't have a strong urge to use nicotine or in the counterfactual world, they would have been smokers.