Letter to Professor Ashton

Dear Professor Ashton,

On Friday eight highly respected, credible, and independent public health and tobacco addiction experts, including Professor Ann McNeill, Professor Peter Hajek, and Professor Robert West, wrote in the journal Addiction expressing their concerns about the recently published WHO commissioned review of evidence on e-cigarettes. These experts did not state that e-cigarettes were 100 per cent safe; they simply stated that the WHO review contains important errors, misinterpretations and misrepresentations and that as a consequence the WHO could be putting policy-makers and the public in danger of foregoing the potential public health benefits of e-cigarettes.

Following the Addiction report you, in your capacity as President of the UK’s Faculty of Public Health, took part in at least two BBC radio debates, one with Professor Robert West and one with the former head of ASH Clive Bates. It is fair to say that these were rather ill mannered debates on your part. Whilst Professor West focussed on actual evidenced based facts, you preferred to highlight your concerns for which in many instances there was little or no evidence. In your debate with Mr Bates you even went as far as to say nicotine made people go blind and despite repeated requests from the interviewer you were unable to provide a single piece of evidence to back up this statement.

Over the weekend you then engaged with a number of e-cigarette users (vapers) on Twitter. We were not engaged in any of these exchanges but we have seen the tweets (see attached). Whilst you may have been subjected to a number of antagonistic tweets, which we would not condone, there can be no excuse for some of the language you used in your own tweets. Nor can there be any excuse for searching through Twitter to find tweets that vapers had posted weeks or months earlier and then to insult them. I include below a selection of your tweets.

“What do you call an unfettered, anonymous abusive apologist for the e-cig tobacco complex? A coward”

“I think I have identified a new species of human being this week. Obsessive compulsive abusive onanist with ecig tendencies”

“Have you always been an anonymous c..t or do you occasionally have a smudge on (sic) of personality and a human identity?”

“These abusive ecig people remind me of the lads who used to play with themselves behind the bike sheds at school”

“They (e-cig users/ supporters) are even more pathetic than that. Need ecigs to get aroused”

“Why are most of these ecig trolls anonymous? Are they just completely pathetic or pawns of Big Tobacco?”

You clearly realise how damaging these tweets are, not just to you, but also to the Faculty of Public Health, as you spent some time deleting the more abusive tweets from your twitter feed. As we have written, we do not condone any abusive tweets that you may have received, but you are the professional, the head of the Faculty of Public Health. You are the one appearing in the news and debating on national television and radio. You are the one who heads up a body that should make pronouncements based on evidence based research. It is clear from these tweets and by your increasingly alarmist pronouncements on the radio that you do not have much time for e-cigarettes and certainly no time for the vapers who rely on them to prevent them going back to smoking tobacco cigarettes.

In the radio debates and in your engagement on Twitter you have made clear that you are biased against e-cigarettes and vapers and that your position is not based on an objective review of all the available facts. How therefore can you speak openly on this issue again? Whilst you remain as its president it will also be impossible for the Faculty of Public Health to speak on this issue without anyone raising the question of bias. This is hugely disappointing. As a campaign representing e-cigarette users, their friends, and their families we have no interest in a purely one-sided debate in which only pro-e-cigarette people are allowed to speak. We want a wide-ranging debate with all arguments expressed and robustly debated. In your actions over the last few days you have made this more difficult. It would therefore be better for all concerned if you did the decent thing and stepped down from your position as President of the Faculty of Public Health as you have clearly brought both the position and the wider organisation into disrepute.

We will be publishing this letter on our website and copying it to the Secretary of State for Health.

Yours Sincerely,
Save E-cigs

We call upon the ENVI Committee to maintain its integrity and authority and vote against the tabled Trilogue changes.

On Wednesday, in accordance with the European Parliament’s Rule 70.5, the single vote on the revised Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) will take place in the Parliament’s Environment, Public Health, and Food Safety (ENVI) committee.

This will be the first time MEPs have had an opportunity to express a formal opinion on the TPD since the historic vote on the 8^th of October last year.

As Martin Callanan MEP so clearly set out on these pages recently, a simple majority of ENVI committee members is needed for the committee’s consent on the negotiated text.

If the report is adopted in the ENVI committee with less than one-tenth of members voting against, (7 MEPs), the TPD will go to vote in plenary under Rule 138.

This will mean that the TPD will be subject to a single vote.

However, this could change if, before the drawing up of the final draft agenda, political groups or individual MEPs who together constitute one-tenth of all MEPs, (76 in total), request in writing that the TPD be open to amendment, in which case the Parliament’s President shall set a deadline for the tabling of amendments.

As vapers and scientists made clear last week, and as manufacturers will make clear this week, the TPD in its current incarnation is deeply flawed.  Clive Bates has drawn our attention to just one of these flaws on his excellent blog, and this is just one example drawn from a very long list.  We have arrived at this situation primarily because the current version of the TPD, and in particular Article 18, was drafted on the hoof, behind closed doors, and without any consultation with those who will be impacted by this directive.

Like many others, Save E-cigs has come to the conclusion that if Article 18 cannot be significantly amended, then it should be removed from the TPD.  Not all MEPs will wish to amend the TPD; some who previously campaigned on our behalf now believe that they have done all they can, and those who have always been against us are unlikely to support us now.  That said, a number of MEPs do want to at least try to have Article 18 amended.  Like us they see it as unworkable.  They recognise that it could lead to a ban on refillables, and that with a ban on certain currently available nicotine strengths, they worry that e-cigarettes may cease to be as effective and therefore will be seen as a less attractive alternative to smoking tobacco cigarettes.

Those MEPs who seek reform are supported by industry, the independent scientific/public health community, and most importantly, upwards of 12 million vapers from every corner of the European Union.

If any credibility is to be salvaged from this whole process, it is vital that these views are allowed to be heard in the European Parliament, even if ultimately they are voted down.  We, the ones who will have to live with the consequences of Article 18 should be given our opportunity to have our say and to have our arguments articulated by our democratically elected supporters in the European Parliament.

MEPs on the ENVI committee therefore have a wider obligation not only in ensuring they do not deny or make it harder for their colleagues to table amendments to the TPD if they so wish, but more importantly a duty to a very fundamental matter.  In October a majority of their MEP colleagues from across the political spectrum voted in favour of amendment 170.  It is therefore  their basic duty as members on the ENVI committee  to ensure that the wishes of the majority are reflected in their vote.  The TPD amendment that is in front of the ENVI Committee is significantly different  from amendment 170, and therefore no matter what individual members may feel personally or politically, the ENVI Committee can only, if it is to maintain its integrity and authority vote against the tabled Trilogue changes.

The easiest way for this to happen is for all members of the ENVI committee to vote unanimously to reject the TPD.  In laying aside their personal views on the TPD, ENVI members will make it easier for amendments to be tabled ahead of the final vote in plenary in March and will therefore be doing their colleagues and vapers across the EU a great service.

We urge all readers to contact members of the ENVI committee ahead of Wednesday’s vote asking them to vote reject the TPD.

You can find a full list ENVI committee members and their contact details here.