“Challenging Perceptions” — hear voices from around the world on how to communicate tobacco harm reduction effectively. From researchers to advocates, GFN 2025 brought powerful insights on evidence, empathy, and engagement.
Transcription:
00:09 - 00:11
[Brent Stafford]
What did you think of GFN this year?
00:11 - 00:20
[Cecilia Kindstrand]
I think it was really brilliant. It's always good here to come and hear and listen to different opinions. It was a very good conference, as always.
00:21 - 00:28
[Brent Stafford]
And the strapline is challenging perceptions. How do you effectively communicate THR?
00:28 - 01:06
[Cecilia Kindstrand]
I think what we can do from the industry side is to explain, and I'm from Swedish match, so we have a long legacy when it comes to harm reduction. We divested our cigarette business 30 years ago, 25 years ago, and we have a really safe product. And we have been able to shift consumption from combustibles to snus in Sweden in this case. So I would say we have a good story and we just need to continue explaining what we have done and try to take that experience to other markets and other people.
01:06 - 01:08
[Brent Stafford]
So what do you think of GFN this year?
01:08 - 01:34
[Kristof Redei]
I think it's fantastic. It's my second year this year. I'm in the Tobacco Harm Reduction Scholarship program. So the first year I had a nice big cohort of people to hang out with. This year there's still a few of us here. So meeting some new friends, some old friends. Learning a lot, really, folks from so many different backgrounds, so many different countries, there's nothing I could... So the strap-on is challenging perceptions, effective communication for tobacco harm reduction.
01:35 - 01:38
[Brent Stafford]
How do you effectively communicate tobacco harm reduction?
01:39 - 02:27
[Kristof Redei]
Yeah, I think every audience is a little bit different. I personally am working on a project to communicate with the effective altruism community, which is a very specific kind of philanthropic humanist social movement. They're very into working with evidence-based policies. And so for me, I actually have the luxury of delving into more of the evidence and talking about numbers and talking about how cost-effectively THR can help people both in the developed world, especially in LMICs. So you've got actually a receptive audience in a way? I hope so, yeah. I think these people that I'm writing for are very open-minded. Some of them are even, they're working in tobacco control, but they're willing to hear out other aspects of the argument. And then there's people who are starting their careers looking for something impactful to do. And there's also people who are potentially donors to organizations associated with THR.
02:29 - 02:35
[Brent Stafford]
The strapline is challenging perceptions, right? How do you effectively communicate THR?
02:36 - 02:59
[Arielle Selya]
That's the big question. On my end, I'm doing what I can from a research perspective to produce the research, but also communicate it out to a lay audience. I also had a session earlier, day one, I think, where we used the Delphi method to come to consensus about different risk perception claims. So that's a method that maybe can be used to bring different experts with different opinions together.
03:00 - 03:02
[Brent Stafford]
Has it gotten worse out there in terms of public perception?
03:03 - 03:14
[Arielle Selya]
In terms of public perception, yes, maybe. But I also am seeing some signs of changing too in the academic literature in some cases.
03:14 - 03:17
[Brent Stafford]
Yeah, how do you mean? Because you do review a lot of the academic literature.
03:18 - 03:26
[Arielle Selya]
Yes. So I'm seeing some pro-THR papers, fairly speaking, come out from groups that are historically anti-THR.
03:26 - 03:27
[Brent Stafford]
So that's good news.
03:27 - 03:30
[Arielle Selya]
I agree, it's good news. I think maybe the times are changing.
03:32 - 04:18
[Heneage Mitchell]
GFN this year was, as usual, excellent networking. As a consumer, I... I really look forward to coming here because I meet people like Assar and the community. Because consumers, advocates, for us it's a difficult field to work in because we're unfunded, unloved in many cases. But what we're doing is so, so important because all of this, the GFN, everything, it's about us. And if it's about us, we have to be involved and we appreciate the platform and the forum because it is the only one we really have globally to get our message across that nothing about us without us.
04:18 - 04:28
[Brent Stafford]
So the strapline for this week is effective communication for tobacco harm reduction. How do you do that? How do you effectively communicate, THR? That's a really good question.
04:29 - 05:43
[Heneage Mitchell]
And if I knew the answer, we wouldn't be here. But part of it is talking to you, talking to anybody that will listen. I think... There's several elements to it. First of all, it costs money to access mainstream media and it costs money and time to leverage social media and social media is an echo chamber. Mainstream media just doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with anything that's scientific or human rights oriented when it's to do with tobacco because tobacco is regarded as evil and if you smoke tobacco, I will cite you, I will directly quote you from a WHO official who was addressing the Philippine Senate a few years ago and she was asked a question related to giving choices to smokers. And she said, we don't care about the smokers. And I think that pretty much says what we're up against. If major institutions such as the WHO doesn't care about the smokers, that means governments don't have to care about the smokers other than cash cows.