The World Health Organization (WHO) and its single most significant funder for anti-smoking efforts, US billionaire Michael Bloomberg, have today[i] sought to distract from years of failure under the WHO’s MPOWER tobacco control strategy by focusing instead on what UK-based public health agency Knowledge Action Change (KAC) and other observers are calling a new ‘war on nicotine’.
- No fewer smokers around the world in 2021 than when the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control was enacted
- Global institution insists safer nicotine products pose threat – when evidence shows they offer significant opportunity to help adult smokers quit
- Harm reduction long integrated into WHO response on drugs and HIV/AIDS – but not smoking, which kills 8 million a year
On publication of the WHO’s ‘eighth annual report on the global tobacco epidemic’, the organisation is continuing its misguided insistence that vapes (e-cigarettes), snus, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco devices, collectively known as safer nicotine products, are a threat. This ignores the growing international, independent evidence that they offer millions of adult smokers the opportunity to quit deadly combustible tobacco.[iii]
1.1 billion people continue to smoke worldwide and 8 million lives are lost annually to smoking-related disease, figures that have remained static for two decades. Unable to demonstrate that its tobacco control strategy has resulted in meaningful outcomes – the most important of which would be substantial declines in smoking – the WHO focuses instead on how many countries implement its ‘MPOWER’ measures (standing for ‘Monitoring tobacco use and preventive measures; Protecting people from tobacco smoke; Offering help to quit; Warning about the dangers of tobacco; Enforcing bans on advertising, promotion and sponsorship; and Raising taxes on tobacco’).
On closer inspection, even progress on the MPOWER measures is underwhelming. The WHO reports that 104 countries have introduced ‘one or more MPOWER measures at the highest level of achievement’ since 2007, but also states that 41 of the 49 countries that have not implemented a single measure are low and middle income countries (LMIC). 80 per cent of the world’s smokers live in LMICs. These are the countries least able to cope with the disease burden of smoking or implement the most expensive and effective of the MPOWER measures – ‘offering help’ to quit.
People smoke to obtain nicotine, a substance which carries a low risk profile. It is not nicotine that causes cancer or other smoking-related disease, but the thousands of toxins released when tobacco burns. Safer nicotine products offer adult smokers who cannot quit ways to use nicotine that are substantially less harmful than smoking. This approach is called tobacco harm reduction.
GSTHR Press Release – 2021-07-27.
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