Vaper Trails: New nicotine products and the innovation principle

Research

Vaper Trails: New nicotine products and the innovation principle

Victoria Hewson and Christopher Snowdon

14 April 2022

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https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Vaper-Trails.pdf

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Summary

The benefits of innovation are unpredictable and hard to quantify. Fear of adverse consequences can lead to excessive emphasis on risk avoidance, leading to regulation that holds back beneficial innovation. The experience in tobacco harm reduction illustrates this.

Innovative reduced-risk nicotine products, such as e-cigarettes, snus and heated tobacco, have been associated with steep declines in smoking prevalence in several countries, including the UK, but have been banned in others on the basis of the precautionary principle.

While some residual uncertainties remain, there is ample evidence that these products will not increase the health risk to smokers who switch to them, nor to society as a whole. This evidence would not exist if every country had preemptively banned them.

Those who are opposed to tobacco harm reduction tend to focus on the potential risks of alternative products, rather than their risks relative to the hazards of smoking. This is a mistake. The realistic counterfactual to a scenario in which hundreds of millions of smokers switch to lower-risk nicotine products is not one in which nicotine use disappears but one in which hundreds of millions of people continue to smoke cigarettes.

Impact assessments for regulations in this field are supposed to include full cost–benefit analysis but in the case of EU laws, this has not always been reflected in the eventual legislation, and in the UK, dynamic effects on smoking cessation have been poorly addressed.

Framing the use of precautionary principle in the field of tobacco harm reduction to better account for the benefits of new products in bringing about smoking cessation could improve cost–benefit analysis and regulatory outcomes. The same lesson can be carried into other policy areas.

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Christopher Snowdon

Head of Lifestyle Economics, IEA

Christopher Snowdon is the Head of Lifestyle Economics at the IEA. He is the author of The Art of Suppression, The Spirit Level Delusion and Velvet Glove; Iron Fist. His work focuses on pleasure, prohibition and dodgy statistics. He has authored a number of papers, including "Sock Puppets", "Euro Puppets", "The Proof of the Pudding", "The Crack Cocaine of Gambling" and "Free Market Solutions in Health".

Victoria Hewson

Head of Regulatory Affairs

Victoria joined the IEA’s International Trade and Competition Unit in Spring 2018. She is a lawyer and practiced for 12 years in the fields of technology and financial services, before joining the Legatum Institute Special Trade Commission to focus on trade and regulatory policy. She has published work on the implications and opportunities of Brexit in financial services and movement of goods and the issues in connection with the Irish border. Before entering the legal profession Victoria worked for Procter & Gamble in the UK and Germany.