The UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is considering prescription of e-cigarettes on the National Health Service.
This consideration heralds the next big revenue stream for big tobacco, whose lobbyists have campaigned for the prescription of e-cigarettes as UK smoking rates dwindle. We absolutely disagree that “doctors, medical leaders and health campaigners welcomed the move”.
The argument underpinning this volte-face (physicians always shunned so-called big pharma’s attempts at co-optation in the guise of antismoking collaborations is that e-cigarettes are safer than conventional cigarettes, an assertion that could prove as harmful as the endorsement of tobacco by physicians between 1920 and 1950. It is universally accepted that cigarette smoking is harmful.
Big tobacco eventually had to end its exploitation of misguided medical approval to sell cigarettes to a credulous public. Many doctors (and the public) are falling victim to a campaign built on selective reporting and misleading interpretation of scanty, poor-quality data to secure support for replacing one harmful mass addiction with another.
The immediate toxic effects of e-cigarettes far outweigh those of conventional cigarettes,
Sarah Brown Et. Al. – The Lancet – 2021-12-18.
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