SWITZERLAND: Difficult to impose vaping in the country!

The danger of a schism hovers over the fight against smoking. On the one hand, the proponents of strict abstinence, and on the other, the tobaccoologists who defend risk reduction. Nearly 60% of European smokers have recently tried to wean themselves off. The central issue between the two approaches lies in the means available to get them out of tobacco. The emergence of the vape crystallizes this opposition. Around this object, sanitary and social controversies, huge economic interests for states, pharma and tobacco companies. In the middle, millions of vapers, mostly using nicotine and 98% ex-smokers or smokers to wean themselves off.

Legal tobacco, illegal vape in Switzerland

Switzerland, through the prohibition of nicotine liquids, follows a tough policy against the vape. The status of this alternative, and its assimilation or not tobacco, will be one of the stakes of the future law on tobacco products (LPTab) whose agenda has already fallen behind. The current ban on nicotine liquids "is unfounded", According to the legal opinion of Jacques Roulet, presented the 30 May by Helvetic Vape, the Swiss association of vapers. The Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) responds to wait for the next LPTab. That is, the 2019 horizon - fourteen years after the ban. Diligence policy whereas the FOPH could integrate the vape in an ordinance of the new law on the foodstuffs and usual products by which it treated it until then whose entry into force is planned next January.

However, the expert report presented in 2014 by Professor Jacques Cornuz, vice-president of the Federal Commission for Smoking Prevention, highlights the need for nicotine for smoking cessation using the vape. The prohibition of nicotine liquids has confined it to Switzerland where, in return, smoking continues from 2008 to 25% of the population. In comparison, the UK has seen its smoking rate drop by 11 points since 2006, passing under the 20%. Action on Smoking and Health, the leading anti-smoking organization in the UK, lists 1,1 million tobacco weaners. Evidence that supports studies showing a cessation rate using the vape around 40%, accompanied by 25% to 50% smokers greatly reducing their consumption. No product has breathed such a breath of fresh air into the fight against smoking. Whereas with the only will, 96% of stop attempts fail.

«People smoke for nicotine but die from tarIn 1974, Prof. Michael Russell, a pioneer in tobacco addiction research, was leading the way in risk reduction. Instead of condemning any nicotine consumption, this approach considers substitution products, introducing the idea of ​​a continuum in the scale of risks. In 1998, Professor Neal Benowitz, clinical pharmacologist at the University of California, San Francisco, establishes, in a reference work on the toxicity of nicotine, its very low cardiovascular impact, its absence of carcinogenesis but a risk for development brain of the fetus. Yet, nicotine still has a demonic reputation. While the acute oral toxicity dose of 60 mg (0,8 mg / kg body weight) for an adult is based on a questionable self-experience of the nineteenth century. Professor Bernd Mayer of the Institute of Pharmacological Sciences at the University of Graz, Austria, has updated the surprising gap in this standard and relies on recent research to re-evaluate it between 0,5 g and 1 g (6,5 mg to 13 mg / kg).

Without combustion or tobacco, the vape does not generate carbon monoxide, which asphyxiates the body taking the place of oxygen in the blood, nor tar, which lining the lungs. A scientific commission, for the English parliament, evaluates it to "at least 20 times safer, and probably considerably more" than to smoke in term of risks in the long term4. Lack of cytotoxicity established by Professor Konstantinos Farsalinos, researcher at the Onassis Center in Athens, similar addiction to nicotine gums, themselves very little addictive, according to a study by Jean-François Etter, professor of public health at the University of Geneva and responsible for the stop-tabac.ch website. No nicotine free-base nor toxic such as polonium 210, cadmium, arsenic, ammonia, etc. Hundreds of scientific studies demonstrate the very low dangerousness of the product.

In the state of knowledge, we can not hide this evidence: for his health, a smoker has everything to gain from giving up the crap by the vape.

