Times of London investigative reporter Billy Kneber published four excellent articles documenting how major tobacco companies have been manipulating England to promote and protect e-cigarettes. While , as he notes, the strategies are nothing new, but the specific details provide important insights into the industry’s successes in England, including specific organizations and people and how the industry passes money through intermediaries to hide its involvement.
One thing that has helped the industry along, however, is the unwavering boosterism for e-cigarettes coming from some elements of the British health community who are not connected to the tobacco industry who have clung to their views well past when they should have stopped promoting e-cigarettes.
Here are the four articles:
How the tobacco industry is bankrolling pro-vaping campaign. Tobacco firms have bankrolled scientific papers playing down the risks of children vaping as part of a secretive lobbying campaign to boost… Archived copy
The Elf Bar billionaire who has made a fortune on bubblegum vapes. A Chinese entrepreneur has made hundreds of millions of pounds selling disposable vapes in the UK that are popular with children. Zhang Shengwei… Archived copy
Tobacco giants linked to attacks on World Health Organisation. Tobacco giants have links to vaping groups running online campaigns attacking the World Health Organisation (WHO), and have helped fund… Archived copy
How UK ‘sleepwalked’ into youth vaping epidemic. Britain “missed warnings” that the country faced an epidemic of youth vaping after “gambling” with non-smokers’ health by promoting e-cigarettes… Archived copy
Everyone interested in e-cigarettes should read all these articles.
Here is a selection of some quotes from the articles that demonstrate the depth and quality of the investigation:
• Cigarette manufacturers have funded research papers questioning the risks of youth vaping. They have then been cited as evidence in government consultation responses by tobacco-funded campaign groups.
• Hundreds of British doctors have attended pro-vaping smoking cessation training sessions run by an NHS doctor who has taken millions in funding from Philip Morris International.
• Tobacco giant British American Tobacco helped run a “grassroots” campaign that presented itself as the voice of ordinary vapers, which has sought to influence government policy in apparent breach of global rules on tobacco lobbying.
While it presents itself as the voice of ordinary activists, saying it is dedicated to “amplify[ing] the voices of vapers worldwide and empower[ing] them to make a difference in their communities”, the World Vaping Association has secretly been funded by large tobacco companies including British American Tobacco.
The paper WVA cited on youth vaping was bankrolled by another tobacco giant, Philip Morris International, and co-authored by Peter Lee, a long-time tobacco industry consultant.
The paper discussing the risk of vaping to adolescents was led by Riccardo Polosa, who has provided consultancy services to British American Tobacco and runs a research centre which has received millions from Philip Morris.
E-cigarette campaigners are particularly focused on the UK because authorities have enthusiastically adopted pro-vaping policies, viewing it as a key tool for smokers to quit. Smoking cessation clinics hand out free vapes and some hospitals have vaping shops on their premises.
As the paper was co-authored with tobacco company employees, Lee said Philip Morris would have seen the paper and offered comments in advance of publication but “if they wanted to change a paper to say something that the data didn’t show I’d probably drop out of authorship”.
Many scientific journals ban articles with tobacco industry links so Lee’s 2022 paper was instead published in an online journal called F1000 Research which allows paying users to post articles and then submit them for peer review post-publication. Two of the people who subsequently peer reviewed Lee’s article and approved it worked as consultants to the e-cigarette industry.
The World Vapers’ Alliance was set up in the United States in 2020 by the Consumer Choice Center (CCC), an advocacy group linked to libertarian networks funded by the industrialist Koch brothers. [History of how the US Tea Party has its origins in the tobacco companies’ efforts to create a smokers’ rights movement.]
The CCC has been funded by several of the world’s largest tobacco companies including British American Tobacco and Philip Morris.
[The Foundation for a Smoke-free World] FSFW [created and fully funded by Philip Morris International] has handed out millions in grants each year, and has given more than £5.7 million, and pledged a further £4.5 million, to Knowledge-Action-Change (KAC), a company founded by British professor Gerry Stimson.
KAC … organises the annual Global Forum on Nicotine, which has featured tobacco industry speakers as well as academics, campaigners and public health experts.
Stimson was also the first chairman of a British campaign group, the New Nicotine Alliance (NNA), which advocates “reducing harm from cigarette smoking without necessarily giving up the use of nicotine”.
Cigarette makers have been able to foster links with a small group of supportive politicians who are willing to work with organisations connected to tobacco companies. They were members of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on vaping which was set up in 2014 and closed down three weeks ago.
MPs who sat on the APPG have benefited from corporate hospitality or other trips paid for with tobacco money. [The Times lists several parliamentarians, how much they received and how they helped tobacco companies.]
Public health experts said the UK’s decision to enthusiastically promote vaping to smokers has helped normalise a product which has been taken up by large numbers of non-smokers, including the under-18s.
“The UK is pretty much out of step with the rest of the world,” Professor Andy Bush, an expert in respiratory disease in children, said. “Which either means we’re the smartest group of people on the planet or a bunch of idiots.”
Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that the debate about e-cigarettes and public health was initially dominated by addiction specialists who failed to take into account the “broader population perspective” of the possible consequences for non-smokers.
“They’ve dug themselves into a corner and they cannot concede that they were wrong. I think it’s as simple as that,” he said.
By this stage, a small but vocal group of academics and medical experts were championing e-cigarettes as a key new tool to stop smoking. They had a background in studying addiction and had seen first-hand the often devastating health impact of cigarettes on chronic smokers.
They were also disciples of a psychiatrist called Mike Russell who wrote that people “smoke for nicotine but they die from the tar” and was an early advocate of a “harm reduction” approach of offering safer alternatives to people unable to give up. [Russell had undisclosed links to British American Tobacco.]
Two academics who were members of this group, Peter Hajek, who had already gone on record opposing “unnecessary regulation” of e-cigarettes, and Ann McNeill, were chosen by Public Health England (PHE) to lead a review of the evidence on the new products.
‘95 per cent safer’
The evidence review they published in 2015 included the striking statement that vaping was “around 95 per cent safer than smoking”.
An editorial in the Lancet criticised the finding, sourced from a paper led by the addiction researcher David Nutt, which had been published a year earlier.
That paper estimated the level of harm of different nicotine products by convening a panel of experts, although it noted there was a “lack of hard evidence for the harms of most products on most of the criteria”.
It was funded by a Swiss company run by Delon Human, a doctor who has taken funding from British American Tobacco. One of the panellists admitted that he served as a consultant to an e-cigarette distributor and another had links to Nicoventures, a company created by British American Tobacco to sell e-cigarettes.
Despite this controversy, Public Health England and its successor, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), has stood by the 95 per cent safer claim. [emphasis added]
The story that The Times documents parallels industry efforts to make it appear that US smokers opposed tobacco control policies dating back to the 1980s as well as to organize opposition to e-cigarette restrictions in the 21st Century.
Knowing this history is important. The two papers just cited have detailed lists of tobacco industry allies and front groups. (So does this British paper on the policy dystopia model.) TobaccoTactics.org and SourceWatch.org are also good sources on industry front groups. Some things never change.
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