Clampdown on e-cigarettes could be counter-productive

Further to the letter from Linda McAvan MEP (Yorkshire Post, September 21), I share the concerns expressed in relation to the need to make smoking less attractive to young people so that fewer of them take up this lethal habit.

The proposed tobacco control measures in the directive currently going through the European Parliament can help in this respect.

However, I fear there is a danger that what has been proposed in relation to e-cigarettes could be counter-productive by reducing the variety of e-cigarettes on the market and thereby making them harder for smokers to obtain, which risks pushing people back to tobacco. This is not good enough.

It is important to note that there is already a raft of consumer product legislation that applies to e-cigarettes, so the question is not whether to regulate, but how best to do it.

There is a need to tighten up some of the existing legislation such as introducing an under-18 sales ban and restricting marketing aimed at children, but such changes can be made without recourse to the authorisation of medicines.

Indeed, there is a danger that many existing products won’t survive any introduction of medicines regulation, because it was designed for rather different products such as nicotine gum, and also because manufacturers (many are small and medium-sized companies) have neither the know-how nor the financial resources for it.

Liberal Democrat MEPs have put forward alternative proposals that would regulate electronic cigarettes sensibly and we are working hard to get as many other MEPs as possible to support our position.

The fight against tobacco, which kills 700,000 people a year across the EU, is a tough one requiring action at many levels; over-regulating electronic cigarettes will not help.

From: Michael Ridgway, Ghyll Wood, Ilkley.

REGARDING the letter from Linda McAvan MEP relating to tobacco control measures currently under discussion in the European Parliament, she certainly does not have the support, as she professes, of all political parties on the proposed measures.

There is still no evidence that packaging influences cigarette sales nor, as is proposed by the European Parliament committee, that the size or the position of health warnings influences tobacco consumption.

This whole debate over plain packaging in the UK has not considered evidence of other forms of preventing the uptake of tobacco smoking among young people.

Where children in Germany are taken as part of their education to hospitals and receive lectures and see pictorial graphics about the effects of tobacco on the human body, this has resulted in a dramatic fall-off in cigarette smoking by this group. This in a country without all the excessive regulation of display bans, vending machine bans and now packaging restrictions that Ms McAvan MEP wishes to impose on the rest of us where there is no evidence that it will be at all effective.