In the absence of being able to dispute the absence of the main tobacco pathogens, the attacks focused on the aldehydes in the vape. In January, the media claims that "e-cig is 5 at 15 times more carcinogenic than tobaccoAccording to Portland researchers. The 13 may, on the site of his university, Professor David Peyton distanced himself: "We never said that". The dangers of tobacco are not reduced to aldehydes. Above all, the study shows that at normal power, the vaporizers release only minute rates. It is only overheating that these toxic substances appear significantly. Unrealistic case to use, according to Pr Farsalinos who judges the biased protocol in the review Addiction.

The anxiogenic buzz swarms. Like, last November, the hearsay attributed to a Japanese researcher by AFP when he had just published a study demonstrating the opposite. This deleterious climate stifles confidence in the vape. From 2012 to 2014, the Europeans considered it harmful have gone from 27% to 52% according to the Eurobarometer. A catastrophe in the eyes of the proponents of risk reduction. The influence of pharmaceutical and tobacco lobbies is probably not unrelated to these rumors, but they also come from the pro-abstinence environment.

Gateway effect or nerdization of smoking?

Proponents of abstinence take up the old slogan anti-condom: the vapote would promote smoking by trivializing the gesture. In February, Dr. Joan-Carles Suris, from the University Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine in Lausanne, sounds the alarm in The Morning: "the electronic cigarette is a gateway to youth smokings. " Yet his study3, realized with Christina Akré, does not present any case of young brought to tobacco by the vape! Also shocking, value judgments such as this smoker pretexting that "if it's bad to start the cigarette againAre endorsed as factual scientific truths. Does this explain why the study was not peer-reviewed, an essential scientific validation procedure?

In contrast, the study "Paris without tobacco", Led by Professor Bertrand Dautzenberg on more than 3300 French students, concludes a" competition with tobacco, encouraging a decline in smoking of younger "down 10 points since 2011. The same trend in the United States is controversial. From 2011 to 2014, the Center for Disease Control records a fall from 15,8% to 9,2% of smokers among 15 / 19 years. But the body is sorry for 13,2% of vapers. On the side of tobacco specialists, Professor Michael Siegel, from Boston University, is pleased: the vape "diverts young people from cigarettes", very few vapers then go to killers. "Tobacco testing is almost always older than that of the electronic cigaretteAnd the vapewith nicotine is the exclusive privilege of smokers", Says a survey of the Foundation of the breath, on 3000 French teenagers in 2014.

Political smoking

The tobacco industry seeks to equate this competing alternative as a simple accessory. Paradoxically, the camp "quit or die"(Giving up smoking or dying) takes up this refrain, amalgamating the two modes of nicotine consumption. "The ability of the tobacco industry to gag the threats of alternative technology is not due to a cabal of clever geniuses. Rather, it comes from actions involuntarily useful to these societies of people considering themselves mortal enemies. Big Tobacco has few friends. " But with such enemies, he has no needn ", writes David Sweanor, adjunct professor of law at the University of Ottawa, specializing in public policy on tobacco control.

Various reasons explain this strange alliance against nature. Corporatist conservatism of medical mandarins in front of a scientific revolution initiated by the users, according to David Sweanor. Exacerbated moralism does not support the vapoteur enjoy his smoking cessation, for Pre Lynn T. Kozlowski, psychologist at the University of Toronto. The deleterious influence of the pharmaceutical lobby, the bulk of whose revenues come from tobacco-related diseases, for many others. And perhaps, the advertising effect of tobacco "endgame"(Smoking cessation) in 2040 by the World Health Organization.

Filled with incantatory formulas, one of the few practical objectives is the hunt for the vape. Easier than the anti-smoking measures, it is appreciated by authorities without imagination or courage by ensuring, for now, the maintenance of tobacco revenue.

Will Switzerland continue to knowingly sabotage a way to make tobacco obsolete? The answer could be in the hands of social actors, vapers and health professionals, if they mobilize in time.

Source : Lecourrier.ch