Martin Cullip, an international researcher at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Consumer Centre, spoke in an InsideSources column about the differing attitudes towards vaping by vaping authorities in the UK and the US. The following is the full text:

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the UK's leading anti-smoking organisation, has released a report detailing the use of vaping products in England, Scotland and Wales. The report is based on a survey of 13,000 adults and has been widely publicized in the UK media.

The ASH report said that the number of people using e-cigarettes in the UK has increased significantly, with 4.3 million existing e-cigarette users in 2022, an increase of 19.4% from 3.6 million in 2021. Additionally, more than half (2.4 million) of current e-cigarette users in the 2022 survey have switched entirely from combustible cigarettes to e-cigarettes.

Unlike the US, where public health agencies in the UK are fairly lax on adult e-cigarette use, the report has been warmly welcomed by anti-smoking groups.

ASH's deputy chief executive Hazel Cheeseman said it was good news that more and more smokers were switching to e-cigarettes. Even the reported increase in vaping among never-smokers doesn't overly concern Cheeseman, who said vaping in this group tends to be rare and experimental.

Additionally, ASH revealed that fruit flavours are the most commonly used flavours by UK adult e-cigarette users, with 41% of respondents using them. Menthol was a close second at 19%.

Interestingly, only 15% of respondents claimed that tobacco was their primary flavor of choice.

E-cigarettes are available in a variety of flavours in the UK, with little or no panic from the government, government-funded health organisations, public health charities and NGOs.

All recognize that flavor is important in keeping e-cigarette users away from the smell of combustible tobacco.

ASH declared in their press release that there has been a vaping revolution in the past decade. This comes shortly after the ASH briefing on vaping among UK youths, which was endorsed by several prominent public health bodies and in collaboration with regulatory experts and academics. The briefing overturns media claims that youth vaping has the potential to be a potential public health disaster, leading to a generation addicted to nicotine.

All of this is a far cry from the approach taken by the FDA and numerous U.S. public health organizations. These groups often exaggerate the potential harms of vaping and shout that the teen vaping epidemic has largely subsided.

The UK government subsidizes e-cigarettes, the National Health Service recommends e-cigarettes to smokers who cannot otherwise quit, and e-cigarettes have cross-party political support, as well as support from health charities. Some hospitals can even find vaping shops.

In the UK, smokers have thousands of different vaping products, flavour options and nicotine strengths to choose from, with the latest ASH data showing that it has largely succeeded in enticing many to stay away from combustible tobacco and consume nicotine in a safer way.

That's because manufacturers in the UK only need to notify regulators which vaping products they intend to sell, make sure they don't contain certain harmful ingredients, and make sure they're only sold to adult smokers to help them quit.

By contrast, the FDA has authorized only a handful of vaping products made by 3 companies, all of which are used only in tobacco flavors, preventing the United States from enjoying a similar vaping revolution in the United Kingdom. This completely ignores governments around the world, who acknowledge that vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking, and that no deaths from nicotine vaping have been reported anywhere in the world since nicotine vaping was introduced 20 years ago.

So why is the FDA taking this overly preventive approach to vaping, peddling dangerous misinformation at every opportunity? This has resulted in the US essentially giving up the enormous public health benefits enjoyed by the British population, thanks to its agency's embrace of harm reduction when it comes to nicotine use.

Given what's happening across the Atlantic, why is the American public deprived of revolutionary risk reduction by the FDA's bureaucratic narrow-mindedness, embarrassing regulatory blunders for the industry, and a cowardly capitulation to well-funded prohibitionist groups Nicotine products?

The American public suffers from the FDA's incompetence, while the UK actively acknowledges and embraces tobacco harm reduction. Adults who smoke in the U.S. deserve better than a regulator that ignores its main purpose — saving lives, not trivial politics.

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