News released from South Africa last week suggests that the government there has banned the sale of electronic cigarettes. From now on these products and other related nicotine substitute products will have to be prescribed by doctors. This may apparently take up to two years to push through and will then be subject to a charge of $40 per prescription. Naturally users of the products in South Africa are astonished and angry at the proposed changes. Naturally there has been some speculation that similar measures may follow soon in the UK. Versions of smoke-free cigarettes are already illegal in Australia, and banned in Canada, Brazil, Singapore and Thailand because side-effects haven't been tested. However, is that ever likely to happen? Will our government follow suit and try to stop the sale of electronic cigarettes? From the comments of the Cabinet Office's behavioural insight team, better known as the Nudge Unit, this seems highly unlikely.
The think tank wants to adopt the new technology because policy officials believe the rigid "quit or die" approach to smoking advice no longer works.The Nudge Unit wants nicotine addiction to be managed to help smokers who otherwise won't quit: an approach the Unit believes could prevent millions of smoking deaths. Ten million people in the UK smoke, and smoking claims 80,000 lives a year. The think tank?s first annual report published last year in the face of harsh criticism from the anti-smoking lobby, implemented a series of measures it believes could save thousands of lives a year, as well as ?100 million over the course of the next parliament. The Unit wants to explore and encourage new products that deliver nicotine to people's lungs but without the harmful toxins and carcinogens in tobacco smoke that kill.
The annual report reads: "It will be important to get the regulatory framework for these products right, to encourage new products.
A canon of behaviour change is that it is much easier to substitute a similar behaviour than to extinguish an entrenched habit (an example was the rapid switch from leaded to unleaded fuel). If alternative and safe nicotine products can be developed which are attractive enough to substitute people away from traditional cigarettes, they could have the potential to save 10,000s of lives a year."Experts have advised the government that the nicotine contained in some new, smoke-free electronic cigarettes is no more harmful than caffeine in coffee. A Cabinet Office source said: "A lot of countries are moving to ban this stuff; we think that's a mistake." The unit is also keen to engage with those critics who believe its analysis and intervention in people's behaviour is "nanny statism".
David Halpern, the unit's head, told the Guardian newspaper:
?"As with seatbelts and the smoking ban, these ideas were unpopular at first but after a while when you explain them to people, they understand and say, 'Yeah, alright then.? We're confident about how well this can work, and the early trials have also made us much more confident about public acceptability. There's no doubt it can save many lives and hundreds of millions of pounds. In fact, our problem has become that we have so many inquiries from across Whitehall, we have to turn down many of the requests for help."
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