This article was originally published in The Financial Post.
Opinion: Nicotine isn’t a health hazard. Why is Ottawa so against vaping?
It has no problem with nicotine products from Big Pharma. But nicotine products from Big Tobacco transform it into a Raging Bull.
The first thing to be said about Health Minister Mark Holland’s recent media outburst is that he has reason to be frustrated with British American Tobacco, parent of Imperial Tobacco Canada (BAT/ITC). After two years of negotiation and safety verification, Imperial obtained Health Canada approval to sell its Zonnic oral nicotine product as a smoking cessation aid but then proceeded to market it as a consumer product, using images of young adults, as the e-cigarette Juul did when it first came on the market. The promotion has put Big Tobacco back in the public eye and again painted it as untrustworthy, even though Zonnic is about the safest nicotine product that can be purchased anywhere and is as safe as the nicotine gums, patches and sprays marketed by Big Pharma.
But annoyance with Imperial’s promotion of Zonnic does not justify Minister Holland either losing it at his press conference or punishing Imperial via public policy. Deploying fabrications and claims unsupported by any evidence, he is trying to get the provinces to help him take on every segment of the nicotine industry. If he succeeds, he will ultimately hurt consumers and the perfectly legitimate production of what are, at bottom, low-risk nicotine products.
Holland said vaping of nicotine has killed people. In 2019, 70 individuals in the U.S. did die from vaping cannabis. What is known as EVALI (incorrectly named “e-cigarette vaping-associated lung injury”) is due to a toxic-level suspension agent in street-purchased cannabis, not nicotine.
He repeatedly claimed there is a nicotine epidemic among our youth, but without producing evidence of that. He made outrageous statements about flavours — claiming no adults would want to use the berry-flavoured nicotine products critics say are aimed at young people, despite Statistics Canada surveys repeatedly finding adults’ flavour choices are similar to young people’s.
Holland indicated he would meet any inappropriate supply of nicotine products with an iron will — in any “dark hole” the tobacco industry dragged him into. But his Robert De Niro Raging Bull act is less than convincing. Where has he been in recent years as roughly five billion illegal combustible cigarettes have entered the country annually? Smoking is 20 times more toxic than vaping and 100 times more toxic than oral nicotine pouches. And we know exactly the dark hole where illegal cigarettes originate.
Experimenting with vapes and nicotine pouches doesn’t help anyone’s health — unless they’re being used to quit tobacco smoking. But, unlike the alcohol and cannabis that Canadian adults from sea to sea to sea consume in a myriad of flavours, nicotine is not carcinogenic. And the arrival of nicotine products has helped cause smoking to all but disappear among Canadian young people.
Nicotine is not a carcinogen, though you wouldn’t know that from Holland’s bellicosity against it. Quite the opposite, it retards the effects of dementia and Alzheimer’s. It provides balm to people who suffer from depression and anxiety. It is consumed disproportionately by minorities and those with mental health disorders. And Mr. Holland wants to deny these groups access to it in low-risk form?
Banning flavours will see nicotine users resort to the illegal market. Nicotine products are not complex to produce. People who already sell tobacco products illegally will be more than happy to supply them. And we know that governments simply will not challenge any First Nations involved in this trade.
It should be recognized that pharmaceutical products are also flavoured. Johnson and Johnson’s Nicorette Quick Mist is a berry flavour — exactly the flavour that Minister Holland rubbished in his rant. And yet he gives a free pass to pharmaceutical products. Big Pharma funds the medical profession and the medical profession at large is adamantly against low-risk nicotine products that do not come from pharmaceutical producers.
Health Canada employs lots of experts. Many international scholars sit on Canada’s Vaping Advisory Board. These experts are a source of informed advice. Did they sign off on the new anti-nicotine campaign? What is the advice coming from the Tobacco Directorate in Health Canada? There is real academic research supporting the value of flavoured vaping as a quit-smoking device.
In making policy in this area, it is important to focus on the health of nicotine-users, both current and potential, and to limit kids’ access to nicotine. A sensible combination of policies would aim to: constrain the illegal sector; limit the destruction of legitimate businesses; keep counterfeit, untested products off the market; and respect the right of adults to consume a drug that is an order of magnitude less dangerous than the drug most favoured in Ottawa, namely alcohol. A minister who finds himself in a rage should calm himself and seek advice. Mr. Holland needs to grant agency and information to Canadians and rid himself of his Robert De Niro drive.
Financial Post
Ian Irvine, professor of economics at Concordia University, has been a consultant on alcohol and tobacco policy, including for the federal government. Some of his recent research has been supported by the Foundation for a Smoke Free World. And he has accepted conference remuneration from BAT/ITC.
